‘You too, Max. Take care.’

‘I’ll call you Wednesday, 8.00 a.m.’ I hung up, then dialled Fifeshire’s number in London. I needed one boffin to be despatched smartly.

After I had spoken to Fifeshire, I went to the Toronto branch of Thomas Cook and had a good look at aircraft schedules and railway timetables, and then there wasn’t a great deal more I could do until the following morning. Oscar Wilde once described the Niagara Falls as ‘a vast, unnecessary amount of water, flowing the wrong way, and falling over an unnecessary amount of rocks. Sooner or later,’ he said, ‘every American groom takes every American bride to the Niagara Falls, and they must surely be the second biggest disappointment in American married life.’

His observations did not deter eight million tourists a year from making the pilgrimage down the Niagara peninsular – where, incidentally, the grapes for some of the world’s most revolting wine are grown – to see for themselves, and I decided to do likewise. I stood in the teeming spray, as the water slid gently over the lip, before thundering down into the foaming abyss with a demonstration of power it would be hard to rival, and I decided his estimation of the cunning of the Marquis of Queensbury wasn’t the only thing poor Oscar had been wrong about.

Chapter 23

23

The train’s horn blasted twice, and we flashed through a tiny station. Short Richard’s offspring divides nation with friendly underground railroad. I looked at the clue for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours since I had boarded the train at Winnipeg. It was 6.45 p.m., Thursday, New Year’s Eve, and Operation Angel was due to start in five days’ time. The ground outside now was thick with snow, and the sky, which had been dark grey all day, was now black.

In a first-class compartment two carriages down, with drawn curtains and a locked door, Douglas Yeodal, the nuclear energy expert, ace lecturer and pacifier of the press, from Huntspill Head, was quietly dismantling and examining a nuclear fuel bundle with the letter B clearly stamped after the third digit of its serial number. The bundle had been obtained by Harvey Sparrow after a lengthy search, not a little bribery, and not a lot of burglary, from the storage depot of American Fossilized’s Seattle plant.