She was in an Arklight safe house in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg, and he was in his office at the RTI headquarters. The illusion was created by the ORB—the Operational Resource Bay—which was one of Doc Holliday’s inventions. Dozens of small cameras worked in sync to use a proprietary imaging tech to put holograms of them both into a shared space. It looked like they were seated together on a bench in Döbrentei Square in Budapest on a quiet evening. The ORB even added ambient noise of nearby traffic, birdsong, and laughter—but muted.

Lilith was amused. “Here, of all places? Since when are you sentimental?”

He smiled faintly. “I often come here.”

“Not really,” she chided.

“Not really, but the ORB allows me to mix business with pleasure.”

She smiled and shook her head. “St. Germaine mooning over where we had our first kiss.”

“Behave,” he said.

They smiled at each other, and he saw the small movement as she very nearly reached out to try and take his hand but stopped herself because that was beyond even the ORB’s capabilities.

Then she asked, “Do they know?”

“Bug knows, of course. He’s known since the beginning.”

“Who else?”

“Scott Wilson suspects, and as long as it’s only a suspicion, I’m not burdened by the weight of his disapproval.”

“What about Rudy Sanchez?”

“We’ve … had talks about Ledger. Diagnosis and prognosis. I shared with him the psych eval from the profiler Wilson put on it. Rudy’s conclusion was that it was a very well-written, well-considered piece of garbage.”

“I read it, too, and Sanchez is quite correct.”

“It’s not entirely without merit,” said Church, though he didn’t push the issue. In truth, he found it to be pedestrian. Wilson had wanted an objective opinion from a top forensic psychologist, but applying standard models—even models of known psychological deviations—to Joe Ledger was a waste of time and resources. But Wilson was as concerned and as frustrated as everyone else, and approving the report was something he could at least do.

“Will you tell Junie?”

“No,” he said. “Not until we know more. Right now, all we’ve been able to do is lift the crime scene reports from whichever agency has jurisdiction. And we’ve received uploads of data, but all the data transfer is from sites like internet cafés, or coffee shops with no camera surveillance. Some materials were left in airport lockers. No collectable forensics of any kind.”

“Ledger knows his tradecraft, I’ll give him that,” said Lilith.

“Bug has done a lot of searching for real estate rentals and hotels, and he believes Ledger is using the Bucharest model.”

“Smart,” she said.