She went back to the file notes, looking for it, found the connection in a gait match that linked target on the concourse, before he’d disappeared, to an unknown individual at the Berlin flight departure gate. The hit had come after the plane was already in the air, which was why they’d called up the Berlin station.

She’d have done the same if the decision had been hers.

But that’s all they’d had, just that flash of a match and no identity to go with it. The war room had scraped photos, birth dates, places of birth—addresses when available—off each travel document linked to that Berlin manifest and had dumped them into a mix-and-match search through national and international driver’s licenses, identity cards, mug shots, social media profiles, cellular records, insurance providers, Internet providers, utility companies, hotel chains, credit card companies, marketing aggregators, and law-enforcement databases. Hits had come back in the thousands. Those required human interaction. The desk jockeys would have to follow each lead, even the most absurd, in a laborious process of elimination. They’d find him, eventually.

Nobody was truly invisible.

People who did disappear didn’t get there through lack of data but rather because of low prioritization, and the resources required to find the connections.

The data itself was always there.

Commercial surveillance through banking, telecommunications, and travel alone was such an integrated part of life that, but for the most disenfranchised, it couldn’t be avoided. Staying off radar wasn’t something a person did for six months out of the year. It was a fully committed disconnected lifestyle, in which a single sloppy move last month was all it took for the truly persistent to find you today.

The average person couldn’t do it.

The average professional couldn’t do it.

This guy might be good, but no one anywhere was that good. Friends, family, habits, patterns, he had them, and the war room would find them. What jumped at her now wasn’t what the queries were pulling, but what was missing.

Nowhere in any of this did anything point to the accomplice.

And also, nowhere was there an obvious link to Emilia Flynn.

Kara clicked over from cameras to the internal data system.

She stopped.

There was a fine line between watching out for her team and the accusations of misuse of authority that could arise because of it. But combine a query on Emilia with the Emilia-and-Nick rumors, add in the Kara-and-Nick rumors, and doing this would mean handing Liv Wilson a knife and asking her to stab her whole team in the back with it. She’d have to stick to looking in places she’d already been.

She went back to the cameras instead, found Emilia at the taxi stand, and worked a reverse search through the feeds, tracing a backward journey through the airport, right into the Jetway of their own flight out of Dallas.