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The fire service appeared, but though everything in both the affected rooms was charred by the white heat of the explosion, nothing was actually blazing. The forensic team had plenty to do, bagging every last crumb of the debris, part of it human, for later analysis.

Homicide was represented, on the orders of a major general, by Detective Borodin. He could see at a glance there was nothing in the room bigger than the palm of a hand, and a dangerous four-foot-diameter hole in the floor, but there was something in the bathroom.

The door had evidently been closed, for it had fragmented and the bits hurled into the sink. The wall in which it was set had also come down, being forced into the bathroom by the blast from the other side.

But under the rubble was an attaché case, scored, charred, and deeply scratched. Its contents, however, had survived. Apparently at the moment of explosion the case must have been standing in the most sheltered place in either room, up against the inside bathroom wall between the toilet an

d the bidet. The water from the shattered appliances had soaked the case, but its contents had survived. Borodin checked to see that he was unobserved, then slipped both documents under his jacket.

Colonel Grishin had them in time for his coffee. Twenty-four hours can make a difference to a mood. He gazed at them both with deep satisfaction. One was a file, in Russian, which he recognized as the Black Manifesto. The other was an American passport. It was in the name of Jason Monk.

“One to get in,” he thought, “and one to get out. But this time, my friend, you are not getting out.”

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TWO other things happened that day and neither attracted a whit of attention. A British visitor whose passport gave his name as Brian Marks flew into Sheremetyevo Airport on the scheduled afternoon flight from London, and two other Englishmen drove a Volvo sedan across the border from Finland.

So far as the officials at the airport were concerned the new arrival was one of hundreds and appeared to speak no Russian. But like the others he made his way through the various controls and finally emerged to hail a taxi and ask to be driven to central Moscow.

Dismissing his taxi on a street corner, he made sure he was not being followed, then continued by foot to the small second-class hotel where he had a reservation for a single room.

His currency declaration form showed he had admitted to a modest amount of British sterling pounds, which he would need to re-declare on departure, or produce official exchange receipts in lieu of them, and some traveler’s checks to which the same stipulation would apply. His currency form made no mention of the bricks of hundred-dollar bills taped to the back of each thigh.

His surname was not really Marks but the similarity with Marx as in Karl Marx had amused the engraver who had prepared his passport. Given the choice, he had elected to retain his real first name of Brian. He was in fact the same Russian-speaking ex-soldier with a career in Special Forces whom Sir Nigel Irvine had sent on the reconnaissance mission in September.

Having settled in, he set about his various tasks and purchases. He rented a small car from a Western agency and explored one of the outer suburbs of the city, the district of Vorontsovo in the far south of the capital.

For two days, at varying intervals so as not to attract attention to himself, he staked out and observed one particular building, a large windowless warehouse constantly visited during daylight hours by heavy trucks.

By night he observed the building on foot, walking past it a number of times, always clutching a half-empty bottle of vodka. On the few occasions another pedestrian came the opposite way, he would simply weave from side to side like any drunk, and be ignored.

What he saw he liked. The chain-link fence would prove no obstacle. The truck bay for deliveries and pickups was locked at night, but there was a small door with a padlock at the rear of the warehouse, and a single guard on foot made occasional tours of the outside during the hours of darkness. In other words, the building was a soft target.

At the old South Port secondhand car market, where everything from a decrepit wreck to a nearly new limousine just stolen in the West could be bought for cash, he acquired a set of Moscow license plates and an assortment of tools, including a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters.

In the center of the city he purchased a dozen cheap but reliable Swatch watches and a variety of batteries, rolls of electrical wire, and tape. When he was finally satisfied that he could find the warehouse with complete accuracy at any time of the day or night and get back to the city center by a score of different routes, he returned to his hotel to wait for the Volvo pushing south from St. Petersburg.

The rendezvous with Ciaran and Mitch was at the McDonald’s hamburger bar on Tverskaya Street. The other two Special Forces soldiers had had a slow but uneventful journey south.

In a garage in south London the Volvo had been endowed with its unusual cargo. Both front wheels had been removed and replaced with old-fashioned tires containing inner tubes. Before this, each inner tube had been slit. Into the tubes were dropped hundreds of thumb-sized pellets of Semtex plastic explosive. The tubes were then patched, slipped back inside the tires, and inflated.

With the spinning of the wheels, the puttylike explosive, extraordinarily stable unless subjected to the attentions of a mercury-fulminate detonator, had melded into a skin lining the inside of each inner tube. In this manner, after being shipped to Stockholm, the Volvo had rolled sedately for a thousand kilometers via Helsinki to Moscow. The detonators came in the lower layer of a box of Havana cigars, apparently bought on the ferry but in fact prepared in London.

Ciaran and Mitch stayed at a different hotel. Brian accompanied them in the Volvo to a patch of waste ground near South Port where the car was jacked up and the two spare wheels the tourists had thoughtfully brought with them replaced the two front wheels. No one took any notice; the car thieves of Moscow were always cannibalizing cars around the South Port area. It took only a few more minutes to deflate and remove the inner tubes, stuff them in a carryall, return to the hotel, and strip away the melded Semtex that lined them.

While Ciaran and Mitch assembled their goodies in the hotel room, Brian took the shredded rubber tubes out into the streets to lose them in a variety of public garbage bins.

The three pounds of plastic explosive were divided into twelve small pieces, each about the size of a crushproof cigarette pack. To these were added one detonator, one battery, and one watch, with the wires connecting the components at the appropriate places. The bombs were finally held together with stout plastic tape.

“Thank God,” said Mitch as they worked, “we don’t have to use that kipper rubbish.”

Semtex-H, the most popular of all the RDX plastic explosive derivatives, has always been a Czech product, and under Communism was made completely odor-free, which made it the terrorists’ favorite device. After the fall of Communism, however, the new Czech president Vaclav Havel quickly acceded to a Western request to change the formula and add a particularly foul odor to make the stuff detectable in transit. The odor was similar to rotten fish, hence Mitch’s reference to kippers.

By the mid-nineties detection devices had become so sophisticated that they could even identify the non-smell variety. But warm rubber has its own very similar odor, hence the use of the tires as a transporting device. In fact the Volvo had not been subjected to that sort of test, but Sir Nigel believed in extreme caution, a quality of which Ciaran and Mitch totally approved.

The raid on the factory took place six days after Colonel Grishin received the Black Manifesto and the passport of Jason Monk.

The trusty Volvo, with its new front wheels and equally new and false Moscow license plates, was driven by Brian. If anyone stopped them, he was the Russian speaker.