He shook his head and raised the cup in a salute of thanks.

She slid back onto her bed and woke the laptop.

The enormity of what had just happened settled like a cold, wet quilt.

She blanked at the screen, fingers moving slowly of their own accord.

Thirty minutes ago she would have been antsy, waiting for news so they could be on their way again. Now all she wanted was for minutes to multiply.

She didn’t have enough of them.

Nick needed to know about target having been outside their hotel.

The longer she waited to tell him, the more questions there’d be over why she hadn’t said something sooner. But to tell him now would require time. And telling him now would result in resources and attention turning to something that mattered less than the overall objective. Target was their objective.

He’d come and gone.

To find him, she needed to get ahead of him.

She needed to track him before the clues died.

The computer booted.

E-mail from Bart waited for her.

Her thoughts scattered, and pressure built.

There was too much too fast.

She ignored the e-mail and followed a hierarchy of links to the hotel cameras and any Internet-connected cameras nearby, and she searched the street outside the hotel, searched for visual proof that she wasn’t imagining this, that she wasn’t crazy.

For thirty minutes she hunted, and she finally found him at that damn Internet café, and she traced him from there to the nearest streetcar, and from streetcar toward the old city and into Námstí Republiky—Republic Square—and caught a glimpse of him crossing the wide-open center space and turning down a side street, like a burglar casing a joint, and lost him within Hotel Kings Court.

Try as she might, she failed to pick up the trail.

The urgency of informing Nick faded.

Even if she’d gone to him immediately, they’d have already been too late.

She summarized the find, collected time stamps and screen grabs, packaged the material, and sent it to headquarters. She copied Nick, was tempted to copy Steven Hayes, Liv’s supervisor, because the logical thing to do when one didn’t trust that material was being put in the right hands was to put it in someone else’s, but logic didn’t work in a bureaucracy. Logic wasn’t prudent. Emotions, personalities, politics, hierarchy, they all got in the way of logic, and of the objective, and made the world a messy place.

She hit SEND, and the mental chaos eased up.