Nick was just as dead as if headquarters had planned this.

With each step, anger and rage and hate grew stronger. She no longer cared about the objective. She wished Jacques Lefevre and Christopher Holden, or whoever the hell they were, long and happy lives. At least someone would escape this tragedy.

She’d find a way to do right by Nick, would be patient and smart and would ensure nothing led back to her, because the only way to avenge him in death was to honor him with her best-lived life. She paused on the ground floor.

Sirens reached the square. Shouting followed.

Law enforcement fanned out.

Juan was one building over, four flights up. There was nothing she could do for him. She gripped the straps at her shoulders. Leaving the rifle behind would make it a whole lot easier to slip away, but this was all she had of Nick.

She wasn’t letting go.

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 21

Prague 9, near Kolbenova Metro Station
Prague, Czech Republic

JACK

THE WORLD WAS DARK, AND TIME UNCERTAIN, SAME AS THEY’D BEEN since the pillowcase went over his head. He sat motionless in that uncertain dark, chin to chest, wrists shackled to armrests and ankles to chair legs, listening to acoustic patterns that spoke of empty walls and empty floors with just enough furniture that the three men who guarded him weren’t playing musical chairs for a place to sit. He was in a ground-floor room in an empty office or industrial building somewhere near Prague.

They hadn’t driven fast enough or long enough to get farther than that.

And the air was too sterile, absent the cooking grease, body oil, and cleaning chemicals that lingered in curtains and furniture, for it to be a home or hotel, and too still and quiet to be an embassy or other building under diplomatic cover, and it had none of the baseline stench of body fluids and fear that would have pointed to a black site. Whatever here was, it was temporary, outside the apparatus purview, and away from spying eyes. Just he and the men who’d grabbed him, waiting in silence.

No television, or radio, nothing but an occasional whisper.

They’d hit him hard, these men.

They’d shoved him to the floor of the van, and tossed Anna in through the back, and her high-pitched terror had bounced within the enclosed space as they careened across cobblestones, and bullets ricocheted off the panels.

He’d tried to crawl toward her, to comfort her.

Their boots had responded with vicious kicks.

He’d seen them, their hands and feet. He’d seen through sound and movement, just as he did now, and he’d tracked them like Doppler tracking a storm. His senses, running on overdrive and fueled with post-Clare trauma, had driven him to his knees in a retaliatory strike he hadn’t planned.

He’d punched his elbow back into the nearest face.