‘Of course he’ll know. But he’ll go for it, because he has to. Nazim might be pretty high up in his organisation’s chain of command but he’s not the top of it. Not even close. He’s just a soldier in an army. And whatever he might be risking if he takes our bait, he knows it’s nothing next to what his superiors will do to him if he loses their fentanyl. Then it’s him on the wrong end of the knife.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ said Segal, smiling for the first time. ‘I hope they chop off his rotten head.’

Roth pondered the idea for a moment, then said, ‘Okay. Sounds like a green light to me.’

Everything seemed to make perfect sense. If what Segal had told them was true, little could go wrong.

But there was just one possibility that Ben had overlooked. His plan was unravelling even as they spoke. He didn’t know it yet, but he would realise his mistake soon enough.

Chapter 50

Ninety minutes earlier

As the last arrival rolled to a halt on the cracked, rain-slicked concrete outside the warehouse, everybody climbed out. It was just after 4.30 a.m., the time when the world was at its lowest ebb. The six vehicles that had driven through the night from Paris to Sandouville were a mixture of commercial panel vans, all different makes and models, some stolen, the rest cheaply procured for cash.

Their occupants totalled fourteen men. Two of them were white European converts who, after years of living the kafir life, had found deep comfort and enlightenment in jihadist ideology. Another seven were immigrants from Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Qatar, Syria and Afghanistan. Four were French-born members of the main jihadist cell in Paris. All were utterly loyal to their leader, Nazim al-Kassar. And all were men with a hardcore criminal past that included rape, murder, terrorist plotting, gun running and bomb-making. There wasn’t one among them who wouldn’t gladly make the ultimate sacrifice for this sacred mission on which they were now embarking.

Nazim was wearing a black leather jacket and a black baseball cap. He walked up to the warehouse entrance, unlocked the heavy padlock at the foot of the steel shutter and stepped back as two of his men, the Syrian called Abbud and the Nigerian called Shaykh, heaved it up with a noisy clatter. Shaykh was possibly the most devout of the entire gang, diligently observing his five-times-daily prayers and the recitation of the Fatiha, or opening, prayer a full seventeen times each day, and was often muttering Qur’anic verses to himself; all this, despite the fact that he was black, and that his Arab fellows quietly considered his race to be born slaves, described by the Prophet as ‘raisin heads’ in the Hadith.