Al-Lihaib waited until they had both sipped their hot mint tea before he spoke. ‘You had a lucky escape,’ he said.

‘Allah was looking over me,’ said al-Hussain.

‘As were your team, thankfully,’ said al-Lihaib. ‘It is rare actually to see a drone but one of the men caught the sun glinting off it, then the missile being launched.’

‘I barely made it off the roof,’ said al-Hussain. ‘I’m sorry about the men who were with me. I shouted a warning but they froze.’

‘They had been briefed?’

‘They had been told to follow my orders immediately. As I said, they froze.’

‘You had only seconds in which to act,’ said al-Lihaib.

‘The question is, how did they know where I would be?’ said al-Hussain. ‘I was told of the location only an hour before I got there.’

‘And we learned of the colonel’s visit only that morning, by which time the drone was almost certainly in the air.’ Al-Lihaib sipped his tea.

‘Could the drone have been protecting the colonel?’ asked al-Hussain.

‘Out of the question,’ said the commander. ‘The Americans and the British do not use their drones to protect foreigners, only to attack their enemies.’

‘Then how did they know I would be on the roof?’

‘They didn’t,’ said al-Lihaib. ‘They couldn’t have.’

‘Then why?’

Al-Lihaib took another sip of his tea. ‘It could only have been the British jihadist they were after,’ he said. ‘The British have been using the drones to track and kill their own people. They must have been following him, watched him join you and go to the roof. Once they had a clear shot, they launched their missile.’ He smiled grimly. ‘You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the Brit they wanted to kill. You would have been collateral damage.’

Al-Hussain drank some tea.

‘Your parents are in Lebanon?’ asked al-Lihaib.

Al-Hussain nodded. ‘They fled in 2013.’

‘They are safe?’

Al-Hussain shrugged. ‘I haven’t spoken to them since they left. I told them they should stay. We are Syrians, this is our country. We should fight for it.’

‘Sometimes we have to take the fight to the enemy,’ said al-Lihaib. ‘Like the martyrs did on Nine Eleven. The whole world took notice. And in Paris. We hurt the French, we made them bleed. They learned a lesson – you hurt us and we hurt you. An eye for an eye.’

Al-Hussain nodded but didn’t say anything. Al-Lihaib reached inside his robe and took out a passport. He placed it on the table in front of al-Hussain.

‘What’s that?’

The commander waved for him to pick it up. It was a British passport. The man in the photograph was strikingly similar to al-Hussain but, according to the printed details, he was called Hammad Rajput. He was two years older than al-Hussain and had been born in Birmingham. The beard in the picture was shorter and well-trimmed, but the likeness was so close they might have been brothers.