I was jet-lagged from my flight back the day before, and feeling the damp cold more than usual after my brief spell in the Namibian heat. The death of Ogomo certainly wasn’t being used by the British press to sell their newspapers, not that it was likely he would have been plastered over the headlines. I didn’t think the efforts of his life would have exalted him to a pole position in The Times obituaries, but I did think they might have been worth more than the only mention they did get in the British press, which was two lines on the overseas news page of the Guardian – Not that I was about to start writing letters to The Times about it. I had a feeling that if the authorities had looked hard enough, and found the car that hit him, and connected it to a German geologist that didn’t exist, there might have been a few more lines; but knowing the type of man that had died, and the type of authorities they were, it was unlikely they would look hard enough to find the car and make the connection, and even if they did, they would probably assume it was the work of a right-wing German organization.

I had just finished relating to the two men everything that Ogomo had told me, and the not particularly pleasant method by which I had obtained his silence. Quoit made it plain, from the expression on his face, that he would have preferred the company of the chickens in the hold of the Illushyn to being in this room with me. He gave me the sort of expression that is normally reserved for a prospective house-purchaser’s first sight of a damp patch on a bedroom wall. Fifeshire wasn’t moved; deaths of enemies only upset him when they attracted publicity and he was called upon to explain them. He sucked in and blew out another massive cloud of smoke before he finally broke the silence.

‘It is now crystal clear, from what you tell us, that we are dealing not with a bunch of ideologically motivated social misfits, nor a bunch of savages suffering from delusions of grandeur, but with the crème de la crème: top table of the Worshipful Company of International Terror-Weavers and Blood-Mongers. They’re having a nuclear cocktail party on 4 January, and half the Western world is cordially invited. Isn’t that about right, Flynn?’

‘I think that sums it up very well, sir.’

‘England, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. Are they going to blow up one nuclear power station in each country, or the whole damn lot? And how are they going to do it? What do you think, Isaac?’