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thudded into the ceiling and bits of polystyrene fluttered to the ground. ‘Oops,’ he said. He spoke into his radio mic. ‘Everything secure?’
    ‘All accounted for, sir,’ replied a tinny voice. ‘You okay in there?’
    ‘Mine got away. I’m on my way back,’ he said. ‘That’s it then,’ he added, to Knight. ‘Job well done.’
    Knight went to the emergency exit, kicked it open and gave the CO19 officer a thumbs-up. No alarm sounded: it had been disconnected by a SOCA technician the previous evening. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
    ‘All part of the service, Spider. You take care now.’
    Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd, undercover agent with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, took his Ray-Ban sunglasses from his pocket, put them on and walked out into the sunshine.

Three men were sitting on the bench, the morning’s newspapers spread out on the floor in front of them. Two were in their twenties, the third in his early thirties, and they all had dark brown skin, jet black hair and were casually dressed in sweatshirts, jeans and brand-name white trainers. The bench was in the Rose Garden, a quiet area of the Paddington Recreation Ground in Maida Vale, north-west London. The park had once been a place where elderly ladies walked their dogs and mothers watched their toddlers take unsteady steps, but now it was a meeting place for the various immigrant groups crammed into the damp flats of nearby Kilburn. On any one day there would be clusters of young men from Kosovo, from Bosnia, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from West Africa, a veritable United Nations of refugees who had fled to Britain for a better life. They had quickly discovered they were not welcomed by the majority of the population. They were hated because they were a different colour, because they spoke a different language and wore different clothes, but mostly they were hated because they refused to integrate. They stayed in their tight groups and spoke English only when it was absolutely necessary. Several times a day the council security guards who prowled the park made a half-hearted attempt to move them on, but they simply returned a few minutes later. There was nowhere else for them to go.
    The three men on the bench weren’t refugees, or asylum-seekers, and they spoke with northern English accents. They were all British-born, they supported English football teams and they were studying at British colleges or universities. If they had been asked for their nationality they would have said unhesitatingly that they were British, because that was what it said on their passports. But the three men didn’t feel British. They felt as alien as the recently arrived refugees dotted around the park. They had no love for the country that had educated them, no empathy with its people. In fact, when there was no one to hear what they were saying, they would proclaim their hatred for the British and everything they stood for.
    A fourth man joined them. He had unkempt blond hair and blue eyes, and was wearing brown cargoes and a Levi’s T-shirt. ‘Greetings, brothers,’ he said. His name was Paul Bradshaw. It was two days after his twenty-fifth birthday, two years and three months since he had converted to Islam.
    ‘We did it,’ said the youngest of the group, punching the air with a clenched fist. Rafee Talwar had been born in Leeds but his parents were from Pakistani Kashmir. He wore a sweatshirt with the logo of the South Bank University, where he was studying economics. But it had been more than six months since Talwar had read anything other than the Koran. He was short-sighted and wore large, black-framed spectacles that gave him the look of an Asian Buddy Holly.
    ‘We did nothing,’ said Bradshaw, sitting next to him. He looked at his watch, a cheap plastic Casio. ‘Where is Kafele?’
    ‘He is coming,’ said Talwar, and gestured to the entrance to the Rose Garden. A young man wearing a Gap sweatshirt was approaching the gate.
    ‘He’s always late,’