What concerned him in the here and now were the human eyes belonging to those who knew better, those who knew where and how to look.

His sister’s words kept him tied to that past and dying art.

“Old school,” was what she’d said.

Clare in the body of a sixty-something-year-old man.

He’d detoured through public spaces, down underground walkways, up empty side streets, into covered shopping areas, and out parking garages to ensure the only way those eyes could stay on him was to follow on foot. He’d moved slowly enough, obviously enough to avoid losing the tail, attempting to force errors and flush whoever followed him so he could see for himself what he was up against and how many were out there, or convince himself he hadn’t been followed at all.

Three hours of wasted time.

He was as certain of being alone as certainty would allow and doubted the certainty. Anyone capable of eluding him this far was capable of eluding still, but neither could he find what didn’t exist, and therein lay the madness.

Absent proof, he found remnants of a ghost in everything.

He just wasn’t sure whose ghost, exactly.

He stretched arthritic fingers toward his shoe and secured the laces, waited until another train rolled in, and joined the departing crowd headed toward Else-Ury-Bogen. Shielded by movement and numbers, he shed his limp and shed the hat, converted jacket to coat, swapped chipped and aged glasses for big, black, bulky frames, and exited out onto the street a good twenty years younger than he’d gone in.

And he followed the old cobblestones parallel to the tracks, scanning windows and doors, searching camera angles, feeding distance calculations and route possibilities to the multidimensional maze inside his head, a maze in which he could travel only forward, never back, and every move toward one opponent rotated layers within time and space, creating blind spots, opening weakness, and shutting off access to the others.

His primary goal was survival.

The goal of survival was to find Dmitry, the real Dmitry. And every other person within the maze was an adversary intent on thwarting that goal.

The US hit squad was close and closing in.

They’d had proxies waiting for him at the Berlin airport, local operatives assembled out of the embassy in a hurry, on the barest of need to know. He’d seen that in their hair and clothing styles, their familiarity with the airport, and in the way they wore dumb cluelessness like a group of teenagers who’d stumbled from bed to kitchen in search of coffee and found themselves in an airport, playing facial Whac-A-Mole. It hadn’t been a fair match, not by any stretch, those four officers, agents—whatever they were—with real world training, put up against a pair whose entire lives had been preparation to survive the worst of Clare’s paranoid fantasies.