Jack ignored the summons for water, as if the thing he wanted most in the moment had no meaning at all. He picked up the packet, slipped a finger through the seal, and pulled out a stack of documents about thirty pages thick.

They were photocopies, all of them, more than half of which related to Clare: photographs in which he wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out, and segments of classified material that had been lifted out of both US and Soviet files, and a history that documented a hole-filled variant of the stories she’d told throughout their childhood. And there were copies of his and Jill’s true birth certificates, and a trail of documented sightings, and crossed-out dead ends littered with handwritten margin notes, which ended abruptly at the Savoy in Berlin when he and Jill were nine, and picked up again with a single entry in Houston two weeks back.

What was left constituted a separate dossier that ran nearly as long as Clare’s, a convoluted web of legends and lies surrounding a man who, given the contents, could only have been the Broker, a man whose history had intertwined with Clare’s starting years before he and Jill were born and had remained intertwined until a series of macabre photos that, if genuine, pointed to the night Clare had left them.

Noticeably absent was any detail on Clare’s current status or location, and in that absence he found answers he hadn’t deliberately come here to find.

Clare hadn’t died that night.

She’d made it out. She was alive.

Jack flipped back to the beginning, searching for and confirming what his subconscious had grabbed on the first pass.

He hadn’t been handed intelligence documents.

If that was the case, Clare’s file alone would be six inches thick on the light side. This hand-notated, curated collection had been extracted and distilled from multiple sources slowly over time, and that said nearly as much about the person who’d put it together as it did about the subjects within.

This wasn’t Clare’s handiwork, and wasn’t the product of a bureaucratic intelligence-gathering machine in some basement-level government office. What he held here was the persistent decade-spanning quest of someone who cared about what had happened to Clare and her children and who had a personal reason to find them.

These were Dmitry’s files.

Everything, except the final page.

Jack tugged that piece of paper free, laid it flat, and studied a photo that had no earthly business being in this packet—an image so far removed from reality that if he didn’t know better, he’d assume it had been sitting in the photocopy tray when these copies were made and had been gathered up by mistake.

It had no label and no explanation, but he knew the face.

Everyone knew the face.

Clean. Wholesome. American.

US senator Alex Ford Kenyon.