He wouldn’t have given her much thought if she hadn’t positioned herself for an uncomfortable wait with an unobstructed view and, in so doing, piqued well-honed assassin sense. So he’d observed, watching without really watching, searching for the unknown and unknowable, until betrayal had surfaced in a single wayward glance.

The object of her attention was a Caucasian male, ten, fifteen years her senior, in scuffed shoes and worn suit, dragging a beaten pilot bag toward the boarding line, but recognition and acknowledgment had flowed in that butterfly blink, followed by the furtive evasion of an actor who’d realized a heartbeat too late that she’d mistakenly looked at the camera.

She hadn’t come up from her phone in the forty minutes since.

Not so much as a pause when his own target had boarded with first class, and not a hint when her partner in the well-worn suit had stood to brush off crumbs and throw away an empty sandwich wrapper. Nothing, until he himself had leaned forward to reach for a water bottle and her thumbs had stalled and shoulders tensed.

He had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

He’d seen no reason to risk his own objective or add a fresh bull’s-eye to his back if, by extreme coincidence, she’d come in pursuit of someone else.

But with that final tell he’d known, and knowledge forced him to act.

He wasn’t an easy man to find, yet here she was.

Who’d sent her and why controlled his response.

He uncapped the bottle and took a long swig.

Death was never just death.

Eliminate a team of contract killers midflight, disembark before they were discovered, and that’d be the end of this; take out a government task force, and each fresh body would give rise to ten more fighting in their place.

Infinite possibilities converged into a pinprick overlap that held only one possibility: an identity used one too many times.

A compromised passport had led her to him.

He rolled the half-empty bottle between his palms.

Timing, location, and circumstance rolled into a Venn diagram inside his head.

She’d come on behalf of the United States government.

She’d come because the Broker, the man who’d played king against king and bartered souls for national secrets, who’d negotiated hits between buyers and assassins, and who’d forced order onto lawless chaos was dead. Dead without a protégé, dead without a plan for succession, dead to a sudden void in which the highly skilled killers he controlled were now unchained, free to pursue private agendas and vendettas.

The powers that be would never afford that risk.

The Broker was dead, now the ecosystem had to die with him.