He had gotten this far using the contingency procedures he’d forced on Christine months earlier. At the time she’d not seen a need for it, convinced that his past with Mossad was permanently buried. Slaton had feared otherwise, a fear now proven correct. But clearly she’d listened, because the agreed upon message was there. Christine had done her part, and now the rest was up to him. Tactically, his execution had been good, though not without mistakes. How easy would it be for someone else to check her message board at work? The meeting with Nurin’s men had gone horribly wrong, and now the Swedish police were looking for him. And then there was Mossad. Would they give up? Perhaps coerce another retired assassin to do their bidding? Or was Nurin sitting patiently, waiting for Slaton to show up in Geneva? There was no way to tell. The more he thought about it, the more faults he saw in his and Christine’s escape plan.

All the same, he was close. She was close.

He looked at the seascape ahead and saw a vast archipelago, hundreds of square miles of rock and forest and dark water. It seemed overwhelming. He didn’t know what he was looking for—not exactly, anyway. He had no more than a rough starting point and two sets of sharp eyes, his and Janna Magnussen’s. Slaton didn’t want to carry his plan any farther—every time he tried to imagine where he and Christine could go next, doubt rolled in like a heavy fog. He simply had to find her. Would she be where he hoped? What was she doing right now? For Slaton there was only one certainty.

The next hour would be the longest of his life.

Chapter 17

SEVENTEEN

Christine Palmer was, at that moment, waist deep in the very cold Baltic Sea.

The sailboat she’d appropriated, a vessel that normally drew five feet of water to the base of the keel, was heeling markedly in three briny feet on a rising low tide. Standing on the rocky bottom of a nameless bay, Christine had a paintbrush in hand and was mopping a wide blue line around the waist of the boat using bottom paint she’d found in a storage bin. The heavy stripe was the final touch. She had already removed a set of faded red sail covers and made slight alterations to the boat’s registration number. Taken together, the changes gave a markedly different appearance from the craft she’d spirited away from a private dock outside Stockholm. That was the word she’d settled on: spirited. Far preferable to stolen, pilfered, or the overrationalized borrowed.