The man was an outspoken, polarizing firebrand, a pro-Russian populist heading into a huge political win in an election that half the country believed was already hacked by the Russians, and this was his assassination order.

Jack tapped the pages to align them and flipped to the beginning again, because any kind of movement was better than sitting in dumb silence while the man in the suit scrutinized him. He would have asked why—why now, why this target, why him as the assassin—but his brain, on fire, drew all his body’s wattage and left his mouth with nothing to operate it. The questions were pointless, anyway, because he’d already been given the answers.

These pages collectively, in totality, were a map, a chronology that walked down a chain of decision-making logic the same way comic book panels walked readers through a story, all of it leading to that final, incongruent photograph. Except this story didn’t start at the beginning—it started at the end, started with the Broker’s death—and this story had never been about him or his sister, not at first, not even now.

This was about chaos.

The maze inside his head snapped and re-formed.

Clare vanished from it completely.

The tightness constricting his chest, the sense of entrapment and double-blind doubt that had made it hard to think dissipated, and for the first time since he’d stepped off that flight in Frankfurt, he understood that whatever mistakes he made going forward, were his mistakes to own completely.

Clare had had nothing to do with this.

He’d been set free.

The man in the suit said, “Your mother was intelligent woman.”

“Is,” Jack said. “She is an intelligent woman.”

And that was part of what kept him tongue tied.

The story in these pages, Clare had seen it all years ago.

She had known fate would snag him and had tried to warn him.

Not the micro-level stuff that related to this particular target in this particular scenario. Even if she’d had that kind of foresight, she wouldn’t have cared.

Clare didn’t give a shit about politics or politicians.

To her, they were glorified bureaucrats, interchangeable, replaceable self-serving pawns in love with the idea of importance, for whom she held varying degrees of contempt and animosity, and not without good reason.

Her own government had turned its back on her, had labeled her a traitor and an enemy of the state, so she’d become one, hiring out to anyone if the money was right, but she was a patriot all the same. She was loyal not to any flag or nation-state, but to the ideals her country was founded on and that she’d sworn to uphold.

She’d have put a bullet in any assassin foolish enough to take this job.