The guy was Asian, late twenties, with straight black hair, thick black glasses, wearing a plain collared, button-up shirt, and damn near invisible in the stereotyped cliché, caught by surprise in the beat between stowing a bag at his feet and rising for the entertainment system, and coming eye to eye with the one person whose eyes should have been avoided.

He recovered fast, but Holden knew, and knowing was enough.

They were good, this team of assassin hunters.

They’d boarded the airplane armed.

He’d come empty-handed.

They had him outnumbered no idea how many to one, and if their kill skills came anywhere close to their ability to hide and blend, then he was vulnerable here, in what would soon be a dark, pressurized aluminum tube hurtling through the sky at five hundred miles an hour.

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Flughafen Frankfurt am Main
Frankfurt Airport, Germany

KARA

SHE SHOVED SHOULDER FIRST BETWEEN A WIDE MAN AND A SLOWER-MOVING elderly couple and swerved around a lanky teenager, fighting against foot traffic, pushing to keep pace with a target that slipped farther and farther away.

An errant suitcase drifted into her path, shifting the obstacle course.

She ducked, sidestepped, nearly stepped on a kid, and knocked into the plywood construction barrier that walled off half the corridor.

Heads turned and murmurs rose in her wake. She was aware of that somewhere on the edge of focus, knew she was moving too aggressively and drawing unwanted attention, but it didn’t really matter anymore.

The target had most certainly made her, had probably made the whole team.

These weren’t the evasive movements of a man dodging suppositions and shadows because he suspected being followed. He was bolting.

She had to close the gap, had to get close enough to tag him.

Twenty feet ahead a cluster of women in burkas moved to the right.

The jostling crowd parted long enough for her to see him slip behind them.

A suitcase wheeled into her knees.

She glanced down to avoid tripping and in that second lost sight of him.

She elbowed forward, pushing against slower walkers, eyes fixed where she’d last seen him. She projected his path, searched heads and shoulders, clothing, shoes.

Her lips mouthed, Come on, come on, come on.

Nothing. And more nothing.

She wove toward a seating area, boosted herself up onto an armrest, and scanned the crowd. To the mic at her collar she said, “I’ve lost visual.”

She had watched it happen and had no idea what she’d seen.

Nick’s voice answered. “Talk to me, Angel,” he said. “Give me something.”

Desk jockeys across the ocean chased camera feeds, hunting facial recognition and body measurements, trying to grab hold of a target who’d become his own rabbit in his own magician’s vanishing hat.

Kara dropped back to the floor, glanced at the ceiling.

Bodies and suitcases, sounds and color continued on in a blur of motion.