Clare had so many paranoid fantasies of her own that it’d been hard to know where hers ended and others began, but that was the thing he understood now and hadn’t then. Clare might be paranoid, but she wasn’t delusional.

The Cold War had ended, but the world hadn’t changed.

Russia’s end goal was still the same. Everywhere you looked, active measures were on display: fear stoked into outrage, ideological differences reinforced until they turned violent, the worst of human nature fed and nurtured until some no longer saw their opponents as human at all.

And now they wanted him to kill their biggest proponent.

This wasn’t an assassination. This was the start of a second Civil War.

Brilliant, really. Or at least it had been until the Broker had pissed Clare off, and she’d gone rogue and killed him, and the world’s underbelly had lost its shock collar, and governments, panicked at the idea of assassins running amok, sent out their own hit squads in preemptive strikes, and now every killer for hire with the skills and smarts to carry out this kind of job had a target on their back.

He bet these genius masterminds hadn’t seen that coming.

Not that the Kremlin lacked for killers, per se.

Journalists and dissidents and people who knew things suffered such a high rate of clumsiness that their deaths barely blipped the news anymore.

But European borders were small and porous.

Getting into the United States meant crossing an ocean or a whole heck of a lot of land, and acquiring legal transportation and accommodation and vanishing within a surveillance state on high alert were whole other issues. Whoever they’d lined up was either dead or suddenly unable to get within a hundred miles of a US border.

Dmitry, intentionally or not, had handed them the perfect Moscow-connected, familial replacement. But that’s where Jack’s understanding stopped and where the data didn’t fit. He slid the senator’s face toward the man in the suit.

The bodyguard approached, a liter of bottled water in one hand, drinking glass in the other, interrupting where interruption was least appreciated.

Jack skipped the glass, cracked the seal, and drank straight from the plastic, downing gulp after gulp in an attempt to drown the desert, and set the half-empty bottle on the table. “I’m useless to you on this,” he said.

The man shrugged. “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

“To pull this off, you need someone who can slip undetected through the American landscape, and I’ve already got one of their kill teams chasing me. In my position I’d be better off using this information as a bargaining chip.”

The man in the suit harrumphed and leaned forward. “We talk like Americans, okay? Business. No more pretend.”

“All right,” Jack said. “No more pretend.”

“The woman with you, she is not sister, Jillian.”

“Correct,” Jack said. “And you are not Dmitry.”