Tae blew on her hands. “Sergei played me from the first day he met me, at my favorite coffee shop. I have no doubt he was following me for days, maybe weeks before that, because he seemed to know all the things I like. He knew my favorite takeout place, my gym—he showed up there too—and most importantly, the fact that I worked for Project 534.”

“And what do they want with you?” Dodge said. “If they’re already using the smallpox virus, why does it matter if you know?”

She sighed. “Because I developed a vaccine for the strain. And if they’re going to use it to threaten the world, then . . .”

Colt went cold to his bones. “Then you’re the only one who can stop them.”

A beat where her words earlier settled in. “Only I can stop them.”

Right. “It makes sense,” Colt said. “Why else would the Bratva assassin who kidnapped Noemi have your picture on his phone?”

“I still can’t figure out why he took Noemi,” Dodge said.

Silence, and Colt replayed that moment when he’d centered the Russian in his crosshairs and saved Ranger’s life.

He’d hurt then, too, but he’d done his job.

See, he was going to be just fine.

“How did you end up on a plane in Alaska with a mobster?” Echo asked.

“I was working on the vaccine at the time, and it had gone successfully through our first batch of trials when I got another report of a village, this time in Uganda, that had been wiped out by the same smallpox variant. I knew, then, that something wasn’t right. Nepal to Uganda? No. I told my colleague Faheem about it, and he said he’d talk to our boss. That night, he was in a fatal car accident.”

She wiped her fingers under her eyes. “He was a good man. Had a wife, two kids. And in my bones, I know it wasn’t just an accident.”

“You suspected he was murdered?”

She nodded. “But not soon enough. At the time, Sergei was insisting I take some vacation time. He booked us on an Alaskan cruise. His idea. He’d even lined up a day of aerial sightseeing”—she finger-quoted the last word—“for us over Denali from Prince William Sound. I thought it was a great idea. Maybe in the back of my head I was a little freaked out by Faheem’s death though, because I brought my research with me. Just my journal and notes, but . . . I don’t know. It had been a part of my life for three years. Leaving it behind felt just a little too naked. Still, I didn’t suspect Sergei in the least. Sure, he was a little pushy, but I just thought I was out of the game. I didn’t realize . . . anyway . . . No reason to distrust him. Not, at least, until we docked in Juneau.”