So far, the only actionable pattern they had was that all the targets were churches. That left them with 37 million potential targets for the next attack. He needed to do better than that. He knew he could do better than that.

Jax cleared his search bar and started the series of searches again, but this time zoning in on the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. Jax spotted a link between it and the Church of Saint Étienne during his first cyber-sweep. An obvious connection. So obvious he assumed it would be shared only by the first two attacks. But he thought it was worth checking.

He opened a new browser tab, typed in ‘Milan Cathedral’, and included the search term ‘terror attack’, along with another filter excluding all recent results.

He was rewarded with 218 results. He clicked on the Wikipedia entry at the top.

1889 Milan Cathedral bombing

On February 4, 1889, an explosive device secreted in a casket killed an Italian politician and two members of his family in the . . .

Just like the Church of Saint Étienne and the Church on Spilled Blood, Milan Cathedral had been the scene of a previous terror attack. Just two years before Tsar Alexander II was killed in front of the Church on Spilled Blood by the world’s first suicide bomber, an Italian minister was killed by a bomb that had been planted in his father’s coffin. The Church of Saint Étienne had been terrorised by a gunman in 1903.

Three out of three. He started a new search.

1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham, Alabama – Wikipedia.

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was an act of white supremacist terrorism which occurred at the African-American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963.

Four out of four soon became five out of five. Then six out of six. And, finally, after learning the Archbishop of Salisbury had had his throat slit in a politically motivated attack in 1884, he had seven out of seven.

Jax could now narrow down the number of potential targets from every church in the world to only those churches that had previously been attacked. He figured there wouldn’t be many. Ten, maybe twenty.

He was wrong.

There were hundreds. So many he didn’t bother counting. There was no way they could organise and deploy sufficient personnel to stake out all of the churches. Not in twenty-four hours. There was also little chance of convincing the churches to shut their doors on Christmas Day on the word of an Australian inmate.

Think. Think. Think.

There had to be a pattern within the pattern.

Jax jumped when the electronic lock to his cell door snapped shut.

No way.

He pulled the sheet from over his head and looked around. ‘Shit,’ he said softly into the dark.