“This also is true.”

Jack placed his finger in the center of Senator Kenyon’s forehead. “You want an assassination,” he said. “I want Dmitry.”

The man nodded toward the vodka. “Drink.”

Jack dumped the liquor into his mouth. Swallowed, ate, rolled the glass between his palms, and held on to it to prevent another refill.

The man said, “There is work, and when work is done, you have Dmitry.”

“But, as I said, I’m useless to you on this.”

“Is only part true,” the man said. “There is work, and is other work. We speak with Jillian also.”

Those words, so casually spoken, implied that all the effort he’d gone through to keep Jill away had been wasted, but inferring that her compliance was a done deal was where the suit man went wrong. “You don’t have her,” Jack said.

The man made a mewling sound, as if to say, “Who knows?”

No, they didn’t have her, but they would speak with her.

In his head, he could see it, the table in Berlin, the way the emissary had pushed the phone toward him—specifically toward him—and the way his sister’s body had tensed. He’d needed her to have it for reasons of his own, but it’d been the emissary who’d manipulated her into wanting it.

The maze snapped again, ordered and reordered, and the kill team that had followed him out of Dallas blinked to the far edge. He knew now exactly how they’d found him, and why it’d been him, not Jill, that they’d pursued.

To the suit, he said, “My sister won’t be easy to convince.”

“We have you,” the man said. “This is enough.”

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 23

Hradany
Prague, Czech Republic

JILL

SHE CAME TO SLOWLY, FALLING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS, WITH each rise a little more cognizant, a little more confused. She knew the room, its texture and smells and size, knew the single bed, the small table that doubled as a desk, and the hardback wooden chair. Knowing amplified the anxiety. All of this was wrong.

She’d left this room. She shouldn’t be here.

And she drifted down again, grasping for a sense of time within space.

Somewhere in the fog, a voice said, “How’s your head?”

She knew that voice, warm and cozy. She liked that voice.

But that, too, was wrong, and her thoughts startled, scattering with the beat of a thousand wings. She struggled to see, to think.

A shadow filled the blur, the outline of a face.

The voice said, “Here, drink this. It’ll help you feel better.”

Warm, sweet liquid touched her lips.