Unremarkable, Jax thought. Average height. Average build. Not handsome. Not ugly. His nose wasn’t big or small. His lips weren’t full or flat. His jawline was neither masculine nor feminine. His eyes weren’t any one colour: blues, greens and browns mixed into ambiguity. He was the type of person that could change his look with a hairstyle. Change his age with a bottle of hair dye. Bland. Anonymous. Adaptable. The type of face that people forgot. That most people forgot.

This was the third time Jax had seen this man. He’d put the second time down to chance.

Jax kept his eyes firmly on the mystery man as he slid onto the metal bench. ‘You are not my lawyer,’ he said.

Jax left the statement hanging. He waited for a tell. He didn’t get one.

‘Correct,’ the man said. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

Jax paused. Assessed the situation. Instead of answering, he leaned back and looked under the table. ‘Ah, the shoes,’ he said. ‘Impressive.’

To the untrained eye they looked like regular dress shoes, but Jax knew they were also steel-capped, slip-resistant and stick- and fire-proof. Jax even knew the brand – these were cop shoes, not lawyer shoes.

‘So, I’m a cop?’ the man asked, looking Jax dead in the eye. He was unflinching, no expression for Jax to read.

Jax looked at his suit, tailored and pure wool, before shaking his head.

The man raised his head and met Jax’s eyes. ‘Officer Tom Clarke,’ he said. ‘ASIO.’

CLARKE reached down and grabbed his briefcase. He placed it on the desk, punched in the combination code, and clicked the lock open. He quickly shuffled his way through the contents, a kaleidoscope of coloured files. After pulling out a yellow file, he slid it across the table.

‘Media clippings,’ Clarke said. ‘I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of news in here. Have a read. Might save us some time.’

Jax opened the folder and started to flick through the stack of A4 pages within. They were plain text versions of the original newspaper reports, provided by a media tracking service called Page Track.

Islamic terrorists were planning on inflicting ‘maximum damage’ by blowing up Australia’s only nuclear reactor, police claim.

A plot to blow up the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney was yesterday foiled when police arrested 12 men with alleged links to ISIS. In Australia’s biggest ever counterterrorism operation, a joint taskforce arrested the men during a series of simultaneous dawn raids across Sydney.

Police found a Sydney street map highlighting the site of the reactor and notebooks outlining police tactics and chains of command. An unspecified amount of explosives was also seized from the home of one of the 12 men arrested in the raids. A list of material needed to make explosives was found at another address.