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officially charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and a Red Notice had been issued by Interpol. Interpol did not have the authority to issue arrest warrants in the formal sense – that was the domain of the sovereign member states – but a Red Notice was the closest thing there was to an international arrest warrant.
    Antonov was a South Ossetian, and had known war all his life. North Ossetia was part of Russia, but South Ossetia had always been the subject of dispute between Georgia and Russia. Most South Ossetians carried Russian passports and wanted to break away from Tbilisi. They had declared it a republic in 1990 and the Georgian government had sent in tanks. A series of conflicts followed.
    Laszlo, by then a well-seasoned fighter and nationalist, had turned to the Russians for support. The Georgians were preparing to slaughter his people again, and he needed to defend himself. Happy to have a vicious and well-trained proxy, the Russians gave him the funding and the weaponry to raise a clandestine paramilitary unit from men he had fought with for years. Officially it was called the 22nd Black Bear Brigade, but the locals referred to them simply as the Black Bears. Laszlo was the unquestioned leader and his brother, Sambor, was second-in-command.
    The Black Bears fought like a Special Forces unit: they lived covertly in the field for weeks, attacking Georgians in small numbers before fading into the night; destroying their line of supply and communication and killing as many high-ranking officers as they could until their army was incapable of making tactical decisions on the ground. Laszlo conducted his war with speed, aggression and surprise, in a way that even the SAS would have admired.
    When Georgia launched an offensive in 2008 to retake the breakaway republic, about fourteen hundred locals had been slaughtered. In retaliation, Laszlo had led a massacre of more than six hundred innocent ethnic Georgian men, women and children in one night of carnage. He had then provided the Russians with vital information that helped Moscow make the decision to send troops and tanks over the border to ‘protect Russia’s citizens’.
    The home secretary had been informed the moment the Security Service had discovered Laszlo was in the UK, and James Woolf, section chief, Branch G, had become the senior case officer.
    ‘And this government will honour all its commitments and agreements with the ICC.’
    Clements rolled his eyes. He never quite understood how the government decided on their cabinet appointments. This latest home secretary had come from the Department for Work and Pensions, where she’d been responsible for work rights and benefits for the disabled, not protecting a country. ‘Spare us the synthetic moral outrage, Sarah.’
    He ignored the horrified looks from those around the table. Even in these informal times, few civil servants, no matter how senior, would have been quite so forthright when speaking to one of their political masters. ‘If we went round arresting every tyrant and warlord with blood on his hands, we’d have to build another fifty jails to house them all, and we’d lose so much export business that our economy would collapse even more quickly than it already is. The death of a few hundred civilians in South Ossetia now and then didn’t even rouse theindignation of the Guardian ’s bleeding-hearts brigade, let alone the rest of the press. I’ll tell you how interested any of us was: the only imagery we have of him dates back to 2001.’
    He paused long enough for that fact to sink in.
    ‘Can you imagine the media storm that would break if even one British citizen out for a gentle stroll on Hampstead Heath is shot by a foreign gunman because the government insisted on a kid-gloves arrest rather than sending in the SAS to do what they do best? Do I really have to remind you about the Libyan Embassy and the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher?’
    ‘That’s