Jack hooked a finger in the ring and dangled the keys above the manifest. He waited a while before speaking. “We went after answers and got them,” he said. “There’s no question Dmitry’s alive or that he’s real. There’s also no question that finding him will be the lesser challenge. So do we go, or do we let it go?”

Jen sighed, and the guys seemed to understand what the sigh meant, because the mood turned somber. She said, “I’ll go for you.”

“It can’t be like that,” Jack said. “We mess this up, and there are real-world consequences on the other end.”

“Baby steps, my brother,” she said. “This is my way of getting to that.”

They stared at each other, some silent contest of wills, which Kara didn’t quite understand and which Chris put an end to by pushing back from the table.

“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s settled. Keeping you buttheads alive seems to be my new job, so I guess that means I’m going, too.” He tugged a small plastic case from the inside of his jeans, removed a microSD card, loaded that into a phone, and fiddled with the device until he had what he was looking for. “While we’re still doing show-and-tell, here’s my contribution from Berlin.”

He turned the screen so they could see it.

It showed a short, pudgy, balding man.

To Kara, he said, “You know him?”

She leaned in for a better look.

“He introduced himself as Luka Marinov,” Jack said.

She didn’t recognize name or face, but if this was the guy who connected Berlin to Prague, that put him in the orbit of global players, and odds were high the war room had something. She shook her head.

Chris extracted the card and offered it to her. “Keep it,” he said. “You’ve got as much vested in figuring out who he is as we do.”

She tucked the card into her sock, closest thing she had to a wallet since she hadn’t had anything personal on her when they’d grabbed her.

She had the card with her now, padded in tissue, snug between insert and sole, like a pebble near her heel.

They left the next morning, all four of them in one vehicle.

Louisville was where Jack stopped so they could make the calls.

First was her conversation with Hayes, and once that was settled, Jack used Hayes’s SIM to call the Russian who’d abducted and blackmailed him.

The man answered as if he recognized the number.

That surprised her more than anything else in this insane week, and that last conversation on the train came roaring back with raging focus.

“Moscow has been playing you,” Jen had said. “Your branch, division, whatever it is you guys are. Keeping you focused on my brother so you don’t look at me.”