The words stole thought from her head and breath from her lungs, and she was, for a few seconds, speechless. New meaning layered over old, and thinking of Emilia now led to thinking of Nick, and that he’d died without knowing and that he was dead, and the world closed in on her again.

She forced agreement up her throat and out her lips.

“I need equipment,” she said. “And I’m going to need the rest of my team.”

The departure to Bratislava was coming up fast. She needed to get to Aaron, needed to get him on that train. She dropped handset into cradle.

She would, without a doubt, find her target.

What she did when she found him was yet to be determined.

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 26

Toledo Executive Airport
South of Toledo, Ohio, USA

JACK

HE STEPPED FROM AIRSTAIRS TO TARMAC, FUEL FUMES AND WINTER cold kissing his lungs, the whine of the Gulfstream engines fading as he followed the cabin crew’s finger-pointing instruction toward the center of a squat, metal-topped structure, where administration offices and government offices combined under a single roof into a terminal of sorts.

Not that he needed directions to find it.

The building was the only one in sight, the only thing in sight, really.

This airport, with a runway just long enough to handle private jets and prop planes, was but a blip on the map. There were railway tracks in the near distance, and a freeway not too far off, and not much else for miles around.

He’d flown Prague to Toledo on Moscow’s dime.

Toledo was his choice, as was the detour through Nassau that allowed him to preclear US airspace in the Bahamas.

The Russians had set the time frame, handled logistics.

He was traveling on their papers—a French passport with a backstopped legend that would have made Clare weep in envy—genuine documents for a genuine individual with impeccable references but, more importantly, a travel history limited to the European continent.

A visit to any of the Five Eyes countries would have ruled him out. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, they all shared signals intelligence and biometric data.

Several Pacific nations posed a similar risk for different reasons.

Every year the world’s borders grew less porous. Every year it got harder to slip between the cracks. But the world hadn’t yet united in a single biometric database, and so Jack’s face and Jack’s voice had been the first of this traveler’s records siphoned into US biometric repositories. He’d set the baseline. A new hairline, prosthetic facial adjustments, the man’s own fingerprints covering his, and a set of balls forged in the pits of hell had been enough to get him a few cursory questions, a quick declaration, and the thump in his passport that sent him on.

This stop now was just a pass-through formality.