‘Target alighting the train,’ he whispered into the microphone attached to the underside of his collar.

The five other agents on the train, all on separate carriages, disembarked with the target at St James Station, a small but busy underground stop near Sydney’s centre.

‘Got him,’ the agent taking lead of the trail said.

Sami wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Witnessing first-hand the efficiency of Clarke and his team, he’d had something of a wake-up call. Now, he was operating with a level of focus and precision he hadn’t experienced for years, if not a decade. There was no way he and Mav were going to be the weak link.

Sami immediately passed the coordinates of St James Station to the drone operator who was on standby. On loan from the US, the state-of-the-art military drone was on the suspect almost as fast the sunlight, its million-dollar camera picking him up the moment he emerged from the station and set foot on the street. Even though the drone flew at an altitude of 20,000 feet, the image it provided was so good that Sami felt like he could reach out and touch the top of the target’s head.

Six separate feeds were being delivered to Sami and Mav in the van by the time the target reached St Mary’s Cathedral, the drone pictures still the clearest. Sami watched as the suspect cased the historic cathedral. To any passer-by, he probably looked as if he were simply admiring the church, standing out the front with his paper and pen, making a sketch then taking some pictures.

But it was clear to Sami that wasn’t what he was doing. The phone call he’d made to an inmate at Goulburn jail revealed he was using his pen and paper to list exit points and count the crowd, while the pictures would likely be used to identify points of vulnerability in the cathedral’s structure.

AFTER that, while tempted to make an immediate move, both Sami and Clarke had agreed they needed to watch, listen and learn – just a little longer.

Now, Sami was almost certain these were their men. The information they had gathered, much of it resulting from the work of an intriguing inside asset named Riley Jax, suggested there were going to be two more attacks. One this month, on 25 November, and another the following month, on 25 December. That made sense. A Christmas Day finale. No better date to put an exclamation mark on the biggest attack on Christian Churches since the Holy Wars.

The four men in the flat, paid for by an already convicted terrorist named Halim, had all spent time in Goulburn jail. That made sense too.