JAX didn’t have to go back far to find the memory he needed: of the Arabic text on the Serpent’s wall. What he did need to know was how to type Arabic into a QWERTY keyboard. It didn’t take him long to find an image of an Arabic keyboard on the internet. One at a time, he pulled the Arabic letters from his head and found them on the Arabic keyboard he’d also memorised. Having changed the language settings in Microsoft Word to Arabic, he then found the corresponding key on his QWERTY keyboard.

He soon had the entire passage on his screen. He copied the chunk of text from Word and pasted it into Google Translate. And, like magic, the impenetrable Arabic became English.

He will rise with the Mahdi, redeemer of all religions: Twelfth Imam and high priest, to defeat the al-masih ad-dajjal and rid the world of evil. Together they will rule the righteous dominion.

Jax copied the translation and pasted it into his search bar. He knew exactly what he was looking for: an English translation of the Quran, with chapter and verse. ‘Come on,’ he muttered under his breath as he waited for the results to load.

Then suddenly he sat bolt upright, startled by what he was sure was a distant footstep . . .

WALLACE studied the screens: live traffic cameras, helmet cams, vehicles cams and a live feed being beamed down from Overwatch. Facial recognition software was being used to scan the people in the crowd.

‘Sector Two is clear,’ came the call from Sweeper One, the forward-deployed motorbike unit, giving the green light for the motorcade to proceed.

‘We are green,’ Wallace relayed to the other units. ‘ETA to delivery is twenty-four minutes.’

RONIN One threw his hand in the air and drew a fist, the command freezing the rest of his unit statue-still. He kept his hand raised while Clarke delivered the latest order.

‘Target is on the move,’ the soldier said after acknowledging the command. ‘Proceed to checkpoint Alpha Block. I repeat, new order is to proceed to Alpha.’

JAX turned towards his door and looked hard into the dark, listened closely. The footstep became footsteps. A guard. Had to be a guard. Maybe a random cell check?

Jax ignored the search results, which had now loaded, and closed his laptop. He turned off his phone. He thought about putting it to sleep instead, but the thought of it waking up while the guard was looking through his window forced his hand.

He pulled up his covers, lay his head on his pillow. He would pretend to be asleep. He closed his eyes, but his ears remained wide open.

The footsteps grew louder.

Not a guard. Those weren’t the chunky rubber soles of the guards’ boots. Not a random cell check. The footsteps were the sound of leather striking concrete. So, not an inmate either. And the footsteps were getting louder.

Click!