This was everything opposite Prague. Opposite direction, opposite feel, and if he’d read the signals right—and he was pretty damn sure he had—opposite the plans she’d made with her brother.

Whatever she was doing here, she was doing behind her brother’s back.

As if there weren’t already enough warning signs.

He had followed her on foot out of Savignyplatz, a six-kilometer trek across town, through high-traffic areas and appearance changes, into a residential area, where she’d disappeared through a nondescript door and reemerged a half hour later as a woman twice her age, drab and unnoticeable, but for a carry-on suitcase, and had followed her out of Berlin by train in a jagged route that detoured through Frankfurt and Paris. He’d been able to stay with her because he was her, another iteration of her, ghost and chameleon, familiar with the ways in which a person stood and walked and gestured identified them as much as any individual piece of clothing did. But mostly he’d been able to stay with her because her disguise was flawed.

The carry-on was her weakness and his touchstone.

No matter how she disguised the thing or where she left it, she always circled back to claim it, and what should have been a prop, a transition piece, or a distraction to facilitate shedding one persona for another had become a homing beacon instead.

From her very first abandon-and-return, he’d understood.

She’d perceived enough of a tangible, credible threat at that outdoor table in Berlin to assemble an arsenal. She was traveling armed and traveling heavy.

But whatever she’d prepared to fight wasn’t in this French village. He knew that because she’d left the suitcase behind, tucked out of sight in the station’s tiny ticket-master office, a courtesy she shouldn’t have been granted but had been because few were capable of telling her no.

If patterns prevailed, she’d return to collect it.

That was the only logical thing he had to hold on to in this illogical venture, and the only thing stronger than the nagging possibility she’d brought him to this location to lose him. Well, not just to lose him.

There were a hundred faster, easier ways to get rid of him if ditching him was what she wanted, and none of them involved a daylong detour into the foothills southeast of Geneva.

No, this village, this town hall, was too specific. She’d come here looking for someone or something. But letting him believe he had the drop on her the whole long way, setting him up in an impossible surveillance position, and leaving him waiting and watching at the front while she slipped out the back and caught the last train out for the night, knowing he’d be stranded in a town with limited transportation options, that was exactly the kind of thing she’d do for personal entertainment.