‘This is our target. I know you all have heard of him. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist unit.’ Buslenko nodded an acknowledgement to Belotserkovsky, the Berkut member of the team. ‘I want you all to take a moment to think of the most dangerous person you have ever come across in your career.’ Buslenko paused. ‘Now imagine someone twenty times more dangerous and you’re beginning to understand Vitrenko. He was nearly caught in Hamburg, Germany two years ago. He was being tracked by his own father, also a former Spetsnaz officer, as well as the Hamburg police. Vitrenko arranged a little spectacle for the Hamburg cops. He wired his own father up to an anti-tank mine and put it on a timer so that the investigating cop could bear witness to Dad being splattered across half the city. When it comes to killing, Vitrenko sees himself as a poet. An artist. He has a taste for the symbolic and the ritualistic. Before he took up his command post in the Berkut in nineteen-ninety, he’d already had a distinguished Soviet career in Afghanistan and had then volunteered to help our Russian cousins in Chechnya. The story is that he went renegade, converting the loyalty of his men from the “Motherland” to personal loyalty to him. This group forms the basis of the criminal organisation he has built. Vasyl Vitrenko is as skilled a killer and torturer as you are ever likely to experience. Like I said, he sees himself as an artist …’ Buslenko clicked the mouse and another image filled the screen. It took a moment for the explosion of blood and meat to be recognisable as the remains of a human being. ‘He believes that Ukrainians are descended from Vikings, which is partly true, so one of his specialities is to copy the Viking Blood Eagle ritual. He tears the lungs from victims while they are still alive and throws them over their shoulders as the wings of the eagle.’

Buslenko paused to let the image sink in. But this wasn’t an audience to be easily shocked. Buslenko clicked the mouse again. Another face replaced Vitrenko’s.