Didn’t know what the standard deviation for no-shows looked like on this particular route at this time of year, at this time of day, but an Internet search gave her rough averages, and by appearances, that flight out of Frankfurt had taken off with an inordinately high number of empty paid-for seats.

Eyes closed, Vivaldi rolling through her brain, Kara willed herself through to the other side, trying to understand from target’s perspective why buying out a third of the flight would have been worth the trouble.

The expenditure would have run into the high four figures.

The time investment, too, would have been considerable.

Most of the bookings had been for individuals or couples rather than large traveling groups, and keeping that many names, birth dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and passport details realistic and pointing to unique IP addresses required incredible attention to detail. For all of that, he gained . . . ?

—Multiple tickets, multiple names.

—A whole heck of a lot of obfuscation.

The possibilities forked, and she followed the tangents.

Headquarters had scraped the manifest, pushed the data through software analysis, turned up thousands of hits. They’d followed each one in a time-consuming process of elimination, but every name on that list, whether on the flight or not, had led to a legitimate person with a fully backstopped, ordinary, boring life.

—Borrowed identities.

Target could have moved through security with travel documents and identification for a different flight and used a borrowed identity to board this one.

Gate agents rarely confirmed identification as part of a domestic boarding process, but on the chance they did, a quality fake would be enough. The photo wouldn’t even need to match, because nobody ever looked closely, and if the war room ever did manage to link a name to his body, all they’d find at the end of the rainbow was a random stranger with no idea how he’d been pulled into this game of intrigue.

—Wasted resources.

—Wasted attention.

Liv Wilson and team had spent the past twenty-four hours immersed in a game of which one of these is not like the others. If Kara’s hypothesis held, the war room still wouldn’t have found him, because, in a repeat of the same damn strategy that had led to chasing a hat in Frankfurt, they weren’t looking for the real him.

Kara rested her fingers on the keyboard and let the adrenaline pass.

The dutiful part of her wanted to alert the war room to the anomaly.

The rest of her knew she’d be wasting her time.

She returned instead to the camera feeds in the Berlin airport.

She’d been through the deplaning footage once already, a quick pass to confirm with her own eyes what others had already reported.

But target had boarded that flight.

He wasn’t a ghost, and he didn’t have superpowers.

He was just as human as she was.