He’d jabbed a finger on the left edge of the improvised map. “Americans,” he’d said. “Here, here, here. They’re the ones coming for the kill, so they’ll be the ones my sister is focused on.” And he’d followed out at an angle and pointed. “Russians. They may or may not know about the Americans. May or may not know about you. But they wouldn’t have gone to all the effort to get us out of Berlin if they thought this thing was going to go down easy. They’ll have someone there to protect their investment, and this would be the best defensive position.”

He shifted the napkin, tapped left and then right. “My sister. With her, there’s no guarantee, but these two layups are my best guess.”

He pointed to the Kings Court patio. “That’s me.” He nudged the hand-drawn map across the table. “I mean, it’s not anything you wouldn’t have seen for yourself if you’d had time to recon.”

Holden snatched the napkin, muttered, “Smart-ass.”

Jack responded with another almost smile.

“I’ll have a body double with me,” he said.

Holden’s gaze paused in its arc toward the napkin, came back up. He raised his eyebrows in question.

Jack said, “I show up alone, they’ll just drag the whole thing out. My sister never shows up at all, and they’ll push things off for another day.”

“Yeah, but fixing that by bringing in a civilian?”

Jack sighed. Stood. “Trust me,” he said. “I hate it more than you do.”

“Your sister knows?”

Jack nodded, made his way back around the table and, like a man headed to his own funeral, slipped off into the night the same way he’d come.

But at least he had known what he was getting himself into.

Holden studied windows and doors, finger itching to preempt the threat laid out on that napkin. Just a half inch was all it wanted, a few pounds of pressure to turn gray matter to red mist. A delivery van entered the opposite end of the empty square, and stopped near the streetcar platform a hundred meters down.

Holden quick checked Jill’s position.

She was still under Mylar, but he caught a glimpse of muzzle.

The vehicle idled.

Driver stayed seated.

The itch transferred to Holden’s brain, wheedling and begging to put a bullet through the windshield, arguing that the van hadn’t been accounted for on Jack’s map, as if the map were some sort of step-by-step game plan instead of a concoction of reconnaissance and guesswork inked out onto a piece of trash.

In the near distance, church bells rang the nine o’clock hour.