‘The first deposit in every instance is sixty-one cents,’ Clarke said.

‘Why?’ Jax asked.

Clarke squinted as he studied, before throwing up his hands. ‘Fucked if I know,’ he muttered.

‘Phone numbers,’ Sami interrupted, ‘fucking phone numbers.’ Sami snatched the paper from the table and jumped out of his seat. ‘YES!’ he yelped. ‘Phone numbers. The sixty-one cents is a country code: +61 – Australia.’

‘Correct,’ Jax said. ‘Someone used the betting account system to send each terror cell a phone number at what would have been 8 pm on the twenty-fourth in their time zone.’

Sami started slapping Jax on the back.

‘Good work, kid,’ Sami exclaimed. ‘You’re a goddamn genius.’

‘Not really,’ Jax said modestly. ‘It’s something only an inmate would know – sorry, that only an Australian inmate would know. Betting accounts are used like banks in our prisons. It’s the financial system behind the jails’ secret economy. You missed it because you didn’t know to look.’

Jax noticed Clarke hadn’t said much.

‘It’s ingenious,’ Jax continued, trying to get through to Clarke. ‘A series of deposits, so small that not even the betting agency would take note. Whoever made those deposits was anonymously telling their operatives that they need to contact him – and is supplying the number to do it. Each of the numbers is different. Each call was no doubt made to a burner phone, and probably from a burner phone.’

Jax looked at Clarke. ‘Well?’

‘Sorry, I’m just thinking it through,’ Clarke said. ‘Tracing the calls will give us a general location for where the calls were received. Depending on the network, that tower could be a hundred kilometres away from where the call was actually taken or made. Let’s assume the records say the calls were received in the Goulburn region. Let’s go even further and pretend we can get an exact location – Goulburn jail. That only confirms what we already know. That the man we are looking for is an inmate. We’ll learn something we didn’t know if the calls have been received somewhere else. But . . . it isn’t about the calls that have been made already – it’s about the call that is going to be made.’ Then Clarke smiled, from ear to ear.

‘Yes,’ Jax said. ‘If we monitor the betting accounts, we’ll get his new number.’

Clarke looked towards Sami.

‘One call and I’ll have the combined resources of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and Homeland Security tracking every betting account in the world. Hell, I’ll even put a call in to NASA. How about the hardware?’