Jack moved in closer, cheeks too large and cheekbones too wide, nose and jaw too low, eyes too puffy, and—unless the light was playing tricks—skin tone a full four shades darker. That last feature, Holden knew, was specifically for facial recognition software.
Algorithms and deep learning systems were only as strong as the data sets used to train them, and facial recognition, like so much of technology, was plagued by bias and inherently prone to err with darker skin. He’d made use of the same technique for the same reasons, though this was the first he’d seen it used by someone else.
Jack clamped a brotherly hand on Holden’s shoulder and slipped behind him for the opposite seat. “Miserable night to be out alone,” he said. “Figured you could use the company.”
Holden watched him settle, waited until reciprocal silence bordered on rudeness and, stretching one word out into two long syllables, said, “Bullshit.”
Jack laughed, and with the laugh, the facade cracked and familiarity seeped through. Brother and sister. Same damn twisted sense of humor.
Jack nodded toward the svaák. “That stuff any good?”
“It’s warm.”
“Coffee is warm. Tea is warm.”
“Yeah, well, this is warm in all the right places.”
Jack tipped the chair back until its front legs came off the ground, and he studied the sky. “My sister does have that effect on people,” he said. “Stick around her long enough and even heroin will seem like a reasonable way to cope.”
There was humor in the sibling jab and camaraderie in its delivery, and it felt as if they were old friends with years of common history, instead of recent enemies who’d been bent on killing each other and almost had.
But this wasn’t a friendly visit, no matter how friendly it might be.
That wasn’t how things worked in this world.
Jack, still staring at the sky, said, “Picked you up coming off the plane in Frankfurt. In case you were wondering.”
Holden raised the mug in salute. “Question did cross my mind.” He nudged it toward the hostel. “Your sister know I’m here?”
“Not that she’s mentioned, but then, she makes a habit of not mentioning things to me, so who knows?” Jack dropped the chair forward. “Wasn’t just you I picked up coming off that plane, though,” he said. “Those playmates of yours made me worry when you didn’t show up in Berlin.”
“I was there.”
Jack motioned to the hostel’s upper-floor window and then toward Holden, as if drawing a link between one city and the next. “Obviously, right?”
Memory made a fast rewind to Savignyplatz, shifting context to what Holden should have realized then. Obviously, while he’d been busy tracking one half of the brother-sister team across town, the other half had been tracking him. Not the whole way, just enough to ascertain he was capable of keeping up, because knowing where to find one made it easy to find the other.
Simple. Elegant. Dangerous.
Jack had planned this conversation before any of them had left Berlin.
Holden rewrapped his fingers around the mug.
Heat seeped into his skin, and silence seeped into the discussion.
Jack said, “So how’d things go with your Frankfurt fan club?”
“I’m here and they’re not, obviously.”
Jack tipped a finger forward, as if to say, “Touché.”
“Dead or shook?” he said.
“Dead.”
Jack leaned the chair back again. “There’ll be others,” he said. “They’ll just keep right on coming and coming and coming.”
Holden took a long sip.
The warmth reached his belly, almost reached his head.
He placed the mug on the table, stretched his legs, said, “It’s cold, John, and I’m tired, and charming as I may be, I know you didn’t come crawling out of the shadows for a round of small talk. What are you doing here? What do you want?”
Jack relaxed, the whole of him, as if the upper layers of a multilayered disguise had dissolved and all that remained were baseline latex features. He dropped the chair legs. “Rendezvous is tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred.” He cut his eyes toward the hostel. “Using her to lead you to it won’t give you enough time to scout, won’t give you much of a chance to sleep, either, and you’re gonna need both, so I’m here saving you the time.”
Holden’s eyes narrowed in barefaced suspicion.
No way in hell had a guy fighting a four-dimensional war inside his head broken a perfectly good charade to offer intel as some altruistic gesture.
“Why?” he said.
Jack laced his fingers atop the table, waited a beat, said, “Because at some point tomorrow, after nine, several armed men will come careening through that square. They’re going to grab me, haul me off, and when that happens, my sister is going to lose her goddamn mind. I need you to be there to keep her safe, mostly from herself.”
Holden’s mouth opened and shut.
In his head tomorrow’s rendezvous played out as a mirror of what he’d seen in Berlin: sister as sniper on a rooftop, brother as bait on the ground, and between them a vast no-man’s-land filled with lies and manipulation.
Danger crackled up his spine.
This right here was Jill detouring into France behind her brother’s back. This was that multiplied by a thousand life-or-death twists, because it made him an explicit accomplice in their private sibling war.
He said, “You’re asking a goddamn awful lot.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I am.”
Holden said, “Let’s make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re about to let yourself be grabbed, and your sister—the one responsible for protecting you and keeping you safe—has no idea?”
“Correct.”
Holden snorted. “Hell no, and no thank you.”
Jack sat silent, expression fixed, undeterred.
Holden said, “You’ve got government-sanctioned killers coming after you on one side. There are underground assassins hunting for you on the other. This thing with the Russians is still anybody’s guess, and your response is to stab your one ally in the back? That, my friend, is betrayal or insanity, maybe both.”
“I know what it looks like,” Jack said. “But that’s not what it is.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is, John. She’s going to think it’s real, and putting her in that position is top-level sadist shit, and I want no part of it.”
Jack leaned forward. “I love my sister, okay? But sometimes love means doing the hard things, and this is one of those things.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Holden said. He nudged the mug aside and matched Jack’s posture. “I could’ve been killed between Frankfurt and Berlin. Your sister could have lost me a hundred times between Berlin and Prague. I can still refuse to be your tool, and nobody with any sense of probability, especially not you, rolls the dice expecting the stars to align before the numbers stop tumbling.”
“All true,” Jack said. “And if any of those variables hadn’t fallen into place, I’d be faced with a much harder choice than asking you to look after her.”
The implication settled.
Holden stared at Jack hard, sat back, crossed his arms.
If anyone could compete with these two for most screwed-up childhood, it was him—the kid who’d watched his mother die and been torn from her arms, the kid who’d been delivered as a trophy to the man who’d ordered her dead, and who’d subsisted on scraps and garbage and the kindness of strangers until he’d grown strong enough to escape to the streets, and who’d been running from emotional attachment ever since—yet somehow they made him look like the well-adjusted adult. Hell, they made their crazy-ass mother look reasonable, and that was after she’d ambushed his team and killed half his men.
“I’ve seen a lot of messed-up shit in my life,” he said. “But this? This is something special.”
Silence returned.
Jack said, “I can’t fight a three-front war, Chris. Whatever kill list you’re
on, I’m on it, too.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the hostel. “Not her—they don’t even know she exists—me, the guy who had nothing to do with the Broker, the idiot going broke trying to make a living in this stupid gig economy because I refused to utilize the only skill set I have. If I preempt this shit and kill them first, ten more will take their place. This will never end, and I’ll become my mother, jumping at shadows for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, the thing with Dmitry has splintered into two directions, both of which lead to who knows where or what, I’ve got no idea how much of any of this is my mother fucking with my head, and my sister, bless her tar-black soul, is actively sabotaging my every move.”
Jack placed palms on the table and in a slow, measured cadence said, “I can shortcut through it all, but that means letting the Russians have me for a while, and if I do that and she goes off script—something she’s well known for—the whole thing blows up. For me to be able to walk out alive, I need her safe, out of their reach, and on the outside.” Jack took a breath and stopped, explanation unfinished, ending abrupt.
Holden pulled a toothpick from the packet in his pocket, shoved it between his teeth, waited for the missing pieces and, when they didn’t come, said, “I’m not your windup toy, John.”
Jack said, “I never—”
Holden held up a finger and stopped him.
“Maybe all those cloistered years fighting with just your mom and sister left you oblivious to how many others out here know this game and play it well.” He leaned forward. “All this blah-blah-blah asking for help and trying to persuade, it’s all just window dressing and performance art, John, so I can feel like a willing participant and maybe overlook the fact that you already factored in our friendship and my affinity for your sister as a given days ago. And you know what? I’m not even mad. Playing chess with people is what you do. It’s who you are. Kudos and much respect. But what I hate—hate—is that you’ve dragged me into your bullshit family feud.”
Holden paused for effect. “I want to say yes . . . you already know it. I don’t want to see your sister messed up more than she already is. But I do this, and we get a future of escalating hurt and retaliation, the both of you trying to use me as a pawn to strike against the other. I might as well rip the Band-Aid off and walk away now, because no amount of friendship is worth that kind of drama.”
“It won’t be like that,” Jack said.
“No? What’s her reaction when she finds out I was in on your plan?”
“If she finds out.”
“Now you’re just insulting me.”
“Okay, fine. She’ll probably try to kill you.”
“And supposing I survive that?”
“She’ll try to use and manipulate you to get back at me.”
“Yeah.” Holden’s jaw ground down, turning wood into splinters. “You drive a really hard bargain, buddy. You should probably try sales.”
Jack held motionless for a second or two, lips pressed together in a not-quite-there grin, as if he was plotting the safest way through a verbal minefield. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I don’t feel like I’ve got a whole lot of choice here, either. I promise you, if I had any other way, I’d take it.”
This time authentic desperation backed the words, a resolve Holden had seen in cornered animals and in men who went charging to their deaths because forward provided the only hope of escape. He said, “If I do this, I need your word that you never pull this shit on me again.”
Jack breathed out long and slow relief.
“You have my word,” he said.
“Even if your sister refuses to play by the same rules.”
“That will be between you and her.”
Holden spit out what was left of the toothpick, retrieved another, and pointed it in Jack’s direction. “I want everything,” he said. “Every detail of what you know and what you’ve set in motion for tomorrow. Leave out anything—anything—and your sister sabotaging you will be the least of your worries.”
CHAPTER 19
Námstí Republiky
Prague, Czech Republic
HOLDEN
NEARLY FOUR HOURS HE’D BEEN ON THIS ROOFTOP SLOPE, EIGHTY feet up in temperatures that hovered near freezing, tucked in behind brick and trying to keep the wind gusts from sucking the warmth right out of him, waiting for a hint of morning and then for sunrise and then for the clock to roll around. Jill, nearly invisible beneath a black Mylar blanket, was fifty meters west atop a different building, one he’d need a running start and reasonable leap to reach. It was as close as he could get to her without giving up the ability to assess the action with his own eyes while also staying out of sight.
Another few minutes and chaos would descend on Republic Square, though it wasn’t so much a square as a zag of pedestrian streets that connected Prague’s grand concert hall and the Palladium shopping mall and boutiques and hotels in art nouveau buildings through a wide, empty cobblestone wedge, a center with nothing but streetcar tracks and escalators descending deep into the metro underground. On its corner, in the armpit of the zag, stood Hotel Kings Court and its awning-covered restaurant patio. Holden checked the time, swept the scope.
The cobblestone center was clear, and pedestrians were few.
There was plenty of empty space for a vehicle to maneuver.
Made sense why the Russians had booked the twins here.
If one had to use a hotel to facilitate an abduction in Prague, Kings Court on a cold weekday morning was about as good as it got. Assuming, of course, it made no difference if the abductee’s head got blown off.
For that, the hotel was bullshit—an open patio surrounded by four-, five-, six-story buildings, every one of them with a clean line of sight on location—no one with any kind of strategical sense would put a wanted, high-value asset in that position, not even if they didn’t know there were killers waiting for a chance at a headshot.
Holden shifted the scope to the five-story directly across center from the patio.
His finger twitched against the trigger guard. For the umpteenth time, the map in his head played through the series of shots he wanted to take but couldn’t.
Fourth-story window.
Trigger pull.
Shift right, one floor down.
Pull.
Shift down, ground floor across the tracks.
They were there, the American killers, barely meters from where Jack had predicted they’d be. He’d diagrammed the square while back at the bar, mouth motoring as he scrawled on a napkin, marking positions, describing access points and exit strategies, and factoring cardinal coordinates against the sun’s trajectory for shadow length and glare.
He’d jabbed a finger on the left edge of the improvised map. “Americans,” he’d said. “Here, here, here. They’re the ones coming for the kill, so they’ll be the ones my sister is focused on.” And he’d followed out at an angle and pointed. “Russians. They may or may not know about the Americans. May or may not know about you. But they wouldn’t have gone to all the effort to get us out of Berlin if they thought this thing was going to go down easy. They’ll have someone there to protect their investment, and this would be the best defensive position.”
He shifted the napkin, tapped left and then right. “My sister. With her, there’s no guarantee, but these two layups are my best guess.”
He pointed to the Kings Court patio. “That’s me.” He nudged the hand-drawn map across the table. “I mean, it’s not anything you wouldn’t have seen for yourself if you’d had time to recon.”
Holden snatched the napkin, muttered, “Smart-ass.”
Jack responded with another almost smile.
“I’ll have a body double with me,” he said.
Holden’s gaze paused in its arc toward the napkin, came back up. He raised his eyebrows in question.
Jack said, “I show up alone, they’ll just drag the whole thing out. My sister never shows up at all, and they’ll push things off for another day.”
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“Yeah, but fixing that by bringing in a civilian?”
Jack sighed. Stood. “Trust me,” he said. “I hate it more than you do.”
“Your sister knows?”
Jack nodded, made his way back around the table and, like a man headed to his own funeral, slipped off into the night the same way he’d come.
But at least he had known what he was getting himself into.
Holden studied windows and doors, finger itching to preempt the threat laid out on that napkin. Just a half inch was all it wanted, a few pounds of pressure to turn gray matter to red mist. A delivery van entered the opposite end of the empty square, and stopped near the streetcar platform a hundred meters down.
Holden quick checked Jill’s position.
She was still under Mylar, but he caught a glimpse of muzzle.
The vehicle idled.
Driver stayed seated.
The itch transferred to Holden’s brain, wheedling and begging to put a bullet through the windshield, arguing that the van hadn’t been accounted for on Jack’s map, as if the map were some sort of step-by-step game plan instead of a concoction of reconnaissance and guesswork inked out onto a piece of trash.
In the near distance, church bells rang the nine o’clock hour.
Holden breathed a slow in and out and descended into the zone where the cold dissipated and the wind went silent, and his heartbeat swallowed him, steady and rhythmic, counting down to where all that mattered was the micrometer air buffer between metal and skin. Timing was everything.
Make a hit too soon and chaos would break loose before the plan got under way.
Wait a beat too long and the plan maker would be dead.
“They’ll find you,” he’d told them. “You’ll end up running hard.”
He’d been wrong about the running.
Not wrong about the finding, maybe not so wrong about the dying.
Jack stepped out of the restaurant, onto the patio.
The blonde at his side stole breath from Holden’s lungs.
Her name was Anna, that much he knew. She was a drummer in an alternative band and, with the makeup and costuming, was closer to any living, breathing copy of Jill he’d have thought possible.
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