'We may remember that quite recently the head of Russia's Analytical Centre for Social and Economic Policies warned Yeltsin that the growth in organized crime here could well overturn his government and force Russia, with her back to the wall and at gun-point, to choose between anarchy and fascism under the leadership of some dangerous fanatic like Zhirinovsky – with twenty-eight thousand nuclear missiles at his command.'

'I understand it's on the cards, yes,' I said. But that wouldn't account for the 'towering rage'. I waited again.

'General Mikhail Yegorov, Russia 's first deputy interior minister, believes there are upwards of five thousand individual mafiya gangs operating in this country, totalling a hundred thousand active members. Other estimates are double that. Four million business organizations are known to be forced to pay protection money to their local mafiya "services", some of them foreign entrepreneurs – American, British, Japanese – with the result that the price of consumer goods is being forced up by more than twenty per cent, triggering a runaway inflation and damaging the economy to the point where the Russian man-in-the-street is near destitution at a time when Yeltsin is desperate to keep down the threat of revolution on the scale of the storming of the Winter Palace. I'm quoting these few statistics from memory simply to give you a brief picture of events.'

'Understood.'

Behind Croder's narrow, silhouetted head, snow eddied past the stained-glass windows, black against the acid neon of the street lamps beyond.

'But this doesn't,' he said, 'explain the prime minister's feeling of an almost personal affront, does it?'