There was enough familiarity to say that possibly, maybe, this was the face she’d seen in those airport corridors, but not enough that she’d have argued it with any certainty. She clicked through to the file itself.

The war room had added information while her team was over the ocean, including a short, lightly redacted summary of the SIGINT and HUMINT that had pointed headquarters to him, all of it Russian sourced.

That was a potential problem.

Moscow was notorious for pushing disinformation in ways that made it difficult to differentiate truth from fiction, but right here and now that issue was above her pay grade. These details pointed to a planned political assassination, and they came with a high analytic confidence rating, which was as good as it got.

No details on where or when or who.

She scanned down the war room’s query timeline.

They were gunning for leads on target through informant networks.

They’d run his gait through Next Generation Identification and pushed his passport photo and multiple variants of the passport name and birth date through aggregated social media and commercial data, financial and credit histories, and law-enforcement databases, but so far the guy was as much of a vanishing act in real life as he’d been at the airport. That just didn’t seem right. Even the best of the best of the killers on the Broker list had some kind of footprint.

She clicked through for the airport security feeds, which, helpfully, had already been labeled according to a corresponding site map.

Images filled her screen in a sort of spliced quick time.

One world faded and another filled its space, and she settled into a rhythm, clicking, scanning, enhancing until her target came into view.

He was impossible to miss.

He glowed on-screen. Well, not a glow, exactly.

The hat he wore was reflectable- or infrared-equipped—possibly both or something else altogether—and light that had been invisible on the ground was a blinding patch of white on screen.

It was a curious choice, the hat.

The only practical reason to wear something like that was to prevent facial recognition from picking up his nodal points, but that made no sense in this environment. The same tech that kept his face out of the data systems created an obvious digital beacon that screamed, “Look at me,” to anyone watching the monitors.

A person with the ability to slip between shadows the way he did should have been more concerned with avoiding attention than drawing a line straight to him.

Target moved off-screen.

She jotted a note, marked the time stamp, continued to the second feed, and accelerated the frame rate until the lighted hat came into view. She was there, too, in that sequence, not nearly as blunderous as she remembered but just as slow.