Quoit eyed me nervously, looked at Fifeshire for a brief moment, then shot his eyes back to me again, as if he were afraid that if he took his eyes off me for too long, I might dash out of the room and reappear in a motor car. ‘Mr Flynn,’ he said, ‘did this – er – Ogomo chap give any hint at all about how they might – er – blow up these power stations?’ Quoit took his metal-framed glasses off and chewed for a moment on the end of one of the arms; then he took it out of his mouth. ‘What I mean – er – is …’ He squinted at Fifeshire, ‘it is very important to establish this, Sir Charles—’ he turned his head back towards me and squinted furiously, then put his glasses on for a moment to make sure I was still seated, and hadn’t crept out and got behind the wheel of a motor car, then took his glasses off again. ‘Did you get the impression that the purpose was merely to put the power stations out of action, for example, by knocking out the power cables, or – er – was the purpose to cause a leakage of radiation?’

‘To cause a leakage of radiation, without doubt.’

Quoit bit furiously on the arm of his glasses again, then once more removed them from his mouth. ‘You don’t think it might possibly be a bluff?’

‘These people don’t bluff,’ said Fifeshire, ‘not the team the Namibians have put together.’

‘It’s very difficult to know quite what they mean when they say “blow up” a nuclear power station. As you know, nuclear power stations are huge complexes, comprising a number of buildings and spread out over fairly large areas. They would need vast amounts of explosives to blow up entire power stations – hundreds of tons of high explosives. They could never smuggle that sort of quantity in. How could they? They could just go for the core, but unless they breached the containment building, that wouldn’t do them a lot of good. And they would need a tremendous amount of explosives to do that.’ He started to chew again on the plastic on the end of one arm of his glasses.

‘What if they used an atomic device?’ I asked.