I opened the briefcase and switched the ovinator on.

'Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?'

'Well, all right, then,' conceded Bowden, 'I guess I'm with you on this.'

'Millon?'

'I'll do whatever Bowden does.'

'It really does work, doesn't it?' observed Stig, giving a short snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.

Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the ovinator in the briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.

'What are in those trucks?' asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.

'You don't need to look in the trucks,' I told him.

'We don't need to look in the trucks,' echoed the border guard.

'We can go through unimpeded.'

'You can go through unimpeded.'

'You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'

'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'

He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.

Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards, who only needed a short burst from the ovinator to isolate the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was not electrified and I pushed it open to let the car pass.

The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.

'Now can you tell me what we're doing here?' asked Millon, staring intently out of the window and taking frequent photographs.