There was no we here. He knew exactly how many operatives had followed him off that flight, and he also knew they weren’t the only ones who’d come looking. There’d been another spotter in the waiting area—he’d made the guy right about the time he’d caught sight of Jill—and where there was one, there’d be others. Priorities had forced him to keep moving and trust that she’d find what needed finding and let him know the rest later.

The whole truth required quid pro quo, and she was holding out.

The aircraft started forward under its own power, and the long taxi to the runway began. Tarmac and grassy areas and position markings filled the windows. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Russians?”

The corners of her lips twitched in that way they always did when she realized she’d overplayed her hand. “Not Russians,” she said. “Russian. Singular.”

His brain measured her assessment against a history of half-truths and lies.

“Nobody sends one-man surveillance,” he said. “Not for people like us.”

Her tone caught a corner and edged toward offense. She said, “Well, if he did have partners, they were better than anything Clare’s thrown our way, because I sure as hell didn’t make them.”

“Clearly.”

She sniffed in disdain. “A little credit, dickface. If I was gonna lie about it, I’d offer you something plausible.”

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

That in itself was a lie, but she was right about the Russian, not that he believed her, per se, but her version confirmed what he’d seen for himself, even if he still questioned what he’d seen exactly. The spotter had been aware of him—recognized him—and hadn’t tried to hide it, and he’d seemed to be aware of the kill team and seemed to be there simply to observe.

Jack said, “The guy knew I was being hunted?”

She leaned back with a wistful exhale. “Yeah. He saw it all. He was good, old school. Like Clare in the body of a sixty-something-year-old man.”

Jack let the description settle.

Disguise was personal, not some generic Halloween costume that anyone could pull on and off at will. Age, body structure, physical agility created constraints, and those constraints made it a whole lot easier to pass off a woman in her late fifties as a male of similar age than to give a sixty-year-old man the swagger of a teenage gang-banger.

Jill was too smart, had too much of Clare in her, to assume what she saw was anything other than what she was meant to see, which was why she hadn’t identified the spotter by age or gender and had instead identified the tradecraft.

The tradecraft was an issue.

He said, “You sure it wasn’t Clare?”