Among the lads there was a good deal of talk about money, because this looked like being a lucrative trip. What with allowances for food, accommodation, laundry, arduous conditions and so on, our pay was going to build up to two or three times its normal level. The expenses for the whole trip had been reckoned at £6,000 per head, and four grand of this had been paid up front. Anyone prudent put most of the cash into his bank account, but Pavarotti went straight into Monmouth and put down a deposit on a thirty-five-year-old scarlet XJ120 Jag which he’d been fancying for months. I put three grand into my building society account and changed the rest of the money into dollars, insisting that the paymaster got me new notes from the bank, with no year earlier than 1997 on them and in low denominations, because I’d heard that fifties and older notes wouldn’t be accepted in Russia.

When we asked Sasha about the black market for money, he said that it had collapsed. He explained that Moscow, like all Russian cities, had become so flooded with US dollars that anyone could get them, and the rate of exchange was the same everywhere – about seven roubles to the dollar, ten or eleven to a British pound. In the previous year, he told us, following rampant inflation, the rate had swollen to outrageous proportions: 7,000 roubles to the dollar, 10,000 to the pound. But then on 1 January the Russian government had divided the currency rate by a thousand in an attempt to simplify things and calm the economy down.

More briefings about the Russian Mafia came from another visiting professional from the Firm, this one a smooth, silver-haired fellow called Edgar (his surname). Again, Sasha was able to supplement his information, which had been collected from intelligence reports, with first-hand knowledge. The briefings confirmed what Sasha had already told us – that the main Mafia activity was extortion, and the worst threat was against people with big money: leading businessmen, heads of companies, bankers. We learnt that over the past few years various branches of the Mafia had risen to prominence and then faded away. The first to show had been the Solntsevo gang, named after the scruffy suburb on the south-western fringes of Moscow where its members lived. Lately, however, that lot had apparently yielded supremacy to the Ismailovskaya Mafia, also based in Moscow and led by a notorious crook called Sergei Askyonov. This group, with its strong military connections, claimed to have a private army of more than a thousand men.