Croatia was amazing. More specifically, Croatian men were amazing. Tall and broad, full heads of lush dark hair, light eyes and golden skin—like Olympic athletes, the whole lot of them. And they proclaimed their love so readily. On the first night, on the first meeting. Of course, Candy got that a lot, but she got it more in Croatia.

When she wasn’t stuck with Ben Jaggers.

Watching a luxury condo complex on a city-center street crowded with exhaust-belching buses.

In a fucking Passat.

Van Sciver—or, more precisely, Van Sciver’s room of supercomputers—had unearthed René’s location fairly quickly after the chalet combustion. A hub of five major freeways, Zagreb is a confusion of bypasses and congestion. An ideal location for René to slip in and out of. Plenty of avenues for escape. But also plenty of stakeout spots like the one Candy and Jaggers had pinned down for the past week, parked off a major artery among a crowded lineup of other vehicles.

Why couldn’t it have been Split with its view of the sparkling Adriatic or Dubrovnik with stone city walls and hills of lavender? But no, here she was in the Detroit of Croatia, stuck in a Volkswagen with that yellow bastard.

A group of Croatian men dressed in soccer uniforms hopped off a bus ahead of them, joking and shoving one another. Forked triceps and cleft chins. She felt taunted, a cat in an aquarium.

“Are you watching the building?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Candy said, flicking her eyes back across the four lanes of traffic to the high-security condo complex. She resumed watching people trickle through the front gate.

Fat woman with stroller. Silver-haired captain of industry. Three schoolgirls in fetching plaid skirts.

René had already had his daily morning outing, a trip to a bakery for a croissant and juice and to the drugstore for God knew what. Dex never left his side, his remaining hand shoved in his trench-coat pocket, a lumbering gumshoe with a thyroid condition.

Now they were back in the condo, a baited trap, and Candy had nothing to do but ogle soccer players, endure Jaggers, and wait for Evan to show up.

Under cover of night, Jaggers had managed to get several hidden surveillance cameras up around the building’s perimeter, streaming into the laptop that rested on the console between them. It was available for close-ups and replays, but over the past days they’d seen few customers worth a second look.

Her phone sounded, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” She’d chosen the new ringtone mostly to annoy Jaggers, though he seemed annoyingly unannoyable.

He just sat in the passenger seat, as still as a frozen rat, an elaborate GPS unit resting across his stick-thin thighs.

She picked up.

“STATUS upDATE?”

“In clear view of restaurant. Still no sign of the expected party.”

“LIGHTNING BUG is ON StandBY. AwaitING coordinates.”