His ticket had been bought and paid for by a man they knew only over the phone. He’d claimed to speak for Dmitry Vasiliev, a person who didn’t technically exist—ghost of a former KGB officer, present-day enigma, father they’d never met—and they’d have been a disgrace to the blood running through their veins if they’d accepted the invitation at face value. But that was obvious, and the obvious was easy, and easy made for carelessness and created blindness to what the obvious obfuscated.

It was never the trap you could see that snared you.

That was Clare 101.

To see the obfuscated, they’d need an unknown observer, and so Jill had flown out a day early to get that observer’s vantage, and he’d been the lure, traveling on the ticket Dmitry’s guy had sent, a ticket purchased in a name that, until last week, they’d believed only they and Clare had known. So it wasn’t that he’d drawn attention that had come as a surprise, it was whom he’d drawn attention from, and what she really wanted to know was why the US government had sent a kill team after him.

He’d like to have had that answer for himself.

She said, “Someone went through a lot of trouble to put that team on your flight, John, but I just don’t get it. Those guys were slow to adapt, got panicky over losing visual, and moved like they were wading through knee-deep mud. The woman has your level of pain-in-the-ass potential, but other than that they didn’t exactly send their best, so why bother? Some sort of dry run? A setup for distraction?”

Jack weighed his response.

By any measure they should have had to work harder to shake what was, he assumed, a highly trained operative team. But that didn’t mean the killers were second rate or lacked skills, it meant their own frames of reference were skewed. Compared to what Clare had thrown at them, anything else would be easy. That had been the whole point of their insane childhoods—day after week after month trapped inside her paranoid nightmare of psych-outs and blindsiding tests—never knowing what would come at them or when, because her whole purpose in life was to prepare them for a war she saw coming but that never arrived.

“Just their first taste of what they’re chasing,” he said. “Took them by surprise, is all. It’s going to get harder.”

Jill gave him a heavy dose of side-eye. “Why would anyone come after us in the first place if they didn’t already know what they were chasing?”

He didn’t have an answer for that, either.

“I marked four,” she said. “How many you think we missed?”

He shrugged in noncommittal nonanswer.