That would have been really helpful to know before they’d boarded.

The men and women they sought to liquidate were assassins for hire, top-tier names on the Broker list, the ones smart enough, invisible enough, dangerous enough to become national security threats if the right money came along. Odds that two of them coincidentally happened to be on the same flight were about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a rabid shark in the middle of the desert.

Their target was on his way to a rendezvous in Berlin.

A second assassin along for the ride meant that somewhere out there, a third party had a vested interest in seeing he never made that meeting. A second assassin also meant a killer would be robbed of payment if Nick’s crew hit target first, which made Nick & Co. the competition, which meant that unless Emilia was successful, there’d be an assassin gunning for them, and from the look on Emilia’s face, as of Frankfurt, that killer was most definitely alive and roaming free.

Kara narrowed person-of-interest possibilities down to three, closed out the Dallas feeds, and switched back to the Frankfurt arrival. This time, she stuck with a single camera and watched the entire flight deplane.

She found target, and found Daniel, Peyton, and Emilia, and found the three persons of interest, but still no accomplice.

More curiously, there was also no Bill Wright.

She let the footage roll long past the deplaning.

Motion out on the tarmac, beyond the window, caught her attention.

She switched feeds for a better angle.

A stretcher wheeled a body from aircraft to ambulance. New data layered over old, and Kara understood, and she felt so very, very small.

What had seemed like war-room incompetence had been distraction in the juggle between crises. Emilia’s target had struck preemptively on the flight.

She’d lost a man before the wheels had ever touched down.

Hers would have been a very different hunt through the airport, and all of this while Nick’s team had been tracking their man through the concourse.

Kara’s throat tightened, and emotion built like water welling in a blowhole.

She hadn’t known Bill personally, but she’d known of him, and known he was good people. She was overtired, needed sleep, was useless on this now.

She nudged the mouse to close down the camera feeds.

A flash of color at the edge of the frame gave her pause, and she stopped, pointer hovering over box, mind processing, trying to grasp what she’d just seen.

She pushed the time stamps backward and rewatched at the edge of the lounge.

The accomplice was there, acting as lookout.

She hadn’t been on that Dallas flight, because she was already in the terminal, waiting for the flight to arrive. This explained how events in Frankfurt had spun so quickly out of control, and explained target’s foresight and preparation.