She came up on her fast, boots pounding gravel, and the woman turned and, in that turn, exposed her neck, and Jill brought the blade of her hand down hard over the greater auricular nerve. Brachial stun. Three to seven seconds was how long it took the body’s nervous system to recover, longer if she’d hit too hard.

The woman’s legs went out, and she dropped hard and fast.

Jill grabbed her collar, dragged her backward into the light.

Five seconds was what it took to get that deadweight into Holden’s range.

The night around her turned into a war zone.

A tranquilizer hit the woman’s upper thigh.

Jill let go and rushed for the motel-room door.

No time, no time, they had no time.

The noise would have raised the neighborhood. A law-enforcement response wouldn’t be far away, and any engagement on their part—deadly or otherwise—was out of the question if the rest of this was going to work.

They needed to get gone.

The ceiling rattled, and Holden dropped down to the sink counter.

“There are more of them out there, coming over the fence,” she said.

“Go,” he said. “Go, go, go.”

Outside came another burst of gunfire, and then another after that.

She reached for his gear, slung the strap over her shoulder, hefted her own bag, strapped up the CO2 rifle, grabbed hold of the weapons case and supplies, and heaved her way out like a laden donkey, headed for the fence opening to the street.

In the rooms around her, doors remained closed, and curtains motionless.

Guests would have to be insane to do more than roll to the floor and reach for their phones. She lugged her way to the vehicle next door, which Jack, in his many-steps-ahead thinking, had secured for them. It was disposable. One-time use. That meant plates from a clean vehicle had been swapped out for those on this stolen one.

By morning it’d be a death trap.

Silence took her past bodies of the men who’d come over the fence, dead from shots she hadn’t taken, that Holden hadn’t taken. That’d been Jack on the rooftop, using whatever their compatriots had carried up there, turning their own weapons against them. He’d never been one to let a good setup go to waste.

When the cleaners moved in and pored over the scene, all data would point to a defector in their midst, and the analysts would reject that narrative, but the idea would be planted, and it’d be there, infecting every skirmish that followed.

She reached the beat-up RAV4.

The keys were beneath the passenger seat, same place she stashed those for the Fiesta, because that’s how things worked.

She off-loaded the equipment into the rear.

There were already bags in the back, courtesy of Jack, and she stole a few quick seconds to run through the inventory.