He was close enough to touch.
Close enough that she could have accomplished what she’d failed to get close enough to do in Frankfurt, but of all the scenarios she’d thought of before leaving the hotel, bringing a weapon because the target she’d spent days trying to locate would instead locate her wasn’t one of them.
She kept her gaze low to avoid accidental eye contact, pushed into the lobby, strode for the elevators, and lingered there.
He never followed.
To the best of her knowledge, he never set foot inside.
She returned to the room and found it dark and quiet, as she’d left it.
Juan, splayed out on the nearest bed, watched television with the volume too low to hear. She handed him a coffee and pastry.
“Anything new?” she said.
He shook his head and raised the cup in a salute of thanks.
She slid back onto her bed and woke the laptop.
The enormity of what had just happened settled like a cold, wet quilt.
She blanked at the screen, fingers moving slowly of their own accord.
Thirty minutes ago she would have been antsy, waiting for news so they could be on their way again. Now all she wanted was for minutes to multiply.
She didn’t have enough of them.
Nick needed to know about target having been outside their hotel.
The longer she waited to tell him, the more questions there’d be over why she hadn’t said something sooner. But to tell him now would require time. And telling him now would result in resources and attention turning to something that mattered less than the overall objective. Target was their objective.
He’d come and gone.
To find him, she needed to get ahead of him.
She needed to track him before the clues died.
The computer booted.
E-mail from Bart waited for her.
Her thoughts scattered, and pressure built.
There was too much too fast.
She ignored the e-mail and followed a hierarchy of links to the hotel cameras and any Internet-connected cameras nearby, and she searched the street outside the hotel, searched for visual proof that she wasn’t imagining this, that she wasn’t crazy.
For thirty minutes she hunted, and she finally found him at that damn Internet café, and she traced him from there to the nearest streetcar, and from streetcar toward the old city and into Námstí Republiky—Republic Square—and caught a glimpse of him crossing the wide-open center space and turning down a side street, like a burglar casing a joint, and lost him within Hotel Kings Court.
Try as she might, she failed to pick up the trail.
The urgency of informing Nick faded.
Even if she’d gone to him immediately, they’d have already been too late.
She summarized the find, collected time stamps and screen grabs, packaged the material, and sent it to headquarters. She copied Nick, was tempted to copy Steven Hayes, Liv’s supervisor, because the logical thing to do when one didn’t trust that material was being put in the right hands was to put it in someone else’s, but logic didn’t work in a bureaucracy. Logic wasn’t prudent. Emotions, personalities, politics, hierarchy, they all got in the way of logic, and of the objective, and made the world a messy place.
She hit SEND, and the mental chaos eased up.
She could let target go for now and return to what had sent her out the door in the first place. She opened Bart’s e-mail and clicked through to the data dump. Both files were there, as requested. The first contained the Broker’s raw data, the second everything the war room had reconciled against it, and that’s what she wanted first:
Holden, Christopher–Alias
Name: Unknown
Age: 36, est
Nationality: Venezuelan, presumed
Headquarters placed him as working for the Broker for at least six years. She scanned a list of weapons, skills, and potential sightings, kept going along a blood trail of confirmed kills, suspected kills, kidnappings, and assisted assignments.
Some of the names she recognized, most she didn’t.
The most recent activity had been two weeks ago outside Austin, Texas—abduction, not a kill—contract origination out of Russia, target Karen McFadden.
She grabbed her notebook, flipped to a fresh page.
There was something familiar about the name, something she couldn’t place.
She added it to the diagram of unknowns.
Headquarters had no decrypted match for the buyer’s code name.
But Russia . . .
Russia by itself meant nothing.
Like China, like the United States, Russia was a global player meddling anywhere it could to advance its interests, but timing and current circumstances . . .
She returned to the material.
The Broker’s data put Christopher Holden’s last known location as Houston.
That was a trail she could follow without hiding behind a proxy, but the information was stale, which made it low priority.
The war room had connected him to four confirmed aliases.
She had to assume there were more.
The file contained twelve photos: one from the Broker’s file, in which his face was distance-blurry and concealed by cap and glasses, four lifted from the alias-identification documents, and a series that would have come from Emilia prior to boarding out of Dallas. He had dark hair, a strong jaw, was easy on the eyes in a masculine Enrique Iglesias sort of way.
A knock on the door jerked her out of the hunt.
Juan dragged himself off the bed to answer and returned with Nick and Aaron. The look on Nick’s face said there was news.
She said, “Rendezvous confirmed?”
“Nine tomorrow,” Nick said. “Republic Square, near Old Town. We bug out in an hour for recon.”
Kara’s body froze, and her thoughts raced from video feed to video feed, recalibrating everything she’d seen—target’s lack of fear, the way he treated as a game the threat they posed to his life—and where those feeds had led.
She said, “No. It’s a trap.”
The room went pin-drop silent.
The gears in her head locked up.
She should have waited. Should have kept her mouth shut.
She glanced at Nick. “Have you checked your e-mail?”
“I’ve been on the phone.”
All three of them stared at her, waiting.
Nick said, “On a confidence scale of one to ten.”
“Nine.”
“We move out in an hour. You don’t have time to tell it twice. Go.”
Her mouth opened. No words came out.
She struggled to break the interconnected puzzle into separate pieces that would be easy for logic to follow, that wouldn’t create accusations and set off a time bomb of cascading repercussions. She started at the end.
“He followed us here,” she said. “Like he did in Frankfurt.”
The room erupted in an echo of “What? When? You didn’t tell us. Why?”
She dug fingers into the bedspread to keep them still, focused on the foot of the bed to avoid eye contact. “Went out for coffee about an hour ago,” she said. “Spotted someone I thought was him on my way back, wasn’t sure, had to confirm, and by the time I found him in the feeds, he was already gone.”
Juan said, “So he’s running recon for a hit.”
Kara said, “If he wanted to hit us, he would have already done it.”
Aaron said, “Riiight. Cuz assassin dude totes just wants to be friends.”
The sarcasm shorted her train of thought.
A joke, maybe, but a joke he’d never have thrown at Nick or Juan if they’d offered the same assessment under similar circumstances, and that made it not a joke; made her the joke. For a brief second her cheeks burned and her skin flushed with the shame of old humiliation. She was that kid again, mom in prison, dad unable to cope, sneaking out with the .22 before school to hunt rabbits and squirrels to provi
de a semblance of dinner for her sisters, showing up in clothes too big and shoes too small and sometimes mucky, because she didn’t always have time to wash off before the bus arrived. The kid tormented by teachers and bullied by classmates, and written off as stupid by everyone who should have cared because she was poor and dirty and afraid to speak. But at least they’d had the balls to come right out with it.
She’d known where she stood with them.
This thing Aaron did, that so many men did, passing off belittlement as humor, slithering down an escape-hatch variant of learn to lighten up if called out, spinning their own bias as her personal failing, that was just chickenshit cowardice.
She said, “Walk us through your thought process, Aaron. Explain how you got to that conclusion. Help me see what I’m missing.”
He smirked, almost winked. “It’s not that important.”
“It was important enough to interrupt. Clearly, we need to hear this.”
Aaron glanced at Nick and then Juan. Said, “You know, with the thing about how you didn’t think our guy was running recon.”
Kara waited.
Aaron placed hands behind his back and stood military at ease.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
She said, “Well, when you do have something that matters, let us know.”
That was as close to subtlety as she was capable of getting and probably should have earned her a goddamn medal. She turned to Nick, said, “We’re dealing with a guy who knows what we are, knows why we’re here, who is capable of getting close enough to strike first, and hasn’t. Once is a coincidence. Twice is a pattern. He utilizes misdirection as a weapon. Everything we’ve seen, we’ve seen because that’s what he wanted. Think of it as elaborate, high-end stage magic—sleight-of-hand, disappearing acts—every step thought through in advance, focusing your attention where he wants it so the illusion seems real. He wanted us to know he was with us in Frankfurt, and he wants us to know how to find him here in Prague.”
Juan said, “Why? He’s a dead man walking, so if he’s as good as all that, why stick around? Why not just take off and be done with us?”
She said, “Why does anyone refuse to walk away from something they know might kill them?”
“Because he’s an overconfident prick.”
“No, forget about him for a minute,” she said. “What about you? You know this job might kill you, so why are you here?”
Juan hesitated.
Nick said, “Something matters to him more than the immediate risk.”
“Right,” Kara said. “So, Frankfurt was him assessing that risk, and we gave him a baseline gauge of our threat level. Then he got in close, showed us what he could do. We didn’t take the warning, and that told him we’re predictable, dependable.”
The room went quiet.
“I tracked him through camera feeds from here to Republic Square,” she said. “So the real question is why a guy who uses misdirection as a weapon went out of his way to ensure we know where to find him for a rendezvous that matters more to him than the risk we pose.”
Juan said, “He wants us there?”
“Yes. He wants us there. But that’s just problem one.” She took a long, deep breath. “Problem two is that our guy wasn’t the only assassin on that Dallas flight.”
For the second time, the room erupted in a chorus of questions, and she fought to find the line between giving them the information critical to the moment and accidentally pointing fingers of betrayal at headquarters.
Anything to do with Emilia’s team was a no-go.
So was anything to do with their target having an accomplice.
And especially anything to do with the war room having withheld information. Nick knew about all three, he’d pick up the inference. From the stricken look on his face, he’d already recognized where this was going.
She said, “Best as I can tell from the information currently available, we’ve got one target heading into the rendezvous at Republic Square and a second right behind him, hired to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Juan said, “Hold up a minute. You’re saying we’ve got someone out there competing with us for the kill?”
“By appearances, yes, and that takes us back to the question of why our target would have gone out of his way to ensure we know where to find him, and that answers Aaron’s original point. Just because he left us alive doesn’t mean he intends to keep us alive. Either he knows there’s a threat bigger than us gunning for him, or he expects some kind of foul play from the people he’s meeting tomorrow, maybe both. Regardless, we’re firepower and distraction. He’s setting us up to do his work for him.”
With that she stopped. There was nothing more to say.
Nick stayed silent.
The room stayed silent.
The silence grew until it took on a life of its own.
Aaron was the first to speak. He said, “Republic Square, that’s a busy, kind of high-end shopping part of town, isn’t it? If anything goes down that requires more than a round or two, we’re going to blow our cover. I mean, there’s really not much worse we could do to announce to the Czechs that we’re here, right? So does keeping this operation dark rank higher or lower than taking out target?”
The question sucked what little oxygen was left out of the room and proved Aaron was capable of thinking strategically when he wanted to, which made Kara detest him a little less, but his question wasn’t really the question.
He knew, they all knew, that if the op went sideways, they were on their own.
This was the tact in him finally surfacing, asking if they’d just been deliberately fucked over. She answered yes the only way she knew how.
“Target takes priority,” she said.
Nick said, “You sent all this in?”
She glanced at her wrist. “About an hour ago.”
He said, “We recon. We set up for the hit. I’ll take this to command for clarification, but unless something changes, we’re still go.”
CHAPTER 18
Hradany
Prague, Czech Republic
HOLDEN
THE BAR WAS SMALL AND NARROW, A RECENTLY UPDATED AFFAIR IN A centuries-old building, the type of place that catered to neighborhood regulars by the generation, which guaranteed his face stood out the moment he stepped in, but the bar was the fastest way behind the walls. He paused at the threshold in a beat of acknowledgment for the sideways glances, a beat that placed every barstool and beer mug in snapshot threat assessment.
Three men at the counter, focus on the television at the far end.
Young couple preoccupied at a tiny table against the right wall.
Early evening. Sparse crowd.
That would change as the night wore on.
The bartender was a woman in her late fifties, with arms men half her age would envy. She glanced his way, sized him up the way he sized up the room, and he continued in her direction, navigating the tight walkway between bar top and tables. He asked for svaák—mulled wine, popular in the colder Czech months—headed out back to a small patio, where remnants of warmer times were still evident on the trellis, pulled a chair free at one of the tables not yet put up, tucked his chin into the scarf, and wrapped his hands around the mug for warmth.
Late, late fall in Prague was a shitty time to be outdoors.
A light turned on in an upper-floor bathroom window across the courtyard.
That he was out here freezing, trying to catch a glimpse of her through the back side of a youth hostel, instead of across the street, watching its entrance, was case in point for why Prague had filled Cold War legends with intrigue and spies.
Forget geography and centuries of political alliances.
The lure was in the architecture, tight streets flush up against the buildings, solid walls, solid doors, limited ground-floor windows, block after block of man-made canyons, which left pedestrians exposed to the elements and to watchful eyes, and made it difficult to hide while out on the streets b
ut easy to disappear once off them. The real living went on in the open spaces behind the walls, which was why a cold backyard patio was as close as he could get to her right now.
He sipped the svaák and watched the light.
Another half hour and he’d head back around the block, walk in through the front, and inquire about a room of his own, though there was a chance, as with everything she did, that the hostel was a ruse—that the light he watched wasn’t even hers—and that she’d slipped away while his back was turned.
Part of him would be relieved to discover that she had.
Trying to keep up with her was exhausting.
He tracked people to kill them and did what was necessary to stay invisible to those who wanted to kill him, but thirty-six hours of hopping trains and crossing borders, of sleeping in short bursts and second-guessing and triple-questioning every damn move, while tailing someone whose entire life had been a lesson in strategic evasion, had turned grueling patience, lateral thinking, and meticulous attention to detail into mental mush. He was ready to be done.
The upper-floor window dimmed with shadow.
He recognized its shape and averted his gaze, as if somehow that lessened the creep factor or made any difference at all if she knew he was watching.
Motion just beyond the patio light pulled him back to ground, footsteps he’d have heard sooner, movement he’d have caught faster if he’d been focused on the job itself rather than the person. His senses dropped into the space between life and death.
Sound slivered and light fractured.
His hand moved from table to jacket, reaching for the firepower that would put an end to threat before it began.
A male voice off the side of the patio said, “I’m unarmed, Chris.”
Strategic thinking somersaulted head over heels.
The voice’s body stepped into the light, all five feet, ten inches, in nineties denim and a warm winter coat, hands up, palms open, fingers waving hello.
Holden exhaled, part guffaw, part exasperation.
He was half tempted to pull the trigger anyway. “Jesus, man,” he said.
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