Sami’s agents had recovered little from the scene to either validate or refute his suspicions. Several of the victims could not be identified. The official death toll given by the French authorities was an educated guess, based on missing persons and who was believed to have been in the church at the time of the attack. Sami thought the true number might never be known, given that several bodies had been completely incinerated.

The identity of the attacker or attackers remained unknown. A canvass of the area had proved frustrating, particularly as there was no CCTV in the vicinity of the church. None of the 2890 tourists who had visited the historic town in the previous month was on a watch list of any kind or had the type of profile that suggested they might be a terrorist.

The fact that the authorities had been left to try to establish the identity of the attacker or attackers concerned Sami, because terrorists usually did that themselves, recording and posting a martyrdom video. But none had surfaced yet. And neither ISIS nor any other group had claimed responsibility for the attack.

Sami had sent his two agents back to their Paris base as soon as they’d filed their less-than-definitive report, which attributed the attack to a ‘lone-wolf individual or group, either French or foreign, inspired by ISIS if not supported and financed by the Syria-based terror group’. His superiors at Langley weren’t too concerned, given that no US citizens had been killed in the attack. Sami’s brief was simply to monitor and report on any threats posed directly to the United States or to US interests abroad – and the Normandy attack appeared to be neither.

The St Petersburg bombing had come exactly a month later. On the twenty-fifth day of the month, just as in Normandy, the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood was levelled. Again a church, again a home-made ammonium-nitrate-based IED, again no survivors, again no witnesses, again no martyrdom video and again no terror group taking credit for the attack.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ screamed Tom Morrissey, CIA Director of Operations, from his office in Langley. ‘Is this something I need to be worried about?’

Sami told him he didn’t have enough intelligence to be sure.

‘Well, fucking get it,’ Morrissey had yelled before slamming down the phone.

Sami had sent a team of six to St Petersburg, including his best agent, a thirty-two-year-old policing prodigy he had nicknamed ‘Maverick’, partly because he looked like Tom Cruise but mostly because he was a dickhead like the character in Top Gun. Ryan Smith, as his parents had named him, put the nickname down to his good looks, of course.