The woman fell. Her bike clattered. Itzal hurried toward her with all the urgency of a passerby running to help, and it was help, but of a different sort.

The decision to take a nonfatal shot came from trust.

Itzal, on the ground, was in a better position to assess her true threat.

His hands worked fast. Her head dropped. He called for help, and the front staff rushed from the hotel, and in the confusion, Itzal slipped away.

Holden inched back from the edge.

Time, unspooling, made movement feel like slogging through sludge.

He found the spent shell casings, pocketed them. Crawled back to the access ladder, raced the rungs down, and hurried to the room to collect his cases.

The Polizei would have already been called.

He had to be gone before they arrived.

He disassembled the rifle and shoved each piece securely into foam, snapped the cases shut, grabbed the handles, left the room, and jogged down past the now-empty first-floor lobby, down to the hotel’s basement, and pushed out the door into a small parking garage. If things were otherwise, he’d head for the border and spend the next week out of sight, laying low, waiting for the drama to die down, but he didn’t have that luxury.

An engine revved. Tires squealed.

A black BMW 6 Series backed up and stopped in front of him.

The passenger window rolled down.

Itzal said, “There will be no running. Come.”

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8

Savignyplatz
Berlin, Germany

JACK

HE STEPPED FROM TRAIN TO OPEN-AIR PLATFORM, OUT OF STALE AIR into a drizzling damp and the must of aged stone, wet concrete, and hints of exhaust from late afternoon traffic. He pulled the old jacket tight against the chill and followed the transit crowd, moving slow, head low, shoulders stooped, right leg hitching with a slight limp he’d picked up just outside Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof.

Train doors hissed and closed.

The carriage gave way to empty tracks.

A sparse crowd waited on the opposite platform.

He veered out of the pedestrian flow for an empty bench, groaned stiff joints toward the seat, and leaned forward to tie wayward laces.

Loafers, sandals, heels, and sports shoes strode past his head.

He analyzed gaits and soles and sizes, searching for the familiar and for the out of place, and he scrutinized the shape and height of bodies and clothing across the tracks, looking for signs of the same—an amateur maneuver, obvious and sloppy by old-school standards—anachronistic cloak-and-dagger theater in a world where station cameras and city cameras, facial recognition, gait recognition, and the predictive software they tied to posed a more realistic threat.

Would have, anyway, if subterfuge wasn’t as much about showing a hand as hiding one, and digital surveillance didn’t still have exploitable weaknesses.

As far as electronic eyes were concerned, he’d never gotten off the plane.