Everyone in the room nodded in assent. I looked at Quoit, and the strain showed in his face. From the time the van with the two men in it had pulled up beside him while he was walking his dog, to the time a man in a balaclava had stuck his head into the chicken coop in the hold of the Illushyn and said, ‘All right, Sir Isaac, you’re safe now!’, he had lived in a drugged half-world, with little conception of time, and none at all of place. Since arriving back in England, he had been under almost continuous hypnosis, as the MI5 interrogation team had attempted, as kindly and gently as they could – two things which didn’t come naturally to them – to prise from out of the deeper recesses of his mind descriptions of his captors, of where he was taken and held, of the making of the videotape, of the food he had eaten, of the taste of the water he had drunk, the crockery, the cutlery, right down to the name Thomas Crapper & Sons inscribed on the porcelain at the bottom of the lavatory bowl. He had produced very little that was of help; the only detail of his entire ordeal that he was able to recall clearly and accurately was the clucking noise of the chickens.

‘Do you have any idea, Sir Charles, what the Soviets’ motives might have been in kidnapping Sir Isaac?’ asked the Home Secretary.

‘There are a number of possibilities. The first is that the Russians simply want to stir up unrest, as they do from time to time. They often do this to distract Western attention from something that is going on inside the Soviet Union – a trial of dissidents, or a purge of some minority sect, something like that. But I don’t think it is so in this case.’

‘The television programme that the BBC put out has certainly stirred up unrest – the Energy Secretary has made my life merry hell for letting that go out.’

Fifeshire grinned. ‘You mean he actually had to answer questions about nuclear energy? I should think it did him some good. It’s about time, after two years in office, that he actually read a book on the subject.’ Fifeshire turned his eyes away from the Home Secretary, summarily dismissing him from his attention, and stared for a brief moment at the rest of us, one by one. ‘The second possibility is that the Russians are becoming concerned about the world supplies of uranium. We know that the Soviet Union has very large uranium reserves in the ground, but we are also beginning to learn, from intelligence sources, that because of its geographical locations, and its relatively low grade, much of it cannot be mined economically.