Analysis of competing hypotheses said the flight to DC had been misdirection, that heavy security at the capitol made DC a less than ideal location, and that because round-the-clock protection was provided only to congressional leadership, non-leadership senators and representatives were softer targets, especially vulnerable while away from the capitol and in their home states. He could have gone anywhere.

She couldn’t fault either analysis.

But something more, something abstract wasn’t showing up in available data. At its most basic, it was what she’d told Nick before they’d left to recon Republic Square. Target had gone to great lengths to reach that rendezvous, but he didn’t trust whomever he’d gone to see. Didn’t trust them in Prague and didn’t trust them now.

—Didn’t trust who, exactly?

—Didn’t trust them, why?

—Because, logically, his employers would want him to succeed.

These actions created inconsistency. What didn’t add up in the present somehow tied to the inconsistencies in Republic Square and to the shooting in Prague that had taken place the following day.

She’d gotten wind of that while she was in Slovakia, holed up in a ski resort, scouring raw data, trying to force logic over senselessness. It’d come in as an unrelated alert, and it’d added another layer of context.

The timing had been too close, the details too similar to Republic Square, to have been coincidental, and so she’d swapped one search for another and found Charles Square, a park that formed the center of a large downtown rectangle not far from Old Town, and she’d found police-scanner transcripts and camera feeds.

The two dead in that shooting were Russian.

They’d been long-distance kills, sniper kills.

And if she’d had any doubt that two shootings in two squares over two days in Prague involving Russians might be coincidence, a glimpse of a blonde—the accomplice, the sister—in the corner of a two-second frame had obliterated doubt and everything else she thought she knew about the day Nick died.

She’d sat there, frozen, staring.

And when she could move again, she enhanced the footage and replayed it, and her own words to Nick came back home.

Everything we’ve seen, we’ve seen because that’s what he wanted.

First time she’d seen the blonde had been in footage at the Berlin airport.

It’d been that footage that had connected accomplice to target.

Second time she’d seen the blonde had been at Hotel Kings Court.

It was vindication, then, proving she’d been right about the accomplice.

But the same vindication that fed her ego blinded her to what should have been glaringly obvious. The master of disguise had chosen no disguise at all for that distinguishing head of hair.

We’ve seen because that’s what he wanted.

The woman thrown into the van at Hotel Kings Court hadn’t been the sister.