Nobody put up any good reason for keeping Rick on the team. Mal saw the point of what I was saying and finally agreed that Rick should go. The only argument was about his share of the Mafia dollars – and in the end we voted that he should still get it, provided he kept his mouth shut about the whole episode when he reached home.

So the day’s training got under way an hour late. I stayed in barracks, fighting to catch up with paperwork – mainly the course reports on the students, which we were supposed to be continuously updating.

All morning I kept remembering how, at the climax of the siege of the Libyan Embassy in London, the police negotiators had kept the terrorists in play by telling them direct lies: that the Libyan Ambassador was on his way, that a coach was coming to take them to Heathrow, and so on. Even Trevor Lock, the policeman trapped inside the building, couldn’t get any straight answers from the police. Several times he asked for an assurance that the building wasn’t going to be assaulted – and at the very moment when the SAS men were laying out their abseil ropes on the roof, the cops promised him blind that all they were trying to arrange was the villains’ getaway.

Now we seemed to be in an unpleasantly similar situation. The boss would go on saying, ‘No, no, Geordie, everything’s fine,’ until the very moment when Clinton or some other jerk in Washington pressed the button. The CO was bound to toe the line. But for us poor sods at the sharp end it was different. Maybe we’d see a brilliant white flash. Maybe we wouldn’t.

At midday I called the Chargé again and heard that the American Ambassador had died from his wounds. All US flights into Moscow had been suspended, and American citizens advised not to travel to Russia by any means. More and more I was needled by apprehension that this whole train of events had been set off by us – by our participation in the hit on the apartment. Then I told myself that if we hadn’t gone along with it the result of the shoot-out might have been much the same, with a few more casualties to the forces of law and order – but still the feelings of guilt were building up.

Before Toad left I took him aside and asked, ‘Is there any way you can disable Apple?’

‘Not unless we go back down the tunnel,’ he replied. ‘Now it’s live, it’s live.’

Chapter Twelve

TWELVE