There were four of them—a Tunisian, two Moroccans (from Brussels), and an Englishman. The Englishman had a tattoo on his right temple of a dragon or a lion (or possibly a cocker spaniel, it was hard to tell), and he was new, so the Tunisian had doubts. Could he be trusted? Was he devout? These questions he had raised to the Moroccans, who shut him down. They themselves had been raised in the West, they said, and no one questioned their devotion. And they knew converts like this Englishman. They had seen for themselves that converts were among the strongest believers.

But this afternoon the Englishman wasn’t praying. None of them were. They were sitting in a rented Renault parked next to a boulangerie in a small town near Lille, in the north of France. The boulangerie was popular, there were people walking by the car nonstop, occasionally glancing inside. It was not the ideal place to be parked. The men were concerned about drawing attention—three Arabs and guy with a weird tattoo. But this spot had the best view of the back of the dairy.

They had been surprised by the size of the place. It was at least fifty meters square, with giant silver silos erupting like launch tubes from its mass. The men in the car had taken a crash course in the configuration of milk processing—pre-stack tanks, pasteurizers, separators, and the rest. They wanted to make their intervention after pasteurization for sure and preferably after homogenization. Either way, they had to get inside.

Now, parked in this inconvenient spot, ameliorated only by the pleasant scent of fresh baguettes wafting from the boulangerie door, they watched truckers and warehousemen moving in a repetitive choreography of receiving and shipping at the dairy’s loading docks, gleaming silver tanker trucks filled with raw milk arriving and refrigerated containers of finished products departing from docks at the far end of a long row. What they didn’t see were any guards on the site. They did see Arabs among the workforce. That was the clincher. The Englishman had wanted to be the one to go in, but the Tunisian, short and slight and two days beardless, would do it. The other three would handle the chemical, drive the car, provide surveillance and backup if necessary, and, when it was done, help to make the announcement. If the dairy was shy about spreading the word, they would make sure the world knew anyway.

The loading docks looked like the best point of entry. Slip behind a tractor-trailer and in through an open door; there were dozens. It would be no problem getting a gray shirt and pants. Close enough to the factory uniform. The Tunisian was ready. He had pickpocketed the ID of a worker who was drunk after work at a café on a Friday when he should have been at mosque. More shame on him.