Jack let out a low whistle. He glanced at his nails. “Gonna be a whole something else trying to pull that off. It’s almost like Moscow had some backward idea about which one of us was made for the harder stuff.”

She kicked him under the table but grinned as she did it.

Holden studied brother, then sister and pondered the dilemma.

Assassination wouldn’t weigh heavy on the conscience—certainly not on his or Jill’s—and whatever it weighed on Jack’s wouldn’t be enough to offset the risk to someone he cared about. But they were also smart enough to understand that in doing this, they’d press thumbs hard on the world’s political scales, and there was a difference between indifference and being the spark that ignited civil war.

He said, “Is Dmitry worth it?”

Jack said, “That’s not the question that needs answering.” Holden laced fingers and rested hands on the table.

Jill crossed her arms again.

Jack said, “From a purely self-preservation perspective, right? We’ve got the Americans, we’ve got the Russians, and we’ve got ourselves caught in the middle. Whether we do or we don’t, the Americans consider us a threat and want us dead, so they don’t factor. That leaves the Russians. If we don’t do this, they’re also going to want us dead, and we can pretty much write off ever meeting Dmitry, which means we basically get to repeat Clare’s life for the past twentysomething years.

“If we do go through with this, we keep the possibility of meeting Dmitry open, and assuming we survive, we’ll have a safe haven in Russia. Problem then becomes the Russians own us, and there will always be one more thing they need us to do. And there’s also the inconvenient fact that the whole reason the Americans are trying to kill me in the first place is that the Russians pointed them my way.”

Jill said, “Seriously?”

“Gave them my flight details out of Dallas. There’s a kill team in Houston now, waiting for me to surface.”

She said, “You led them there.”

“I did.”

“So you’re saying what? We do a Clare, twist this to our advantage?”

“No. Clare spent her best years paranoid and on the run. To come out on top, we’ve got to arrange the board so the powers that be are better served by keeping us alive. It’s not Clare we want to pattern after. It’s the Broker.”

Holden said, “You see a way to do that?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. He looked right at him. “Bolivia.”

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 30

Prospect Hill, San Antonio
Texas, USA

HOLDEN