“I’ll come see you for congeniality lessons when this is over.”

He said, “Flight out of Dallas to war-room op files and personnel files gets me your original Christopher Holden guy.”

“That’s it?”

“You slay me with the questions. There’s also Emilia Flynn, your buddies Nick Carson, Juan Marino, and . . . Oh, this is cute. Looks like a whole party of your kind was on that flight.”

“How many?”

“Eight, including you.”

That accounted for Nick’s and Emilia’s teams and ruled out anyone else working for headquarters who might have tagged along, but it still got her only a single liquidation target, and the wrong one at that. She said, “Send me the op files on the placeholders and the next eight names down the list.”

Bart paused. The silence thickened, and she could hear the hesitancy.

She said, “I’m searching for a needle in a haystack right now, so unless there’s been an adjustment to my clearance that I don’t know about, there’s no reason why there’d be any heat on this. Man up and send me the damn data already.”

“And then we’re settled?”

“Then we’re settled.”

“Need about ten minutes to pull it together,” he said.

She hung up without a good-bye, squared her bill at the coffee bar, purchased a couple pastries and caffeine to go, and made her way back to the hotel, Styrofoam in hand, focus on the pavement, thoughts bolting like a herd of spooked horses in a multidirectional gallop.

She was familiar with need to know, and accepted her place in that hierarchy.

That her team’s target wasn’t on the liquidation list for the reasons headquarters claimed didn’t matter. Why he’d made the list didn’t change the objective or her obligation to shut up, follow orders, and do the job, but it mattered a whole heck of a lot in terms of being successful at her job.

Who the target was, what he was, determined how they pursued him and how they took him down. The information headquarters withheld could make the difference between putting him in their crosshairs or winding up in his—and that was just one target—it didn’t even factor for a second assassin competing with them for the kill.

Christopher Holden was a whole other issue.

Top of the list meant he was highly dangerous and a high liquidation priority.

Probably why they’d sent Emilia after him.

She wouldn’t begrudge that truth, Emilia was good.