If he’d walked on that plane, he’d most certainly walked off. They were all just looking in the wrong place or for the wrong thing.

Illusion and misdirection were his comfort zones.

That’s where she’d find him.

She located footage for the secured areas and started where the war room had long ago stopped. This was stale data. Locating him in the past wouldn’t lead to him in the present, but for her, it didn’t have to.

Tracking him to current location was the war room’s job.

What she wanted was to understand.

She searched among the baggage handlers and fuel suppliers and food-service personnel, running feed after feed, laboriously enhancing images and pushing stills through recognition software.

The system finally spit out a partial match.

Its face belonged to one of the ground crew.

He worked the job as if he’d been doing it for years, but she knew him by the way he slipped away. The entirety of start to finish filled her with awe and concern.

To make this happen, he had to have known airlines and routes and have had the uniform in advance, and he had to have made the switch while their operative was on the aircraft, all of which meant he’d already anticipated and prepared against someone waiting to snag him in Berlin before her team had even known they’d be tracking him out of Dallas.

With that level of foresight, they could be chasing him indefinitely.

—No.

—Illusion and misdirection.

Everything they’d seen thus far was what he’d wanted them to see, which meant even in this, he expected to be seen, which meant he was directing their attention away from something else.

—The accomplice.

Nobody watching the flight had been looking for a second person, because she hadn’t discovered the second until after the flight had landed.

The accomplice, too, had been there.

Kara went back to the Frankfurt boarding footage and watched the passengers, ignoring faces, focusing on attributes, and notating key characteristics, and she returned to the Berlin arrival to study the process in reverse. Over and over she watched and replayed, and each time the woman with lush blond hair drew her attention. She was young, stylish, haughty in a way that reminded her of the girls at school who’d thought they were better than everyone else and deserved special treatment because their parents had money. The worst had also been beautiful.

That’s what this blonde was, and she had no match on the outbound side.