NEARLY FOUR HOURS HE’D BEEN ON THIS ROOFTOP SLOPE, EIGHTY feet up in temperatures that hovered near freezing, tucked in behind brick and trying to keep the wind gusts from sucking the warmth right out of him, waiting for a hint of morning and then for sunrise and then for the clock to roll around. Jill, nearly invisible beneath a black Mylar blanket, was fifty meters west atop a different building, one he’d need a running start and reasonable leap to reach. It was as close as he could get to her without giving up the ability to assess the action with his own eyes while also staying out of sight.

Another few minutes and chaos would descend on Republic Square, though it wasn’t so much a square as a zag of pedestrian streets that connected Prague’s grand concert hall and the Palladium shopping mall and boutiques and hotels in art nouveau buildings through a wide, empty cobblestone wedge, a center with nothing but streetcar tracks and escalators descending deep into the metro underground. On its corner, in the armpit of the zag, stood Hotel Kings Court and its awning-covered restaurant patio. Holden checked the time, swept the scope.

The cobblestone center was clear, and pedestrians were few.

There was plenty of empty space for a vehicle to maneuver.

Made sense why the Russians had booked the twins here.

If one had to use a hotel to facilitate an abduction in Prague, Kings Court on a cold weekday morning was about as good as it got. Assuming, of course, it made no difference if the abductee’s head got blown off.

For that, the hotel was bullshit—an open patio surrounded by four-, five-, six-story buildings, every one of them with a clean line of sight on location—no one with any kind of strategical sense would put a wanted, high-value asset in that position, not even if they didn’t know there were killers waiting for a chance at a headshot.

Holden shifted the scope to the five-story directly across center from the patio.

His finger twitched against the trigger guard. For the umpteenth time, the map in his head played through the series of shots he wanted to take but couldn’t.

Fourth-story window.

Trigger pull.

Shift right, one floor down.

Pull.

Shift down, ground floor across the tracks.

They were there, the American killers, barely meters from where Jack had predicted they’d be. He’d diagrammed the square while back at the bar, mouth motoring as he scrawled on a napkin, marking positions, describing access points and exit strategies, and factoring cardinal coordinates against the sun’s trajectory for shadow length and glare.