This was a team that expected to be trailed.

By whom, she didn’t know—Emilia’s assassin, the Russians, both, something else altogether—but these two had come prepared for high-level evasion, and her own team had stepped right into the middle of that.

Were still in the middle of whatever it was.

That raised the exponential risk of getting caught in existing cross fire.

The weight of the implication must have shown on her face, because Nick crossed her field of vision and nudged the bed. She pulled earbuds out.

He said, “What’d you find?”

She scooted over, made room for him.

Aaron stopped bouncing the ball.

Juan rolled over and opened one eye.

Ringing interrupted before she had a chance to get to show and tell.

Attention riveted in Nick’s direction, the entire room reverent and focused.

The conversation was one sided.

They waited.

Nick said, “Understood,” and ended the call.

“Pack up,” he said. “Rendezvous has moved to Prague.”

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16

Eglise Amberieu en Bugey
Ambérieu-en-Bugey, France

HOLDEN

THE CHURCH FILLED ONE SIDE OF THE SMALL PLAZA, TWO VAULTED stories of quarried limestone blocks and lead-paned windows that led off the main street in a solid wall. Narrow homes and old stone buildings edged the rest—solid doors, wooden shutters, sun-bleached plaster—in neat, crisp lines, hemming in a few trees, tidily parked cars, and the cobblestone center. Clean. Calm. Quiet.

The only thing that moved was water spurting from the center fountain.

Not the kind of place a person could sit for a while and go unnoticed.

Stores, cafés, banks, all the busy places he’d have utilized to blend into the background, were a few blocks over.

It would have been easier to kill her here than it was to surveil her.

Ironic, considering she wasn’t an easy person to kill.

Also ironic, considering this was the first time killing wasn’t the objective.

The bell tower, twenty, thirty feet above the church peak, with a clean line of sight on the mairie—the town hall—was where he would have gone if it had been. What he’d needed was a fast, clean exit. The belfry couldn’t give him that, and the plaza was too exposed, too naked to hang around in an attempt to observe both sides of the mairie, which was how he’d gotten to where he was now, holed up in a place of worship, staring out a window and watching the entrance like a trusting dog convinced its person would walk back through that door any second.

She might. She might not.

She’d been in there two hours, at least he believed she was still in there.

Two hours for God only knew what.

The destination had been Prague.

This wasn’t Prague.