The glass steamed again and he wiped it once more. The desert was gone, London back. London. The capital of Great Britain. So-called Great Britain. Taher had to prevent himself from thumping his fist on the window and obliterating the image. He hadn’t known it all those years ago, but the devastation wrought that evening in the desert had come from a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a Royal Navy destroyer stationed three hundred miles away in the Persian Gulf. The new way of waging war. The modern way. Just like a computer game. Type a few letters and numbers. Hit the enter key. Wipe away half a dozen innocent lives in a targeting error. For the few people that bother to read the news reports the lives lost are dismissed in a phrase that brought bile to Taher’s throat: collateral damage.

He rubbed the area of old scar tissue on his right forearm and then looked through the dirty glass again, the city spread out before him. Cars spiralled along roads. People disappeared into a tube station. Aeroplanes hovered on the horizon on their final approach to Heathrow.

Well, there were other ways of fighting back, he thought. You didn’t need a million-pound missile fired from a billion-pound ship, you didn’t need to be a global military power. You just needed determination, a few trusted followers and the knowledge you were performing the will of God.

Yes, the day was surely coming when the good folk of London would experience collateral damage for themselves.

Silva was back in Plymouth. Walking the round. Delivering the letters. Thinking about the utter craziness of Fairchild’s suggestion.

When Karen Hope turns up you’re going to kill her.

She’d walked out on him after that, his voice echoing in her ears as she started her bike and rode away.

…you’re going to kill her.

Fairchild was living in a world of make-believe and movies where snipers took potshots and escaped by jumping from buildings or hanging on to a rope lowered from a helicopter.

…kill her.

Assassinate the future president of the United States? Straight up madness.

And yet as she trudged the streets in the warm summer rain, the story Fairchild had spun snagged at her thoughts and refused to lie buried. What if her mother had discovered something about the Hopes that was incriminating enough for them to consider murdering her? Although her mother had no interest in American domestic politics, she’d certainly had many assignments related to US foreign policy. The relationship with Israel, the funding of the Taliban, the two wars in Iraq, the war on terror. Fairchild wasn’t a back-room general either, and he’d served in several wars. Would such a man indulge in high fantasy? She didn’t know, but if it hadn’t been for the cryptic postcard her mother had written her she may well have dropped the whole thing.

…hidden secrets… definitely Hope…