Josh Ireland

You are the person that will help.

I think they're all terrified, but Aiting knows that the first person against the wall is going to be him.

And there is a close friendship between the two men, which will persist for decades afterwards.

Okay.

So there is a genuine attachment, a genuine sentimental connection between them, which may or may not be to do with the fact that, you know, he's effectively his stepdad or might not be.

Sure.

It's just complicated.

And so they come up with a plan.

And the first, there are a couple of terrible plans.

I think they initially think about bombing the compound.

they then they try and think about poison but then they realize that no one knows how to make poison and there's always like with all these things there's always like a note of grand farce of like they're only one step away from a kind of ealing style comedy and then the what the plan that eventually settle on has sort of two attractive features as far as they're concerned

What the idea is is that Ramon will find a way of getting himself alone in Trotsky's study and then will kill him not with a pistol but with either a knife or the weapon that they decide to choose which is an ice axe.

And the appeal of the ice axe is that it's

It's not a subtle weapon.

It's not a surgical weapon that if anyone is killed with an ice axe, you know, it will create carnage on their head and an incredibly visceral symbol of the price you pay for standing up for Stalin.

And I think there had actually been an NKVD assassination a year or two before using ice picks.

There is some sort of precedent for it.

And also, a weird thing you learn about Mexico, quite a lot of mountains, quite a lot of mountaineering.

A lot of ice axes.

Quite easy to get hold of an ice axe.