If he’d been a different kind of target, they’d already be dead.

But that they were there at all, that was a problem.

He’d expected a welcome committee of some sort.

With the way his original itinerary had been booked through to Berlin, it’d have been incompetence of the highest order for them not to have someone on the ground watching as a just in case, but this hadn’t been that. These three, with their luggage, neck pillows, electronic distractions, and the basic accoutrements of a long layover, were too starched, too food and drink free, too directly focused on one specific gate—his specific gate—to have already spent hours watching a succession of flights deplane.

They’d come in a hurry. Recently. Specifically.

They were watching for his flight.

Which meant that at some point in the hour and a half between the departure gate closing in Frankfurt and the arrival gate opening in Berlin, someone had connected the dots linking him from one flight to the next, and for that to have happened, there’d have had to have been vast resources and top analysts working to make him dead.

He had no idea why.

And he’d had no time to pursue that tangent, because in the hierarchy of what mattered most, finding Dmitry took priority, and the Russians had been waiting, too. There’d been two of them this time, nowhere near as skilled as the solitary spotter in Frankfurt but skilled enough. They’d been aware of the American presence and aware of Jill and aware of him, and he’d seen for himself what his sister had described:

One team hunted him.

The second observed the hunt.

The whole of it had been déjà vu, which had sent blood rushing to his head and certainty careening into chaos. Time had split, dropping him into an alternate reality in which the invitation from Dmitry had never happened and these operatives weren’t Americans or Russians and none of this was real—not in any true sense—because this was Clare again, Clare manipulating perception and manufacturing truth, Clare putting his mind under fire and his body in the crosshairs, Clare testing response and reaction time, just as she’d done his whole damn life, and in that alternate reality this entire thing was an elaborate show-and-tell, live-demonstration field test, to which outsiders had come to witness what he and his sister could do.

Hate and disgust and rebellion had risen from deep buried grudges.

Hate for the woman who should have been his mother, disgust at himself for being so goddamn gullible, and adamant refusal to be her unwitting puppet.