They were brazen, foolish, two high-value assets with a high price on their heads, sitting exposed like this. No matter how skilled they were, they weren’t invincible and the sister hadn’t found every threat last night.

She hadn’t found him.

He’d been watching when she’d entered the plaza; watching when she’d reemerged blond and drunk hours later; watching when the brother arrived; and was now watching the rendezvous he’d spent so much energy to reach.

Itzal had driven him to Dortmund.

Deutsche Bahn had gotten him the rest of the way.

He’d made it to Savignyplatz by after-dinner dark.

There, he had scouted apartment entrances, searching for full mail slots, which pointed to occupants being away, and had found a unit with an advantageous view, let himself in, and spent the intermittent stillness hashing and rehashing a confluence that grew bigger by the day.

There were five, maybe six players in motion now.

—The twins tracking their father.

—The Russians tracking the twins.

—The Americans tracking the twins.

—Himself tracking the twins.

—The Americans who had been tracking him.

Clare, the mother, was still a question mark.

He hadn’t seen signs of her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t around.

And now, down at the table, the wrong man had shown up at the right time and right place. Not Dmitry. Not the father. Something else.

The man offered the brother documents.

Body language spoke of irritation, agitation, and a contest of will.

Holden reached for a spotting scope, secured the adapter, snapped a phone into the holder, and captured a photo array—not of the same quality he’d have gotten with a telescopic lens but good enough to get a record of the man’s face.

A breeze lifted the pages and showed him Eurail Passes, a hotel, a city.

Whatever came next involved travel, and travel created a new set of issues.

The man followed the documents with a phone, and then the conversation, barely ten minutes old, showed signs of ending. Holden packed up his gear, hands moving quickly, methodically, while his focus stayed on that café.

He’d been willing to lose the siblings in Frankfurt, because he’d already had the rendezvous details, but if he lost them now, this would be the end.

The twins would never check into that hotel.

Odds of randomly finding either of them in a city of one and a quarter million people weren’t odds he wanted to gamble on. Anyone else, it’d be different.

Life and the simple acts required to sustain it inevitably left a footprint.

Connections tethered humanity to routine.