Holden raised the mug in salute. “Question did cross my mind.” He nudged it toward the hostel. “Your sister know I’m here?”

“Not that she’s mentioned, but then, she makes a habit of not mentioning things to me, so who knows?” Jack dropped the chair forward. “Wasn’t just you I picked up coming off that plane, though,” he said. “Those playmates of yours made me worry when you didn’t show up in Berlin.”

“I was there.”

Jack motioned to the hostel’s upper-floor window and then toward Holden, as if drawing a link between one city and the next. “Obviously, right?”

Memory made a fast rewind to Savignyplatz, shifting context to what Holden should have realized then. Obviously, while he’d been busy tracking one half of the brother-sister team across town, the other half had been tracking him. Not the whole way, just enough to ascertain he was capable of keeping up, because knowing where to find one made it easy to find the other.

Simple. Elegant. Dangerous.

Jack had planned this conversation before any of them had left Berlin.

Holden rewrapped his fingers around the mug.

Heat seeped into his skin, and silence seeped into the discussion.

Jack said, “So how’d things go with your Frankfurt fan club?”

“I’m here and they’re not, obviously.”

Jack tipped a finger forward, as if to say, “Touché.”

“Dead or shook?” he said.

“Dead.”

Jack leaned the chair back again. “There’ll be others,” he said. “They’ll just keep right on coming and coming and coming.”

Holden took a long sip.

The warmth reached his belly, almost reached his head.

He placed the mug on the table, stretched his legs, said, “It’s cold, John, and I’m tired, and charming as I may be, I know you didn’t come crawling out of the shadows for a round of small talk. What are you doing here? What do you want?”

Jack relaxed, the whole of him, as if the upper layers of a multilayered disguise had dissolved and all that remained were baseline latex features. He dropped the chair legs. “Rendezvous is tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred.” He cut his eyes toward the hostel. “Using her to lead you to it won’t give you enough time to scout, won’t give you much of a chance to sleep, either, and you’re gonna need both, so I’m here saving you the time.”

Holden’s eyes narrowed in barefaced suspicion.

No way in hell had a guy fighting a four-dimensional war inside his head broken a perfectly good charade to offer intel as some altruistic gesture.

“Why?” he said.