Jack reentered the plaza from the opposite side, different clothes, different shoes, different demeanor, and he crossed to the corner café, ordered coffee, and chose an outside table, newspaper in hand. He sat fully exposed with his back to the sun, offering a clean shot to about half the buildings on the square, his way of telling her that, all evidence to the contrary, he didn’t perceive a terminal threat.

Time to rendezvous counted down in her head.

She studied faces and clothing and shoes and gait.

Her skin tingled in subconscious recognition, and it took a beat for logic to process what instinct had homed in on.

The subject was male, late forties to early fifties, balding, five feet six if he stretched, and carrying forty pounds of genuine paunch around the middle. He wore a midrange suit and low-end dress shoes and carried a satchel like any other cubicle slave heading to the station for the weekday commute, but he didn’t fit.

He was similar, but not the same.

He read as a well-fed bureaucrat shielded by two degrees of deniability.

The only way to avoid the tells of being an outsider was to buy local, and he didn’t belong, even by Berlin standards.

He made a direct line for Jack’s table.

Jack stood, shook hands.

The bureaucrat sat.

Jill loathed his face, not for lack of aesthetics but because he wasn’t Dmitry—at least not Dmitry in the photos she’d seen—and he wasn’t the spotter in Frankfurt, and he wasn’t one of the two who’d been waiting for their flight in Berlin, and they hadn’t crossed the ocean and dodged assassins to meet with this joke of a man.

She scanned the periphery, scanned him over.

She found no nervous tics, no subconscious gestures to send adrenaline dripping or betray this rendezvous as more than a conversation, but without a doubt, he was a new variable, and new was a problem. She still didn’t know what Jack had learned about the kill team in Frankfurt, didn’t trust he’d give her a full accounting of this, either, and she didn’t have enough of an angle to play bad lipreading to figure out for herself what went on below. Away from the action was not where she wanted to be.

She inched back from the edge, paused, and debated.

Jack would be vulnerable until she got out of the building, but he’d stated his opinion by putting himself out in the open, and she’d already taken out the immediate threat. Well, except for the sense of more, which still itched her insides, but hours of searching hadn’t given her its source and overactive instinct was as much an explanation as anything.

If she hurried, she could get to ground in sixty seconds.

She could take a handgun, come back for the rest later.