This, then, was assassin’s suttee—a modern take on that old Hindu tradition in which living wives threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyre—more specifically, the part in which unwilling wives were forcefully thrown into those flames by others. This hit squad had come to do the throwing.

Holden tucked the bottle back into the bag and took another look.

Where there were two, there would be others. Only a fool would send a pair to hunt him, and she hadn’t come at the behest of fools.

Speakers overhead announced another boarding class.

The departure area emptied in the direction of the gate.

He shoved thick-rimmed glasses onto his face, stood, and wound between seats, moving with the herd.

The woman at the pillar shoved the phone into her pocket, reached for her roll-along, and fell in not far behind, lips twitching with the ventriloquist movement of throat whispers into an unseen mic. His left eye watched it happen courtesy of the pinhead camera in his hatband, watched it in the lens of those thick-rimmed glasses the way drivers watched cars in the rearview.

The line congested. He slowed. She moved in closer.

Proximity added ten well-concealed years to her face and changed the shape beneath her cropped jacket enough to confirm that, had she been a normal traveler, she’d have set off enough alarms going through security to lock down the airport.

He stepped out of line, checking pockets, scanning the floor.

By assassin standards he might as well have tipped his hat and nodded hello.

Passengers jostled him.

Legs and luggage moved forward.

He found the boarding pass that had never been missing, tucked it into his passport, and followed her down the Jetway and into the belly of the plane.

Flight attendants split the passenger feed between two aisles.

He ignored them, followed where his killer led, studying seated passengers without studying, watching those at his back as well as those ahead, searching for another glimpse of recognition or subconscious betrayal, and got nothing.

She stopped, hefted her carry-on into the overhead.

If she’d looked at him, he’d have smiled.

Instead, she squirreled in for the window, and he continued on, matching seats to faces, noting positions and patterns, ruling out young children, discounting large family groups, analyzing the old with a critical eye, and mistrusting the flight crew.

Kill or be killed at thirty thousand feet; three hundred potential threats.

A father paused to lift a kid-size suitcase into stowage.

The line stopped, and in that beat, fate looked Holden square in the face.

He’d have missed it if he’d blinked or turned, the pupil-expanding, heart-pounding, unguarded shock that registered on the face in the aisle seat ahead.