英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

Chapter 37
Munroe guided Neeva through the crowd of onlookers, gatherers who’d arrived in the wake of the sirens and lights, past the police cars. 
There were others, too— fellow hotel patrons who, after the shooting ended, and realizing the police had arrived, had also made their dash for freedom, adding to the confusion and the crowds.
They continued along the sidewalk, away from the hotel, Munroe waiting for the instant death that might or might not come and caring not one way or the other. 
One bullet and the pain would stop. But the death never came.
And so Munroe moved Neeva onward, more quickly now that they were beyond the police. 
Additional sirens called from down another street, undoubtedly summoned as backup after the first on scene had experienced the guests pouring out and seen the hotel proprietor on the floor of the lobby. 
She didn’t think the owner was dead, although they’d passed through too quickly to confirm— for conscience’s sake, she hoped he was still alive.
Neeva, by her side, legs moving twice as quickly as Munroe’s, continued to sob. 
Munroe said, “You can stop crying now,” and from one breath to the next, the tears dried up.
As she had done so many times in the past hours, Munroe turned down streets at random, moving slower this time not only to accommodate Neeva but also her own weakening, 
stopping occasionally to ask strangers for directions to the nearest metro, only to deliberately head off course, doing the mental math: 
trying to avoid making a beeline for her destination without taking so long to get there that Lumani was able to project her plan and arrive before she did.
One more phase and she could stop. This last strategic play meant, at least for the night, that the constant movement and the adrenaline spikes would be over, meant she could sleep.
The metro station led off the street and to the underground. If Lumani followed, and Munroe expected he would, he would be methodical and slow. 
She’d picked off two of his men in one day, and he’d be concerned about avoiding strategic errors, although why he hadn’t taken the shot outside the hotel puzzled her.
The train arrived, and with rush hour long past, they found seats easily. 
Munroe caught stares from two passengers across the aisle and swiped at her forehead. 
Neeva handed her a washcloth that she’d apparently taken from the hotel, and Munroe tamped down the blood.
To Neeva she said, “Are you still willing to go through with your plan— to be used as bait?”
The girl didn’t answer immediately, and Munroe switched on the cell phone. “I can’t guarantee this will work,” she said. “And there’s the possibility we only half fail— that you end up getting taken and I can’t get you back. 
“I need to know you’ve seriously weighed the consequences and I’m not gambling with your life without your consent.”
Neeva stared at the floor a long while and then looked up. “I understand the consequences,” she said, “and yes, I’m still willing.”
Munroe reached for Neeva’s hand. Squeezed it. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe,” she said, 
and when Neeva smiled in reply, Munroe turned to the phone and worked as quickly as the spotty cell signal would allow, utilizing credit card numbers she’d had and memorized for years, setting the steps out in advance that would get them to the end of the night.
“Okay, then,” Munroe whispered, and she dialed Lumani. When he answered, she said, “I want to make a trade.”
A heartbeat of pause, then Lumani said, “You’ll give up the package?”
“I can’t protect her,” Munroe said. “I’m bleeding. Weakening. You’ll take her from me, anyway. But I want the girl in the United States freed as was the original offer.”
“That was before you killed Tamás.”
“I still want it.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“No guarantees?” she said.
“I can’t. But like you said, I’ll take her from you, anyway.”
“Why didn’t you shoot?” she said.
“The timing wasn’t right.”
“You want me dead,” she said.
“Yes, badly.”
“I’m going to leave her at a restaurant for you to pick up,” she said. “I won’t be there.”
“I’ll still find you.”
“Possibly, but not tonight.”
“Where will you put her?” he said.
“I’ll call you when I figure it out.”
THE TAXI MUNROE had arranged for was waiting at the station when they arrived, and the transfer from train to platform to stairs to car made seamlessly. 
Munroe gave the driver the name of the hotel she’d booked across town and, seated in the comfort of the backseat, fought the body’s command to drift to sleep— sleep Neeva quickly succumbed to.
Buildings rose like silent sentinels standing guard along the way, their facades framed and shadowed by streetlights, casting an otherworldly impression over sidewalks alive with pedestrian traffic. 
Munroe studied the eateries, searching for one that would abet her purpose, and when she found it, signaled the driver to pull over.
Her instructions were simple. Drive around the block at least once, and upon the return, idle down the street with the meter running. 
“When it’s time to leave,” she said, “it might be with two sleeping people, and I’ll probably need your help.” She waved a wad of cash. “Assuming you’re available.”
The driver’s smile widened and he nodded. “Yes, available,” he said.
Munroe nudged Neeva, and the girl came awake grudgingly. “It’s time,” she said, and Neeva scooted out of the taxi with her.
The restaurant filled a corner, the front well lit and inviting, but the side street mainly in shadow, and most of the tables set out under awnings along the fronting still empty.
Munroe called Lumani, and although she suspected he wasn’t far away, she gave him the coordinates. 
She placed Neeva at the table in a corner, in a chair whose back faced the windowless side of the restaurant, and left all of the bags but the satchel at her feet.
Munroe pulled the trackers and the handmade envelope from her pocket. Scribbled a fake address on it. 
Neeva forced a smile, but reflective of the stress and exhaustion, the gesture came out crooked. 
Munroe said, “I promise.” And with a kiss on the top of the girl’s head, walked away.
The journey wasn’t long. Several meters along the length of the building, into the shadows, far enough away from the restaurant patio that she wasn’t visible beyond the lights but still close enough that she could see the back of Neeva’s head.
A group of two men and a woman walked in Munroe’s direction, and Munroe called out to them, offered a hundred euros if they’d take the envelope and drop it into the nearest mailbox for her.
Their expressions were a mix of suspicion and curiosity, but money, the world’s most common language, was one they spoke well, 
and so they took the envelope and the cash and continued along their way until their laughter and playful banter faded with them.
In the shadows, Munroe waited, her back to the wall, time continuing its slow march forward while her glance roved from Neeva to what she could see of the sidewalk and the pedestrians who filled the night.
In place of the Jericho, she held the taser. Double-checked the safety, reconfirmed the battery power. 
The moments passed, and eventually Neeva was forced to order a meal to retain her seat, but still no Lumani.
He’d seen the blood. He’d seen the limp. He was running on nervous fumes and exhaustion the same way she was, and he wanted the package. 
He had to show. And even if he took Neeva down from afar, he’d still have to come in close for the pickup. 
Even if he’d driven by once— twice— to confirm Neeva was truly alone, Munroe should have caught sight of him by now.
Consumed by the silence, by Lumani’s absence, by exhaustion, and entirely focused on trying to spot him on the street and in the crowds, she nearly missed the cues of approach from behind. 
Didn’t hear him, didn’t see him slinking through the shadows from the opposite direction until almost too late.
She turned. Caught a glimpse of him. Of the handgun. Exhaustion became energy. Weakness became strength.
He was still in the range between far enough to miss and close enough to hit.
He stopped suddenly when she turned. Drew, and so did she; he fired and the slug hit her square in the chest. 
The force threw her backward onto the ground, and when he approached to fire again, she aimed the laser sight at his neck. Pulled. Threads of voltage sent him into spasms. 
Hurting, trying to breathe, Munroe forced herself up from the ground and closed the distance. 
Kicked the gun out of reach; it was another HK USP .45 Tactical, same as what Tamás and Arben had used. 
Let go of the taser and put the Jericho to Lumani’s forehead.
With a boot on his chest, she used her free hand to search for the syringe he surely carried. 
Found it. Jabbed it into his thigh. Waited with the gun to his head until his eyes shut and his jaw went slack. Punched him just to be sure. 
The sedative would have been measured to heavily dose Neeva and her nearly half-weight to his, but at this point, what the fuck ever.
A group of pedestrians on the other side of the street had watched the entire scene. Munroe waved them on. 
“It’s official business,” she said, and whether they believed her or not, they moved on. 
Human nature was always more inclined to apathy, to avoiding involvement, to seeing things as someone else’s problem. People were easy like that.
Munroe called to Neeva, though it took several attempts, each louder than the last, to capture the girl’s attention. 
Neeva, as Munroe had been, was so entirely focused on pretending to eat and act naturally while studying pedestrians that she’d filtered out the noise from behind. 
When the girl finally heard the call, she put money on the table and brought the bags, then, spotting Lumani on the ground, smiled. 
Had no idea that because of Munroe’s slipup they’d both come perilously close to disaster.
Munroe blinked back the exhaustion. God, she needed sleep. Soon. Almost. Another hour at the most and she could collapse.
Munroe gave Neeva a strained smile. “Good job,” she said, and dialed the taxi driver. When he answered, she called him around for pickup.
That Neeva was still awake was a bonus Munroe hadn’t counted on, and so together, with one of Lumani’s arms draped over Munroe’s shoulders and Neeva propping him up more with her head than shoulders, they walked him to the curb. 
To the occasional passersby who stopped to gawk, Munroe said, “Too much wine,” which inevitably elicited snickers.
Inside the cab, Munroe handed the driver half the cash she’d offered and said, “The rest when we reach the hotel.” Switching to English, she said to Neeva, “We need to get him naked.”
BY THE TIME they arrived at the hotel, through something of a maneuver in the small backseat, they’d stripped Lumani down and then Munroe, having confirmed the pants and shirt were free of trackers, put them back on. 
The shoes, jacket, belt, and everything else he’d worn and carried on him she’d rolled into a ball, and they’d stopped along the way so that she could dispose of them.
With another portion of cash handed over to the driver, he didn’t question the many requests for turns and false starts. 
They traveled aimlessly along random streets. Stopped and waited. Moved to parking garages and waited more, and although Munroe expected a tail, she found none. 
Throughout, the taxi driver paid attention but said nothing but grazie when at last he parked at the curb outside the hotel and Munroe handed him the last of the money. 
“I have more,” Munroe said. “Wait and I will return.” To Neeva: “I’ll be right back.”
Taking Lumani into the hotel, unconscious and barely clothed, was one thing, putting him on display and babying him through the check-in procedure another, 
and so she entered the hotel alone, scoped the lobby and the elevator area to place the cameras and security, and then returning to the front desk, secured the keys.
At the taxi, Munroe and Neeva inched Lumani out, and with his arm draped over her shoulders and his body sagging, Munroe handed the driver another payment. 
“Don’t return for any of the items we threw away,” she said. “Not even the phone or the watch— there are evil people looking for those pieces, and if you carry even one of them, you’ll invite death to your family.”
The driver gazed at her quizzically and she said, “You have enough money to make up for any value you might get out of going back for them. Please just believe me.”
He nodded.
“I’ll keep your number,” she said. “I may need your help again.” 
So he smiled and waved before driving off, and she stared after him, hoping he’d follow through— not just for his own sake, but for hers.
Munroe turned from the diminishing taillights toward the bright hotel entrance. 
With Neeva’s help, she juggled carrying bags and walking Lumani through the front door, a slightly more attention-gathering process than it had been getting him from the back of the restaurant into the taxi.
This hotel, unlike the boutique one that had served her purpose earlier in the evening, was a European version of an American chain, which made it easier to blend in and hide. 
The twenty-four-hour front desk rotated shifts, and employees and guests passed through the cycle in numbers great enough to make this one odd incident just another curiosity.
From lobby to elevator, past curious hotel personnel and guests, Munroe tossed out the occasional sarcastic comment poking fun at Lumani and eliciting smiles as they continued on, up several floors, down a hall, and finally, into the seclusion of the room.
Munroe shifted furniture, and when she’d cleared the space she needed, she stripped Lumani out of his clothes again and then maneuvered him into the desk chair with its back wedged into a corner. 
With the roll of tape, she bound him— ankles, knees, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso— 
so that he took on the shape of the chair and could not, through accident or effort, tip it over. 
The sedative wouldn’t be enough to keep him under for long, but he was as sleep-deprived as she was, and she expected him to be out a while. 
She didn’t tape his mouth for fear of suffocating him, and because in any case what noise he made would surely alert her before anyone else.
Duct tape. Perfect weapon; so many uses. With her work done, Munroe took a step back and tossed what little was left of the roll onto the desk.
Munroe sighed. Glanced at Neeva, who’d fallen asleep as soon as Munroe had gotten Lumani in the chair. 
Sat on the room’s one bed and took off her shoes. Lay back and darkness descended.
TAPPING PULLED MUNROE from the deep. Subtle random thuds that paused and continued on, eager and frenetic, only to pause again. 
Without moving, without changing the rhythm of her breathing, she opened her eyes just enough to observe and for a minute or two lay still, 
while Lumani twisted in the chair, straining at the bonds, throwing himself forward and occasionally inching the chair away from the wall.
Neeva slept on. Munroe opened her eyes fully, waited until Lumani had finished thrashing. 
Smiled at the shock on his face and the sudden freeze when his eyes locked onto hers and he realized she’d been watching him. “What do you want with me?” he said.
Munroe sat. Stretched. The clock on the desk told her six hours had passed since she’d dropped into oblivion, and the darkness on the other side of the curtains, that dawn had not yet arrived.
She stood. Pulled the last bottle of water from the grocery bag. Opened it and, standing in front of him, staring at him, took a long, drawn-out swig.
She wiped a hand across her mouth. Placed the bottle on a side table, close enough that had he not been secured to the chair, he could have reached out and taken it.
Pulled the taser from the bag and rewound the electrode wires she’d had no time to deal with when hustling him from the street into the taxi. 
With the probes back in place, she set the taser on the desk within his line of sight. He studied her intently now.
She fished through the satchel for another gas cartridge, shook it for him to observe, and then slowly, deliberately, each movement exaggerated for staged effect, swapped old cartridge for new. 
Facing him, she sat on the edge of the bed with a box of ammunition and reloaded bullets into the two spare magazines she’d not yet had time to refill.
Swapped out the half-empty one for a full one. Reloaded the third as well.
“Where’s your rifle?” she said.
“In my car.”
“Where’s your car?”
“It was not far from the restaurant where I was supposed to pick up the girl.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “You are definitely the wounded party here.” Loaded the last magazine. “You didn’t have keys in your pockets.”
“I had a driver.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Another one?”
He shrugged.
Munroe stood. Picked up the taser. Casual and nonchalant, she aimed the laser toward his chest and fired.

Chapter 36
Without moving his eye from the scope, Lumani returned the phone to his pocket, drew a breath, and tried to block out the sting. 
He shouldn’t care, had no reason to care what she said. 
Prove himself stronger and smarter than his opponent. Reclaim the package. Kill what stood in his way. Succeed in the mission. These were the things that mattered. 
She, with her words and her strategy, was not a person but an obstacle and a challenge. She was prey. Formidable prey, but prey nonetheless. 
Yet it pleased him to speak with her, and it puzzled him that it should. Perhaps like a cat playing with the mouse: entertainment before food, although the food had just bit him, and this he didn’t like.
Lumani lay prone against the wooden bench, off which he’d tossed cushions and dragged from the living area, propped on his forearms, rifle on a bipod, the scope and muzzle continuing out between gauzy curtains that hung over open balcony doors four stories up and at an angle to the hotel. 
He had a clear shot of the entrance— the only way his prey would be able to reach the street— and she would be a fool to wait inside with the police on their way in.
She could have left the last of the trackers in an empty room and jumped the garden wall or gone out a window, while, like a fool, he waited her out, but his predator’s instinct had said that she remained in the hotel.
Feeling the trap, he’d sent Tamás. Now Tamás was dead, and instead of flushing her, as Lumani had intended, 
he was left second-guessing, watching the entrance while police cars circled, forced to wait out instinct in the hide he’d accessed by bullying the old lady who’d been home when he’d come knocking.
She was in the kitchen now, secured to a chair with her own tablecloth and quieted with a freshly laundered dish towel in her mouth.
He might eventually kill her. Or he might not. He was not a thug like the others, brutes who couldn’t adapt to situations as they unfolded. 
He was not useless overdeveloped muscle who took pleasure in the screams and the crying and the fear, who felt manliness in unearned respect or felt nothing at all. 
His job was the capture, and he was a professional to whom killing was occasionally a part of the work: 
messy but necessary, preferably executed from the business end of a rifle where he wasn’t forced to touch the dead.
The screaming sirens were in front now, four cars with engines running and lights flashing, uniforms approaching the front door with far less precaution than he would have deemed prudent. 
She would need to exit the hotel soon unless she planned to be taken into custody because of Tamás’s death.
In anticipation of the hit, Lumani rested his index finger alongside the trigger guard, controlling his breathing so his heartbeat didn’t pulse heavy through his fingers, his hands, his shoulder, and knock off his aim.
Onlookers, summoned by the sirens like zombies to the living, gathered from apartments and shops, curious, stupid, stupid people with their cell phone cameras waiting to catch some action to send to friends or post online, 
lucky people because Tamás had gone in to blow down doors and not the entire building.
Sirens. Police. Crowds. And still no sign of his prey.
Questions and self-doubt percolated and mixed into a potent cocktail. He couldn’t afford another failure.
Inside his head, the sparklers tickled, the collapse was there at the edge of his senses, creeping closer because of the need for sleep and the ongoing lack of success. 
Soon. Soon enough he could lock himself into a hotel room for days and pump toxins and chemicals into his system in a form of rapturous release from the pressure of perfection and the agony of rejection and nonexistence.
But not yet. Lumani took his eye off the scope. The window of opportunity was closing. 
He risked the streets being cordoned off, risked getting caught in a random photograph posted on the Internet, risked visual proof that tied him to the scene when the police came around for witnesses.
He inched backward, drawing the rifle with him. Froze.
The prey and the package barreled through the door, huddled together and covered in dust as if they’d escaped a bomb blast. 
Eye returned to the scope, Lumani followed them and drew in the magnified version: Michael, bleeding as she’d said, from her face and legs. 
She limped and yelled about a shooter, switching between perfect English and broken Italian, words that he read on her lips. 
Her clothes were different. Everything was different. And the package— good God— worthless now, emaciated and hairless.
Officers who hadn’t yet entered the hotel ushered the women away from the door, victims to safety, 
and once they were away from the door, the curious and the crowds drew nearer so that Michael’s head dipped and dodged between others’, limiting his line of fire.
Lumani’s lips twisted into a vicious smile. She’d waited to use the police and the crowds as diversion and deflection; she’d timed this to limit his ability to take the shot. 
He snorted. As if that would make any difference. 
Crosshairs on the target, Lumani calculated, deliberated, waited through the movement. Exhaled slow and measured. 
And then Michael turned, leaned beyond the brown hair on the head that separated her from him, and stared straight at him. 
Finger to her temple and thumb in the air, mock gun to her own head, she pulled an imaginary trigger.
His heart reacted as if physically tagged. Another slow breath in countermeasure and he moved his finger from trigger guard to trigger. 
So little pressure to send the death. But his hand shook. 
The crowd parted slightly. Michael’s back was toward him again and she, with the bald girl at her side, moved slowly away from the hotel.
So little pressure. He could make the hit. He could end the life of this person who, by her very existence, proved his own worthlessness, who had with no effort earned Uncle’s approving affection.
If he could calm. But his heart continued to beat heavy and he felt the thud in his fingers. The kind of beating that wouldn’t be stilled by breathing or lack of breath. 
Confused, he pushed back the panic at this new imperfection. No. Not imperfection, this was strength. For the first time in memory, the kill wasn’t business. 
This was personal, and this beating was passion warming: the first sensation of what it meant to desire the death of another for pleasure.
More sirens wailed from far down the street. Lumani drew backward. Disassembled the rifle and packed it up. 
Returned to the kitchen, a room with barely the floor space for the tiny table and two chairs tucked to its sides: a room built for the lonely. 
The woman was in the center of the area, bound as he’d left her, but the cloth was out of her mouth; 
she’d found a way to rid herself of the gag but hadn’t called out or raised the alarm— a wise choice that had kept him from having to permanently silence her.
Her chin raised when he stood in the doorway, face haloed with short curly hair clearly dyed to hide the gray. 
He imagined that she, in her independent solitude, might be a grandmother; 
wondered what it must feel like to have a pillowy mother figure with the warmth and care and universal acceptance mothers were said to provide. He envied the imagined offspring.
The woman stared up at him with soft rheumy eyes while he deliberated eliminating this witness as a professional should, 
then he stepped into the room and patted the old woman on her head— a form of affection, he thought, to this mother of sorts. 
His movement came jerky and awkward and not at all familiar to what he expected a touch to an old woman should be.
Lumani blocked the apartment door open on his way out so that when he was gone, she could call for help. 
This was like the people who paid money to… What was the American word? Offset? Yes, to offset a carbon footprint for their wasteful lifestyles. 
He had paid in professionalism for the pursuit of death. No matter that it was passion for watching another die that spurred him on now, he was not like Arben and Tamás. 
To prove his point, he had allowed the old woman to live, and now he would go kill Michael.

Chapter 36
Without moving his eye from the scope, Lumani returned the phone to his pocket, drew a breath, and tried to block out the sting. 
He shouldn’t care, had no reason to care what she said. 
Prove himself stronger and smarter than his opponent. Reclaim the package. Kill what stood in his way. Succeed in the mission. These were the things that mattered. 
She, with her words and her strategy, was not a person but an obstacle and a challenge. She was prey. Formidable prey, but prey nonetheless. 
Yet it pleased him to speak with her, and it puzzled him that it should. Perhaps like a cat playing with the mouse: entertainment before food, although the food had just bit him, and this he didn’t like.
Lumani lay prone against the wooden bench, off which he’d tossed cushions and dragged from the living area, propped on his forearms, rifle on a bipod, the scope and muzzle continuing out between gauzy curtains that hung over open balcony doors four stories up and at an angle to the hotel. 
He had a clear shot of the entrance— the only way his prey would be able to reach the street— and she would be a fool to wait inside with the police on their way in.
She could have left the last of the trackers in an empty room and jumped the garden wall or gone out a window, while, like a fool, he waited her out, but his predator’s instinct had said that she remained in the hotel.
Feeling the trap, he’d sent Tamás. Now Tamás was dead, and instead of flushing her, as Lumani had intended, 
he was left second-guessing, watching the entrance while police cars circled, forced to wait out instinct in the hide he’d accessed by bullying the old lady who’d been home when he’d come knocking.
She was in the kitchen now, secured to a chair with her own tablecloth and quieted with a freshly laundered dish towel in her mouth.
He might eventually kill her. Or he might not. He was not a thug like the others, brutes who couldn’t adapt to situations as they unfolded. 
He was not useless overdeveloped muscle who took pleasure in the screams and the crying and the fear, who felt manliness in unearned respect or felt nothing at all. 
His job was the capture, and he was a professional to whom killing was occasionally a part of the work: 
messy but necessary, preferably executed from the business end of a rifle where he wasn’t forced to touch the dead.
The screaming sirens were in front now, four cars with engines running and lights flashing, uniforms approaching the front door with far less precaution than he would have deemed prudent. 
She would need to exit the hotel soon unless she planned to be taken into custody because of Tamás’s death.
In anticipation of the hit, Lumani rested his index finger alongside the trigger guard, controlling his breathing so his heartbeat didn’t pulse heavy through his fingers, his hands, his shoulder, and knock off his aim.
Onlookers, summoned by the sirens like zombies to the living, gathered from apartments and shops, curious, stupid, stupid people with their cell phone cameras waiting to catch some action to send to friends or post online, 
lucky people because Tamás had gone in to blow down doors and not the entire building.
Sirens. Police. Crowds. And still no sign of his prey.
Questions and self-doubt percolated and mixed into a potent cocktail. He couldn’t afford another failure.
Inside his head, the sparklers tickled, the collapse was there at the edge of his senses, creeping closer because of the need for sleep and the ongoing lack of success. 
Soon. Soon enough he could lock himself into a hotel room for days and pump toxins and chemicals into his system in a form of rapturous release from the pressure of perfection and the agony of rejection and nonexistence.
But not yet. Lumani took his eye off the scope. The window of opportunity was closing. 
He risked the streets being cordoned off, risked getting caught in a random photograph posted on the Internet, risked visual proof that tied him to the scene when the police came around for witnesses.
He inched backward, drawing the rifle with him. Froze.
The prey and the package barreled through the door, huddled together and covered in dust as if they’d escaped a bomb blast. 
Eye returned to the scope, Lumani followed them and drew in the magnified version: Michael, bleeding as she’d said, from her face and legs. 
She limped and yelled about a shooter, switching between perfect English and broken Italian, words that he read on her lips. 
Her clothes were different. Everything was different. And the package— good God— worthless now, emaciated and hairless.
Officers who hadn’t yet entered the hotel ushered the women away from the door, victims to safety, 
and once they were away from the door, the curious and the crowds drew nearer so that Michael’s head dipped and dodged between others’, limiting his line of fire.
Lumani’s lips twisted into a vicious smile. She’d waited to use the police and the crowds as diversion and deflection; she’d timed this to limit his ability to take the shot. 
He snorted. As if that would make any difference. 
Crosshairs on the target, Lumani calculated, deliberated, waited through the movement. Exhaled slow and measured. 
And then Michael turned, leaned beyond the brown hair on the head that separated her from him, and stared straight at him. 
Finger to her temple and thumb in the air, mock gun to her own head, she pulled an imaginary trigger.
His heart reacted as if physically tagged. Another slow breath in countermeasure and he moved his finger from trigger guard to trigger. 
So little pressure to send the death. But his hand shook. 
The crowd parted slightly. Michael’s back was toward him again and she, with the bald girl at her side, moved slowly away from the hotel.
So little pressure. He could make the hit. He could end the life of this person who, by her very existence, proved his own worthlessness, who had with no effort earned Uncle’s approving affection.
If he could calm. But his heart continued to beat heavy and he felt the thud in his fingers. The kind of beating that wouldn’t be stilled by breathing or lack of breath. 
Confused, he pushed back the panic at this new imperfection. No. Not imperfection, this was strength. For the first time in memory, the kill wasn’t business. 
This was personal, and this beating was passion warming: the first sensation of what it meant to desire the death of another for pleasure.
More sirens wailed from far down the street. Lumani drew backward. Disassembled the rifle and packed it up. 
Returned to the kitchen, a room with barely the floor space for the tiny table and two chairs tucked to its sides: a room built for the lonely. 
The woman was in the center of the area, bound as he’d left her, but the cloth was out of her mouth; 
she’d found a way to rid herself of the gag but hadn’t called out or raised the alarm— a wise choice that had kept him from having to permanently silence her.
Her chin raised when he stood in the doorway, face haloed with short curly hair clearly dyed to hide the gray. 
He imagined that she, in her independent solitude, might be a grandmother; 
wondered what it must feel like to have a pillowy mother figure with the warmth and care and universal acceptance mothers were said to provide. He envied the imagined offspring.
The woman stared up at him with soft rheumy eyes while he deliberated eliminating this witness as a professional should, 
then he stepped into the room and patted the old woman on her head— a form of affection, he thought, to this mother of sorts. 
His movement came jerky and awkward and not at all familiar to what he expected a touch to an old woman should be.
Lumani blocked the apartment door open on his way out so that when he was gone, she could call for help. 
This was like the people who paid money to… What was the American word? Offset? Yes, to offset a carbon footprint for their wasteful lifestyles. 
He had paid in professionalism for the pursuit of death. No matter that it was passion for watching another die that spurred him on now, he was not like Arben and Tamás. 
To prove his point, he had allowed the old woman to live, and now he would go kill Michael.

Chapter 35
The door handle moved again. Subtle. Audible only because Munroe anticipated the movement. 
With the Jericho aimed toward where she expected a body and the two spare magazines shoved tight against her waistband, Munroe moved the few steps to the desk. 
The heavy side faced out where it could provide the most benefit in shielding her body from whatever came through the door, and she kept behind the furniture, one knee to the floor, hands on the desktop for control.
Silence ticked along until the next subtle rocking of the latch against metal.
But the door didn’t open, which she would have expected by now if the person on the other side had even a modicum of lock picking skills. 
Munroe leaned out to scan the floor. Had it been she on the other side, had the equipment been available, she would have run a camera under the door to confirm the location of the room’s occupants, 
and if she hadn’t had the equipment, she would have waited until the dead of night, when people slept the deepest, would have used stealth to enter and dispatch. 
But no hair-thin wire snaked in silhouette to the sliver of light beneath the door, and so she braced for an explosion that never came.
Instead, another subtle tap arrived, and less than a minute later still another, louder and more obvious: 
each new noise, like scratching at the door, was an invitation welcoming the curious to approach and discover, a juvenile trick encouraging the strategist to overanalyze. 
If the hunter was lucky, tapping might bring someone like Neeva closer, but Neeva wasn’t alone, and Munroe wasn’t stupid, and Lumani knew this.
Another tap.
The man-boy had sent an underling to flush her out.
Strategy to strategy, Munroe mentally placed herself on the other side, stood in the hall facing the door, blocked off from her quarry 
but so close she could feel them, hoping for some sound, some giveaway to point in the right direction so as not to immediately walk into the line of fire; 
sweating each protracted second because she’d already attracted attention coming into the hotel and couldn’t wait long in the hallway.
She understood. Stretched out and snagged a bag of food, pulled it toward her, and right hand still steady on the desk, removed four of the small juice bottles. 
Left-handed, she tossed them in a patterned succession toward the door, the closest she could get to imitating footsteps with what she had.
Whatever the hunter wanted— noise, vibration, shadow— he’d received the cue. 
The door blew inward; an explosion neither small nor controlled. 
Light from the hallway flooded the room. Dust and haze and smoke filled the hole where the door had been.
Time slowed. Movement filtered into her brain in incremental gaps. 
The door lay in thirds, one part braced against the foot of the bed, the others strewn across the floor. 
Ears ringing, eyes smarting, Munroe emptied half the magazine in a diagonal across the hole, placing bullets where she imagined an enemy she couldn’t see, 
shots that thundered back in recoil, noise that masked the spit of return fire, which came not angled down from a standing man, but up from off the floor, splintering the desk, sending fragments flying.
He was rolling. Crawling. Moving toward the desk.
She went up, slid over the top to avoid his line of fire, hands first, counting rounds, giving up precision to protect her head, 
hoping for a hit to his legs, groin, face, something unprotected, because bullets to his chest didn’t appear to stop him.
Behind her, stone shattered, spitting shards.
Beneath her, wood chunked off.
The slide across the desk continued, a slow-motion eruption of noise and fragments. 
She dumped onto the floor behind her target, swapping magazines as she went, that frustrating swap that stole seconds and slowed her down, and happened only as quickly as it did because of long practice.
Fired again until the click. Released the second magazine and, wasting more time, loaded the spare while crawling forward. 
Pulled the slide and, all or nothing, continued around the desk, shooting hand leading the way. 
And then, after another six rounds, the realization dawned that the return fire had stopped.
She paused to deafening silence. Ears useless.
From her position, she could see the edge of the enemy boot. She fired into it. Nothing.
Moved to her knees. Inched toward the empty door frame. Head out once and back. Nothing.
Again and back.
Nothing.
Stood and stepped into the hallway. A door opened, and the amped-up adrenaline took her within a hair of firing. 
Wide eyes in a wizened face spotted her or maybe the gun. The door slammed.
Idiots. People were idiots. Why? Why did they have to risk a look? Munroe spun, ears still deaf, eyes burning.
Lumani was near. Maybe not in the hallway, but close. If he’d sent Arben Two to flush her out, then he was here— in a hide watching the exit or in the hotel itself.
Munroe stepped back into the room, kept low to avoid casting a shadow on the window drapes. Paused at the body on her way to the bathroom.
He’d been hit several times. Two in the chest, slugs nestled into his vest, one in the calf. 
Maybe that’s why he’d fallen, but a random shot had killed him, had to have been one she’d taken while on the floor, had gone up through his chin and out the side of his head. He was missing an eye and part of his face.
Munroe knelt to examine his weapon: HK USP .45 Tactical with a suppressor. 
Wanted to take the gun but wouldn’t, wanted his vest as well, but it would require too much time and effort to get the thing off him, and so she shoved aside the mattress and knocked on the bathroom door.
“Neeva, come on out,” Munroe said. “We need to move quickly.” The door opened a crack and Neeva peeked out from it.
“Let’s go,” Munroe said, and she reached for the packed bags beside the bed.
Neeva said, “You’ve been hit,” and she pointed at Munroe’s thigh, where tears ripped into the pants outlined blood and flesh, and surrounding the holes, wetness seeped and stained the cloth a darker color.
Munroe paused and glanced down, feeling for the first time what she hadn’t during the rush of adrenaline. Droplets ran from her leg onto the floor.
“And your face,” Neeva said, and Munroe swiped her free hand across her forehead, her cheek, and drew it away bloody.
“Give me a second,” Munroe said, and moved past Neeva into the bathroom. Didn’t have time for this crap. 
Needed to get out before Lumani closed in, but escaping the hotel alive wouldn’t do much good if she was going to bleed out fifteen minutes down the road.
With Neeva watching, she unzipped and pulled down the pants.
“In the bag is a bottle of peroxide and the roll of duct tape,” Munroe said. Peroxide she would have used on her hair if Neeva hadn’t taken so damn long in the bathroom. 
“Get those for me, will you? And quickly please. We need to go.”
Neeva jerked back, as if from a trance, turned for the bags, and rummaged through items from the drugstore. 
While Neeva busied herself, Munroe examined the wounds: two from shards of stone, one massive splinter that might as well have been a dagger, and one from a bullet that had grazed her thigh and lodged elsewhere. 
She gritted her teeth and pulled the largest of the chunks from her leg above the knee. 
Ran water and soaked the towel, irrigating the wounds as best as she could given the passing time, then pressed the towel as a compress.
Seconds counted.
Neeva placed the items on the closed toilet lid, and Munroe tore at the packaging. 
“Get that open,” she said, and when Neeva handed the hydrogen peroxide back, Munroe dumped it on the open wounds. 
Took a dry washcloth, wadded it in place against the largest bleeder, and wrapped it with duct tape. 
It would be enough, would have to hold until she could get a better look.
The pain she could block out, that was the easy part, and it had nothing to do with being tough or a badass and everything to do with how she’d gotten through those nights in the jungle with the knife coming at her time and again.
Block it out. Push past it. And then kill. Munroe tossed the tape at Neeva. “Pack it up,” she said. “We’re moving.”
She’d also taken hits to her chest and abdomen— those she’d felt, like a punch in the gut that sucked air out of her 
and would most likely leave bruises, would keep her sore for a while— hits that should have torn holes through her torso and created massive trauma. 
In this she’d had the advantage. She’d had reason to expect the hunter would wear body armor and had adjusted during the firefight to compensate. He, on the other hand, had had no idea.
She wouldn’t bother searching for the slugs, they’d be there waiting, nestled between the leather and the repellent lining durable enough to protect vital organs from an assault rifle. 
Miguel Caballero, the Armani of armor. They’d been stupid to let her keep the jacket, and now the stupidity had cost them.
Munroe pulled her pants back up, zipped, and stepped from the bathroom. 
Grabbed the satchel and the bags from beside the bed, handed the bags to Neeva, and moved on toward the hallway. The time for battle dressing had stolen two minutes.
At the hole in the wall Munroe paused. In the far-off distance, as expected, came the sirens. 
If Lumani had been inside the hotel, he would have struck after the firefight, during the moment of weakness, before she’d had a chance to gather her wits and get upright again. 
But even knowing this she moved with caution, taking another peek out into the hallway— a quick scan front and back before continuing on.
The hotel had two exits on the ground floor: the one they’d entered off the street to the front and the other directly opposite, down a long hallway to a dining room and then the back that opened onto a walled-in garden. 
The layout was crap as far as an escape went, but it had probably worked to their advantage. 
The building had but one exit, Lumani would be there with his rifle and so had allowed his henchman to come up alone.
Munroe motioned Neeva to the stairs and down half a floor. They stopped on the small landing. 
Munroe turned on the phone and located the preset for Lumani’s number. Made the call.
No Lumani, only a mechanized woman’s voice in French and then the tone for voice mail. 
Munroe hung up, dialed again. To Neeva, she said, “I need you to start crying.”
Neeva said, “Wha’?”
“A man just tried to kill you. You’re an actress, I need a fit of hysterics— but without any noise until we head down the stairs. Can you do it?”
Neeva nodded.
Munroe dialed Lumani again. More French. Hang up. Repeat. Repeat. 
On the fifth attempt, Lumani answered.
“Did you hear the shooting?” Munroe said. She spoke in English.
He didn’t ask who she was, sounded neither surprised to hear from her nor disappointed. 
“I heard,” he said. “Since you call me, I assume it’s Tamás who is the dead one.”
Ah, so Tamás was the name for Arben Two.
“You don’t sound angry,” she said.
She could hear the inaudible shrug.
“This will be a problem for me because his incompetence becomes my failure.”
“Your problem, you fix it,” Munroe said, quoting the Doll Maker.
“Yes,” he said, and his tone had a bite. “I’ve taken fault for him more than once. I won’t cry that he’s gone.”
“Can you see the police? How far away are they?”
“There’s traffic, maybe two minutes.”
“I’m bleeding,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Not really,” she said. “It saves you the trouble. The plan was never to let me go, you would have killed me the moment your delivery was successful.”
The sirens were louder, would be at the hotel soon.
“You are waiting for me, Valon, you and your rifle. Are you here to kill me or to take back your merchandise?”
“Both,” he said, and then paused. “Did you know about Logan? Did you know before you ran?”
“No,” she said.
“Does he mean nothing to you?”
She heard pain in his voice. “He means everything to me,” Munroe said. “But you overestimated my ability to bear the impossible. There’s no winning for me no matter what I do.”
“It was not me,” he said. “Was not me that made the decisions. I follow rules, just like you.”
The sirens were outside in the front of the hotel now.
“Not like me,” she said. “Everyone has a choice. Even when there’s a gun to your head you still have a choice. I made my choice, and you, Valon, you don’t have a gun to your head.”
Munroe hung up. Turned to Neeva. Her cheeks were flushed, her skin mottled and red, her eyes puffy and swollen, and tears ran down her face.
“Now you can start screaming,” Munroe whispered. They took the stairs at a near run, heading toward the front door with Neeva in hysterics, the two of them nearly colliding with the first of the police officers who had come in cautious and guarded through the front door.
“Upstairs,” Munroe yelled. English first. Then Italian. “Upstairs, upstairs, the man with the gun is upstairs.”

Chapter 34
In the low light coming from the bathroom, both women stared at each other: Neeva at what had been added, Munroe at what had been taken away.
“You look different,” Neeva said.
“So do you.” Younger. More helpless. Tinier, if such a thing was possible.
“Trying to wash out the curls only gave me a clown wig,” Neeva said. “I figured this was better than being reminded of them every time I looked in a mirror.” 
She lowered her eyes. “What do you think?”
“Kind of gives you an emaciated concentration-camp-survivor look,” Munroe said. “Or maybe chemo.”
Neeva half smiled and her cheeks flushed. “It’s sort of a disguise.”
Munroe stood, secured the weapon in her waistband. Ran her palm over Neeva’s shaved head. “I’ll help you with the spots you missed,” she said.
Munroe put Neeva’s head over the sink and, with razor in hand, worked over the stubbled patches. 
Said, “Why’d you do the identity change before heading to Hollywood? You have a good relationship with your parents, so it’s not like you were running away or anything.”
Munroe shut off the water, handed Neeva a towel. Neeva rubbed a hand over her head and smiled. “It’s smooth,” she said, 
and then her expression changed. “My mom was always really good about keeping me out of the limelight, not using us kids as chips in her politics.”
Neeva dropped the towel into the sink. “We weren’t part of the whole stage, stumping for votes as part of the wholesome family image, but I still saw what happens when people know your name and your face. 
“They constantly twisted what my mom said or did to turn opinions and projections into truths, 
“but where it got totally crazy was how they did it to the rest of my family, who didn’t even have anything to do with anything.”
Neeva slid down the wall and stretched her legs out so that her feet nearly touched Munroe’s. 
“There’s no such thing as truth, that’s what I learned,” she said. “Only opinions people want you to believe as truth.” 
She ran a hand against her scalp once more and smiled again. “I knew that once I got work in Hollywood, everything about me would become public property and I’d have to deal with that same issue. 
“I didn’t want the movies and the roles I took to impact my mother’s career— didn’t want to worry that my potty mouth or late-night partying would become her politics or that my own talent would be smothered by her shadow. 
“I just wanted to be me without the baggage, so I changed my name, invented a past, and started clean.”
Munroe said, “Funny how that decision came full circle.”
“What do you mean?”
Munroe stood and, hand outstretched for Neeva to follow, led her back to the bedroom and out of the confining space, where it had been harder to keep attuned to the sounds in the hallway and the street. 
She listened and, certain that things were still as they should be, said, “The same baggage you tried to save yourself and your family from is pretty much what saved you now— all the media attention, the speculation, put your face on every TV in the world.”
Neeva sat on the floor beside the mattress. “I guess,” she said, and Munroe tossed a package of cookies and a bottle of juice in her direction.
Neeva touched the mattress. “Why is this here?”
“So when the shooting starts and I shove you into the bathroom, I can put another layer of protection between you and the bullets.”
“I thought I was here to help.”
“You won’t be much help if you’re dead.”
“But what about you?”
Munroe joined Neeva on the floor. Placed herself so that the room’s one window was ahead on the opposite wall and the hallway door between her and Neeva. 
Unlike American construction, which relied heavily on drywall to partition rooms and often used hollow doors, this hotel was European and old, 
which meant stone and solid wood— meant that unless Lumani or Arben Number Two, or anyone else who might be with them, intended to blow the place up, they’d be coming through one of those two openings.
Munroe put the Jericho on the floor, took a cookie out of Neeva’s package. 
“Like I told you, if I don’t get them first, then I’m dead either way, so it doesn’t much matter.”
“Who did that to you?” Neeva said, and she moved to touch Munroe’s torso but stopped with her hand hovering in the air above the jacket.
Those who dared to ask about the scars inevitably used questions framed in the context of what and how, but Neeva had cut to the heart of the question with who. 
Munroe glanced at her, one victim of violence to another. Neeva withdrew her hand and, like a wounded child, went back to the cookies.
“It was a long time ago,” Munroe said. “Done over the course of a few years by a man quite similar to the one who put the purchase price out for you.”
“Do you ever think about trying to get even?”
“He’s dead now.”
Neeva stopped chewing and very slowly swallowed. “Did you kill him?”
“Yes,” Munroe said, mimicking the slow speech, “I did.”
“Was it difficult to get away with it?”
Munroe shifted, shoulder to the wall, so that she stared fully at the girl. 
Measured and deliberate, she said, “It was a long time ago, in a place most people don’t know exists. Why all the questions, Neeva?”
Neeva shrugged. “Sometimes I think about how it would feel.”
“Revenge is best left to fantasy,” Munroe said. “It feels better there. 
“In real life you can eventually learn to deal with the pain and trauma, learn to cope on some level, you know? 
“But you can never undo death, and even if you think they deserve it, killing doesn’t take away your pain, just puts you on dangerous ground that can collapse out from beneath you at any time.”
“You did it.”
Munroe stared at her a moment longer, thoughts running in a melee that amounted to My point exactly, but she said, “I did. 
“Partially out of revenge and partially to save my life and the lives of future victims, but even if it had been entirely to settle a score, that means I, of all people, should know.”
Without meeting Munroe’s eyes, Neeva nibbled on a cookie, said, “Would you take it back if you could?”
“I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t paid a price.”
Neeva huffed. “Well, I still think people like this doll guy and the Pretty Boy, people like them, will never learn or ever stop unless someone goes up against them, fight fire with fire, you know? Someone has to teach them.”
“The problem with fighting fire with fire is that you can get burned and you risk becoming like them.”
“Has that happened to you?”
“It has at times,” Munroe said, and shifted back against the wall, forearms resting on bent knees, and stared across the room at the curtained window.
Neeva tilted sideways and tipped her head so that she rested against Munroe’s shoulder. 
“I like you, Michael,” she said, “even if sometimes you don’t like yourself a whole lot.”
Munroe smiled, leaned over, and kissed the smooth top of Neeva’s head. 
“Thank you,” she said, and after a pause, “What happened to the one who hurt you?”
“Nobody knows,” Neeva said. “They never found him.”
Munroe understood, then, what had driven Neeva to leave the safety of the consulate. 
The offer to give herself up as bait was more than just an exchange of one life for many lives. 
Neeva’s actions were those of trauma victim refusing to be the victim again— revenge surrogacy, insistence on playing an active role in what happened next. 
She rested her cheek where her kiss had met smooth skin.
“How do you know about the man with the dog?” Neeva asked. “Who he is and what he has planned?”
“I don’t know who he is,” Munroe said, “only what he represents.”
“So you’re guessing?”
Munroe shrugged Neeva off her shoulder and placed her hands, fingers splayed, across her abdomen. 
“There are these. The man with the dog is just another version of the psychopath with the knife.” 
She turned to Neeva. “He paid to have you kidnapped so he could own you as a slave. Do the details of why or what for make a difference?”
“Not really,” Neeva said. “I mean, sort of, in terms of physical pain and the idea of murder, they do. 
“But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people— 
“sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.”
Munroe said, “Those are some pretty big thoughts for such a little person.”
Neeva’s face clouded. Her mouth shut, then opened again. “Was that a joke?”
Munroe flicked a finger against Neeva’s nose. “Yes,” she said. “It’s called dry humor. You should try it sometime.”
Neeva smiled. Slumped back against the wall. “This doll-guy situation is an extreme of what I deal with in everyday life,” she said. 
“Where men believe that what they want I want, and they project that on to me and then blame me, curse me, when I don’t respond the way they’ve fantasized, like it’s some personal attack on them, like they’re entitled to something. 
“Doll guy and dog guy and rape guy, the dangerous ones, they just go a step further and take it anyway. 
“Then they blame you and the way you look for what they did. What’s worse is that a lot of the time, society blames you, too.”
Munroe put her arm around Neeva and moved the girl’s head back onto her shoulder. 
“You are way too young and innocent to be forced to understand these types of things,” she said.
“I’m not as innocent as you think I am.”
“And apparently not quite as naive.”
Neeva pulled her head off Munroe’s shoulder and shifted to her knees, hands on her thighs, eyes happy and smile wide, then pumped a fist and whispered, “Yessss.”
The smile and simple joy were infectious to the point that Munroe, in spite of circumstances, couldn’t help but smile in return— 
a smile that faded fast in the wake of a barely perceptible tap against the door handle. 
Not the movement of the door being tried but a gentle rocking of the latch in its holder as if the wood had only been touched or brushed against.
Munroe’s hand moved to the weapon on the floor. Fight-or-flight instinct would have her unload the magazine into the door and push on after the hunter, 
but the same wood and stone that protected her also protected him.
Focus never leaving the hallway door, she turned slightly so that her mouth was to Neeva’s ear and whispered, “Go to the bathroom. Lock yourself inside. 
“I don’t care what you hear, or what you think is going on out here, don’t come out till I call for you.”
Neeva, who’d been oblivious, turned to follow Munroe’s line of sight and, staring wide-eyed, whispered, “Are they here? I want to help.”
“You’re here. That’s the help. I need you alive. Get your gun. Go.”
Neeva reached for the weapon that lay in the shadow between mattress and wall, low-crawled to the bathroom, and with a near silent click shut herself inside, taking the light with her. 
Munroe closed her eyes, allowing fingers, hands, and senses to work where sight failed, and shifted the mattress so that it straddled the bathroom door.

Chapter 33
The tram stopped at a light, and Lumani’s car, pointed in the wrong direction, was forced by traffic to continue on its way. 
With Bradford’s phone, Munroe utilized online maps and based on location searched out nearby hotels.
Eye on the traffic, she waited another stop and then, last minute, nudged Neeva toward the door and maneuvered to be last off the tram. 
Left Neeva’s old shoes on the floor by the feet of an elderly man as they moved off, and if anyone noticed the subtle deposit, no one called attention to it.
They’d only traveled four stops, but because of the direction and route, and the ebb and flow of traffic, Munroe had gained more time. 
They moved on foot again, following the directions from her phone, the streets darker now, the lights reluctantly turning on to replace the fading daylight.
The hotel, when she found it, was a boutique establishment, modern and clean and upscale, with a proprietor who gladly accepted cash, courtesy of the aproned man, and travel documents, courtesy of Lumani. 
He didn’t question the absence of luggage and led them up one floor and down a short hall to their room. Opened the door courteously, 
and when Neeva entered, Munroe stopped in the hallway to tip the man but, more specifically, to prevent the potential loss of innocent life that her presence might cause, 
to warn him, to caution against those who would undoubtedly come hunting for her. The man looked at her quizzically and then turned to go.
Munroe entered the room and closed the door. Neeva stood quietly with eyebrows raised, as if saying What now? but what came out of her mouth was “You speak a lot of languages.”
Munroe nodded. “I do.” She shed the weight of the bags onto the bed and dumped out the contents of the satchel.
Neeva stared, mouth agape, and Munroe held up one of the firearms. “You know how to handle one of these?”
Neeva nodded. 
Munroe released the magazine and checked the chamber. Tossed an empty magazine at Neeva, then handed the gun to her. 
“Show me. I don’t want to wind up with a bullet in the back of my head.”
Neeva snapped the magazine into place, ratcheted the slide, and taking a wide stance, two-handed, 
as if she’d spent considerable hours at a firing range, pointed the weapon at the window and pulled the trigger for the click.
Munroe handed her a box of ammunition, then turned toward the room’s one window along the far short wall and approached from the side, peering out with a quick glance and retreat, an instant assessment of potential threat. 
The room was one floor up, fronted by a small garden and a wide street that faced three- and four-story buildings. 
Not much available for a sniper’s hide, but if one was to be had, Lumani would certainly find it.
Staying away from the window, Munroe tugged the drapes closed. The room went black and Neeva flipped on a light.
“Keep it off,” Munroe said. “We don’t want to cast shadows.”
“Were you trained by the CIA or, like, some military special thing or other?”
Munroe smiled. “No.” Picked up the second empty magazine and, until her eyes adjusted to the dark, loaded bullets by feel.
Neeva said, “How do you speak so many languages and know about the things you know? How did you get this”— she paused— “stuff?”
Munroe tapped the magazine to seat the bullets, pulled the weapon from her waistband, and swapped out magazines. 
“It’s a long story,” she said. She put the contents of the satchel back in the bag and moved everything to the floor.
The one bed in the room was queen-size and welcoming, and her nearness to it, and the darkness, heightened the gravity of the need for sleep. 
She pulled back the linens, shoved the mattress off the bed, and propped it, like an A-frame, up against the wall near the bathroom door. “I need your help moving the desk,” she said.
Calculating trajectory and strategy, Munroe pointed and mapped with her fingers so that Neeva understood, and together they rearranged the pieces. 
“Will they come for us?” Neeva said.
“They have to,” Munroe answered. “Every change of direction we’ve made, we’ve dropped a tracker and kept on. 
“They know we know we’re being followed, so for us to stop moving is counterintuitive. 
“They won’t know if our bread-crumb trail was just a way to lead them to a trick where we pretend to be holed up but we’ve really dumped the rest of the trackers and split. 
“They’ll have to come to find out.”
“So you want them to come?”
“Yes.”
“And when they do?”
Munroe ignored the question and pulled the ball of the doll dress and the rest of Neeva’s clothes from the bag, shook out the dress, and laid it flat atop the empty bed frame. 
“What are you doing?” Neeva asked.
“Teasing them,” Munroe said.
Her fingers hunted among the folds and seams for the small electronic piece she knew she’d find eventually. 
Grimaced when she grabbed hold of the plastic and used her teeth to cut through the threads that kept the strip fastened between layers of clothing. 
And then, having freed the device, held it out for Neeva to examine. “It sends a signal so they can locate you.”
When Neeva handed the thin piece back, Munroe took it to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.
Now came the waiting. Could be half an hour or thirty hours; the move was Lumani’s to make and she hated that this gave him the advantage. 
She was a hunter, not a hider, a predator not prey; 
hers was meant to be the position of seeking, discovering, gathering information, and controlling the elements. Not this. And this was all she had.
In the bathroom, where there were no windows, Munroe unscrewed all but one bulb, and this she allowed as their only source of light. 
Unwilling to shut the door and chance being cut off from the main room if the attack came sooner than expected, she stripped out of the Doll Maker’s collared button-down and T-shirt,
and Neeva stared at her in a way that defied all rules of common etiquette. Finally the girl turned away.
From beneath the tight sports bra, Munroe pulled at the bandage that wrapped her chest. Drew the length out until she was free, balled the elastic up, and tossed it in the garbage. 
At the sink, she ran cold water, then using the hotel’s small bar of soap and a hand towel, washed her torso and arms, her face, neck, and hair.
She needed a shower. Desperately. But couldn’t risk getting caught compromised when the hunters arrived, and even this was pushing her luck.
Munroe stepped from the bathroom, towel around her neck, and Neeva stared slack-jawed. 
Munroe didn’t need to follow her line of sight to understand the reaction. 
The scars were ugly, and there were many, always prompting questions to which she rarely provided a truthful explanation.
“If you want to use the bathroom, now’s a good time,” Munroe said. “I have no idea how long we’ll be waiting, so if you’re hungry, help yourself to the food, too.”
Neeva nodded, silence instead of conversation, avoidance instead of questions, while she rummaged through the shopping bags, pulled out a few items.
All the way from one side of the bed to the bathroom door, with the same stupefied lack of etiquette, her eyes remained on Munroe’s torso. 
“I might be a while,” she said, and Munroe answered with a dismissive wave.
When Neeva had shut herself inside, and Munroe no longer had a gawking audience or light for that matter, 
she stripped down and removed every bit of the Doll Maker’s clothing in the same way she’d had Neeva remove her own in the clothing store. 
Redressed in the items she’d purchased: boots, black cargo pants, and a black camisole layered beneath the jacket she’d kept with her since Dallas. 
As long as the jacket was zipped, the outfit remained if not quite androgynous, not exactly gendered, either, and would allow her flexibility when the time came to move again. 
At the moment, returning to being female was the better bet considering every visual record of her movement over the last forty-eight hours would show her as male.
Clothing, hair, shoes, accessories: these were props, visual cues, that people used to filter information and make instant assessments out of random connections, to categorize and assign value to those who populated their world. 
And layered beneath the props for sight came those for smell, and hearing, and more, that sense of intangibility that allowed people to read nuance and body language and interpret what the other senses didn’t grasp directly; cues that together formed a picture that matched perceptions based on expectations and that, when adjusted one way or the other, filtered past the gatekeepers of the mind, allowing Munroe to become whatever she needed to be.
THE WATER IN the bathroom ran long and the sounds of Neeva messing about filtered beneath the door. 
Munroe pulled the pocketknife from the satchel, sat on the frame of the bed, flipped the blade open, and stared at her hands. 
This knife, like all knives when she picked them up, became a living thing,
and like all blades in her hands when the voices were alive and the darkness nibbled at the edges of sanity, this one, too, begged to be used. 
Not on the soles of her shoes, as she worked it now, probing until the heels gave way, but to be used on those who tormented. 
To cut, the way she’d been cut, and to make others suffer for the pain they inflicted.
Munroe folded the blade and pocketed the knife.
In the hollowed-out segments of each shoe, Munroe found two more tracking devices. 
She pulled them out and palmed them. Took paper from the desk and folded it into a makeshift envelope. Dropped the trackers inside and shoved the packet into a pocket. 
These were the last of them, and when they were dumped, she and Neeva could effectively disappear. Lumani had to know this. Had to feel the pressure. 
Even if he assumed this stop at the hotel was a feint or, in terms of the chessboard inside her head, a decoy: a move that lured a piece into an unfavorable position, he had to act, had no choice, the issue was only when he’d come, not if.
The water in the bathroom continued running, and so Munroe lay on the floor beside the upright mattress. 
With her body horizontal, exhaustion settled heavy, thick and blanketing, threatening to submit her fully to sleep against her will.
Taking the phone from her pocket, she dialed Bradford, the fulfillment of her promise, and in the seconds that it rang, her eyes closed of their own accord, only to open reluctantly when he came on the line.
“How are you?” he asked, and she heard in his voice the same worn-down fatigue that she felt.
“I’m okay,” she said.
Questions about Alexis, Logan, and Samantha were foremost on her mind, but to ask for news would only add to Bradford’s burden and so she left them untouched. 
“I got another image of Alexis,” she said. “A concrete floor and a fairly large space.”
“How long ago?”
“A couple of hours or so, but who knows when it was taken.”
“I’ll get to her,” he said. “It’s slower work now. I do have backup but not much, and I have to be careful in covering my tracks so I don’t face”— he paused— “local complications. But I know where she is.”
Elation tugged at Munroe’s thoughts. She sat up. Hugged her knees.
“Talk to me,” Bradford said. “You’ve got Neeva with you. Are you about to play capture the flag with the traffickers?”
“Sounds bad,” she said, “but, yes, that’s what it amounts to.”
She walked him through the events that had put Neeva back into her custody, the offer the girl had presented, the steps she’d taken so far to stay ahead of Lumani, and the reasons why she now waited for him to find her. 
When she’d stopped and silence ensued, she could hear in Bradford’s sigh the words of caution and warning he would never say. 
He moved instead to the topic they’d both danced around: the darkness.
“I’ve got a handle on it,” she said. “I promise you, it’s not like Africa. 
“I’m tempted, you know, the urges are pretty strong, to seek him out in retribution for what he’s done to me and Logan, and I may yet. But on my own terms. Consciously.”
“What do you know of the client?” Bradford asked.
“Wealthy, male, and a regular. 
“He’s paid for several girls from this trafficking organization, but this isn’t the only operation, so there might be other victims— less famous ones, you know?— cheaper. 
“He could have a place or even several places where he stashes his purchases long-term, but I think it’s more likely each girl replaces the one that came before.”
“And the torture aspect?”
“I can’t be certain,” she said. “But it’s the only way everything makes sense— rules I’ve had to follow, the way he toys with the traffickers— he fits the profile. 
“I could be wrong. I could be projecting my own past onto the present, but it doesn’t really matter— “he’s no less evil if instead of torturing and killing these girls, he’s pimping them out or collecting them and keeping them locked away. 
“He’s not going to stop, Miles. Even if I take this organization apart piece by piece, this guy will find a way to feed his addiction.”
The running water from the bathroom had shut off for a while, but Neeva was still inside and far too quiet. 
Munroe stood and knocked on the door. “You okay in there?”
“Just a few more minutes,” Neeva said.
A heartbeat of silence and then Bradford continued the conversation. “Your client couldn’t have been the only customer.”
“No,” she said. “But he is one, and he’s one I can find.”
“Is there any way I could convince you to wait? Just buy me a little time so I can get to Alexis. We can sort through options when we have a chance to breathe.”
“Even if this never involved me or mine, you or yours, being this close, knowing what I know…” 
When her sentence faded, Bradford finished it for her. “Knowing what you know, you can’t just walk away,” he said. “But I had to try.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’ll finish this, and I’ll live through it.”
“Don’t make promises like that. You only tempt fate.” He was quiet for a moment, as if resigned and letting go. 
Finally he said, “Regardless of what happens, I understand why you have to do it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Munroe stared at the phone a long while before putting it away, 
and fearing that to lie down would mean falling into a deep sleep, she pulled hair product from the bag and, with practiced fingers, ran the paste through short strands, tugging and spiking, and turning what had been boy into what now went either way. 
Without a mirror, she continued with black eyeliner and then heavy mascara, and was painting her short nails black by the time Neeva opened the bathroom door.

Chapter 32
They rode in silence to Cadorna and left the station for the streets and the plaza that led to the buses and trams, an open-air square, clean and colorful with bright sculptured art. 
To the left, touristic and inviting, rose the massive walls of the Sforzesco castle, and Munroe went in the opposite direction, navigating through pedestrian traffic with the directions Bradford had given, for several minutes along a street lined with trees still bright green with young leaves.
Munroe double-checked the address on her paper and stopped at a gelato store that stood contrastingly spare and modern against the grand colonial structure it inhabited. 
Inside, she found a seat for Neeva and, in an attempt at normalcy and in acknowledgment of the hunger that gnawed at her own insides, reached into her pocket for the last of the euros to buy Neeva something to eat. 
She caught the eye of the man behind the register. He was deceptively young-looking, though Munroe placed him in midthirties, tiny and wiry, and not at all what stereotype might suggest one of Bradford’s connections would look like. 
But in his focused interest, his unwillingness to drop his gaze, there was no mistaking that he’d recognized Munroe, if not Neeva, when she’d first walked through the door.
Without breaking eye contact with her new admirer, Munroe handed Neeva the cash. 
“If you’re hungry,” she said. “But don’t leave the shop. And if you see Pretty Boy, or anyone else who looks familiar, same instructions as last time.”
Neeva nodded and Munroe moved toward the register. 
The aproned man motioned one of the employees to take his place. 
He stepped away from the counter, not so obvious as to be noticeable to the random observer, and definitely not to Neeva, who, money in hand, was already headed to the cold glass cases, but enough that Munroe understood she’d been invited inward.
He exited the room through a swinging door not far from the register and Munroe followed. 
He turned only once to confirm her presence and led the way down a narrow hall that wrapped into an L, past a cold room and a small kitchen, to another door, which, contrary to everything else about the shop, had a keypad and a biometric scanner.
He placed his thumb against the pad and the door clicked open.
The room was walk-in-closet-size with bare walls and a bare desk. 
The door shut behind Munroe of its own accord, and the aproned man turned to face her. 
“I’m told you have a tail,” he said, and his English was spoken with an unmistakable hint of small-town Texas.
“Yes,” she replied, and out of habit scanned the walls and seams of the windowless room, taking measurements, calculating where she assumed the faux walls ended and the real room began. 
“I’m ahead by at least five minutes,” she said. “I’ll drop into a few other places for the sake of appearances.”
He reached beside the bare metal desk. Picked up a briefcase, laid it flat on the desktop, popped it open, and turned it toward her.
Munroe examined the contents. Two Israeli Jericho 9 mms. Two spare magazines. Eight 50-round boxes of 9 mm ammunition.
An envelope. Six blocks of dollar and euro bills, bound and stacked. Cell phone. Charger. Pocketknife. Taser. 
God, she loved Bradford. Only he could have, without any explanation on her part, anticipated her moves in advance. 
Munroe pulled the roll of tape and Lumani’s travel documents from her jacket and dumped them into the briefcase.
She looked up to find the aproned man studying her the way she’d studied the room. 
“Whoever you are,” he said, “Miles just pulled in a large favor for you— you’d better be worth it.”
“It’s well earned,” she said, and the nameless man dropped the briefcase lid, pushed it shut, then handed the case to her.
“Do you have another bag?” she said. “Something easier to carry, that won’t attract as much attention?”
“You’re on foot?”
Munroe nodded.
“In the staff room,” he said, tipping his head in the direction he’d intended. 
She followed him out again to the room next door, where he pulled a satchel from a cubbyhole and dumped its contents on the floor. 
“This’ll have to do,” he said. “Unless”— he glanced at her again from head to toe— “you want a purse.”
“This is fine,” she said.
He held the satchel open while she transferred the items from one bag to the other. “Miles referred to you as a ‘she,’ ” he said.
Munroe shoved the phone into her jacket pocket. Took one of the handguns back out. Released the magazine, pulled the slide, snapped the magazine back into place. 
As soon as she had a moment she’d strip the weapons down, reassemble, and reload, but for now this would have to do.
“I am a she,” she said. She slipped the Jericho underneath her jacket at the small of her back.
The aproned man said, “I see,” and he motioned to the door. “Questions, but no time.” 
She followed him out. “I need a clothing store,” she said. “Something away from the metro— doesn’t have to be big.”
They moved through the swinging door back into the shop. “Take a right on your way out and just keep walking,” he said.
“Someone’s probably going to come looking for me,” she said. “I really do apologize.”
He smiled— the first spontaneous facial expression he’d offered. “I’m not worried about it, might even be a good thing.”
When Munroe returned to the main room, Neeva was sitting at a table eating chocolate gelato from a half-finished large cup. She paused when Munroe approached.
“Take the food,” Munroe said. “We’ve gotta go.” Neeva half stood and, with the cup in her hand, hesitated. “It’s not disposable,” she said. 
Munroe took Neeva’s elbow and guided her upward so that Neeva had no choice but to stand upright.
“Take it anyway, we need to move.”
Neeva put the glass on the table and, with head down and no protest, followed Munroe to the door. 
There, with another scan up and down the street, Munroe slipped back in among the pedestrian traffic.
“Why did we go there?” Neeva said. “Not for food.”
“Money,” Munroe said. “Options.” And left it at that.
They’d need to move quickly to turn this stop into one of many so that Lumani, knowing she was working toward a plan, would be forced to check each lead in his own attempt to put the pieces together and try to jump ahead of her.
Another several minutes of walking and Munroe spotted a clothing store. 
While perhaps not specifically the one the aproned man had in mind, it would suffice.
Inside, she pulled items off of racks, held them up to Neeva for size, and draped them over Neeva’s outstretched arm until she’d combined two full sets of clothing for the girl and another for herself, 
then headed toward the checkout— they didn’t bother trying anything on for fit because they didn’t have the time, 
but once the items had been paid for, she tore tags off several pieces and sent Neeva to the changing room.
“Take off everything you’re wearing,” she said. “Down to your bra and panties— leave nothing that came from the bad people— bring it all to me because I need it.”
Neeva grimaced. “Even the panties? I’ve been wearing this stuff for two days.”
“Everything,” Munroe said.
“What about the shoes?”
“That’s our next stop.”
Years in a job that required the ability to blend seamlessly from one environment to the next had taught Munroe well in regard to clothing. 
The human subconscious filtered out the familiar, and as such, the fastest way to become invisible in any city was to acquire and wear what could be had locally.
Neeva returned from the dressing room and handed Munroe a ball of textured color, and Munroe stuffed the lump into the shopping bag. 
The new outfit, combined with hat and sunglasses, had effectively turned Neeva into one in a crowd. Munroe nodded approvingly.
“What about you?” Neeva said.
“No time, we need to keep moving.”
“I thought you got rid of the tracker.”
“I got rid of some of them,” Munroe said. She took Neeva’s arm and nudged her toward the door.
“So they’re still following us?”
“I hope so,” Munroe said. Heat along her neck, like breath, a finely attuned sense long developed by hunting and hiding, told her Lumani was close.
Imagined or not, she could feel him, watching, breathing in her ear.
Out of the store and down a side street, flattened against the wall, heart slowing into the reptilian calm of narrowed focus, 
Munroe waited, watching traffic, finally spotting a vehicle, which, although only one of many, was traveling particularly slow.
She saw no faces, only the shadows of two people in the front. 
Couldn’t know if the car belonged to Lumani or one of his people, only that intuition had spoken, and she had learned through long, hard experience to trust her instinct and allow the inner tempo to lead where logic failed.
THEY FOUND A shoe store and repeated the procedure, allowing no time to dally, and were on their way again in minutes with directions from the shopkeeper for a grocery store, 
where along aisles a tenth the size of what she’d have found in Dallas, Munroe filled a basket haphazardly and at random with packaged food and bottled drinks.
Outside Munroe handed two of the bags to Neeva. “I know you’re tired, but you’re going to have to help me carry some of this stuff,” she said, “just a couple more stops and we can rest.”
Last came a drugstore, where Munroe searched out the closest items she could find to hair wax, eye pencils, and lip products. 
Added hydrogen peroxide, nail polish, and mascara and grabbed a backpack off a circular rack— a shopping foray that would have made most males proud: items procured with indifferent efficiency. 
Neeva grabbed soap, shaving cream, and a packet of razors and held them up for approval before adding them to the pile.
From the drugstore Munroe led a zigzagged course toward the nearest tramline, reaching the bus-stop-size platform at the same time a streetcar arrived. 
Didn’t matter where the tram was headed, only that they would move away from the area faster than they could if they remained on foot.
The doors hissed shut and Munroe studied passersby through the windows. 
Caught sight of a familiar figure— not Lumani, Arben the second, the nameless silent man who’d been with them in the cells— running, so foolishly running, as if to say Here I am, notice me, through the crowds.
He’d clearly not spotted them, as he had headed for the tramline as if following a map, as if he’d known where to look. 
Then missing the tram, he turned from the platform to the street, and the car Munroe had spotted earlier slowed only long enough for the man to climb into the passenger seat.

Chapter 31
Munroe hunted for transportation along the side streets of Nice. 
Here the pedestrian traffic was lighter and those who took note of their passing fewer, 
but even off the main streets and busy walkways, the occasional passerby turned to stare at Neeva and her odd getup, 
which worked as much as a distraction from her face, and as such a disguise, as it did a beacon.
Neeva, seemingly oblivious as to the liability she was to Munroe, continued on, head up and shoulders back. 
Irritated by the girl’s ignorance, Munroe nudged her. “Keep your chin down, eyes to the sidewalk,” she said, “Unless you’re trying to be recognized and stopped.”
Neeva dropped her head, and Munroe skirted her around yet another corner to another street, keeping the trail as random and unpredictable as possible 
so that Lumani would be forced to follow and couldn’t, even with reinforcements, set an ambush.
Down one more block, around a corner, and finally, on a narrow street with cars parked only on one side, their tires up against the curb to leave a single lane for two-way traffic, 
Munroe found what she wanted: a vehicle plain enough to garner little attention, new enough to be considered reliable, old enough to still be hotwired. And it was unlocked.
Through the window, Munroe checked the fuel gauge. Three-quarters of a tank. 
She pulled the roll of tape from the backpack, ripped off a strip with her teeth, and tossed the tape and the pack at Neeva. 
“Get in the back,” Munroe said. “Keep an eye out— let me know if anyone curious or angry heads this way.”
“We’re going to steal a car out in the open?”
Munroe opened the front passenger door and pointed with a head motion. 
“Consulate’s about a kilometer that way. Just start walking. Pretty Boy will be by shortly to give you a lift.”
Neeva climbed into the back.
Munroe checked the emergency brake and set the car in neutral. 
Lay across the floorboards and, head beneath the steering wheel, removed the plastic cover beneath the mechanism, searched for the wires that would take her home, and said, 
“This makes you an accomplice— no longer an innocent victim. The people in the consulate saw you walk out and follow me on your own, without coercion.”
“Why do you keep trying to scare me off?” Neeva said. “I understand the consequences.”
Munroe pulled at the wires. “Just checking,” she said, “making sure you know there’s a path between death and freedom, and it might not be a happy place, either.”
Neeva huffed in reply, and with the piece of tape stuck to her forehead, Munroe used her nails and teeth to pinch and strip. 
She’d have been faster with more experience, but it’d been a while since she and Logan, still young and stupid, had played anarchists with other people’s cars.
The ignition caught. Munroe taped the exposed wires and scooted out from beneath the seat and got behind the wheel. 
Leaned over to shut the passenger door, then put the car in gear. 
If they were lucky, they wouldn’t need to stop between here and Milan, might not have to go through this process again, 
and with the border only forty minutes away along the highway— a route they could take now that Munroe was certain Neeva wouldn’t be banging on windows and screaming for help from passing cars and tollbooth operators— odds were good that they’d be in Italy before the car was reported stolen.
Munroe checked for traffic and pulled onto the road. To Neeva she said, “If you throw that bag all the way to the back, you can come up front.”
Neeva tossed the backpack behind the rear bench and squeezed between the two front seats, jacket and doll dress tangling as she dragged herself forward. 
“I really think new clothes would be a good idea,” she said, then settled and buckled in. “Why do you keep avoiding the backpack?”
Munroe checked the rearview. Lumani was out there, she knew it, knew he knew she knew, and his continued invisibility added to the pressure inside her head. 
She turned onto a main street and followed instinct toward signage, and the signage toward the highway. 
Glanced at Neeva and found the girl staring, waiting for something. “What?”
“The backpack— why do you avoid it?”
“The phone has a tracker and a bug in it. I pulled the battery, but just in case.”
Neeva’s forehead creased, and the same girl, who while dodging killers and kidnappers would, if given half a chance, have pranced down the streets of Nice with her head held high, glared at Munroe accusingly, as if she’d been betrayed. 
“Why do you still have it?” she said.
“Now you’re an expert, too?”
Neeva crossed her arms and stared at her lap.
Munroe said, “It’s the only way I have to communicate with them— I have a few things to sort out before I can get rid of it. 
“Listen, you chose to come along, uninvited, so if you’re going to stick around, you need to zip it and let me lead. 
“If you question me every step of the way, I’ll give you back just to get rid of you. I need quiet right now.”
“I was just asking,” Neeva said.
“And you’re still annoying me,” Munroe said. “I’m not your friend. Just because I saved your life doesn’t make me a nice person. 
“I didn’t do it for you, I did it for my own reasons— just like what you’re doing here isn’t for me but for yours. 
“So since we’re stuck with the phone for now, the plan is to move fast, stay a step ahead, and avoid saying anything that allows them an advantage. Get it?”
Neeva nodded. “Not stupid,” she said, and despite herself, Munroe smiled.
“Good,” she said. “And when we do get a real phone, you need to call your parents.”
“And tell them what?”
“For starters, that you weren’t re-kidnapped, because it’d certainly make my life a hell of a lot easier if my face isn’t on every other television, right next to yours. 
“And since you won’t be on the flight they booked, they probably deserve to know the reasons why.”
Neeva sighed. “It’s not going to be a pleasant conversation.”
“Welcome to the world of difficult choices. You’re doing a brave thing, Neeva, but it only counts if the ones you love know you’re doing it of your own free will.”
THE HIGHWAY OUT of Nice took them along the coast farther inland than the regional roads, 
a scenic straight shot into Italy that bypassed border control, cut through tunnels, skipped towns, and made a mockery of the wasted time it had taken to drive the opposite direction.
Munroe stuck to the highway only until they diverted past Genoa, and the beauty and grandeur of the coast and the mountains and the tunnels phased into a bland industrial flatness. 
She used Arben’s money to pay the toll and exit the highway. 
Smaller roads meant slower going, but they also meant that Lumani, in whatever powerful vehicle he drove, wouldn’t be able to overtake them on speed alone.
Neeva broke the silence. “What happened to the scarface guy?” she said.
Munroe glanced sideways but didn’t answer.
“At the consulate you said the pretty boy was still out here,” Neeva said. “And you said he and him as if there was only ever one. So what happened to the other? Did he follow us into the garage?”
“There are some subjects better left alone,” Munroe said.
Neeva stared at her hands. “I’m in this of my own free will, so I kinda earned the right to know.”
“He’s dead,” Munroe said, and Neeva nodded, satisfied.
THEY APPROACHED MILAN from the south, following signs toward the city center until they were thoroughly into a mix of civilization and Munroe’s focus changed to locating the metro. 
She continued through a residential area of apartment blocks and dead-ended at Famagosta, a station with not much more to it than a large bus exchange and several parking garages. 
Took the car up a ramp. Found an empty spot, switched off the ignition, and abandoned the vehicle.
The metro station, down a long level, was clean and well lit, with frequent trains running into the heart of Milan. 
Munroe purchased tickets at a vending machine, the price, at one euro per trip, shockingly low. 
Gusts of hot air blew out from the tunnel, propagating the stale smell of burned metal, hydraulic fluid, and machine oil— the universal underground fragrance that belonged only to the tracks. 
She kept her arm linked in Neeva’s, boyfriend to girlfriend, and as in Monaco and Nice, passersby paused or did a double-take when they caught sight of the costume, 
but this time Neeva kept her chin down, and from the smirks and sometimes outright staring, it was evident that people focused so much on the clothes that they failed to take notice of who wore the outfit.
Neeva whispered, “Won’t he follow us in?”
Munroe shook her head. 
Lumani would be an idiot to attempt to track them through the subway, not only because of the cameras and security, but because of how easily he could miss them by even one train. 
She said, “He’ll wait for us to surface and follow from there.”
They rode the line to Milan’s central station, where, as it was now nearing the end of the workday, the building bustled with early twinges of rush-hour traffic. 
They transferred up a level, and yet another, to the main lobby of the station, a high-domed hall, one long side of which led to the tracks for the distance and high-speed lines, and the other to the outside. 
Through this part of the station, travelers, national and international, fed in and out of the city by the hundreds of thousands each day.
Neeva twisted around, her face turned upward, eyes wide in wonder at what was said by some to be the most beautiful station in the world, and tripped. 
Munroe caught her. “Sightseeing is going to get you killed, okay? Focus.”
Outside the station, streets were trash-strewn, narrow, and congested with traffic, and Munroe searched out the storefronts for what she knew had to be nearby. 
Came at last to what she wanted: a small shop sandwiched among a strip of mom-and-pop stores, 
glass windows entirely filled with colorful phone-card and travel advertisements that touted rates to mostly third-world destinations; 
a business that provided the means to make cheap international calls and Internet access by the minute.
Inside, Munroe set Neeva by the front, where she could watch the street from the cracks between the window posters, and handed her the backpack. 
“If you see someone familiar,” she said, “don’t try to be brave. It sounds stupid because I won’t be far from the door, but they can move fast. 
“Scream ‘fuoco’ with everything you’ve got. Noise is your friend.”
Neeva mouthed the word and nodded.】
“And don’t step into the open doorway. If he’s watching, he’ll just as easily take you with a tranquilizer and carry you off.”
Another nod.
Munroe turned to the nearby counter, where an elderly man, the business’s only apparent employee, took Munroe’s money while casting an occasional stare in Neeva’s direction.
The phone booths closest to Neeva were occupied, so Munroe took what was available, trying to keep an eye on the girl while she punched in a seemingly endless stream of numbers and codes to dial Bradford’s number. 
He answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Milan,” she said.
“You okay?”
“Yes, but I’ve got to make this quick because I’ve not only got a tail, I’ve got Neeva with me, too.”
“You what?”
“I’ll explain it as soon as I’ve got more time.”
“I need your address,” he said, and she read the details off the receipt.
In an exchange of business, without any of the emotional undertone that had punctuated their previous conversations, Bradford ran through step-by-step directions that Munroe jotted down; 
an address she dare not put into the phone’s browser or plug into the GPS in case that, too, transmitted details back to Lumani.
“Your guy needs to know I have a tail,” Munroe said.
“Can you shake it?”
“They’re like a bedbug infestation.”
“I’ll warn him,” Bradford said, and Munroe heard the smile in his voice. “Be safe.”
“My very best,” she said.
Neeva still stared out the window when Munroe approached, and the old man still studied Neeva.
“Anything?” Munroe asked, and Neeva shook her head.
A clothing shop three doors down toward the train station displayed discount signs in the windows, and Munroe walked Neeva to it and stepped inside. 
Counted out most of what was left of Arben’s money, found an oversize long-sleeved shirt that could replace Arben’s jacket and a stylish hat Neeva could use to tuck her hair underneath.
Although the two pieces didn’t entirely erase the ridiculousness of Neeva’s getup, combined they helped to make her clothing more of a choice, and by implication far less attention-garnering.
“We’ll get you something else later,” Munroe said. “For now this is all I’ve got money for.”
“It works,” Neeva said.
They returned to the station and Munroe searched for storage lockers, found none, and so followed the signs for Deposito bagagli, the manned luggage depot where for a fee baggage could be screened and left behind. 
She stopped when she saw the line, five people deep. Turned a slow circle, scanning shops and people, searching faces for the curious and familiar. 
Shrugged off the backpack. Opened it long enough to pull out the tape, phone, and travel documents. 
Shoved everything, including the tape, bulky and uncomfortable, inside her jacket, 
then with a subtle re-check of surroundings, pushed the pack and the remainder of its contents into a garbage bag.
Neeva’s mouth opened and her lips formed a question, but she stopped before the words came out. 
Munroe took her elbow and pointed her toward the escalators. “Keep walking,” she said.
If she could have, Munroe would have left Neeva at the station and returned to collect her when business was finished. 
Partners in general added complications, inevitably had to be protected and typically got in the way. 
Neeva, in particular, and under these circumstances, with her lack of training and childlike trust, made for an exceptional burden.
But she couldn’t risk the separation. Not even running decoy.
If Lumani was even half the predator and a fraction the strategist she assumed him to be, he would know this stop at the station and the sudden movement of another tracker was his prey, masking scent. 
To be certain, he’d be forced to check out all leads and it would cost him time, and that was all she’d done by abandoning the backpack and the equipment: purchased time.
Munroe looped from the upper level, wound through crowds, down again to the track they’d just used, returning in the direction from which they’d come. 
Reached the platform, and with Neeva sliding back against a tiled wall in order to catch her breath, 
Munroe scanned faces, waiting for the mechanical announcement and the hiss down the tracks. 
The approaching roar, the squeal of brakes meant another ride, another chance at freedom.
Waiting passengers approached the doors, and Munroe maneuvered Neeva into the thick of the crowd, stepping to the side to allow those within to exit. 
Near the stairs on the opposite platform, Munroe caught the first sign of familiar. 
Recognition came first in a flash of color and a glint, as if light had reflected off metal or an oversize briefcase.
Munroe stepped onto the train and, hand on Neeva’s shoulder, guided the girl behind standing passengers, but the move wouldn’t have made any difference. 
Lumani stared at Munroe through the glass and on his face was a gloating smile. 
The train began to move and he touched an index finger to his forehead and tipped it toward her.
“Was that him?” Neeva said. “Pretty Boy?”
Munroe nodded.
Pulled the pieces of Arben’s phone from her pockets. Put the battery in and powered the device on.
“Are you worried?”
“Not yet,” Munroe whispered, and Neeva, taking the cue, kept silent.
Another text waited when the phone finally booted. Another picture, of Alexis, this time naked, blindfolded, and spread-eagled against a concrete floor. 
Munroe clenched her teeth and deleted the image. To focus on anything other than the moment would mean mistakes, would mean death, 
and by default allow innumerable other girls to fall into the same fate as Neeva and Alexis. She would stay the course.
Warm and uninvited, Neeva’s hand touched Munroe’s arm. Munroe tensed. Neeva withdrew. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”
Munroe nodded and forced a pained smile of acknowledgment, scrolled to the phone contacts, 
and, with paper and pen she’d taken from the phone shop, wrote down Lumani’s and the Doll Maker’s numbers. 
Then, with the phone still on, Munroe dropped it into the jacket pocket of the woman standing next to her.

Chapter 30
The consulate waiting room had long since emptied, and in an unabashed land grab, Munroe stretched out on the longer couch, one arm draped over her face, the other by her side. 
An hour until she could contact Bradford, an hour for the Doll Maker’s latest trick to turn around and around inside her stomach, feeding and nourishing the cancerous hatred that poisoned her.
She hovered above the mental abyss, kept from falling by force of will. 
Shut out the world by descending into darkness, the closest she could get to putting herself into suspended animation while she waited for time to pass, waited to take matters into her own hands and either through her own death or someone else’s put an end to this misery forever.
Conversation between Neeva and the office staff continued beyond the walls, more of the same constant attention that filtered out as an indecipherable murmur 
and made it easy to imagine rounds of e-mail, one person confiding in the next until inexplicably news of Neeva’s surfacing leaked and Internet headlines swirled with rumors and everyone with an opinion became an instant expert. 
Neeva could return to her life, to some sense of normalcy, and this time she’d have a wave of media at her back, cresting her celebrity status higher.
Munroe was glad for the girl. At least Neeva’s story had ended happily, and now she could turn her back on that chapter to focus fully on what she must do next. 
At an hour to the minute, she sat up. Stepped to the glass and knocked for attention. 
Begged for the use of the line once more, and although the staff member, courteous and professional, obliged, Munroe understood from nuance the inconvenience her presence created.
She didn’t need whispers and surreptitious glances to know that by bringing Neeva to the consulate she’d raised unanswerable questions about her own role. 
So the staff, with no authority to detain and question her, focused entirely on Neeva, politely providing Munroe with what she needed to sort out her own plans and then left her alone.
The woman put the handset beneath the glass and dialed. Unlike before, Bradford didn’t immediately answer, and Munroe counted rings. 
The inner pressure that had been kept in check, one soothing pull of oxygen at a time, amped exponentially higher with each long tone— 
fear of losing yet another part of what mattered— a pounding tempo that built, frenetic and maddening— proof, if she ever needed it, that she walked the razor edge of sanity— 
until the line finally connected and Bradford, breathless, as if he’d run for the phone, said, “I’m here.”
The internal pressure released, collapsed into temporary calm.
“I’ve got you set,” he said, “but the closest I could manage was Milan. Can you get into Italy?”
Munroe closed her eyes and sighed. More driving. More time wasted. “Yes,” she said. “I can do it.”
“I haven’t been able to find an alert out for you yet,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it’s not there, just means I haven’t found it. Do you have access to e-mail?”
The waiting room had a computer that the consulate staff would connect to the Internet if that was what she needed. “I can get to my race-or-die account,” she said.
“I’ll send you general directions. It’ll get you started. You’ll need to contact me from Italy for the rest of the details. I’m sorry about that.” He paused. “Do you have any money on you?”
“About seventy euros,” she said. “It’s enough to get me to Milan.” She hesitated. “Miles, they have Alexis.”
Bradford was silent a long second. “I was afraid it would happen,” he said. “I tried to protect her. 
“When you disappeared, we started digging and pulled a match on some of the information in the Burbank files. 
“I went to Kate hoping she might have some idea of what was going on. She’s still facilitating, Michael, even from behind bars, only now it’s not for you but against you. 
“She sees this as her magnum opus. Payback, she said. She’s had an appeal running through the courts— her next court date is in a few days— 
“and although I don’t think she expects you to survive what she’s put into play, no matter how things turn out, I think she’s planning to disappear. I’ve got a team keeping an eye on things so we don’t lose track of her.”
Munroe drew in the words. Plotted through them, then said, “They’re threatening to replace Neeva with Alexis if I don’t get Neeva back to them.” Paused. “But it gets worse.” 
She outlined the logic, the analysis behind her fears regarding the client, the fate she expected either girl to be thrown to, and when she was finished, she shut her eyes against the pain. 
“They’re forcing me to choose who lives or dies,” she said. “And the result of not choosing is the same as making the decision itself.”
“What will you do?” he said.
“Stay the course,” she said. “If it’s not Neeva, not Alexis, it will be Tabitha, or you, or someone else. 
“It’s not going to end, Miles, unless someone ends it.” Munroe drew another long breath. 
“The image they sent me was taken in front of her home in daylight. Find her for me, Miles— please, if you’re able. 
“It’s an unfair burden to place on you, and I’m sorry. It’s the only way I can let everything go. I need you to free me so that I can do what I need to do.”
“I’ll give everything I’ve got,” he said. “My friend will have a phone for you. I want you to call me when you get it.” 
She understood what was left unspoken: call him so they could speak freely.
“I promise.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Always,” she whispered.
She returned the handset beneath the glass and sat for a while, running circles around the effort she’d made to protect Alexis over the years, all of it gone to waste. 
Could count on one hand the people she’d allowed to become that close to her: Logan, Bradford, Kate Breeden, 
and a couple of male friends— long-forgotten— whom she’d brought home to her sister Tabitha’s house for shock value during the worst of her inability to integrate into suburban American life.
They had been rough, her early years in the United States.
As a surprise to missionary parents who believed they were finished with child rearing, she hadn’t exactly been wanted. 
She’d been six when her closest sibling, more like a father than a brother, turned eighteen and left Africa for home. 
There were two sisters before him who’d been old enough to remain in Dallas when their parents had moved to Cameroon, 
and until Munroe, just shy of her eighteenth birthday, had showed up unannounced on Tabitha’s doorstep in the United States, 
whatever familial bond that existed had been based entirely on sporadic photographs and occasional mail that arrived until she was fourteen and had abandoned home for good.
Munroe wasn’t so much the black sheep of the family as a nonexistent child who’d given up trying to belong to sisters she’d never known and a brother who’d abandoned her; 
had given up trying to earn parental approval in favor of carving her own niche on Cameroonian soil 
until, at seventeen, violence sent her running to a country that held no attachment but a passport and strangers she called family.
Moving into Tabitha’s house had meant living with a woman old enough to be her mother, who’d welcomed her because of who she was and resented her for everything she wasn’t; 
a woman whose eldest daughter, Alexis, was the closest Munroe ever had to a real sister, and now the Doll Maker had her.
Munroe stood. As with Logan, she would abandon what she wanted most to do what needed to be done. 
Wouldn’t bother with getting Bradford’s e-mail, she knew where she was going, and Internet access here at the consulate or not, she’d still have to find a way to get the details once she was in Italy.
If Neeva had been alone, Munroe would have stopped to say good-bye, but under the circumstances she preferred not to invite the additional attention doing so would attract. 
In the security area, she retrieved the backpack again with the maps, the tape, the GPS, the pieces of Arben’s phone, and everything else she’d dumped into it before abandoning the Opel.
Passed back through the metal detector— the only way out of the consulate’s one exit— but before she got to the foyer, the side door opened and Neeva was there.
The girl followed her to the elevator. “You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Munroe said, and passed up the elevator for the stairwell.
Neeva didn’t stop. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Now’s not a good time, Neeva.”
The girl followed down the flight of stairs. “It’s important.”
On the second-floor landing, Munroe paused. Turned so that she was eye-to-eye with Neeva, who was a few steps behind. “Go back,” she said. “I’ll e-mail; you can talk to me later.”
Neeva was beside Munroe now. “I want to come with you.”
Munroe paused midstep, Neeva’s words like cymbals crashing inside her head, was noise that kept reverberating and drowned out everything else. 
Hissed, “Are you out of your mind?” Moved another two stairs down and stopped again. Turned again. 
“I just risked my life and the lives of people I love to get you to a safe place. Get away from me. You have your shot at freedom. Go home.”
One floor up, the door to the stairwell opened and the guard, who’d apparently followed Neeva out, leaned over. 
Seeing the two in a standoff, the woman trotted a half-flight down and peered around. “Neeva?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”
The tone was friendly enough, but her facial expression and body language betrayed the protective animosity Munroe had felt since their arrival. 
Neeva turned to the guard, and Munroe, unwilling to endure the ludicrousness of the conversation, used the break in focus to keep going, two steps at a time.
Neeva ignored the woman’s question and followed Munroe.
On the ground floor, Munroe pushed through the door to the lobby, was halfway to the main entry when Neeva popped out behind her saying, “Michael, please let me come with you.”
Munroe said, “Go back.”
Neeva hurried to catch up. “I won’t,” she said— that same goddamn stubbornness and refusal to quit that had made the first half of the drive from Zagreb so much trouble.
Munroe spun around. Nearly collided with the girl. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you have any idea the risks I’ve taken to get you here? 
“People have died for you and you finally have a chance to get out of this mess. Go. Go back. Be free. Live life.”
Neeva crossed her arms. Said, “No.”
“Get the hell back up those stairs or I’ll drag you in by your hair.”
“You wouldn’t,” Neeva said, chin out and defiant. “Not with the consulate people up there, staring at you, secretly wondering if you had something to do with my kidnapping. You’re smarter than that.”
“Fuck you,” Munroe said. “I’m done being responsible for your life.” 
She turned her back and stepped from the cool, silent interior of the lobby to the noise and life of the streets outside.
Neeva did likewise, and the pounding inside Munroe’s chest up-ticked to a dizzying tempo. 
Noah had died and she’d risked Logan’s life to get Neeva to a place safe from the Doll Maker, safe so she could discharge all responsibility, cut loose from the puppet strings, and put an end to the madness. Insanity.
Lumani was out there somewhere— not just Lumani. If he’d had anyone local, then he’d possibly pulled together reinforcements during their hours inside the consulate, would be waiting and watching for an opportunity, 
and here she was again, tracking device saying Come and get me, and Neeva exposed and out on the street in the open, 
as if the entire ordeal of the previous twenty-four hours, the death and the suffering, had been for nothing.
Munroe stared at the empty space where the motorbike had been. Stolen or reclaimed, she’d never know. 
The back of her neck prickled with the unmistakable feeling of being watched. 
Her gaze shifted to the park across the street and from there to the nearby buildings. 
She strode away from the consulate, in the direction away from the coast. 
At the nearest cross street, Munroe took a sharp turn, and at the next street another, each directional change chosen at the last second, a form of mental coin toss, 
while her eyes ran a continuous scan along rooftops, balconies, windows, and streets for a sign of the shooter.
Whatever her pace, Neeva kept up. Not at Munroe’s side, or even as a shadow at her elbow, but with the timed rhythm of a determined tracker, following a few feet behind, just beyond the edge of her peripheral vision. 
Munroe didn’t turn, never stopped to gauge how close she kept but could feel her, tugging at the threads of awareness.
This was the path to madness, to death. Made no sense at all, served no purpose. 
Enraged her sense of justice and fairness. Made a mockery of the life expended and the choices made. 
They passed an empty apartment doorway, and Munroe turned and grabbed Neeva. Shoved her into the nook. 
Fisted the jacket at Neeva’s throat, and, teeth clenched, pushed her against the wall. “They will kill you,” Munroe said.
Chin out, still defiant, Neeva said, “We all die”— a paraphrase of the words Munroe had quoted in the aftermath of the fight with Arben— “it’s really just a question of what deals the final blow.”
“No,” Munroe said. She tightened her grip on Neeva’s clothing and pushed her harder against the wall so that her head knocked back. 
“You don’t fucking understand. They’re not just going to kill you. That man with the dog, the one in Monaco, he’s a psychopathic sadist. 
“He’s going to carve you up in pieces and take his sweet time doing it— he’s not going to just kill you, he’s going to torture you for his own gratification, he’s going to get off on making you bleed and suffer. 
“Do you get that?” Shoved again. Harder. Angrier. “Right now, me standing here, having this moronic conversation with you, ups the chance someone else is going to die exactly like that.”
Neeva pushed back. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “I see what you don’t see.”
Munroe dropped the backpack, kicked it down a step, lowered her voice, and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I am not the stupid silver-spoon spoiled rich kid you think I am,” Neeva said, and she, too, lowered her voice, stopped pushing, and Munroe relaxed her grip. 
Neeva slipped down the wall slightly so that she stood straight again.
“I know you don’t like me,” Neeva said. Her words were rushed whispers, as though she was afraid she wouldn’t have time to finish what she’d followed all this way to say. 
“You think I don’t understand what saving me cost you and that I’m throwing away a chance to live. I’m not stupid and ungrateful. 
“You saved me, right? But people died because you saved me. I don’t know why they want me so bad, but I saw your face when you got that text. 
“You don’t have to tell me, but I know. Someone else is dead or is going to die because of me. How many will it take?” 
Neeva paused; her voice caught and she looked up into Munroe’s face. “It’s not right— one life for all those others.”
The image of Noah, like a mirage rising from the desert, his body on the ground, darkened holes in his forehead, danced in Munroe’s vision, and teeth clenched, she said, 
“It would have been really helpful if you would’ve reached that conclusion twenty fucking hours ago.”
“I didn’t understand twenty hours ago,” Neeva said. “Didn’t get what was going on— didn’t see it until after we were inside the consulate and they started telling me some of the stuff they knew, 
“and then that text came, and I saw your face and…” Neeva stopped. Pleaded. “How was I supposed to know?”
Munroe bit back spite and anger and venom. Food to a starving man, she wanted what Neeva offered yet couldn’t take it. 
“You’ve fought too hard to just roll over now,” Munroe said. “You want to live.”
Tears welled in Neeva’s eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “I want to live so bad— I want life more than anything else on earth.”
“Then why are you doing this?” Munroe said. “I got you to safety.” Paused. Whispered, “I fucking got you to safety. 
“Against everything I wanted, against everything I am. I gave up everything to get you there. And now you just throw it away?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it cost you. I thought you were just like them— the people who stole me.”
“You’d willingly turn yourself over to these people, this”— Munroe spat out the word— “animal?”
Neeva’s cheeks flushed and she shook her head. “I-I … no. Not that. You’re plotting something. You’re going to get back at them, I know it. 
“The men who took me, they still want me, so I thought maybe you could use me. Like as part of a trap or as a bargaining chip in your plan— like bait.”
Munroe let go of Neeva’s jacket. “God, you are so naive,” she said. “You left the safety of the consulate for that? 
“You are young and stupid and clueless, and I despise and adore you for it.”
“Can you, though? Can you use me as bait and would it do any good?”
Munroe checked the street in both directions. They’d already stayed still longer than was prudent; needed to keep moving. 
Munroe took Neeva’s biceps and turned her toward the sidewalk. “You know what happens to bait when you fish?”
Neeva stared at her blankly.
Munroe sighed and picked up the backpack. “This isn’t Hollywood, Neeva. This isn’t a movie set. In real life, the bait dies.”
“But this is all so fucked up,” Neeva said. “That they can just steal women and sell them— they do whatever they want, take whatever they want, and nobody does anything to stop them. 
“But I heard you. You’re planning. You’re actually going to do something about it. 
“I know how dangerous these people are, and I hate them, and I have a chance to make a difference. I can help you.”
Munroe stared at her for a moment, wasting precious seconds, trying to understand the underlying thought processes that had made Neeva follow her, trying to grasp what Neeva really wanted, 
but in the end she had no reply, so she walked on in silence while Neeva stayed beside her, legs working overtime to keep up with Munroe’s long stride.
Whether or not she wanted Neeva along was irrelevant now. 
She didn’t have the time or the inclination to return her to the consulate, and she couldn’t leave her to wander back on her own just so Lumani could pick her up en route. 
“We’ll have to get you a hat,” Munroe said, “and some different clothes.” 
Once more she lowered her voice to a whisper. “And I can’t promise to keep you safe. I have other priorities now.”
“This was my decision,” Neeva whispered back. “I’ll be responsible for me.” She hesitated. “But you’ll do the best you can, right?”
“Yeah,” Munroe said. “The best I can to keep you safe, but you’re better off scared.”
“Of course I’m scared.”
“Good. At least you’re not entirely insane. Odds are ten to one we’ll both be fish food by the end of tomorrow.”
Munroe checked over her shoulder. Along both sides of the street. Crossed it. 
Neeva said, “Well, you wouldn’t be doing whatever it is you’re doing if you didn’t think you’d succeed.”
Munroe stopped midstep, stood just long enough to stare hard at Neeva. “You’re wrong,” she said, then continued walking again.
“I’m doing this because I don’t have a choice. Even if everything had gone the way it was supposed to, even if I had delivered you like they wanted, the people I love would never be safe as long as I’m alive. 
“If I traded you now, they’d still kill me— so I’m dead either way.”

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Chapter 29
OUTSIDE LE GAYAN, PEILLE, FRANCE
Out of Monaco, up into the hills, roundabout to roundabout, Munroe headed away from the coast. 
The rearview offered no glimpse of Lumani, but she didn’t need to see him to know that, like a shadow following the beacon, a shark circling for blood, he was out there. 
The danger wasn’t in the running, the danger was in the stopping, and eventually she would have to stop.
They could find sanctuary if they stayed just one step ahead for a little while longer. 
In Nice, the closest sizable chunk of civilization beyond Monaco, there was an American consulate— 
not the same level of protection as an embassy, sovereign territory on foreign soil, with its Marines and high security, but safety nonetheless.
In Nice, Neeva could contact her parents, get a passport, and go home. 
In Nice, Munroe could contact Bradford. Find out about Logan. Regroup. Think. Sleep. God, she needed sleep. 
In Nice was a refuge, a place where, for a time, she could stop running, but she wouldn’t be able to get there in the Opel. 
Not with the evidence that tied her to the murder in Monaco, a murder for which she wasn’t willing to keep running for the rest of her life.
Scanning, hunting, Munroe scouted the area, time ticking off inside her head. 
At every turn, every junction, she opted for provincial signage and smaller roads until they were thoroughly into countryside.
Neatly kept fields rose and fell with the rises and dips in the terrain. Farmhouses abutted the roadway, and traffic was sporadic at best.
A flash of red caught her attention, and she pulled the Opel off the road and followed a gravel track fifteen meters in,past laundry drying on the line and well-tended vegetable and flower gardens still in the young stage of early spring,to a courtyard between a three-story farmhouse and a building that was either storage or a barn. 
She stopped next to the motorbike that had caught her attention: the flash of color against the whitewashed wall.
Munroe shut off the engine. Waited for any sign of occupancy in the house, and when there was no rustling of curtains, no face peering from window or door, and no dogs coming to greet her, she got out of the car.
Down the road in either direction the quiet hum of nature replaced the traffic noise. 
Birds in a territorial screech flushed from a nearby berry bush, all of it a relative silence that made it easy to hear a car approach from far away,which meant neighbors who’d heard the Opel’s engine would have taken the time to glance out windows; 
meant that no matter how secluded this particular set of buildings, someone had inevitably seen her pull in and was now curious.
Five minutes to be here and gone again, if she could find what she wanted.
Munroe leaned toward the car window, put finger to lips, and motioned Neeva to follow; 
strode across the gravel parking area and up the steps to the farmhouse door.
Peered through the glass; rapped on the frame; was answered by silence.
The predictability of human nature said that the keys to the motorbike were inside. 
Would be found someplace familiar and routine: an office desk, a kitchen drawer, a key rack, or a decorative bowl— 
a spot intended to spare the house owners the ordeal of always having to hunt them down.
Munroe tried the lock, and when the door swung inward, stepped in after it. 
Motioned for Neeva to wait on the threshold, a decision intended to keep egress clear, but especially to keep the girl from touching anything or getting underfoot.
The side entry into the house opened at the end of a long wood-paneled and runner-lined hallway. 
The air inside smelled of a mixture of wax and dust. 
Munroe peered down the hall, stopped short at the sight of several sets of keys hanging from a rack. 
Softly on the runner she moved inward to snag them and then, securing them, backtracked to the kitchen; 
searched through cupboards and shelves, conscious of every wasted second, requisitioning as she went: 
long-handled broom, bottle of vodka, bottle of cognac, large tub of flour, box of matches, and knife.
Returned to the side door and, arms full, nodded Neeva, with her inquisitive and unhelpful stare, out of the way. 
Munroe dumped the bounty on the ground beside the car. “Wait here,” she said, and continued to the laundry lines. 
Tore off a dry bedsheet and brought it to Neeva. With her foot, Munroe nudged the knife toward the girl. “Cut strips,” she said. “Lengthwise. As quickly as you can.”
Neeva set to work without asking why, and Munroe strode toward the motorbike. Checked the tires. Tried the keys until she found the one that brought the machine to life. 
Noted the fuel level, then switched off the ignition and dropped the rest of the keys on the ground, where they’d be discovered easily enough. 
She had her way out, and a compromise between lost time and forensic evidence.
Munroe returned to the Opel. Dumped the bottles of alcohol over the seats and then took three of the strips Neeva had torn and cut.
Knotted the material, and with time moving faster than her fingers, the strips became a braid.
She paused again to listen: No sound of traffic. No sign of Lumani. At least not yet. 
Her initial five minutes had come and gone, and although she understood his mind, his strategy, knew he was content to hold back and let her run, she also knew they’d lost the lead and he would begin to circle in for the kill.
Munroe removed the Opel’s gas cap and used the broom handle to push most of the cloth into the tank. 
When the braid was soaked, she pulled it out and repeated the procedure with the other end. 
Reached into the back of the car to snag the backpack and tossed the bag to Neeva. 
Lowered the rear window on the Opel just enough to feed the wick far into the interior, place it on a puddle of alcohol. When it was set, she moved to the front. 
From the driver’s seat, she scattered the flour in the interior until it filled the air, then tossed it against the windows, over the dash, several kilos’ worth of the stuff until the inside was full of dust.
Dumped the container on the ground and shut the door. “Step back a few feet,” she said, and when Neeva complied, she lit a match and set the wick alight at its center.
Took Neeva by the elbow and hurried her toward the bike.
The flame traveled in both directions, the dust explosion inside the car louder and flashier than the slower burn of the fuel in the gas tank,all told not enough to destroy the vehicle in an exciting ball of flame, but enough. 
Fibers and hair were gone and the fuel would continue to feed the fire and raise the surface temperature inside the car enough to warp plastic and rid it of any prints that were left.
Mouth agape, Neeva stared at the car. “Flour can do that?” she said.
Munroe prodded her forward. “We’re in a hurry,” she said. “We need to go.”
TWO-WHEELED VEHICLES WERE not created equal. The motorbike, closer to scooter than motorcycle, was a world away from the Ducati abandoned in Dallas, black-on-black with speed and torque and adrenaline rush,but in the moment, as a way of escape and of pushing closer to ending the madness, it was every bit as beautiful.
With the Opel billowing black smoke, Munroe revved away from the farmhouse, bike tires spitting gravel, instinct adjusting for the differences between the power with which she was familiar and this lesser thing.
Neeva squeezed hard and pressed her forehead into Munroe’s shoulder.
Reaching the asphalt, Munroe gained speed and traction. Down the road to the left, in the direction they’d come, activity announced itself in flashes of color. 
Not Lumani, but neighbors, inevitably curious about the noise, the smoke. 
Munroe took the turn hard and Neeva yelped; they headed in the opposite direction of whatever was going on down the road.
Without access to the GPS, without a solid bearing on roads that twisted and wound in no specific direction,sporadic signs to tiny and unrecognizable towns became meaningless markers forcing them to wander toward the edge of lost 
until the roads became larger, the signage pointed to the familiar, and the refuge of Nice, which had begun to dissipate like a mirage, phased back into a solid, viable destination.
Into towns, along two-lane streets that ran through the heart of them, the journey segmented into one roundabout and junction to the next; 
curving with mountain ridges and through tunnels, traffic often backing up in long stretches behind slower-moving vehicles. 
Not once did Neeva lift her forehead from the shoulder she’d planted it against, and her squeeze tightened whenever Munroe pulled out of the traffic queue and straddled the line, weaving ahead of cars in a way that would have brought on aggression back home, but here was no different than the erratic riding of the many other mopeds and scooters on the road.
They couldn’t move as fast as Lumani, not if he was driving anything similar to Arben’s Passat,but by zigzagging and maneuvering, cutting through traffic, they would gain a time advantage nothing on four wheels ever could.
Downhill and up again, Munroe bought minutes, bought Neeva’s life in increments,until finally the road wound steadily downward and they reached the city, and neared the coast with the same humidity and salt-tinged breeze that had caressed Monaco’s air.
Like the boardwalk in San Diego or South Beach, the coastal avenue of Nice was green and palm-tree-lined,and even this early in the season was filled with locals and tourists alike, cyclists, pedestrians, and skaters, all threading along the walking paths. 
Once within the city Munroe knew the way without directions, could find the building that anyone else would be hard-pressed to locate without having been there before.
A stone’s throw from the beach, and two doors down from a police station that filled the corner of the block, just far enough back from the ocean that the crowds were thinner, the consulate was housed three floors up in a nondescript office building. 
Only a small square plaque near the intercom buttons announced its presence. No flag. No sign. No nothing.
Munroe took the bike up onto the sidewalk. Thumb-punched the intercom for the consulate before she’d fully switched off the ignition. 
“Get off,” she whispered to Neeva, and when the intercom hissed, she said, “American citizens, passport issues.”
After a short delay, the door buzzed and Munroe stretched forward to grab it. 
“Hold it open,” she said, and Neeva, still sliding off the seat, reached out, took the handle, and stood in the door frame.
Munroe set the kickstand. Left the key in the ignition and hoped against hope that someone would brave the police station and steal the bike. 
She took Neeva by the elbow, prodded her inside, and shut the door behind them.
With the thud, with the silence in the cool empty foyer, with only postal boxes and an elevator bank for company, one world ended and another began. 
Munroe slumped against the wall, and for the first time since she’d felt the sting on her thigh those many, many hours ago in Dallas, she truly breathed.
She had brought Neeva to safety. Realization settled, and against the wall, eyes closed and thumb to the bridge of her nose, she allowed the first wave of relief to reach inside. 
From here, she could discharge her duty and plot her own way forward.
When she opened her eyes, Neeva, looking as tired and beat-up as Munroe felt, was studying her. 
Munroe straightened. Pushed off from the wall and nodded toward the elevator. “Up we go,” she said.
THE ELEVATOR OPENED onto a cramped foyer with a door on either side. 
One led to the stairwell; the other, metal-reinforced and CCTV-monitored, to the consulate.
When they stepped off the elevator, a uniformed guard waited for them.
Asked for passports, Munroe offered a modified version of the truth and presented the person of Neeva Eckridge in their stead.
The guard left them. Disappeared behind the metal door. Returned a few moments later and opened the door wide. 
They moved from a small foyer to an even smaller entryway, made impossibly cramped by both an X-ray machine and a metal detector,and before allowing them into the consulate proper, the guard X-rayed the backpack and requested all electronics.
Munroe handed over the bag. “Just keep it all,” she said. “I’ll get it on my way out.”
The consulate filled the entire floor of the narrow building and was itself not more than one large room, partitioned by false walls and windowed booths that made it possible for those in the waiting area to see, if not hear, most of what went on beyond the accessible spots.
A young couple sat on one of the couches. Munroe assumed newlyweds, from their body language, and their facial expressions guaranteed that they recognized Neeva. 
Were it not for cell phones having been commandeered by the guard, she would have bet thirty seconds before images of Neeva hit the social networks.
The consulate’s one staff member called Neeva to the window, and after a rush of hushed conversation, motioned for her to return to the guard area and from there through the security door that would allow her on the other side of the partition.
Backing away from the window and the woman behind it, turning in the direction she’d been ushered, Neeva glanced at Munroe for reassurance.
Munroe nodded her on.
This was how it should be. The wheels would start spinning, the phones ringing, and the powers-that-be would throw their weight into Neeva’s fight. 
As for herself, all Munroe wanted was a phone that could make international calls. 
She needed to contact Bradford, and surely the consulate had one, but until the issue with Neeva was settled, until Munroe had been vetted, she wouldn’t bother asking to use it.
The last of Neeva’s dress passed around the corner, and Munroe, depleted beyond empty and with nothing more to do than allow fate to run its course, turned toward the waiting area’s smaller couch. 
Ignoring the accusatory stares from the couple and the disapproving look of the guard, she sat, shifting her head to the armrest, her knees dangling over the edge, let go, and fell hard into oblivion.
THE COUPLE LEFT. Others entered and were soon on their way again. 
Another staff member arrived to tend fully to Neeva: On the edge of sleep, Munroe was aware of all of these things,but she pushed them away and allowed time to pass and a dreamless darkness to consume her until finally the room was quiet.
She begged the use of a phone. The consulate staff member passed the handset under the glass and, on Munroe’s behalf, punched in the number for Bradford’s cell as Munroe recited it. 
The connection made, Munroe nodded her thanks, and while it rang, dread and desire mixed, swirling, within a beaker of conflicted emotion.
More than anything, she craved the soothing of Bradford’s voice, craved to drop from the pressure and the pain, from death and the fractured reality of the present back to peace— 
the way things were when she was with him, the way they’d been before this nightmare had struck. 
But the call would also bring news of Logan, news she could not bear to hear, yet must.
Even accounting for the long distance connection, Bradford answered immediately.
“Michael?” he said, and that one word, her name on his lips, like fire deprived of oxygen, suffocated the adrenaline of rage and suffering, suppressed the voices and tremors rumbling in the background, and she fell instantly into a vacuum of nothingness.
“Me,” she whispered.
“Hey,” he whispered back.
Receiver in hand, the cord taut, she slid down the wall and sat on the floor.
“Did you ever get my messages?” she said. “Were you able to find Logan?”
“We got them and we found him.”
The air went out of her. She closed her eyes, breathing in the words she’d feared she’d never hear. “Thank you,” she said. Paused. “Thank you,” she whispered again. 
And then: “I’ve seen some nasty video footage. How is he?” When Bradford hesitated, she said, “Please tell me.”
“They fucked him up pretty bad,” Bradford said. “He’s hospitalized right now— kept sedated for the time being. 
“He’s going to need reconstructive surgery at some point, but it’s hard to get information because I’m not a relative.”
She drank in air, one long, drawn-out breath following another. Decompression. Logan was safe, and the joy of that fact washed over her.
She’d given him up for dead to do what she had to do, and somehow, in the midst of everything, running blind and without options, she’d brought Neeva to safety and Logan was still alive.
He might be damaged, but he was, unbelievably, alive.
She wanted to shout. To dance. To scream Fuck you to Lumani, who by now was certainly hidden in some enclave where he could target the consulate entrance. 
But her reaction remained muted as she stayed sitting, one hand pressed into the carpet, fingers playing with the fibers. 
“If you contact Charity, she might be able to help,” Munroe said. “She holds a medical power of attorney for him.” 
Charity, keeper of secrets from Logan’s previous life and mother of his daughter— a child Munroe had risked her life to save. 
“How are you?” Bradford asked.
“I’m okay,” Munroe said. “In one piece— no bullet holes. I’m at the consulate in Nice, and I’ve brought Neeva Eckridge with me.”
Bradford waited, and then said, “How are you?”
With the unspoken and valid concerns, her smile faded and she searched for words to properly give meaning and context to what he truly wanted to know.
“They killed Noah,” she said, and on the other end of the line Bradford swore unintelligibly. 
She lowered her voice and added, “Truthfully, I’m not well.” They both knew she wasn’t referring to mourning.
“Africa?” he asked.
“Not as bad,” she said, and then after a heartbeat, “Miles, I’ll be okay, I promise. As soon as I fix things on this end, I will be okay.”
“Argentina?” he asked.
She sighed and half-smiled over her failed attempt to get him to let the subject go. 
“No nightmares yet,” she said. “Just the darkness, and it fades quickly.”
“I worry,” he said.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Do you need help getting home?”
“Soon,” she said. “I have unfinished business, but I think there might be an APB out for me. Is there any chance Jack could poke around? See what’s out there?”
There was a long pause, the kind of pause even the worst delay on a horrible international line couldn’t account for.
“Jack’s dead,” Bradford said finally. She’d anticipated something like this and steeled against it,and yet the news still hit hard and overwhelmingly, the rawness inside made worse by Bradford’s having fussed over her while giving no clue to the depth of his own cruel anguish.
“How did it happen?” she whispered.
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