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‘You think this is bad,’ he said, ‘you try landing at Adnan.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, Dez.’

Reid looked up from his papers. ‘Last I heard,’ he said with a vague frown, ‘it was called Grivas.’

We flew for hours over a terrifyingly featureless plain, and then, in the middle of all that nowhere, descended to a full-sized international airport buzzing with military and civilian craft. In the far distance a clutter of launch silos and gantries; closer by, a town of low pre-fabs: Kapitsa, capital (and only) city of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, aka the Number Three Test Area, in the wasteland somewhere between Karaganda and Semiplatinsk. Part of former Kazhakstan.

‘I have a suprise for you,’ Reid said as we waited for the transit bus.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked at him and shrugged, huddled against the dust-dry wind and trying not to breathe too much. The levels were supposed to be safe by now, but I was already interpreting the effects of jet-lag as incipient radiation sickness.

The airport main building was like any such, a neon-lit space of seating and screens and PA systems, but the differences were striking. The duty-free wasn’t in a separate area, because there was no customs barrier. No passport control, either – just a cursory weapons registration and a walk through a scanner. The only thing anyone could smuggle in here that could make any difference was an actual atomic bomb, and they’re not easily hidden. No tourists: all the arrivals and departures were of serious-looking customers: men in suits or uniforms. Very few women, apart from among the airport workers, who all – even the cleaners, I noticed – moved about their tasks with an almost insolent lack of haste, under enormous posters of Trotsky, Koralev and Kapitsa. The men who gave the Soviets the Red Army, the rocket, and the Bomb and who all got varied doses of Stalin’s terror in return.

From every part of the concourse came an irritatingly frequent popping of flashbulbs. Photographers roamed the crowd, scanned faces hungrily, snapped officers and officials and company reps as eagerly as they would video stars. Their subjects responded in a similar manner. All over the place, poses were being struck by ugly, scowling men: shaking hands, bear-hugging, standing shoulder to shoulder and mugging like mad.

‘Where to now?’ I asked, as Ndebele and myself hesitated for a moment at the edge of the concourse. Reid glanced at me with a flicker of impatience.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is where the deals get done. It’s gotta be public, that’s the whole point.’

He set off purposefully towards an open-plan Nicafé franchise. I hurried after him.

‘Hence the paparazzi?’

‘Of course. Stay cool,’ he added to Dez, who was glowering at anyone who looked at us.

We sipped our first decent coffee of the day around a table too low to be comfortable, as if designed to hasten the through flow of customers. On the television four pretty Southeast Asians in pink satin ballgowns sang raucously in English, thrashed instruments and leapt about the stage. The continuity caption gave their name: Katoi Boys.

‘Boys?’ Dez raised his eyebrows.

‘Thai refugees,’ I said. ‘My youngest granddaughter tells me they’re the latest pre-teen heart-throbs.’

‘Kinky, man,’ Dez said with severe Calvinist disapproval. ‘Decadent.’

‘Yeah, that’s what the Islamic Republic told them.’ Reid spoke idly, scanning the crowd. He stood up.

I turned. A tall, slender woman in an ankle-length fur coat was walking up to us, with a wide and welcoming smile. Photographers trotted behind her, at a respectful distance. I nearly fell back into my seat as I recognised her: Myra, my long-ago ex from the Soviet Studies Institute in Glasgow.

‘Well, hi guys,’ she said. She caught my hands and put her cheek to mine and whispered, ‘Smile, dammit!’ and I turned with an idiot grin to face the flash.

One of my earliest memories, oddly enough, concerns the Soviet Union, space, and the Bomb. (I don’t remember being born, but I’m assured that event took place on 5 March 1953,