‘You’re right.’ Anna turned the picture round on the table so that it faced her way. ‘It was designed by Finnish architects. No expense spared. Marble floors at ground level. Fitness room and sauna lined with birch wood in the basement. Whole building air-conditioned. Bullet-proof windows. It’s not confirmed, but we have heard that he’s building a nuclear shelter in the grounds by drilling into rock in the side of the mountain and lining the cavity with concrete and steel.’

I came within a micro-second of making some stupid joke about getting a nuclear device for his nuclear shelter, but pulled myself up just in time and said instead, ‘The satellite imagery should show that, if the site’s still fairly raw.’

When the pictures came over from the States, through the Satcom and our secure computer, they proved brilliantly sharp, and a perfect supplement to the telephoto shots. What the satellite revealed most clearly was the layout of the house and its defences. The building stood on a forested hillside inside a perimeter fence, roughly square, with sides some 400 metres long. The line of the fence showed as a pale gash through the trees, as did the single road running up to the house from a cluster of other buildings on the bottom edge of the compound. The villa was slightly off-centre – closer to the top fence than the bottom – and above it, towards the north-western corner, was a circular helipad. There was also another cleared area, nearer the house, which we assumed was the site of the shelter. A wider shot, of a bigger area, showed the river passing to the south of the site and, away to the right of it, the outskirts of Samashki village.

What caught my eye was an oblong open space in the forest, about two ks to the north-west. From its regular shape, it looked like a man-made field. ‘Here!’ I said to Sasha. ‘This looks ideal as a place to drop into. A good opening in the trees, and far enough from the target.’

‘We land there?’

‘That’s right – and walk in.’

So much was visible on the satellite shots. The telephoto picture showed that the pine-covered hillside was steep, with outcrops of rock among the trees.

When I invited Whinger to make an independent assessment, he came up with the same plan as I had.

‘Bugger the fence,’ he said. ‘They’d have a job to electrify something that long – and where’s the power coming from, anyway? It doesn’t even look as if it’s finished. You could cut throught that, or climb it, no bother. Drop on this football field, or whatever it is, and tab it in. Piece of cake. There may be a patrol on the fence, but I doubt it. The defenders are going to be here, at the bottom, guarding the approach road. There’s no other way any vehicle can get near the house.’