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“Agent Ryker, you have a call from Agent Daniels.”

Marcus and his team were in the DSS command center in Houston eating Chinese takeout and watching the pope’s address to Congress, but he immediately muted the TV, took the call, and put Noah on speakerphone.

Noah reported that he had just broken into a file on Ruzami’s hard drive. It contained detailed blueprints for each of the stadiums in all four cities where the pope would be speaking. These were not commercial blueprints, Noah said. They could only have come from the architectural firms that had designed the stadiums in the first place.

What’s more, Noah and his colleagues at NSA had also just decrypted files containing JPEGs of Google maps and satellite imagery of Miami, Houston, New York, and Chicago. Alone, these were not proof that the pope was, in fact, Kairos’s target. Nor did they provide hard evidence of which city was being targeted—unless they all were. Still, the material at least indicated that the four cities were the focus of Abu Nakba’s planning.

“Good work, young man,” Marcus said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Get this to Dell and Annie and to Roseboro at DSS.”

“Yes, sir.”

No sooner had Marcus hung up than Roseboro called on another line. “Ryker, get yourself to Miami now,” he ordered.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“A NEST team has just found a new hot spot.”

“Where?”

“Barely a mile from the stadium,” Roseboro said. “And the pope flies to Miami in less than twelve hours.”