“Oh. Well, we set a trap, used me as bait—I was always the bait—and worked our way up the food chain. Once we had one of them, we had access to their coms and we used that to lure in their commander. Once we had him, we rigged a pulley system and roped him upside down off a tree. Jack lit a fire beneath him and just kept adding sticks. Didn’t take long before the guy offered up the number Clare used to communicate with him and gave us the city she’d hired him out of. It took a bit of sleuthing on our part to hunt her down, but the story ended with us waiting for her in her hotel room and me putting a gun to her head.”

Holden stared.

“Yeah, fucked up, I know. For what it’s worth, the gun wasn’t loaded. I did shoot her later, but that’s another story. Anyway, Bolivia is John’s strategy.” She tapped the contact information link. “The phone number has a San Antonio area code. Hundred bucks says it rings to a real location and gives us our rendezvous point.”

Holden said, “And we meet at seven in the evening.”

“Yep. Easy peasy. I’ll call the number tomorrow. See where it leads.”

She closed the browser, as if that was all, but it wasn’t all.

The post was missing context for who they’d be baiting or, more specifically, what the endgame might be. Jack wasn’t the type to inadvertently leave out that kind of detail, which meant he was handling it, and as much as she trusted the strategist in him the way she always had, she also didn’t. Not just because he had gone rogue in Prague and cut her out and was now forcing her to fly blind, but because Bolivia was a one-off scenario. It’d worked because they were fourteen, and because they were up against mercenaries, not patriots defending their homeland, and because no matter how lucky they might have been that Clare hadn’t accidentally gotten them dead, they’d always been able to count on knowing that in her own messed-up way, she was trying to keep them alive. This was different.

She’d warned him that trying to play it both ways was going to get them killed. This would be so much easier without Clare as an unknown.

Holden said, “Whatever it is you’re not saying, it’s only fair I know.”