He turned his attention back to his laptop and hit ‘Refresh’. With a touch of the key, a million or so digital trawlers called spiders were dispatched to every major news site in the world. The software, co-built by the CIA and Google, brought all the spiders back just seconds later, 1148 of them bringing news stories that contained a series of keywords including ‘blast’, ‘bomb’, ‘terror’, ‘attack’ and ‘church’. Sami clicked through them. Nothing. All about the previous attacks.

Maybe it was over, the bombing of the church in Alabama the final act. With another eighty-four dead, the death toll from the four bombs had risen to 438 and the world was on the brink of war. The US had launched a series of attacks in the Middle East, using the bombings as an excuse to settle scores. Maybe the still-unknown group had already achieved its goal, whatever that was.

Sami had now been watching his screen, cycling through headlines, for close to twenty-five hours. It wasn’t quite 12 pm Eastern Time, but he had been sitting at his desk since the sun had first risen on the twenty-fifth day of the month, in Kiribati, the tiny Pacific island that sits on the international date line. And it would still be the twenty-fifth day of the month somewhere in the world for another twenty-five excruciating hours. He would not know whether the attacks had finished until it was midnight in America Samoa.

Sami looked around his office, where several ‘world clocks’ were mounted to the walls. It was about to hit 6 pm in Paris, and most of Europe was just six hours away from being clear. It was already the twenty-sixth day of the month in some countries, including Australia and New Zealand. Even those peaceful, far-flung nations were considered potential targets because, given how little the authorities knew about the bombers – there had been no survivors, witnesses or CCTV evidence in Alabama either – every country with a church was considered to be in the blast zone.

The prayer mat caught his eye. Rolled up and jammed between two filing cabinets, the well-used rug was now covered in dust. He stood up, walked over to it and pulled it out, dusted it off. Initially, he couldn’t remember that last time he’d used it, but then he remembered. It was before she had left him. Obviously, God hadn’t been listening then.

‘Sir,’ said a young woman as she burst in without knocking. ‘You’re required in the War Room. Right away. It’s urgent.’