She stayed silent, expressionless, but it grated on her, the way he kept repeating your father, as if the matter had already been settled. Belaboring was what Clare would call it, a clumsy, transparent attempt to bully a baseline understanding.
That wasn’t a good look.
Marinov said, “He was forced to detour to Prague for a work emergency. We tried to reach you, but our previous communication channel was already disconnected. This”—he finger-drew a circle around the table—“the sudden notice, and the suspicion it would cast over his motives, was what he most wanted to avoid. The Savoy was the only remaining option, but it seems the message was . . .” He paused. “Not well received?”
Jill studied him, unblinking, neutral.
Not a good look had shifted from trying to force a baseline understanding into attempting to preempt objections, or as Clare would put it, showing a person the horseshit up front so they stopped looking for a bull. But the bit about the message did explain Jack’s request for silence. He didn’t want the guy across the table to know she didn’t know whatever she didn’t know.
This whole who’s-your-daddy adventure had shunted hard off the rails.
Marinov reached into the satchel, retrieved several pages, nudged them across the table in Jack’s direction, and rested his hand atop them to keep the breeze from carrying them away. “I sent these express to the Savoy, expecting you’d already have them before this morning,” he said. “Your father still very much wants to meet, but it will be a week, possibly longer, before he can leave Prague. He asked me to arrange for travel and a hotel, hoping you’d understand this was a situation over which he had no control.”
Jill tugged the pages from beneath his hand and glanced at them.
The hotel was Kings Court Prague, prepaid for a week as of tomorrow.
The tickets were Eurail Passes, which would allow them to plan their own routes.
She handed both to Jack who, still looking at Marinov, said, “I’d prefer to skip dealing with the messengers and speak with Dmitry directly.”
Marinov said, “That’s perfectly understandable and I’ll be sure to tell him. His English isn’t very good, though, so it’s possible he thinks he’ll make a better impression by first communicating face-to-face. That said”—Marinov dragged a cell phone from the satchel—“as a way to avoid repeating today, he did want you to have this. Maybe it’ll give him a chance to—as you said—skip the messengers. My number is in there. If you run into trouble, have questions, need anything, feel free to give a call. The lock-key code is your birth date.”
He slid the phone in Jack’s direction, just as he’d done with the papers—not toward the middle of the table, where they both would have access to it—directly to Jack, as if this was Jack’s decision to make.
Jill eyed the device with the hunger of permanent second place, and all those years under Clare’s hand—of Jack, the favored child, getting what little approval Clare dished out—left her wishing Dmitry had never found them and that they’d never come to Europe, because if he was real, this right here showed where the story went, and she hated him for it already. She said, “We were curious enough about Dmitry to make one trip. You’re insane if you expect us to follow you down this rabbit hole.”
Marinov smiled slyly. “Do you speak for yourself or for your brother?”
The provocation was a gut-punch trigger that sent anger to her fingertips and made her want to hop the table, straddle his fat lap, and strangle him blind.
Jack rested a hand on her knee before she could act.
He said, “The phone doesn’t substitute for a time, date, and place.”
Marinov raised a finger, as if chiding himself for a memory lapse, dug for another sheet, slid it in the same direction, and said, “Do you have a preference?”
A gust of wind lifted the page slightly.
Jack shifted the phone to weight it down, dropped his finger onto a nine-in-the-morning time slot three days out, and said, “That one.”
Marinov hesitated, as if this felt too abrupt to be the end, as if he expected more, an explanation perhaps, or to have to cajole or convince, and then, realizing that’s all there was or all there’d be, said, “I’ll pass along the message.” He waited again, understood he’d effectively been dismissed, wished them good day, and left.
They sat in silence long after he’d gone.
Jill, first to speak, said, “Do you trust him?”
Jack snorted.
There was relief in that, at least.
He flipped through the rail tickets and the hotel reservation.
Part statement, part sigh, he said, “Prague,” and she knew then that he’d already made up his mind, and that nothing she did or said would dissuade him, and that he planned to go through with this with or without her.
She said, “If you make this trip after being fed that line of bullshit, whoever is behind this will know you’re all in. You’ll just be trading one set of strings for another.”
He offered her the pages.
She waved them aside.
She’d seen the rendezvous time, place, and date. The rest was superfluous. She said, “Prague, John? Come on, seriously? They had us here in Berlin right now. They’ve got no guarantee we won’t vanish. That they’d abandon a sure thing for the risk of trying to lure us out of Germany is all the proof you need.”
Jack said, “Maybe.”
She glared. Now he was just being obstinate. The Czech Republic, with its long ties to Moscow, played host to a larger Russian diplomatic mission than any other country in Central Europe, most of it in the capital. Prague was a hotbed of spies and covert operations and about the closest thing they could get to a lion’s den in the West. Whatever they found there wasn’t going to be Dmitry.
Jack reached for the phone, a sealed model that didn’t allow for battery removal. He said, “It’s the only way to find out if he’s alive or even real.”
His thumb caressed the power switch.
She fought the urge to snatch the thing out of his hands.
He pulled a paper clip from his pocket, sprung the SIM free, and held the card between finger and thumb, as if pondering its possibilities.
“You’ve been here before,” she said. “You know exactly how this game is played, and yet you’re letting them rope you in anyway.”
“I refuse to spend the rest of my life repeating Clare’s mistakes,” he said. “I can’t have this hanging over my head like some zombie issue that refuses to die, the way it refused to die for her.”
Jill leaned up on the table and into his line of sight.
He didn’t respond, so she reached for the SIM to take it.
He snatched his hand away, and focusing on the phone, the papers, he said, “You visited the safe house.”
She didn’t really want to have that conversation, but now wasn’t the time to evade or lie. She said, “Yes.”
“How much was left?”
“Pretty much everything.”
“How much did you take?”
“Half the cash. Some costuming. A few weapons.”
He said, “I could use some of the cash.”
She waited.
“Maybe a quarter of what you’ve got.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll trade you cash for that SIM.”
He held up the card, angled it against the sun. “Can’t afford that,” he said. “Too much risk of you losing or misplacing it.”
The words were so much like Clare’s, always assuming the worst, and with so little respect for what she was capable of.
“I’m not going to lose or misplace it,” she said.
“Can’t afford to have you use it against me, either.”
She bit her tongue, drew blood, forced her hands to relax. “The fuck makes you think I’m going to use it against you?”
He raised an eyebrow.
She sighed. “Look, I wasn’t deliberately late for that flight, okay?”
“Then where were you?�
�
She didn’t want to have this conversation, either, but she was all in now. “On the other side of the terminal,” she said, “trying to see if I could find any more of our Russian friends, and just like I told you on the plane, I fucking lost track of time.”
“And?”
“Only one Russian, John, same as I said before.”
He eyed her with the suspicion of someone for whom disbelief was a baseline response, but she’d told the truth, if not the whole truth.
She said, “Don’t make me fight you for it.”
And that was the thing.
She could take the SIM if she wanted. He knew it, she knew it.
She’d never be able to compete with him brain to brain or make Clare love her the way Clare loved him, but she didn’t need to when she could take him down in two quick seconds. That’d always been the reason for training hard, fighting harder, and getting beat by bigger assholes. But using force here guaranteed he’d vanish to seek Dmitry on his own, and letting him walk into the jaws of death alone meant that good-bye now possibly meant good-bye for forever, and she wasn’t ready for that.
He said, “Look, you want the card, you can have it. But I need a promise from you—not manipulation—a one-hundred-percent, honest-to-God real promise.”
The irony almost made her laugh.
“Coming from the guy who claims I’ve never kept a promise in my life.”
“Do you want it or not?”
“Fine,” she said. “What’s the promise?”
“That you stop sabotaging me.”
“I’m not sabotaging you.”
“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”
She held up her pinkie.
He hooked his with hers, then dropped the SIM on the table and nudged it in her direction. She picked it up before he’d have a chance to change his mind, pulled a small square pill case from her pocket, and dropped the SIM in together with the others.
He said, “No matter what happens with Dmitry, there’s still the kill team, and that’s not going to stop until we put an end to it.”
“How close are they?”
“Close.”
“Bonus for Prague,” she said. “Might buy us some breathing room.”
“Or an opportunity.”
“You see an intersection between the two.”
“If you’re willing to provide cover at the rendezvous and let me take point with a body double, then yeah.”
The suggestion made her bristle.
A plan like that would put him down on the ground again, same as it had here, and if Dmitry was real and this thing in Prague turned out to be legit, it meant he’d be meeting their father first, alone, without her, and that raised the same damn issue that had pushed her back from the rooftop edge to join this conversation and made her want the SIM. But if one of them had to be down in the gorge, she’d rather it be her covering Jack than the other way around.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “But I can work with it.”
His finger traced the edge of the coffee cup.
He said, “Have you heard from Clare?”
This was the second time since Frankfurt that he’d asked about Clare, and it wasn’t like Clare hadn’t been worming around in her head, too.
Clare was a problem.
Jack had always been the favorite—was still the favorite—and being the favorite meant it’d taken him longer to rebel, and meant Clare had fought harder against letting him go. Nonviolent resistance had been his way of breaking free. She’d watched him take a knife to the gut, a bat to his knees, a bullet to a thankfully Kevlar-protected chest, and so much else in his absolute refusal to let Clare bait him into engagement. Not that Clare had deliberately done those things herself. Jack had refused to play war with the combatants she’d sent, and the damage had been done before Clare could call them off. But at least she had called them off. If he thought this was Clare now and it wasn’t, nonviolent resistance would truly get him killed dead.
She said, “You can’t have it both ways, you know that.”
His finger continued tracing circles.
“I’m serious,” she said. “This might be the only time you ever get serious out of me, John, so don’t screw it up. Look at me.”
He stared her dead on in mocking over-attentiveness.
She said, “If you think there’s a chance this is Clare, then we stop right here, right now. Because if you go forward harboring the slightest doubt in that pigheaded skull of yours, you’re going to get us both killed.”
His head tipped left and right, like he was half agreeing with her and half agreeing with whatever weird debate went on in his brain, which meant he wasn’t agreeing with anything.
She slapped him. “I will knock the shit out of you if that’s what it takes.”
He snatched her wrist. Gripped it hard. Glared.
She said, “That’s a little better.”
He let go and shoved her arm aside.
“I’ll put a line out tonight,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find her.”
CHAPTER 14
HOLDEN
FOUR DINING-ROOM CHAIRS PUSHED EDGE TO EDGE CREATED A PLATFORM that kept him off the floor and allowed him to angle off the kitchen window in a way that kept most of his heat profile shielded behind the wall. Fifteen hours he’d been on this improvised bench, waiting for this, brother and sister together for the first time since leaving Dallas, out in the open, easy marks for a long shot.
He had a clear view of the plaza, target in the crosshairs, and he breathed a slow in and out, finger resting beside the trigger guard, the whole of him suspended in the space that hung between kill and no kill.
They were brazen, foolish, two high-value assets with a high price on their heads, sitting exposed like this. No matter how skilled they were, they weren’t invincible and the sister hadn’t found every threat last night.
She hadn’t found him.
He’d been watching when she’d entered the plaza; watching when she’d reemerged blond and drunk hours later; watching when the brother arrived; and was now watching the rendezvous he’d spent so much energy to reach.
Itzal had driven him to Dortmund.
Deutsche Bahn had gotten him the rest of the way.
He’d made it to Savignyplatz by after-dinner dark.
There, he had scouted apartment entrances, searching for full mail slots, which pointed to occupants being away, and had found a unit with an advantageous view, let himself in, and spent the intermittent stillness hashing and rehashing a confluence that grew bigger by the day.
There were five, maybe six players in motion now.
—The twins tracking their father.
—The Russians tracking the twins.
—The Americans tracking the twins.
—Himself tracking the twins.
—The Americans who had been tracking him.
Clare, the mother, was still a question mark.
He hadn’t seen signs of her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t around.
And now, down at the table, the wrong man had shown up at the right time and right place. Not Dmitry. Not the father. Something else.
The man offered the brother documents.
Body language spoke of irritation, agitation, and a contest of will.
Holden reached for a spotting scope, secured the adapter, snapped a phone into the holder, and captured a photo array—not of the same quality he’d have gotten with a telescopic lens but good enough to get a record of the man’s face.
A breeze lifted the pages and showed him Eurail Passes, a hotel, a city.
Whatever came next involved travel, and travel created a new set of issues.
The man followed the documents with a phone, and then the conversation, barely ten minutes old, showed signs of ending. Holden packed up his gear, hands moving quickly, methodically, while his focus stayed on that café.
He’d been willing to lose the siblings in Frankfurt, because he’d al
ready had the rendezvous details, but if he lost them now, this would be the end.
The twins would never check into that hotel.
Odds of randomly finding either of them in a city of one and a quarter million people weren’t odds he wanted to gamble on. Anyone else, it’d be different.
Life and the simple acts required to sustain it inevitably left a footprint.
Connections tethered humanity to routine.
The most cautious varied where they slept, avoided establishing daily patterns, left no digital trail, to make it difficult for someone like him to get ahead of them, but there were still groceries to buy, bills to pay, birthdays and anniversaries to celebrate, meetings to attend. With enough time and patience, he always found a lead.
But these two had no home, no family, no friends, no employer, and they had a lifetime of turning invisibility into an art form, and a kill team at their backs.
Once they were on the move again, they’d untether completely.
He’d have about fifteen seconds from the time they stood to the time they vanished, and he’d need ten to get out the door and another forty to get to the ground floor. He scooped the few items he still had out into his bag, grabbed the straps, shoved the chairs away from the window, and headed for the door.
There was no time to put things the way he’d found them, and it didn’t matter anyway. He hadn’t stolen anything. Hadn’t killed anyone.
Other than a few misplaced items, he’d never been here.
He raced the steps down to ground level and caught sight of the table through the glass. The man stood, hesitated, then turned and walked off.
There’d been no handshakes, no formal good-byes.
The siblings stayed seated, watched him leave.
Tree trunks and bushes partially blocked the view.
Holden stepped outside, and strolled the sidewalk while the twins argued.
To any passing observer it was just a casual conversation, but the two weeks he’d spent tracking them, learning them, told him what it was.
The sister pushed back, left the table.
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