“It’s worse than that,” muttered JD. We all looked at him. “Even if we did make it back to the US…what then? As soon as we show our faces, they’ll extradite us to Germany and we’ll go to jail for seven murders.”

We all went quiet as it sunk in. We couldn’t go home. Ever.

We drove for another ten miles in brooding silence. Then Gabriel suddenly said, “Becker.”

Everyone turned to look at him. He had that look in his eyes: you could almost see the cogs spinning as that scarily sharp mind came up with a plan.

“Becker’s involved in something shady. We got in the middle of it when we saw him buy that file in Berlin and kill the seller. That’s why he took JD prisoner, he was going to interrogate him to find out what he knew. And that’s why he’s framed us, he wants us discredited in case we tell anyone that he’s dirty. No one’s going to believe a bunch of fugitives. The only way out of this is to find out what Becker’s up to and expose him.” He looked at us one by one. “We have to go to Berlin.”

Colton stared at him. “You want to go to Germany? You realize it’s the Germans who are after us, right?”

JD thought for a while. “Gabriel’s right,” he said at last. “We’ve got to go on the offensive. It’s the only way to clear our names.” He looked across at me. “Danny: get us to Berlin.”

Latvia to Germany. Eight hundred miles through four countries. Fortunately, driving was what I did. “No problem,” I told him, and turned towards the highway.

* * *

Eight hours later, we were in a forest in Poland. It was bitterly cold but I’d stopped the car so everyone could stretch and I could pace around and wake myself up for the next stretch. The sun was going down, bathing the trunks of the trees in gold.

I was watching Erin as she slept in the back seat, her head resting on the window. She’d spent the journey getting to know the rest of the team better. I could tell it hadn’t been easy for her: she was shy at the best of times and the guys are big and pretty intimidating: in the rear-view mirror, she’d looked like a mouse in a carful of gorillas. But she’d asked them about the favorite places they’d lived before coming to Colorado and the answers kept us occupied for most of the drive. Colton had told her about the boat he’d lived on in Missouri. Gabriel had described an apartment he’d had in Paris while he was casing the Louvre. Even the notoriously quiet Cal had told us all about the little cabin he’d lived in, deep in the woods of Idaho.