She felt for the mug and dragged it to her face, summoned the energy to get her lips to the rim, and took a sip. Neurons lit up inside her head.

Holden slid a tablet across the table in her direction.

A bottle-enhanced redhead filled the screen, late forties to early fifties, pantsuit, minimal makeup, hair pulled back in a no-nonsense bun, caught mid-stride on her way to a black sedan. She was a picture of power in motion.

Two men in suits walked beside her. Another waited at the rear passenger door. Jill pinched and zoomed and assessed the accoutrements.

Radio earpieces. Service weapons.

By all appearances, John had found what they were after.

The strategy now rested on her getting the confirmation.

For nearly thirty hours she’d been laying that groundwork, every conversation and every visit to the cabin next door, practicing an art that Jack, for all his brilliance, had never fully appreciated.

He thought she manipulated people to get what she wanted. He was wrong.

People manipulated themselves. If you acknowledged their deepest desires, guarded their secrets, soothed their hidden shame, and reaffirmed their worldview and self-image, they tripped over themselves in a race to their own doom while thanking you for the favor. She’d first internalized that insight as an eight-year-old in Sofia, Bulgaria, after their apartment had been burgled and Clare, being Clare and refusing to accept it as a random act of thievery, had hunted down one of the men who’d cleaned them out and had positioned her kids where they could watch the interrogation.

She’d never threatened, never raised her voice.

Instead, she’d cut the man loose, straddled a chair facing him, handed him a beer, and drunk with him. He’d talked—cautiously, at first—and she’d listened and empathized, and by the time she’d sent him on his way, she’d mapped the entire hierarchy of a local ring of thieves.

Not that he knew that’s what he’d done, exactly.

“I could have hurt him,” Clare had said. “People will tell you anything they think you want to hear if it will make the pain stop, but they’ll tell you what you need to hear if they like you and if it’s in their own best interest.”

That was the difference between her and her brother.