He said, “You like the chair?”

“I love the chair,” Jack said. “I also love redundant questions.”

The suit chuffed. He said, “If I unlock, we sit, we talk, have food, some drink, and you sleep in nice bed tonight. Or you fight, run, and men outside door put you back in chair, maybe use knife more on neck.”

Jack forced a patient smile. “If we were interested in fighting or running, we wouldn’t have let you pick us up in the first place.”

“Let?”

“Allow.”

“I know the meaning.”

Jack’s shoulders drooped, and he sighed loud and long, as if these were just so many wasted words. He said, “We traveled to Europe to meet Dmitry. You used that to bring us here, to this.” He tugged the shackles for emphasis. “There’s nothing you could possibly want from us badly enough to go through the effort you’ve gone through if you actually thought we were dumb enough to believe we’d find Dmitry waiting for us in Prague. That’s why you sent those Spetsnaz rejects to collect us, instead of showing up yourself. And we knew you’d pull some stupid stunt like this and came to Prague anyway, which means there’s also something we want from you. So why would we run or fight if we don’t yet have what we came to get?”

The suit stayed silent for a bit, as if weighing each word, and then he leaned in to unlock a single wrist and stepped out of reach.

Jack shook his hand free and rubbed itching skin hard against his thigh.

The man tossed him the key.

Jack snatched metal from the air, put his arm back into the position in which it’d been shackled, opened his fist, and there, with the key nestled neatly in the center of his palm, he winked. All those years of hell, the broken bones, stitches, concussions, welts, bruises, and scars, they’d never been about bullets and blood. They’d been about this.

Legerdemain.

Mental prestidigitation.

That’s what Clare had always been after.

The rest had been to support the illusion, the way a gun supported the badge.

Anyone could be taught to vanish or fight or plan an ambush.

Anyone could point and shoot, and most anyone could even be good at it.

Hell, if there was one thing Clare refused to let him forget, it was that there wasn’t a single skill he had that someone else couldn’t do better, and the only thing that would give him an edge was being able to think ahead of the enemy. “True skill lies in convincing your opponent that he believes what you want him to believe,” she’d said. “And that he believes it of his own free will.”

Jack left the key resting in his palm.

He dragged his gaze from his free hand to the shackled one.

The man in the suit followed along.