Jill said, “Fine, I’ll try one for size. We get a call from someone claiming to be Dmitry. You fly on the ticket he bought, and somehow coincidentally there’s an American hit squad on that same flight. My bet is that the spotter was there to confirm the pieces were falling into place. You only need a single pair of eyes for that.”

Jack rolled his eyes.

She said, “What?”

He said, “The Russian was amused, like you were both in on the same joke.”

“Yeah.”

“And he knew I had killers at my back.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t call in a hit squad for shits and giggles, and a joke is only an inside joke if everyone in on it is amused by the same thing, so either he didn’t want me dead or you did. Which was it?”

The aircraft slowed and turned. She said, “He knew the Americans were outclassed. We both did. That’s what made it funny.”

Jack held up a finger.

He needed her to stop talking.

In his head he saw the hit squad, saw their picket pattern in the airport like beacons inside a cubed map. It would have made better logistical and strategic sense for them to have picked up the trail in Frankfurt than to fly a four-person crew with him across the Atlantic with no ground support on the receiving end. But to get ahead of him like that, they’d have had to have had his itinerary in advance or known who they were looking for ahead of time. They hadn’t.

This had been last minute.

He mentally returned to the gate area and watched the flight deplane, and he searched the waiting passengers, saw his sister among them, and the Russian, and he followed his own path into the terminal. The pieces came at him, over and over.

Kill team. Russian. Him. Jill.

Time and again he got stuck on Jill.

What was it she’d just said?

We get a call . . . There was no we.

The hit squad hadn’t come after them, it’d come after him.

They’d picked him up in Dallas, followed him through Frankfurt, staked out his connecting flight to Berlin, and all the while there’d been not a whiff of surveillance on Jill, not in Frankfurt, and not in Dallas the day before, when he’d played observer on the outbound side of her flight.

But the Russian spotter had known them both.

If, intentionally or unintentionally, Dmitry-in-finger-quotes had pointed the Americans to him, the Americans would have also known them both. And if it hadn’t been Dmitry, then Jill should have been the one with a target on her back, not him.

She was the one who’d taken contracts.

She was the one who, in defiance of everything Clare had taught them, had gone off to work for the Broker. He hadn’t pinged that underworld radar, she had.