She returned to the Frankfurt Airport footage, all the way back to when she’d first realized they were dealing with something different, and searched the cameras at gate twenty-four for whatever had made Angel so certain, she’d wantonly wasted their time and squandered their resources.

She found the answer in a bright patch of white.

Her fingers froze.

Thoughts scattered, and anger rose.

There, in the boarding area, exactly where Angel had directed Nick, was a passenger wearing a hat identical to the one target had worn right before he’d vanished. Nick wouldn’t have seen the light in person, just as she hadn’t seen it on the concourse. But Angel, watching through the screen, most certainly had.

Kara could see how, in the fog of war, two individuals with identical markings could appear the same on-screen and how, without an accurate sense of on-the-ground distance, it would have been easy to get confused. That the war room had stumbled wasn’t worth the anger, but that they’d gotten back into the race without ever allowing the team on the ground to account for the mistake most certainly was.

Their target had had an accomplice.

That factored into everything.

A person, even the wrong person, didn’t simply get up from their seat, walk into the restroom, and vanish, and Nick had been right there.

He’d needed to know about it while it was happening.

Instead the war room had let him walk away.

If she hadn’t taken to analyzing footage, they still wouldn’t know target had followed them to their hotel, and now there was this.

These were failures so egregious, they felt deliberate.

Kara tapped the trackpad and watched the hat in half time. The accomplice waited until Nick had gone, then entered the men’s toilet and never emerged.

She ran the segment through gait analysis, got nothing, so searched the manual way, tracking every single body that had exited that door within a thirty-minute time frame—forty-two men in all—and then she traced every single one, jotting notes and time stamps, locations and interactions, until each had left the airport or boarded a new flight. The work was tedious and consuming and failed to point fingers.

But four of the men had boarded flights to Berlin, so camera feeds for those departures came next, and on the third, recognition hammered through her chest, and for the second time in as many hours, she sat back and stared.

This was the flight headquarters had flagged.

While she and her team had been preoccupied, hunting for target in their hotel, he’d walked back to the terminal, through security, and boarded that flight.

The realization felt personal, in the way feeling stupid always felt personal, but also intriguing. The accomplice had indirectly led her to where the war room had already gone, but the desk jockeys would have followed a different path to get there.