‘Fuck you,’ he said, and waited for the knife to sink deeper.

There was a cursory knock and the door to the entertaining room swung open. Everyone, even Buslenko, turned to look. The Ukrainian Beauty stepped in, a tray in her hands and started to ask if they needed more drinks. Her words trailed off as she saw the dead man on the floor and Buslenko pinned against the wall, a knife at his throat.

‘Get her!’ Kotkin barked at the others and two of them made towards her, leaving Kotkin and one other with Buslenko.

The girl dropped the tray, under which she had been concealing a Fort17 automatic. Calmly, she took Kotkin out first. Buslenko heard the round smack into the centre of the Russian’s forehead, and felt a light splatter of fluid against his cheek. As the Russian dropped, Buslenko grabbed the knife from his grasp and arced it up under the jaw of the man who still held him. The knife sliced up through the soft tissue of his victim’s underjaw, through his mouth and tongue and jammed into the hard palate of the roof of his mouth. There was a series of other shots and Buslenko knew that the other two men were dead. He shoved his last assailant, the knife still lodged in his jaw, away from him. As the man staggered back, Ukrainian Beauty fired two more rounds. The first hit the man in the body and brought him to the floor. The second, textbook style, hit him in the head.

She kept her automatic at locked-arm’s length, scanning the room. There was a commotion outside and a troop of Spetsnaz burst into the room. Buslenko, clutching a handkerchief to the side of his neck where the Russian’s knife had cut him, gestured towards the glass wall at the back of the room.

‘In there! I think he’s in there.’

Ukrainian Beauty walked over to Buslenko. ‘You okay?’

‘I think I owe you a large tip, waitress.’ Buslenko smiled bitterly and looked at the body of the man he had stabbed and she had shot twice. He had wanted to take at least one prisoner alive for interrogation and thought Ukrainian Beauty’s coup de grâce had been unnecessary. But considering she had just saved him from being slaughtered like a farm pig, he passed no comment.

The Spetsnaz commander came back from the other room. Like Buslenko, Peotr Samolyuk was a Sokil Falcon officer.

‘It’s clear.’

‘What do you mean, “clear”? He was in there,’ said Buslenko. ‘Watching. I know it.’

Peotr Samolyuk shrugged black armoured shoulders. ‘There’s no one there now.’

‘You sure it was him?’ asked Ukrainian Beauty.

‘Our primary fucking target was in there. I could feel him. And he’s the only reason we’re here. The intelligence we had that he would be with this group was as solid as it could be. But him …’ Buslenko frowned and nodded down to where the body of the scar-headed Russian lay. A halo of dark crimson had oozed from the exit wound in his skull. ‘He just doesn’t make sense … what was Dmitry Kotkin doing here?’