“What’s the other thing?”

“Which one of you really is the better killer.”

I smiled at him. “That’s actually a pretty good plan. Maybe I will.”

“I can help,” he said. “You need a bloody minder.”

“No doubt,” I said. Then I reached under the pillow, took out my Snellig dart gun, and shot him with a nice big dose of Sandman.

He slid out of the chair and into a heap on the floor.

Ghost looked at him and then me.

I said nothing. Finished my beer and began to pack.

CHAPTER 81

ROTTERDAM THE HAGUE AIRPORT

SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS

Mrs. Gondek was sipping mint tea out of a travel mug when Joe Ledger walked past. He did not look like Ledger, of course. He wore a very old-fashioned suit—fog gray with a faint powder-blue charcoal stripe—and had a very convincing black toupee over his blond hair. His eyes, today, were dark brown, and his mustache was in the clipped Eastern European style. His gait was tentative, selling the fiction of a man who has never quite found his courage in life. Perhaps a businessman who was somewhere on the more useful end of the autism spectrum, but not social, not visibly confident. His dog—white with brown and black patches—walked beside him, and Joe habitually touched the animal as if needing reassurance of the presence of his emotional support. All these items were writ small, so that they had a genuine and lived-in look.

She mentally awarded him a B-plus or perhaps an A-minus.

Her own disguise was one of the thousand variations of her usual kit. A floral dress of the kind popular in rural Italy, a thin white sweater, cheap but not garish necklace, with earrings that nearly but not quite matched. Sensible shoes for walking, and glasses that were merely functional but not stylish. If the circumstances called for it, there were enough separates and other items in her bag that would allow her to become anything from a fashionable tourist to a successful businesswoman to a Sacramentine nun, and she could make the transformation in any toilet stall in under a minute. Mrs. Gondek had been playing this game for a very long time, and she liked being good at it.

As Joe Ledger passed, he never once glanced in her direction. No reason he should. They’d only ever met once, years ago, and before he even had Ghost. The dog did not twitch. Her scent would not be stored in the animal’s vast canine vocabulary of scents.

When they were at least eighty feet down the terminal hall, she began to follow. She was able to walk quickly without ever looking like she was hurrying.