‘The British government. They sponsored us to go and help the resistance. Go and be heroes, liberate Syria from the dictatorship. So we went to help our brothers. Young Muslims from Britain, many without jobs, without respect, feeling isolated by the licentiousness and decadence that surrounds them, spat on, shunned because they were obedient to God, because they prayed and didn’t drink. A chance to do something worthwhile, to attain some worth in the service of Allah, praise be upon him.

‘So we jumped at the chance. We trained, we prepared, and we saw for ourselves the suffering. But where were the arms we were promised, where were the bullets? They didn’t come. So we rationed the bullets, we shared the weapons. We had to steal to eat, to get fuel. We, who had come to be liberators, were stealing from the people we had come to liberate. Imagine, if you can, the shame, the betrayal.

‘The men your brother was with, they are surviving on almost nothing. The West has deceived them, and they are trapped. Every day there is a choice. Do we buy bullets or food? They can’t even come back now. Because the government that encouraged them to go now looks on them as criminals. So they have no choice but to side with the Islamists who have bullets and food.’

Where was this going? Sam’s neck and back ached. The man leaned forward suddenly and he felt his breath through the hood.

‘Find the money. You have a week.’

He was pulled onto his feet, frogmarched back to the van and sedated again.

When he came to he was lying on a bench, with traffic whizzing past a few feet away. He looked round. Cockfosters tube station was just up the road. He got to his feet and stumbled towards the entrance.

Chapter 49

49

Sam sat on the tube, watching the commuters nodding to the music in their earbuds, eyes glued to iPads, Kindles and tabloids: ‘My Serial Sex Cheat Shame’ and below it ‘TIME TO STOP THE TERROR’. The whole front page of the Sun was devoted to a statement by someone – perhaps the paper itself. ‘The government must bring itself to think the unthinkable . . . The time has come to stop the talk and take action . . . The enemy within . . . Time to face the facts. Where all the terror is coming from and what we need to do to stop it. Stop it now.’