She nodded for me to keep watching. The news report cycled through pictures of JD, Gabriel, Bradan, Cal, Colton, Gina…but that was it. “Two more men are thought to be traveling with the group,” Katharina translated for us.

They didn’t even know I was a woman. “Why don’t they have pictures of Danny and me?”

“Better question,” said Gabriel. “How did they get pictures of the rest of us? We wiped the cameras at the prison.”

“I didn’t even go into the damn prison,” grunted Gina.

“It must have been when we were separated,” said Danny. “After the helicopter crash, before we met up at the village.”

Katharina squinted at the photos. “There are trees in the background….” She thumped the table, rattling the plates. “Trail cameras, in the forest. They use them to study wildlife. You must have walked right past one. Becker must have collected the footage from all of them and got lucky.”

“Next question,” said JD, “what do we do now? What can you tell us about Becker?”

Katharina leaned back against a bookcase, nursing her coffee. She was wearing a black blouse and gray suit that made the most of her curves. She was almost a foot taller than me and all of it seemed to be in her legs: now that she was in heels, she was actually slightly taller than Danny. A tall, curvy, ass-kicking spy. Could his ex have been any more intimidating?

Katharina shook her head. “I’ve seen some bad stuff…”—she exchanged glances with Danny—”but Becker’s one of the few people who really scares me. He came up through the military. Special Forces. Then he went into the BND and he moved up fast. So fast that people didn’t realize, at first, that there was something wrong with him.”

Colton leaned back in his chair. “Wrong with him, how?”

Katharina put her mug down. She looked at the floor and wrapped her arms around herself, as if shielding herself from a bad memory. “Not long after I started at the BND, I was on a mission with him. We were talking to this woman, a Chinese national who’d been living in Berlin for a few years. She was having an affair with an executive from one of the big aerospace companies and we suspected she was spying for the Chinese. But she wouldn’t admit anything, even under interrogation. Absolutely would. Not. Crack. So Becker puts her in a car and drives us to a kindergarten. Turned out, it was the one her child went to.”

I saw JD lean forward, that powerful, fatherly concern kicking in.