‘Surprise is what you need,’ I told him. ‘The element of surprise. It would be much better to come down on the apartment from above.’

‘From the roof?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded and said something in Russian, which Sasha translated as, ‘We land from helicopter.’

‘Too noisy.’ I shook my head. ‘Too obvious. Everyone in the building would hear us coming. Immediately Keet and his party would know something was happening. They might go and hole up in other flats. You’d lose the advantage of surprise.’

At Ivan’s shoulder was a tall, cadaverous fellow with a thin, long, rather grey face, a big mouth and unusually red lips. If Ivan was a bear, this guy was a wolf. I wasn’t sure of his status, but he seemed to be the second-in-command. Although I couldn’t understand many of his words I got the gist of them clearly enough: ‘For Christ’s sake let’s go in and shoot the bastards,’ he was saying. ‘Let’s not ponce about with these pissy British ideas . . .’

Ivan, however, ignored him and asked me to carry on. When we looked at a large-scale plan of the site we saw that it comprised not a single tower block, but two structures set at right-angles to each other in the shape of an L, only a few feet apart at the inner corner. I’d noticed several pairs of buildings with this plan as we had driven around town on other days.

Now Whinger and I had the same idea at the same moment.

‘Cross from the other roof,’ he said.

‘Exactly.’ I knew that in Hong Kong he’d practised this very technique with the fire brigade, laddering across from one high-rise block to another and coming down on the target from above. Here, with the flat on the twelfth floor, five down from the roof, it would be child’s play to abseil and come in through the windows, while another party stormed the door from the internal corridor.

I looked at Ivan and asked, ‘This other building. Is that Mafia as well, or is it clean?’

‘No Mafia,’ Sasha answered. ‘No guards on door.’

I pointed at the plan. ‘How wide is this gap between the buildings?’

Ivan gave an off-hand shrug and said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s important.’

‘Maybe ten metres.’

‘No more?’

‘Nyet.’

‘That’s OK, isn’t it?’ I asked Whinger. ‘Forty feet?’

‘Piece of cake.’

I felt my adrenalin levels rising rapidly, and, almost before I knew what I was doing, I was outlining a complete new action plan.