‘With respect, Mr Lang, you were a very small part of it. Too small - forgive me for saying it - too small to know what you were a part of.’

‘As you like,’ I said.

‘Now take a guess at the single most important commodity in the world. So important, that the manufacture and sale of every other commodity depends on it. Oil, gold, food, what would you say?’

‘I’ve a feeling,’ I said, ‘that you’re going to tell me it’s arms.’

Woolf leaned across the table, too quickly and too far for my liking.

‘Correct, Mr Lang,’ he said. ‘It is the biggest industry in the world, and every government in the world knows it. If you’re a politician, and you take on the arms industry, in whatever form, then you wake up the next day and you’re no longer a politician. Some cases, you might not even wake up the next day. Doesn’t matter whether you’re trying for a law on a gun ownership registration in the state ofIdaho, or trying to stop the sale of F-16s to the Iraqi Air Force. You step on their toes, they step on your head. Period.’

Woolf sat back in his chair and wiped some sweat from his forehead.

‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘I realise it must be strange for you, being here inEngland. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I’ve heard a lot of this before.’

‘Just listen, will you?’ said Sarah, and I jumped slightly at the anger in her voice. When I looked at her, she just stared back at me, her lips pressed tightly together.

‘Did you ever hear of the Stoltoi Bluff?’ said Woolf. I turned back to him.

‘The Stoltoi… no, I don’t believe so.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Anatoly Stoltoi was a Red Army General. Chief-of-Staff under Khrushchev. Spent his whole career convincing theUS that the Russians had thirty times as many rockets as they had. That was his job. His life’s work.’

‘Well it worked, didn’t it?’

‘For us, yeah.’

‘Us being…?’

‘Pentagon knew it was bullshit from start to finish. Knew it. But that didn’t stop them using it to justify the biggest arms build-up the world has ever seen.’

Maybe it was the wine, but I felt I was being awfully slow to get the point of all this.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well let’s do something about it, shall we? Now, where did I leave my time-machine? Oh I know, next Wednesday.’

Sarah made a slight hissing noise and looked away from the table, and maybe she was right - maybe I was being flippant - but for God’s sake, where were we going with all this?

Woolf closed his eyes for a moment, gathering some patience from somewhere.

‘What would you say,’ he said slowly, ‘the arms industry needs more than anything else?’

I scratched my head dutifully. ‘Customers?’

‘War,’ said Woolf. ‘Conflict. Trouble.’

Well, here we go, I thought. Here comes the theory.

‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘You’re trying to tell me that the Gulf War was started by arms manufacturers?’ Honestly, I was being as polite as I could.

Woolf didn’t answer. He just sat there, with his head slightly tilted to one side, watching me and wondering if he’d got the wrong man after all. I didn’t even have to wonder.

‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? I mean, I really want to know what you think. I want to know what this is all about.’

‘You saw the footage they showed on TV?’ said Sarah, while Woolf just kept on watching. ‘Smart bombs, Patriot missile systems, all that stuff?’

‘I saw it,’ I said.

‘The makers of those weapons, Thomas, are using that footage in promotional videos at arms fairs around the world. People dying, and they’re using the stuff for commercials.

It’s obscene.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Agreed. The world is a pretty terrible place, and we’d all much rather live on Saturn. How does this affect me, specifically?’

As the Woolfs traded some meaningful looks, I tried desperately to conceal the enormous pity I now felt for the pair of them. Obviously, they had embarked on some ghastly conspiracy theory which would, in all probability, consume the best years of their lives with the cutting-out of articles from newspapers, and the attending of seminars on the subject of grassy knolls, and nothing I could say would divert them from their chosen course. The best thing would be to slip them a couple of quid towards their sellotape costs and be on my way.

I was thinking hard, trying to phrase a decent excuse for leaving, when I realised that Woolf had been tugging at his briefcase - and now he had it open and was pulling out a handful of ten-by-eight glossy photographs.

He passed the top one to me, so I took it.

It was a picture of a helicopter in flight. I couldn’t judge its size, but it was nothing like any type I had seen or heard of. It had two main rotors, running a couple of feet apart off a single mast, and there was no tail rotor. The fuselage looked short compared to the main body, and there were no identifying letters anywhere. It was painted black.

I looked at Woolf for an explanation, but he simply handed me the next photograph. This one had been taken from above, so it showed a background, and what surprised me was that it was urban. The same aircraft, or one like it, was hovering between a pair of faceless tower blocks, and I could see that the machine was definitely small, possibly a single- seater.

The third photograph was a much closer shot, and showed the helicopter on the ground. Whatever else it was, it was definitely military, because there was a mess of very nasty looking kit hanging from the armaments rack that ran through the fuselage behind the cabin. Hydra 70mm rockets, Hellfire air-to-ground missiles,.50 calibre machine guns, and heaps more besides. This was a big toy, for big boys.

‘Where did you get these?’ I said. Woolf shook his head.

‘That’s not important.’

‘Well, I think it is important,’ I said. ‘I have the very strong feeling, Mr Woolf, that you ought not to have these photographs.’

Woolf tilted his head back, as if he was finally starting to lose patience with me.

‘It doesn’t matter where they came from,’ he said. ‘What matters is the subject. This is a very important aircraft, Mr Lang. Believe me. Very, very important.’

I believed him. Why wouldn’t I?

‘The Pentagon’s LH programme,’ said Woolf, ‘has been running for twelve years now, trying to find a replacement for the Cobras and Super-Cobras the USAAF and the Marine Corps have been using since the Vietnam War.’