Margot reached for the cup, though her hands weren’t exactly steady. She would drink it because Dot had made it for her. Because Lukas needed her to. Because dehydration could land her on the floor, unconscious, and she wouldn’t do that to them now. Because she needed to get well, back on her feet, and able to do what needed to be done.

But it wouldn’t soothe her. Nothing could soothe her.

Eighteen.

She cupped the mug in her hands and anchored it against her chest to keep from spilling it. Raised it for a slow sip. Cradled it against her again.

Eighteen.

She clenched her teeth, set her gaze on the windowpane once more. And sent heavenward the only word she could find. No.

8

Sugar cubes. Innocuous squares—or they should have been. Drake turned a page in his newspaper and leaned back against his seat so he could see past it without it looking like he was looking past it.

He’d found a seat in the back of the train so that he could see each passenger who got on. All from behind the cover of his newspaper, so that no one could see him. There’d been the usual moments of tension while the seats beside him filled, but none of the faces that took the adjacent seats belonged to Jaeger, or any of the other German agents whose photographs Thoroton had shown him. He hadn’t exactly relaxed, but he’d ticked those concerns off his list, anyway.

That left only the waiting, the anxiousness of that biggest of questions: Was Drake’s intelligence correct? Would Jaeger be on this train to Madrid, a sample of the sugar cubes laced with anthrax and glanders in his satchel, along with information on which of the freight carriages at the back of the train had the rest of the shipment? Or was this just a pointless use of a ticket?

Something about the movements of the next passenger to get on caught his attention and inspired him to raise his newsprint higher. Compared to the fluid, nearly languid gesturing of the Spaniards around him, this man’s posture was stiff, perfect. He made what seemed to Drake’s eye to be a concerted effort to move like his neighbors, but he didn’t relax enough.

It was something Drake had studied for hours when he first came to Spain to attend university. He quickly grew tired of everyone pegging him as a foreigner the very moment he walked into a room and treating him accordingly. So he had studied his fellow students, his professors, even his grandfather—whose posture was also always perfect, but without that rigidity.

Drake risked half a glance at the stiff man, peeking around the edge of his paper and then hiding again behind it before the man could spot him.

Jaeger.