value. Hassan Abbas had bought it second-hand from an electrical shop in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the local town where they did most of their shopping. There wasn’t
even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite
walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated
prayer mats.
There were no curtains at the windows, because the faded wooden shutters were always kept closed, and no signs of anything that might be described as the comforts of home. In fact, the only
items of real value lay behind the door of the third and smallest bedroom, at the back of the house. The door to this room was the only one with a lock – a five-lever exterior quality Chubb
which had been fitted within a week of the signing of the tenancy agreement at the agency in Aire-sur-l’Adour – and it was always kept locked unless the equipment in the room was
actually being used. The room’s single exterior window was, like all the other windows, kept firmly closed, as were the external shutters. What was not visible from the outside was the steel
grille bolted to the wall inside the room and which completely covered the window opening – another unofficial addition to the property which Abbas had organized.
The other invisible deterrents to a thief were the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols always carried by each of the four men, and the two AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines fully charged,
which were kept propped up behind each of the two outside doors. They had also spent some time carefully positioning plastic explosive charges on the inside of the ground-floor doors and windows,
to be actuated by trip-wires, and installing a number of high-wattage floodlights under the eaves, powerful enough to illuminate the entire grounds.
There were two reasons why the old mill had been chosen, rather than either of the two other houses that had been on the short list. The first was a unique architectural feature of the property
that Abbas had stumbled on almost by accident, and which he devoutly hoped he would never have to use. Just over two miles from the house was the second reason; a small nondescript grey concrete
building, it was the automated telephone exchange which served the properties in the shallow valley which opened up to the south of St Médard.
When Abdullah Mahmoud – the name in the genuine Moroccan passport carried by Hassan Abbas when he had stepped off the ferry from Tangier at Algeciras – had decided on the location of
the property they needed, he had planned to have an ADSL line installed. An Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line would have provided a permanent Internet connection, but technical requirements
meant that the user had to live within about four miles of the local exchange. The other two houses he had been considering were each over ten miles from their respective exchanges, hence the
choice of the St Médard property.
In the event, Sadoun Khamil, who had first supported Abbas’ decision, had later vetoed the idea of ADSL, simply because it would have been an unusual request in that area and might have
attracted attention. So instead Abbas had signed up for Internet access with Wanadoo, one of the French service providers, and relied on a dial-up connection through the V92 internal modem in the
2GHz IBM desktop computer that sat on a rough square table against the wall in the locked rear bedroom of the house.
The PC had been supplied with Microsoft Windows XP, but Abbas had stripped that off because of the potential ‘spyware’ implications of the Product Activation routine, and had
installed Windows ME and Office 2000 instead. The machine had come with Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, which worked well
even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite
walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated
prayer mats.
There were no curtains at the windows, because the faded wooden shutters were always kept closed, and no signs of anything that might be described as the comforts of home. In fact, the only
items of real value lay behind the door of the third and smallest bedroom, at the back of the house. The door to this room was the only one with a lock – a five-lever exterior quality Chubb
which had been fitted within a week of the signing of the tenancy agreement at the agency in Aire-sur-l’Adour – and it was always kept locked unless the equipment in the room was
actually being used. The room’s single exterior window was, like all the other windows, kept firmly closed, as were the external shutters. What was not visible from the outside was the steel
grille bolted to the wall inside the room and which completely covered the window opening – another unofficial addition to the property which Abbas had organized.
The other invisible deterrents to a thief were the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols always carried by each of the four men, and the two AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines fully charged,
which were kept propped up behind each of the two outside doors. They had also spent some time carefully positioning plastic explosive charges on the inside of the ground-floor doors and windows,
to be actuated by trip-wires, and installing a number of high-wattage floodlights under the eaves, powerful enough to illuminate the entire grounds.
There were two reasons why the old mill had been chosen, rather than either of the two other houses that had been on the short list. The first was a unique architectural feature of the property
that Abbas had stumbled on almost by accident, and which he devoutly hoped he would never have to use. Just over two miles from the house was the second reason; a small nondescript grey concrete
building, it was the automated telephone exchange which served the properties in the shallow valley which opened up to the south of St Médard.
When Abdullah Mahmoud – the name in the genuine Moroccan passport carried by Hassan Abbas when he had stepped off the ferry from Tangier at Algeciras – had decided on the location of
the property they needed, he had planned to have an ADSL line installed. An Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line would have provided a permanent Internet connection, but technical requirements
meant that the user had to live within about four miles of the local exchange. The other two houses he had been considering were each over ten miles from their respective exchanges, hence the
choice of the St Médard property.
In the event, Sadoun Khamil, who had first supported Abbas’ decision, had later vetoed the idea of ADSL, simply because it would have been an unusual request in that area and might have
attracted attention. So instead Abbas had signed up for Internet access with Wanadoo, one of the French service providers, and relied on a dial-up connection through the V92 internal modem in the
2GHz IBM desktop computer that sat on a rough square table against the wall in the locked rear bedroom of the house.
The PC had been supplied with Microsoft Windows XP, but Abbas had stripped that off because of the potential ‘spyware’ implications of the Product Activation routine, and had
installed Windows ME and Office 2000 instead. The machine had come with Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, which worked well
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