Jack had run them through a map of nearby buildings and the surrounding streets, diagramming positions and strategies the way he’d mapped out Republic Square in Prague, and they had gone into crawl spaces and had timed distance, and when they’d prepared as much as they could, Jack had tripped the countdown, taken the car, and gone.

The kill team would come, because they had no choice but to come.

When and how many and how hard the fight, were yet to be determined.

Holden had spent the first hour disassembling, cleaning, reassembling, and loading weapons, busy work that didn’t substitute for boresighting and zeroing a scope and making a rifle his own, but it had kept him occupied to a point. He was a mechanic relying on another man’s tools, and on a high-stakes night like tonight, where an inch could mean the difference between life and death, it left him with a sense of foreboding and dread.

That wasn’t helped by whatever was going on with Jill, who hadn’t volunteered a word to him since leaving the restaurant and had met each attempt at conversation with deliberate monosyllabic indifference.

If she were anyone else, if there wasn’t so much riding on his participation this evening, he’d have already gotten up and left.

Instead he shoved a pillow beneath his head and closed his eyes.

The silence dragged on.

He had no patience for passive aggression, not even on a good day.

Jill left the chair and dug through a bag, carried it to the sink area, dumped the whole thing on the floor in a clattering heap, and repacked it, each movement louder and more extreme than the last.

Holden said, “You wanna talk about it, or do you prefer throwing things?”

She pulled out whatever she’d just stuffed in the bag, and shoved it back. Voice sweet, mellow, she said, “Talk about what?”

“The jealousy,” he said.

“Oh?” she said. “What are you jealous about?”

Holden opened an eye, followed her a bit, and closed it again.

The closer they’d gotten to San Antonio—the closer to Jack—the odder she’d behaved, and he’d seen the way her face darkened when Jack had shaken his hand, and was aware of how she’d grown sullen every time Jack had spoken to him directly, and of the subtle attempts to cut him out of the discussion, as if strategy talk was meant for just her and her brother. For someone who’d spent a lifetime wearing character masks and disguises, she was easy to see through when she thought no one was looking.

He said, “My friendship with your brother takes nothing away from you.”

She said, “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”