At the touch of a button, she unlocks what looks like a decompression cell to admit the visitor to the waiting room, a chamber which is also overlooked by video cameras. From the hermetically sealed calm of this office, the men from De Beers are on a mission to impose order on the chaos of the Angolan diamond fields. So far, they have had to keep running just to stay still. It is a modern-day vision of the 1870s diamond rush at Kimberley, South Africa. There are no rules.
Guns are rife, and for hire.
Murders, ambushes and kidnappings are common. Recently, De Beers's man in Luanda was shot and wounded by armed robbers while driving in the diamond area with a huge stack of cash. Far from the mayhem in Africa, on the other side of the world, a helicopter lands on the roof of a building in Charterhouse Street, on the edge of the City of London. It ejects a man in a suit, Nicky Oppenheimer, soon to be chairman of the De Beers empire that his grandfather, Sir Ernest, built into an international company and a global cartel. From the roof he descends to his hushed, wood-panelled offices, to preside over an operation of which the Soviets would have been proud.