SEARCHER III: HIGHER CALLING

Logline: 

Kingsfield summons Jax to New Mexico. Something has been taken from the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City. Three men on horseback have been moving it north for months — through cartel territory, across borders, into country where roads don't go. Jax is sent to find them. 

Opening Scene: 

Brazos Pass, New Mexico. A snow kite catches the wind, lifting Jax fifteen feet above the powder. Snowboard carving silent arcs. No instructor. No backup. She launches off a cornice and hangs suspended between sky and snow for three heartbeats — weightless, free — before gravity reclaims her. This is how she runs. Fast enough to make rational thought impossible. Fast enough to outrun whatever demons followed her up here.

Later, a hotel room. She pops an IPA cap off the countertop edge with her fist. The cap clatters to the linoleum. This is where Kingsfield finds her. She doesn't ask how he knew. He always knows.

More About the Film: 

In the Gila National Forest, three men on horseback navigate a narrow mountain trail. A fourth horse carries a large wooden box. Overhead, a comet no one can explain has entered Earth's orbit — tracking their path since Mexico.

Santa Fe's historic district. Jax walks with Professor Kingsfield past artistic depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The original image exists on a tilma — a cactus-fiber cloth nearly 500 years old that should have deteriorated decades ago. It maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees. It survived a bomb in the 1920s. Science cannot explain it."

A chilling revelation: something has been taken from the church housing her sacred image. When the church curator is murdered, Jax is pulled into the investigation.

Joseph leads the riders. Former Navy SEAL. Cartel infiltrator. A man with a trident on one shoulder and the Sacred Heart on the other. He's not running. He's protecting.

Jax joins as go-between. She becomes something else.

A cartel that worships darker things wants what Joseph is carrying — not to sell, but to destroy. The FBI is watching. The comet is still tracking. And in New Mexico's high desert, where oil and gas extraction scars the land and uranium contamination poisons generations, the oldest battle — light against darkness — is being fought on horseback.

In the high desert, Jax will face what she's been outrunning since the glacier, since the Gardner, since her mother's death: the question of what's worth dying for. And what's worth living for.

"Higher Calling" follows Jax into territory where faith isn't metaphor and the miraculous doesn't ask permission.