'Crashed?' I was thinking of the journey here from the airport through the icy streets.

'I heard there was a plane down.'

'Oh, that, yes. It didn't have my number on it.' What the hell are you doing in Moscow? Iwanted to ask him. The COS hardly ever leaves the signals room in London: it is the innermost of inner sanctums – once a wine cellar underneath the building – where at any given time half a dozen directors in the field could be calling in their reports to the mission boards and asking for immediate instructions, and where sometimes the voice of a shadow executive with direct access to the short-wave bands is heard for the last time if he's left things too late to pull out of whatever death-trap he's caught in and even his local support group can't get him clear. Only a man with Croder's impregnable nerves could run a place like that – but here he was in Moscow.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, 'I believe.'

'Yes.' He didn't believe; he knew: he would have checked before he sent for me.

'I'm not sure I have anything for you.' He watched the man with the bald head at the far end of the nave; I could now see he was polishing some silver candlesticks. 'By which I mean,' Croder added, 'anything you would accept.'

I left that. It wasn't like him to hedge, and it alerted me.

'I was with the prime minister,' he said, 'late last night.'

He waited.

'And how was the prime minister?'

'In a towering rage. He told me in effect that while the US is pouring billions of dollars into the Yeltsin economy and the UK is doing its rather more limited best in the same direction, the Russian mafiya is threatening to destroy that same economy and bring the country to its knees.' His narrow head was turned to watch me suddenly from the shadows.