Nick needed to know—needed to know now—needed to see it for himself, and it’d take longer for her to get the equipment to his room, resecure credentials, and start over than to get him here.

She searched for the feeds by floor and found their hallway.

Empty.

That didn’t mean clear.

She leaned over, picked up the room phone, and dialed.

Nick answered with a voice somewhere between dead asleep and panicked alert.

She said, “Sorry to wake you. There’s something you need to see. Urgent.”

He said, “Give me two minutes—”

She stopped him. “Nick. He’s here. In the hotel. He followed us out of the terminal.”

Silence followed.

She said, “The hallway looks clear, but I don’t know. Be careful.”

She dropped the phone into the cradle and returned to the screen.

She needed to get ahead of this.

Target had been conscious of the cameras from the beginning, which made it hard to get a lock on him, but between the various angles she could build a composite of his face, and there were segments that included his gait.

She pushed what she had into the system.

The algorithms churned.

Facial recognition spit back fifty partial matches, not one of which pinged the passport photo. She scrolled through the hits, looking for anything that fit the profile, saved the array, and closed it out. She didn’t have time or bandwidth to pore through the results for clues and missing pieces, so she clipped images from the camera feeds, attached them for high priority, and sent a requisition to headquarters.

The war room had the manpower and computing power, this was their job, and if they’d done it properly in the first place, she wouldn’t be left doing their work.

That was the frustration and irony of where she was this very moment.

She was an analyst, not a field operative. Her skills were a better fit for a war room than a hotel room, but here she was, and that was Nick’s doing.

He was the one who’d talked her into the career fork from naval intelligence specialist to special unit analyst, and if not for him, she’d probably be back to working out of a windowless room in Norfolk, assembling confidence judgments into briefs that more often than not found their way into the circular file than onto a desk.

He had called her up, said he was in town for the night, had invited her out and buttered her up with a few beers and greasy food, and had then dropped the mother of all requests on her.

He was putting together a team, he’d said, and wanted her on it.

She’d laughed.