‘Before she married that ass. We live very different lives, my sister Georgie and I, but we were both raised religiously. Though I’ll confess I got the bug worse than she did.’ Shelton pointed up at the giant cross on the wall. ‘You might say my religion is my life.’

‘The Church doesn’t pay that well. I take it you’re not a man of the cloth.’

Shelton smiled. ‘Scarcely. Growing up, the only thing I was almost as zealous about as my faith in God was my passion for technology. In my early twenties I hooked up with a gang of other college nerds, and together the four of us designed and co-founded a well-known search engine app that you’ve probably used thousands of times yourselves. This was the dot-com boom, when fortunes that would otherwise have taken decades to amass were often made in a year or less, with minimal effort. When we sold out our stake in the company not long afterwards, I came away with an embarrassingly large amount of money.’

He waved a portly arm around him. ‘As you can see, I’ve used my wealth to isolate myself from the world. I find it a very worrying place. All the more so, knowing what I do about the things that go on at the very highest levels of power. I’m talking about the Satanic influences that have been steadily worming their way ever more deeply into the establishment for the last several centuries and have never been stronger than they are today. Though so few of us in the modern secular world are aware of it and even fewer take it seriously, there is in fact no greater threat facing mankind. And if we do nothing to prevent its malignant influence, the time will soon come when its full horror is unleashed. Then it’ll be too late. “For then there will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be equalled again.”’

‘Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four,’ Ben said.

‘You know your Bible well, for a military man.’

‘Legacy of a misspent youth,’ Ben said. ‘I wasn’t always destined for the battlefield.’

‘And yet, to serve God’s will is to wage battle,’ Shelton said. ‘Against an enemy far more powerful and sinister than any mortal warrior.’

‘Every man has his wars to fight,’ Ben said. ‘What was it that called you to yours?’

‘How did I get into this? Because of what happened to Dave. Before that, my religious belief was just some abstract ideology. That was the moment I realised what we’re really up against.’

‘Dave?’