‘There’s a terraced house in north-west Leeds. There’s a twenty-seven-bedroom mansion outside Sevenoaks; there’s an eleven-bedroom manor house near Cirencester. There’s a forty-four-bedroomed castle near Angmering in Sussex which is used as a country club. There’s a nine-bedroomed house with an estate of 18,500 acres, including two villages and forty-eight outbuildings, thirty miles from Aberdeen in Scotland. There are seven houses of varying sizes dotted across London. Those are twelve of the safe-houses that we know about; and we are certain, that sprinkled around the British Isles, there are at least another twenty-five more. It’s Thursday morning, and Quoit’s plane leaves at 10.00 a.m. next Monday – which gives us somewhat less than four days. You’d have to get an awful lot of search warrants, knock on an awful lot of front doors, and look inside a great many cupboards.’

I got Fifeshire’s point.

There was a long pause, while Fifeshire drew on his cigar a few times in slow succession.

‘If we can get our hands on Quoit,’ I said, ‘then we might find out what the Russians are up to; if we let him go, we might have to wait for their next move. What about Whalley’s yachting holiday with Sleder – have you found out anything more about Sleder?’

‘Yes,’ said Fifeshire grimly, ‘rather a lot.’

Chapter 8

8

The full Aeroflot Illushyn 62 accelerated down the runway, its four Kuznetsov turbo-fan engines greedily gobbling kerosene, and converting the precious liquid into something that was even more precious at this particular moment, as far as the pilot was concerned: the 92,600 pounds of thrust that would accelerate the Illushyn to the one hundred and forty miles per hour needed in order to lift off from the runway and avoid ploughing through the snow-covered perimeter and into the office buildings that lay a few hundred yards beyond.

Captain Yuri Gromkyan preferred, on balance, to fly in the summer; but when the aircraft was jam-packed, like today, to its maximum take-off weight, the denser air of winter was safer for take-off. He knew that on this November day, with the outside temperature hovering around the zero mark at four o’clock in the afternoon, the Illushyn needed four hundred yards less length of runway to take off than in the heat of summer.

He saw his co-pilot, Viktor Kieviz, out of the corner of his eye, scanning the engine and flight instruments, ready to call out the airspeed readings, leaving him free to concentrate on the ribbon of Moscow’s Sheremetieva Airport tarmac rapidly shortening in front of him.

‘One hundred twenty … one hundred thirty … one hundred thirty-five,’ read Kieviz.

In three seconds they would be past the point of no return for this runway, past the point beyond which, no matter what happened, he had to lift off. because he could never stop the aircraft in time to avoid going through that perimeter fencing, across the highway, and into the office complex.

‘One four O.’