The blonde was the misdirection.

—An illusion set up all the way back before Berlin.

But if the blonde was the misdirection, what was she not meant to notice?

—No, not her. The illusion wasn’t just for her.

She could see it in her head then, target and body double, misdirection for whoever had grabbed him. The sister had still been running loose. She would have been vindictive, would have wanted her brother back, and it explained how the drama would have carried over into the next day.

—Except the blonde was the one in that two-second frame.

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

—The sister hadn’t been the one to make them.

—So if not the sister, then who?

For the second time, her words to Nick came home.

Our guy wasn’t the only assassin on that Dallas flight.

It made no sense, but the evidence was there, staring her in the face. Christopher Holden, the assassin whose last confirmed target was Karen McFadden, had aligned himself with McFadden’s children.

They were dealing with a trifecta.

Not one assassin, three—three who wanted something badly enough to lure her team into that rendezvous—three who trusted the Russians so little, they had expected betrayal and had set up a long-game misdirection to avoid it and then had killed two in retaliation—three who were likely now in the United States, or would be soon, to carry out an assassination, and meanwhile the SIGINT and HUMINT pointing headquarters to target continued to be Russian sourced....

She shut the computer down.

Disconnected. Disengaged. Quit.

Nick’s death still sat on her chest like a hundred-pound weight, and these convolutions were more complex than she had the emotional and mental capacity to process. But that was then.

If she’d been on speaking terms with Hayes or headquarters, if she’d been willing to offer the thoughts inside her head, she’d have said that while Jack very well might have returned to the United States as an assassin, nothing he did was ever straightforward or simple. He was lining up to play them all against each other.

Just like Prague.

She stretched her neck and stretched her arms, adjusted the temperature hotter, and let her mind free-fall, becoming him, trying to see want and fear through his eyes.

Ringing from the room, incessant, persistent, refused to give her that space.

She shut off the shower, pulled a towel off the rack, buried her face in it, and wiped water from her eyes.

The ringing stopped.

She toweled off her hair, slowly, in no hurry.

The war room knew where she was.

For something urgent, they’d call back.

The ringing started up again.

She wrapped the towel around her hair, stepped from steam to the shock of cold, carried the phone back into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid and, with a puddle pooling around her feet, answered there.