After a shoot-out in Mindanao that had left several American and Filipino special forces troops dead, Jones had moved to Manila for a couple of months and then breezed out of town hours before a police raid, leaving behind a fully operational bomb factory that he had thoughtfully booby-trapped. Circumstantial evidence suggested that he must have gotten passage to Taiwan on a fishing vessel. The Chinese-speaking world was not a normal locus of Islamic terror, and so why he had gone to Taiwan, and what he had done there, could only be guessed at.