What the suit had offered was a hero’s welcome from Mother Russia when this was over. Citizenship. A house and stipend. A country in which Jack would have safe haven, an obvious need because, clearly, the Americans no longer wanted him as one of their own, and what kind of country was the USA anyway if the government sanctioned extrajudicial killing of its own citizens?

As if the same thing and worse didn’t happen in Russia.

But that was different.

Of course it was different. Russia wasn’t a democracy. Russia didn’t hold itself out as a beacon of morality to the rest of the world, active measures and all that.

Their offer was only partially true.

They never expected to have to fill their end of the bargain.

For him, the only way out was to die or to fake his own death, and faking death meant the rest of his life on the run. Easy enough in principle. He had no roots, no home, no family and, child of the world that he was, he was capable of adapting anywhere. But that left him with a mother he couldn’t trust, a sister who hated him, killers at his back, and a half-cocked, fucked-up plan that would make him persona non grata in every connected country he tried to enter.

That was Clare’s legacy, not his.

He had been running his whole damn life and was over it.

He wanted to go where he wanted, when he wanted, for reasons he wanted, not because his mother or father or sister or the goddamn Kremlin had made their own set of plans. If he hadn’t been willing to be Clare’s puppet, he damn sure wasn’t about to start performing for someone else, and so he’d agreed to the job for the same reason he’d returned after setting Anna free.

It was the fastest way to get what he wanted.

Or the dumbest way to die.

He shoved the papers back, folded the envelope, and stuffed it inside his jacket.

Intelligence, like a parachute, was only as good as the hands that had packed it, and this was more of a tangled death trap than the means to a safe landing.

Didn’t mean he couldn’t repurpose it, though.

He leaned back, shut his eyes, and puzzled through the mental maze in a search for Jill and couldn’t find her. Instead of the positional awareness that connected him to her when their fates intertwined, he had the guilty memory of her loping across the plaza with that damn SIM in her pocket, and the fatalistic acceptance that the laugh-filled hour they’d spent playing cards in her room in Prague might be the last of their shared bond.

He’d taken from her what he had no right to take.

One day, maybe, he’d earn her forgiveness.