Hayes said, “Thirty minutes, Jack. Why don’t you give me a number? I’ll let you know when I get there.”

Jack hung up and continued toward the Grand Theatre.

In thirty minutes, the next show would start.

Holden said, “Convoy bypassing the front for the delivery entrance,” and then, “Twenty-eight friends.”

Jack sighed on the inside.

Twenty-eight itchy trigger fingers multiplied by however many rounds each man carried in a park filled with families and kids, where the best-lit spaces still cast colorful shadow and a shit ton of glare, was peak stupidity. Even if Hayes planned to shut down the entire park, it’d take a half hour at least to clear it out, and under current circumstances, a half hour was a lifetime.

Jack dialed again. He said, “It’s cold, and I’d like to get this over with.”

Hayes said, “Fifteen minutes.”

Holden said, “They’re lit up and headed your way.”

No word from Jill, but Holden’s confirmation said she’d successfully marked Hayes’s men with spy dust.

Not the nitrophenyl pentadien of Clare’s Cold War tales, in which the KGB coated doorknobs and floor mats with an invisible substance that, once touched, was nearly impossible to remove. In those stories many a spy had gotten their entire operation rolled and assets killed by unknowingly creating a trail to every place they visited, every hand they shook, and every paper they touched.

Not one of the commercially available antitheft powders, either.

Those all needed UV light to be seen. That made them useless here.

But fine glitter, herpes of the craft world, made a suitable alternative.

Beneath the park’s halogen and holiday lights, it could turn a dull head of hair into a telltale chandelier. Every small reflection would help separate security from civilian as Hayes’s men attempted to blend.

The men might see it, but like nitrophenyl pentadien, they couldn’t get rid of it.

Jill had filled a few dozen bulb syringes with the stuff.

He’d carried them in for her.

According to Holden, Hayes’s men were wearing it all now.

Jack kept the phone on, kept it with him as he continued behind a restaurant to the dead end of a staff-only area. He pushed the cart in behind the gate, hopped the fence out the back, cut behind a building whose only purpose was to display animatronics, and popped back into the crowds.

Holden said, “Bait taken.”