Jar snapped off an­other shot.

  “Much bet­ter,” he said.

  As the man neared them, he said some­thing in Italian. Jar was pass­able at French and Span­ish and near flu­ent in Eng­lish, but she had never learned Italian. Daeng had a de­cent un­der­stand­ing of it, but he ig­nored the man and said to Jar, in Thai, “One more, baby.”

  The guy spoke again.

  Daeng fi­nally looked at him, his brow creased.

  “Don’t speak…uh…itali­ano,” Daeng said in heav­ily ac­cen­ted Eng­lish.

  “You can’t take pic­tures here,” the man said, also in Eng­lish.

  “Why no? Just take girl­friend and me.”

  Daeng looked at Jar and said in Thai, “Say some­thing that sounds like you’re a little con­fused and also up­set.”

  “Okay. I’m a little con­fused and up­set.”

  “Can you put a little more emo­tion in it?”

  “I do not like to be called baby.”

  “That’s bet­ter. Now put your cam­era away, but don’t look happy about it.”

  She forced her­self to frown as she shoved the phone back into her pocket.

  Daeng turned back to the guy. “Sorry. Not know is a prob­lem. No more pic­ture. Okay?”

  The guy stared at him for a mo­ment be­fore nod­ding. “Good. I think it is bet­ter if you leave now, too.”

  “Leave?”

  “Yes.” The guy mo­tioned for them to drive away.

  “Ah, okay, sure. Sorry. We go.”

  Jar and Daeng star­ted their bikes and pulled onto the road. As they drove by the build­ing, Jar saw a light come on in the fifth-floor win­dow at the far corner.

  “Whose of­fice is that?” Daeng asked.

  Jar had been gif­ted with an ex­cel­lent memory, so it took her only a few seconds to cor­rel­ate the build­ing’s ten­ants to the floor plans. “Piazza and Cam­pagna. They were lis­ted as con­sult­ants.”

  “What kind, I won­der?”

  Jar had no idea. Piazza and Cam­pagna was one of the two busi­nesses with no di­gital foot­print.

  *

  St. Amand looked up as Drake entered his of­fice.

  “A couple of Chinese tour­ists tak­ing selfies,” Drake said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t speak Italian and barely any Eng­lish. They’re gone now.”

  St. Amand nod­ded. “Good.” He poured him­self a whis­key from his bar and si­lently asked Drake if he wanted one.

  “No, thank you, sir,” Drake said. He never drank in the boss’s pres­ence.

  St. Amand sat down be­hind his desk, took a sip, and set the glass down. “Let’s give Mr. Cox a call.”

  Upon land­ing in Rome, St. Amand had re­ceived a text from Ken­neth Cox re­quest­ing to talk to him.

  Drake placed the call on his phone, switched it to speaker, and set it next to the glass. St. Amand re­cog­nized the voice of Cox’s as­sist­ant when she answered. Her de­fi­ant tone from earlier was gone, and she put them right through to her boss.

  “Thank you for call­ing me back,” Cox said. “I trust the rest of your day has been pleas­ant.”

  “Mr. Cox, we are a bit pressed for time,” St. Amand said. “I sug­gest you get to the point.”

  “Of course. My apo­lo­gies, Mr. Becker. I have been in con­tact with Mr. Sand­strom. He has agreed to meet with you to­mor­row even­ing. He’s work­ing on trans­port­a­tion right now, but should be able to ar­rive by late af­ter­noon. If you could tell me where you’d like to meet, I can pass that in­form­a­tion—”

  “We will con­tact Mr. Sand­strom dir­ectly with the loc­a­tion. You can tell him to ex­pect a text when he ar­rives at the air­port.”

  “Oh, um, okay, I guess that will work. I mean, of course that will work. Let me give you his phone num­ber.”

  “We already have it.”

  “You already—”

  St. Amand ter­min­ated the call.

  To Drake, he said, “We’ll meet at De Luca’s. Make the ar­range­ments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And have Havel and Im­rich fol­low him and make sure Sand­strom hasn’t brought any fleas with him.”

  Sand­strom was not ex­actly an up­right cit­izen, so who knew who else might be in­ter­ested in him.

  Drake nod­ded and turned to leave.

  “One more thing,” St. Amand said. “Have some samples avail­able to show him. The fun stuff.” He had no in­ten­tion of cut­ting off the Sand­strom ac­count. There was too much money in­volved. But he was not above mak­ing sure the man knew what he’d be miss­ing if St. Amand did end their busi­ness ar­range­ment.

  “Con­sider it done,” Drake said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WASH­ING­TON, DC

  Quinn landed at Dulles Air­port at six p.m., and was greeted near the ter­minal exit by a man hold­ing a sign with the false name Quinn’s air­line ticket had been booked un­der.

  The driver was a true pro­fes­sional, and didn’t try even once to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion as he drove Quinn into the city. Quinn was grate­ful for that. His fail­ure to con­vince Nate to join the mis­sion lay heavy on his mind. After as­sist­ing his part­ner out of the tricky situ­ation at the drug den, he’d been sure Nate would agree to help. But Quinn real­ized now that was never go­ing to hap­pen. The only thing that might bring Nate back was time.

  The driver fi­nally spoke after they reached the Four Sea­sons Hotel, say­ing, “Have a good even­ing” when he handed Quinn his bag from the trunk. In­side, Quinn rode the el­ev­ator to the top floor and loc­ated the room num­ber he’d been given.

  “Hi, babe,” Or­lando said after she opened the door.

  He wrapped her in his arms and gave her a deep kiss, right there on the threshold.

  Someone farther in the room cleared her throat.

  Quinn let the kiss linger a mo­ment longer. When their lips par­ted, he said, “I guess we’re not alone.”

  “Nope,” Or­lando said.

  Misty rose from the table where she’d been sit­ting as they walked into the room.

  “Hello, Quinn,” she said, hug­ging him.

  “And here I thought you were the lucky one who got out of the busi­ness,” he said.

  “I didn’t get out. I was forced out.”

  “Either way, you were out.”

  “Ci­vil­ian life is not as…in­ter­est­ing.”

  He chuckled. “It’s good to have you back.”

  “We were just go­ing over the mis­sion,” Or­lando said.

  “Is there still a mis­sion without Nate?” Quinn asked.

  “The para­met­ers haven’t changed,” Misty said. “St. Amand is still out there and needs to be iden­ti­fied. We’ll have to do it without Nate’s help.”

  “I thought Nate was the reason ACORT hired the…Of­fice.” He looked at Or­lando. “Does that feel as weird to you to say again as it does to me?”

  “A little.”

  “Nate was the reason,” Misty said. “But no one ever ex­pli­citly said he was a must-have.”

  Quinn raised an eye­brow. “You’re re­sort­ing to se­mantics already? You’re go­ing to be great at this job.”

  “I’m not re­sort­ing to any­thing. It’s true.”

  “Have you at least told your cli­ents he’s not join­ing us?”

  “Of course not. They’ve awar­ded us the job. How we ac­com­plish it is our prob­lem.”

  He held his hands up in sur­render. “You’re the boss.”

  “We’re both the boss,” Or­lando said.

  Quinn glanced at her. “I stand cor­rec­ted.” To both of them, he said, “Have we looked into loc­at­ing someone else who’s seen this guy?”

  “I’ve been try­ing but no luck so far,” Misty said. “Un­less that changes, we’ll have to make do with Nate’s de­scrip­tion.”

  “From a dec­ade ago,” Quinn said.

  “Nine years,” Or­lando cor­rec­ted him.

  “It won’t be im­possible,” Misty said. “We know how he dresses in pub­lic now.”

  Quinn snorted. “I looked at those pho­tos. It’s not even the same per­son in each. The dif­fer­ence is subtle, but it’s there.”

  “One of them has to be him.”

  “Or not.” He frowned. “Am I the only one who feels like you should level with the cli­ent? Without Nate we’ll just be winging it.”

  “If we bow out of one of our first jobs since re­start­ing, no one will ever hire us.”

  Passing on the job was prob­ably the right thing to do at this point, but Misty’s as­sess­ment wasn’t wrong. And if the Of­fice went away, Misty would find her­self on the out­side look­ing in again. Per­man­ently this time.

  He said, “Tell me we at least have a plan.”

  Misty perked up. “We do.”

  “Sort of,” Or­lando said.

  “There’s a chance your friends have already seen St. Amand.”

  It took him a second to real­ize what she meant. “Daeng and Jar?”

  Or­lando nod­ded, and showed him the video Jar had shot.

  “It could be an­other de­coy.”

  “It’s pos­sible,” Or­lando con­ceded, “but take a closer look at this.”

  Or­lando re­played the foot­age, and fast-for­war­ded to the part where the man who might be St. Amand looked to­ward the cam­era and said some­thing to one of the men with him. That man star­ted walk­ing in Daeng and Jar’s dir­ec­tion. She hit Pause.

  “See that?” Or­lando asked. “He’s giv­ing or­ders. If he were a double, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “He would if he was try­ing to act the part.”

  “I’m not so sure. This was an in-the-mo­ment call. No one told him to give an or­der. If he was a double, wouldn’t one of the oth­ers have given the com­mand?”

  “Play it again,” Quinn said.

  She let the video run a third time. She had a point.

  “Okay. Say it is St. Amand,” he said. “Then we can com­pare him to the earlier pho­tos and elim­in­ate the ones who don’t match. And—”

  “And then we can check the ones that do match,” Or­lando said, “to see if there are any identi­fy­ing marks, maybe even ex­posed parts of his face.”

  “Ex­actly.”

  “What a great idea!” Or­lando looked at Misty. “Thank God we have a man here now to solve our prob­lems.”

  “You already thought of that, didn’t you?” he said.

  “Of course we already thought of that. The pho­tos are be­ing com­pared in my re­cog­ni­tion pro­gram right now. Should have some res­ults soon.”

  “I apo­lo­gize.”

  “Tent­at­ively ac­cep­ted.”

  “So,” Quinn said, “you still haven’t told me about this sort-of plan.”

  *

  Nate flew from Chicago to New York, where he caught an even­ing flight to Rome, ar­riv­ing at noon the next day. At some point, he would have to con­tact Quinn and Or­lando and let them know he was there, but that could wait. First, he wanted to see if he could get eyes on St. Amand. If that happened, he could de­liver the in­form­a­tion to his friends and be on his way without hav­ing to in­ter­act with them in any sig­ni­fic­ant man­ner.

  The prob­lem was that Quinn hadn’t given Nate spe­cif­ics on where St. Amand was in Rome. It was a huge city with way more than its share of nooks and cran­nies where someone could lose them­selves.

  Nate wasn’t com­pletely at a loss, though. Quinn had said Daeng and Jar were on their way here so they should be in the city by now. Nate didn’t want to ap­proach them dir­ectly, but should be able to ob­tain their as­sist­ance without either of them know­ing it.

  He took a taxi into Rome, and had his driver drop him off at the small but up­scale Kari Hotel, near the Trevi Foun­tain. Sit­ting in a quiet corner of the lobby, he pulled out his laptop. Sev­eral Wi-Fi net­works ap­peared—a free pub­lic net­work, an eas­ily hack­able net­work for the hotel’s guests, and two ad­min­is­trat­ive net­works that were likely just mar­gin­ally more se­cure. He was most in­ter­ested in one of the lat­ter. It was de­signed to show up only on devices that had been net­work ap­proved. Luck­ily for Nate, the soft­ware Or­lando had de­signed auto­mat­ic­ally mim­icked the ap­pro­pri­ate data for these kinds of setups, and noth­ing was in­vis­ible to him.

  He clicked the GO tab to start the auto­mated hack­ing pro­cess, and re­ceived the mes­sage YOU ARE NOW CON­NEC­TED TO KA_AD_­PRV within twenty seconds. He in­ser­ted a re­ser­va­tion into the hotel’s data­base un­der the name of Brandon Yates, for a pre­paid, weeklong stay in a suite. The name cor­res­pon­ded with the Ca­na­dian pass­port he car­ried.

  He opened the track­ing app every­one on Quinn’s team had. This al­lowed them to find the loc­a­tions of the oth­ers’ phones. It was be­cause of this piece of soft­ware that Nate had aban­doned his old phone soon after the mis­sion in Lon­don.

  He se­lec­ted the SEARCH ALL op­tion and waited while the re­quest was pro­cessed. Soon a map of the en­tire planet ap­peared with four dots on it. Those rep­res­ent­ing Quinn and Or­lando were in close prox­im­ity in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Daeng’s and Jar’s were also to­gether, but only a few miles from Nate.

  He pushed the in­form­a­tion to his phone, then put away his laptop and walked up to the re­cep­tion desk.

  *

  Daeng and Jar’s task for the day was to get eyes again on the guy they as­sumed was St. Amand, plant track­ing bugs on his vehicle and any oth­ers trav­el­ing with it, and see where the arms dealer went. And that all needed to be ac­com­plished be­fore Quinn and Or­lando ar­rived that even­ing.

  Daeng and Jar star­ted that morn­ing by mak­ing the rounds of the four ad­dresses again. They’d seen noth­ing to in­dic­ate St. Amand was at any of them. They de­cided to stake out the of­fice build­ing.

  They parked a couple of blocks away, where Jar spent a few minutes on her phone. When she slipped it back into her pocket, she said, “Fol­low me.”

  She led him into a build­ing across the street and one over from St. Amand’s place, and took Daeng up to the roof via the el­ev­ator and then a steep set of stairs.

  Daeng saw why she’d chosen this build­ing in­stead of the one dir­ectly across from St. Amand’s of­fice. Along the street side was a dec­or­at­ive façade that rose a good meter and a half above the roofline. It had holes through which they could watch St. Amand’s build­ing.

  He peered through one of the open­ings, and dis­covered he could see into the fifth-floor win­dow where they’d seen lights come on the pre­vi­ous even­ing.

  He smiled at Jar. “Good work.”

  “I know.”

  *

  Nate stopped a block and a half away from where the track­ing app in­dic­ated Daeng’s and Jar’s phones were loc­ated. He tapped on Daeng’s dot to open a pop-up con­tain­ing ad­di­tional in­form­a­tion. What sur­prised him was that the dot was ap­prox­im­ately six floors above street level. Also in­ter­est­ing was that the time elapsed since the last sig­ni­fic­ant change was 36 minutes. Jar’s pop-up re­vealed sim­ilar num­bers.

  Nate changed the map from graphic view to street view, and coun­ted the floors of the build­ing his friends ap­par­ently were in.

  Check that. Not in, but on.

  The build­ing was only five stor­ies high, which meant they were on the roof.

  Nate moved down the street un­til he could see the build­ing. A dec­or­at­ive wall of clas­sic­ally in­spired carvings of gods and horses and chari­ots but­tressed the roof. Yep, def­in­itely a stakeout. The wall was the per­fect blind to hide be­hind.

  He crossed to the same side of the street as Daeng and Jar, hop­ing he could pick out what they were look­ing at. The build­ing dir­ectly across from their roof ap­peared to be res­id­en­tial, and on either side of that were of­fice build­ings.

  He scanned the area around him and found no good places to hang out, but that wasn’t a big prob­lem. With Daeng and Jar pinging on his tracker, he didn’t need to stay in visual con­tact.

  An in­ter­net search told him a café was four blocks away. He took one last look down the road, and headed off.

  *

  “I’m just say­ing, if you found your­self in that situ­ation, what would you do?” Daeng asked.

  He and Jar were at op­pos­ite ends of the roof’s façade to give them a wider view of the street, talk­ing via their comms.

  “It is a stu­pid ques­tion,” Jar said. “I would never find my­self in that situ­ation.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Of course I can. It is fic­tion, and there­fore it would be im­possible for me to be in that situ­ation.”

  “Tech­nic­ally, yes. But I mean a sim­ilar po­s­i­tion.”

  “That was not the ques­tion. The ques­tion was whether I would have teamed up with Kylo Ren to de­feat Em­peror Snoke or not. The ques­tion is ab­surd.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I do not know. It is a story. How could I team up with someone in a story?”

  Daeng took a deep breath. “The gist of the ques­tion is whether you would ever team up with someone who—”

  “SUV ap­proach­ing from the west,” Jar said.

  Daeng looked through the gap he’d been us­ing. The vehicle was the same type as the one they’d seen last night.

  “I count four in­side,” Jar said.

  Daeng could see the driver and front pas­sen­ger, but he didn’t have the right angle to see into the back­seat.

  The vehicle pulled to the curb in front of the build­ing, and the four men climbed out.

  Daeng raised his bin­ocu­lars. “Check out the driver.”

  “Yes.”

  The driver was the big guy who had chased them off when they were pre­tend­ing to be tak­ing selfies. Though Daeng hadn’t got­ten as good a look at the oth­ers last night, he was pretty sure the three men with the driver had been among them. The only one miss­ing was St. Amand, or who­ever had been wear­ing the scarf.

 

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