She could let target go for now and return to what had sent her out the door in the first place. She opened Bart’s e-mail and clicked through to the data dump. Both files were there, as requested. The first contained the Broker’s raw data, the second everything the war room had reconciled against it, and that’s what she wanted first:

Holden, Christopher–Alias
Name: Unknown
Age: 36, est
Nationality: Venezuelan, presumed

Headquarters placed him as working for the Broker for at least six years. She scanned a list of weapons, skills, and potential sightings, kept going along a blood trail of confirmed kills, suspected kills, kidnappings, and assisted assignments.

Some of the names she recognized, most she didn’t.

The most recent activity had been two weeks ago outside Austin, Texas—abduction, not a kill—contract origination out of Russia, target Karen McFadden.

She grabbed her notebook, flipped to a fresh page.

There was something familiar about the name, something she couldn’t place.

She added it to the diagram of unknowns.

Headquarters had no decrypted match for the buyer’s code name.

But Russia . . .

Russia by itself meant nothing.

Like China, like the United States, Russia was a global player meddling anywhere it could to advance its interests, but timing and current circumstances . . .

She returned to the material.

The Broker’s data put Christopher Holden’s last known location as Houston.

That was a trail she could follow without hiding behind a proxy, but the information was stale, which made it low priority.

The war room had connected him to four confirmed aliases.

She had to assume there were more.

The file contained twelve photos: one from the Broker’s file, in which his face was distance-blurry and concealed by cap and glasses, four lifted from the alias-identification documents, and a series that would have come from Emilia prior to boarding out of Dallas. He had dark hair, a strong jaw, was easy on the eyes in a masculine Enrique Iglesias sort of way.

A knock on the door jerked her out of the hunt.

Juan dragged himself off the bed to answer and returned with Nick and Aaron. The look on Nick’s face said there was news.

She said, “Rendezvous confirmed?”

“Nine tomorrow,” Nick said. “Republic Square, near Old Town. We bug out in an hour for recon.”

Kara’s body froze, and her thoughts raced from video feed to video feed, recalibrating everything she’d seen—target’s lack of fear, the way he treated as a game the threat they posed to his life—and where those feeds had led.

She said, “No. It’s a trap.”

The room went pin-drop silent.

The gears in her head locked up.

She should have waited. Should have kept her mouth shut.

She glanced at Nick. “Have you checked your e-mail?”

“I’ve been on the phone.”

All three of them stared at her, waiting.

Nick said, “On a confidence scale of one to ten.”

“Nine.”