‘It’s worse for the simple reason that they’re not doing this for the money,’ Segal replied. ‘Which means the fentanyl isn’t going to be stored somewhere and drip-fed into the system like any other retail product the seller has invested in. When that shipment reaches France, just over two and a half hours from now, they intend to dump the entire quantity on the market all at once, for free. Gratis. It will create a tidal surge of chaos such as has never been seen in Europe before. Drug gangs will be slaughtering each other wholesale in broad daylight over who can gain the biggest slice of the cake. The police will be totally unable to contain the violence. There’ll be stampedes and riots. The streets will be lined with comatose bodies and the hospitals will be choked with fatal overdose cases. Within weeks the number of hopeless addicts will multiply exponentially, and half the kids in France will be using. Within months, the effect on the whole society will be devastating, the state’s resources strained far past breaking point. It’s not hard to imagine what comes next.’

‘The next generation of warfare,’ Roth said. ‘They can’t beat us on the battlefield. So this is how they take us down instead.’

‘Using drugs to destabilise the enemy is nothing new,’ Segal said glumly. ‘It’s what the CIA did to the American blacks through the nineteen-seventies and eighties, injecting drugs into their community to tear it apart and weaken potential resistance against oppressive government policy. A century and a half earlier, the same thing was being done to the American Indians, with cheap toxic alcohol, while in the mid-eighteen-hundreds the British were deliberately causing the Chinese to become addicted to opium. Now maybe the Chinese are getting their own back on Western Europe, using the jihadis as pawns in the game. And I’m afraid the strategy may succeed. Look at us. We’re already on our knees. The signs of our decaying secular culture are all around, as the institutions collapse, traditions are erased and the population sinks into mindless degeneracy and nihilism, believing in nothing, living in an ideological void. One small push is all it might take to topple the whole crumbling edifice into total collapse. With the crusaders of the new holy war just waiting at the gates to come marching in and seize power.’

Margot Segal sat slumped in shock and dismay at what she’d been hearing. ‘I just can’t believe anyone could be so vicious and cruel. What have we done to them? What could make them hate us so much?’

‘It’s all right there in their book, Ma’am,’ Roth explained. ‘“The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorise them. They are your enemy and Allah’s enemy.” Qur’an surah eight, verse fifty-nine.’