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a traitor. And as far as Ferguson goes, I’ve received an order from the Grand Council. They want revenge for ben Levi. Nothing less than assassination. Bullet or bomb, I’m open to either.” He laughed. “I suppose I could put it to Tod Flynn.”
    Lily was shocked at the implication. “The political upheaval would be enormous.”
    “And so it should be. That would be the point. That no one is safe, not even those working at the highest level for the Prime Minister himself, and there’s a thought.”
    Lily tried to sound enthused, but managed only a muted “I hear what you say.”
    “Good. With luck, you should be back in London tomorrow. Give my sincere thanks to Hamid Bey for allowing you the few days’ leave to assist me as you have. He has been a revelation once he took over as imam. AQ acknowledges its debt.”
    “I’ll speak to him as soon as I get back. Is there anything more I can do for you?”
    “Yes, I’d like you to look up Tod Flynn’s niece at the Royal College of Music. She interests me. It seems that when she was fourteen, she lost her parents to a car bomb on a trip to Ulster and was crippled.”
    “Dear God,” Lily said, genuinely shocked.
    “Her father was Flynn’s elder brother, Peter. Flynn became her legal guardian, and she’s been raised by him and her great-aunt. I want to know more about her. Something tells me it’ll come in handy for keeping Mr. Flynn in hand.”
    “The usual file?”
    “Exactly, now be on your way. God go with you.”
    —
    She continued to walk at the water’s edge, thinking of Pound Street Methodist Chapel, now converted to the mosque and the headquarters of the Army of God charity. She was a cockney girl who from childhood had only wanted to be a nurse, had qualified against the odds and then joined the Army Medical Corps. In the seven years that followed, one war after another had given her an unrivaled experience of the barbarism, the butchery, that people could inflict on one another.
    In Bosnia, she’d seen open graves with hundreds of Muslim bodies tumbled into them, as if the Nazis had returned to haunt Europe. In Kosovo, you had to get out of the ambulances to pull the corpses of mothers and their children to one side of the road so you could continue. In northern Lebanon, she had served with the Red Cross and UN with only a handful of soldiers to try to control the rape and pillage outside the mission hospital.
    It was the only time she’d fought, and that was in desperation, picking up a dead soldier’s Browning pistol and emptying it into savage faces one after another, and then the trucks had roared up with the men and rifles. Al-Qaeda, ruthlessly shooting wrongdoers, bringing order where there was none.
    Two years later and out of the army, a nursing sister at theCromwell Hospital in London, she’d met the love of her life, Khalid Shah, a handsome Algerian charge nurse, married him, and they’d moved to the dispensary at Pound Street, where it became clear that he was a follower of Osama bin Laden.
    It was a year later that the cruelty of life took him away from her, when al-Qaeda called him in for service in Gaza, an Israeli air strike a month later ensuring his stay was permanent. She couldn’t hate Jews because of what had happened, for her dark secret, even from Khalid, was that she was only a Christian through her father, because her mother was a Jew and had married out. Hamid Bey, the imam at Pound Street Mosque, seemed a reasonable man, and as the dispensary was multifaith, Lily’s Christianity caused no problem. The fact that he also looked the other way where al-Qaeda was concerned was understandable, when one considered that the greater part of his congregation supported it. She had yet to realize that she was entirely wrong in her assessment of Hamid, a savage zealot, who supported the Cause as much as the Master.
    As her husband, Khalid, had been very open about his dedication to al-Qaeda, Lily had, to a certain extent, been