It was obvious. He had to start at A. He blamed the oxycodone for his stupidity. He began to type. First, he searched for the Church of Saint Étienne in Rouvray, France. His screen was soon teeming with text. Thousands of results, many coming from untrusted sources. Fake news. He went back to his search bar and refined his search to verified sources only – reports and documents posted by government bodies, recognised news outfits and individuals in possession of a big blue tick.

There were still pages and pages of results. He skipped over the paid hits, and then he read. Page after page, site after site, Jax consumed it all: facts, theories, opinions and analysis. Two news articles piqued his interest. A former DSGI agent named Pierre Caron was quoted in both reports. He tapped in another search and soon had every quote and every comment that the former French spy had made about the Normandy attack – newspaper articles, blogs, Instagram and Facebooks posts, even emails after he hacked into Pierre’s Gmail. It was interesting and there was lots that Jax didn’t know, but nothing he could use to predict the location of the next attack. Still, he hadn’t been expecting to find a magic wand. Not yet.

He broadened his search to include unverified sources, but, before hitting enter, added an additional search restriction. The geo command limited his search results to only posts, pages and articles about the church attack that had been uploaded in Normandy. He added another command to limit the results further, to those uploaded on day of the attack. Jax then spent about thirty minutes scrolling through first-hand witness pictures and posts and checking the EXIF data on each of the pictures to make sure the GPS coordinates and the time stamp were accurate. Finding the metadata was simple: just a right click, unless they had been posted on Instagram, in which case he had to use a reverse search command to reinstate the EXIF data – the social media platform had added an automatic stripping function when it found out that hitmen were using their app.

He then used another command to do a deep dive into the witnesses who spiked his interest. To check if they had offered more details in chats, private posts, messages or emails. Thank God for Google Translate – almost all of it was in French, and Jax knew only the basics of the language.

He didn’t find his smoking gun, but, again, he hadn’t expected to. He wasn’t going to find a pattern by looking at just one stitch. But he also wasn’t going to find a pattern unless he knew every detail of every stitch – and that included details that everyone, including the CIA, the DSGI, MI6 and ASIO, had missed.