The first episode didn’t break until the next day’s late-evening news: A bomb threat. An amusement park forced to evacuate. A false alarm.

Helicopter footage showed armored vehicles and multistate law-enforcement personnel, and she saw Hayes in that strategy, but it told her absolutely nothing about who’d lived or died.

Twenty-four hours later the senator pinged the news cycle: Emergency hospitalization. Critical condition. Previously undiagnosed health issues.

Twelve hours after that, the world erupted and sent Jen’s words from the train round and round Kara’s head.

All your guys trying to find my brother will never see me coming.

I will put a bullet between the eyes of a sitting member of Congress.

The Russians wanted a spectacle, and that’s what they got.

Every channel played variations of the same clip: Speaker of the House outside an immigration detention center. Bullet strike. Body fall. Chaos.

In the background, beyond the noise, she heard the crack-bang.

Kara listened for it each time the clip replayed.

Sound delay told her the hit had come from beyond 450 yards.

Even with multiple Boomerangs, there’d have been enough time for the shooter to bug out, but so much of this was wrong. Jack had given Hayes a head start, an opportunity to prevent an actual killing, and everything about this was real.

The spin machine kicked in all the same: a name, a face, a manhunt.

A suspect with a lengthy criminal record and a long unstable history. An armed engagement. Eventually, suspect suicide.

And a collective sigh of relief and space to grieve.

Kara shut off the television, conflicted, confused.

Hayes could have averted this but hadn’t, and that troubled her deeply, and she couldn’t point to why, exactly.

It wasn’t death. The entirety of her adult years had been spent as a cog in death’s machine.

And it wasn’t the assassination itself. Her job at headquarters had been to support extrajudicial killing.

And it wasn’t even that it’d been a US citizen or on US soil. She’d been preparing to do the same thing before she’d been snatched.

Nor was it the taking of presumably innocent life. She’d argued out that issue with Nick after her first six months.

It took a while to shut off her mind, but finally, she slept.

She awoke with Jack’s arrival.

He’d returned before the others, a single set of footsteps tromping up the porch, through the front, and to her room. He looked like he’d been awake for days.

He unlocked the shackle, handed her a couple grand in cash, and told her she was free to roam, or to leave entirely if she preferred, but that would mean walking a long way, and if she was willing to wait until Jen and Chris got back, he’d take her wherever she wanted to go. She didn’t know exactly why she stayed.