Max looked around for the terrorists. They weren’t hard to spot. There were fifteen in total. They wore blue overalls, like car mechanics, and black balaclavas. The only visible parts of their faces were their eyes and mouth. Some of them carried submachine guns. Max recognised the guns as MP5s, the same weapons they’d used on the range back at Valley House. Others had pistols, which he couldn’t identify.

Eight of the gunmen had their weapons taped to their hands with thick black duct tape. He didn’t understand why. These gunmen were standing, spaced out, along the two long walls of the hall. Actually, Max thought, perhaps they weren’t all gunmen. Four of the figures looked, from their shape, female. But it was hard to be sure with their heads covered.

Max looked for the other recruits. At the far end of the dining hall there was a raised stage, about a metre and a half high. It had thick red curtains on either side and a painted backdrop for a school play. Lukas, Sami, Abby and Jack were on the stage. They were kneeling with their hands behind their heads. Lukas looked angry, Sami strangely passive, Abby defiant and Jack very scared. None of them was able to speak over the comms; a terrorist was walking up and down the stage in front of them, keeping an eye on them. He carried an MP5.

Automatically, Max started assigning labels to each of the terrorists. He called the figure standing on the stage, keeping watch over Lukas, Abby and Sami, T1. He continued clockwise around the room until he reached T15. In truth, there was little to distinguish them. The figures he thought were female were T5, T8, T9 and T10. T7 looked male but was slightly smaller than the others.

Max turned his attention to the rest of his surroundings. Each of the long walls had a window that ran almost the entire length of the hall. Neither of these windows let in any light. As Hector had informed Max and the others, the windows were covered with fitted blinds that blocked out all daylight. The room was illuminated by strip lighting along the ceiling. Max assumed that the blinds were there so the hall could be darkened for school plays. Today they served the purpose of ensuring that nobody could look in, or out, of the dining hall. Max noticed, however, that the figures with the weapons taped to their hands stood in front of the blinds. Again, he wondered why.

The toilet door opened. Another gunman appeared: T16. He let a couple of kids back out into the hall before roughly pushing the two boys in the queue into the toilet block and following them in.

There was so much here that scared Max: the sinister balaclavas, the evil-looking firearms, his companions’ desperate situation. But there was something else that chilled him more.