“Thought crossed my mind more than once, but no, wasn’t her.” She leaned into the aisle. “He knew who I was, knew I’d made him, and never once tried to evade. If anything, he was amused by the whole thing, like we were both in on a private joke.”

“Amused,” Jack said. “By watching killers try to take out your brother.”

“Ohhh, your little girl feelings are hurt.”

“No, my big girl feelings are appalled.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you were fine—you knew it, he knew it, I knew it—and now you’re missing the point. Forget about the esta-dounidense for a minute and try explaining that Russian super-tradecraft spy guy, singular.”

“I can’t.”

“Such a drama queen.”

He waved her off.

“Think he was Dmitry’s guy who bought the tickets?”

Her fingers punctuated Dmitry with air quotes, but the question still assumed there even was a Dmitry in the first place—that the KGB agent who’d donned the persona of Dmitry Vasiliev twenty-seven years ago was who’d extended the meet-and-greet invitation that had brought them here—and not someone else using his name and familial connection.

He said, “Anyone else would have tried to put a bullet in your back, the same way the Americans tried to put one in mine.”

Voice singsong and teasing, she said, “Clare would beg to differ.”

As if two weeks ago they hadn’t both valued Clare’s opinion somewhere between dementia and psychosis. But that had been before mercenaries had stormed her house and she’d been abducted, and assassins had come after the two of them, and overnight a lying, paranoid, delusional narcissist had morphed into an information repository critical to survival. Even Clare hadn’t known who’d put the hit out on her. Or them.

“The past doesn’t forget,” she’d said. “I had a lot of time to make a lot of enemies, and there’s not one among them who wouldn’t kill you to get to me. The Broker, knowing who’d pay most for that information, is at the head of the line.”

Clare had left them to cut off that head.

She’d promised to let them know if she made it out alive, but promises for her were as situational as her ethics. They hadn’t heard from her—might never hear from her—because Clare did what Clare wanted, when she wanted, for reasons only she understood, and none of that changed the baseline. The world’s underbelly now knew she had children, and knew where those children had last been seen.

The possibilities as to who might be interested in their movements were endless, reliable information on those movements was valuable, and just because someone didn’t want to kill them here and now didn’t mean they weren’t planning to kill them later.

He didn’t have the energy to articulate all that, so he said nothing.