The Bucharest model was a technique established during the Cold War but greatly refined since. A person with the right resources would use several different credit cards to book different rooms in the same hotel. He would check in to each using a variety of disguises. Sometimes confederates were employed for this purpose, but Ledger was almost certainly acting alone. Each room would serve a different purpose—equipment storage, bolt-hole, or actual lodging. Since modern hotels no longer required returning key cards to the desk, there was little way to track the movements of guests until the cleaning staff knocked on the door after checkout time. It was complicated, but the extra steps made it virtually impossible to find someone. And the upper-tier pros often went the extra mile to check into more than one hotel. With Ledger’s high-end talent for languages and regional accents, becoming invisible was easy. The complication for him was Ghost, but somehow Ledger managed. Bug had logged eight different combinations of tall men with large dogs—though the color of the dog’s hair and the stated purpose—guide dog or different levels of emotional support—raised no particular eyebrows. Except to Bug.

And there were also safe houses attached to various organizations, some of which were left empty. Someone with RTI-level equipment could game any monitoring devices, however.

“Ledger used two sets of identities to obtain field kits from two different in-country resources,” said Church. “With those, he can stay off the grid for as long as he wants. And we’ve determined that he used a Lightning Bug to kill his and Ghost’s RFID chips.”

Lilith grunted. “He and his dog are both ghosts.”

“Yes,” said Church. “Which is why I asked you to meet me. What have your people found?”

“We may be getting close,” she said, “or at least closer. After the first few hits here in South Africa, we were able to make an educated guess as to who he was going to target next. We know he’s been going after people of two kinds—scientists who have been on lists of people with possible or likely ties to Kuga operations, and people in the technologies and terrorism arms of the black market who used to work for Ohan.”

“Ledger was very familiar with Ohan’s operation,” said Church. “We were building a mission profile to go after him, but…”

“But Arklight got there first. No apologies, St. Germaine.”

“None needed. My point is that Ledger is well versed on those names.”

“There are people on both of my lists—tech and sales—who are in morgues all over this part of the country. We got to one in the hospital, though. Well, let me rephrase that. We hijacked the ambulance taking him to a hospital. He’s now in a landfill.”

“He talked?” asked Church.