‘You missed him,’ Oleksandr Malarek said, not turning to face Buslenko.

‘If he was there at all, Deputy Interior Minister.’

‘He was there. You know that.’

‘Yes. I know that. Someone was on the take. One of ours. Someone broke my cover and allowed Vitrenko to organise an escape route.’

‘Yes. Someone did,’ Deputy Minister Malarek said without looking at Buslenko. ‘It was Major Samolyuk.’

‘The head of the assault team?’ Peotr Samolyuk had been a Sokil unit commander with fifteen years’ service. Buslenko had always considered him a solid man. ‘Shit. Have you interrogated him? He could be the best lead we’ve got.’

‘Not a lead. A dead end. A very dead end. We found him this morning. He had been tortured and castrated before death. They stuffed his genitals in his mouth.’

‘He was going to talk? But he’d have gone to prison.’

‘We’ll never know. But if he had really been one of Vitrenko’s men they wouldn’t have done that to him. There is no betrayal in Vitrenko’s organisation. They don’t see themselves as criminals, but as a military unit with total loyalty to him. My guess is that Samolyuk took a massive bribe. Maybe he got greedy and asked for more to stay quiet.’

‘Unlikely.’ Buslenko still spoke to Malarek’s profile. A bead of sweat gathered and hung on the tip of the older man’s long nose. ‘No one would be stupid enough to try to menace Vitrenko.’

‘He’s in Germany,’ Malarek said, ignoring Buslenko. The excruciating death of Samolyuk was clearly of no further interest to him.

‘Vitrenko?’

‘Our sources tell us that he is operating from Cologne.’

‘I didn’t think we had sources on Vitrenko,’ said Buslenko.

‘We didn’t. We still don’t, not directly. We have informants who work for Molokov and that’s as close as we can get.’ Malarek wiped the sweat from his fleshy face with the palm of his hand. ‘Vitrenko is selling our people like so much meat, Major Buslenko. He is a traitor of the worst kind. He debases Ukraine by debasing our people. His main centres are Hamburg and Cologne. But he travels back to Ukraine regularly. Part of the intelligence we have gathered is that Vitrenko has had extensive plastic surgery. The photographs we have on file are now useless, according to our sources.’

‘Do you have any information on when he will next be back here? The next time …’

Malarek turned to face Buslenko. ‘There won’t be a next time. Vasyl Vitrenko moves like a ghost. He has so many contacts and informers here that if he does come back, he’ll have evaporated into thin air again before we even know about it. That’s where you come in, Major Buslenko. Vasyl Vitrenko’s reign is an embarrassment to Ukraine. We cannot expect the world to take our new democracy seriously while we are seen as the cradle of the new Mafia. We need Vitrenko stopped. Dead. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You want me to go to Germany without the knowledge or approval of the German government? That’s illegal. Both here and there.’