'Not as far as I know.' He pulled back to let a police car in and we watched it until it went past the Mercedes and got lost in the snow-haze. Dark was already coming down, sheeting the roof-tops with steel.

It was the only reason I could think of for an escort fore and aft: there'd been instructions to protect me from the moment I landed, and that could mean that someone had blown his mission out here and left the terrain smoking.

'Where are we going?' I asked Legge; tried to make it sound casual, as if I wasn't really interested, but didn't bring it off, he knew how interested I was – you never ask questions like that when you're dropped into the field in a hurry, on the principle that you'd have been given the answers already if London had wanted you to know: yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die, so forth.

'Got a rendezvous.' He flashed his lights at someone coming the other way, trying to blind us.

An escort taking us to a rendezvous: someone important, then. Important or desperate or blown or about to be blown: despite Legge's cool I could smell panic in the air, the subtle hint of brimstone.

'Looks different,' I said, ' Moscow.' I hadn't been here since it had become the capital of Russia again. The buildings were the same: it was the traffic, quite a bit more of it. 'Lots of shiny Mercs and Jags and BMWs.' Not lots, I suppose, but they stood out from the crowd of local products.

'Mafiya,' Legge nodded.

The leading escort began taking us into side streets – we were now inside the Boulevard Ring – and finally slid into the curbside just beyond a small Russian Orthodox church and stood there with its parking lights on. Legge stopped outside the church itself and told me to wait in the car.