She watched Ledger head toward the gate for a flight to Rome. That was what Scott Wilson said he’d do. There was a good-size crowd in the waiting area, and she saw Ledger take out an e-reader, sit down in the section reserved for coach, and begin to read.

Mrs. Gondek nodded to herself and edged away to call this in to the RTI.

She walked past a tall blond man wearing a Società Sportiva Lazio jersey, one of the football clubs in Rome. He was reading yesterday’s issue of La Gazzetta dello Sport and listening to something through Apple earbuds. He did not glance at her, nor she at him.

And so she never noticed that the man stood at an angle where he could watch the nervous businessman with the big dog.

Michael Augustus Stafford had no idea who Peggy Gondek was or that one of Mr. Church’s top surveillance operatives had walked within three feet of him. His focus was entirely on Joe Ledger.

He was impressed with Ledger’s disguise and the small personal tics he’d adopted. He filed them away for his own future use. And the dye job on Ghost was subtle and convincing. Stafford had never used a dog as part of a disguise, and he thought it might be fun. He liked dogs and had a mastiff at home that was roughly the size of a stegosaurus. Might be too imposing and noticeable. Maybe something smaller and disposable. Something the cabin attendants would ooh and aah over, giving him a chance to get an email address or phone number.

The challenge was that Stafford did not have a ticket for this flight. He’d followed Ledger here from the hotel, where one of his agents had spotted him. All the intelligence Stafford had gathered indicated that Ledger was following a trail of information that would almost certainly take him to Rome, and from there to one of three possible targets: Tuscany, Sardinia, or Bologna. Kuga had his money on the latter, though Santoro thought Ledger might go back to Tuscany because there was a warehouse near Florence filled to the rafters with components for exosuits that were about to be flown to Canada. Sardinia was the least likely target, mostly because so few people knew about it and it was in a heavily fortified compound.

Stafford’s ticket was for a later flight, and he had to change it.