Her heart pulled tight as she continued to piece together his conversation. There was no direct mention of the president’s name again, not that she could discern, but she saw pieces of other words.
Gala.
Others.
Table.
Intermixed within these was a word she couldn’t quite decipher.
Ku.
She frowned, trying to understand the context. Her Mandarin was good for a foreigner, but one of her weaker languages. She thought through the basic characters that matched.Kucould mean “bitter” or “hardship” in one intonation, or “to cry” in another. Neither quite worked in the context of Seah’s conversation, though. In this moment, she wished desperately that Winter was at her side, that maybe he knew better.
As if he’d heard her, Winter shifted seamlessly into a new song inside the stadium, and the audience responded with a fresh burst of cheers. By the railing, Seah stopped talking to glare in annoyance toward the building’s interior. At the same time, Tems’s voice returned on her earpiece.
“Whoever Seah’s talking to,” he murmured to Sydney, “the person’s also here at the stadium.”
Sydney stiffened, her gaze searching the general area. Tems must be able to see her location on his tracker. “Near where we are?” she whispered.
“I’m tracking the signal on his call. It’s not a phone. It’s on a local area network. The other person’s right outside the stadium’s perimeters.”
As Sydney looked on, Seah hunched lower to continue speaking, his lips obscured by the phone.
Over time, Sydney had learned to recognize the subtle differences between a suspicious conversation and a simply nervous one. Seah seemed like a somewhat awkward man, perhaps prone to anxiety, but there was something about the stiffness of his stance, the way he kept looking at his watch as if he needed to be somewhere.
Back at the reserved box,she thought. He knew he couldn’t be absent for too long.
After a while, he straightened his jacket and started walking back in the direction of the box.
Sydney sank deeper into the shadows as he left, then followed himwith her gaze. “He’s heading back now,” she whispered into her earpiece. “ID on the other person?”
“Still outside,” Tems replied. “Hasn’t moved. You should follow Seah.”
“On it,” she murmured. She hoped that she’d managed to capture some of the video and audio of the cabinet member’s conversation. Then she materialized from the shadows of the plants, turned in the direction of the reserved box, and straightened her sleeves.
That was when she saw it. A red dot of light flickering against the fabric of her suit, inches above her stomach.
A laser sight from a gun.
She didn’t think; she just moved.
In an instant, she had darted behind one of the pillars of the balcony where Seah was standing just minutes earlier, her body hidden completely behind the stone. When she looked down again, the red dot was no longer there.
The other person’s right outside the stadium’s perimeters.
She could hear blood roaring in her ears. Someone had a target on her right now—someone located out in the trees beyond the stadium— and she had just narrowly avoided getting shot in the chest. She looked around, her eyes skipping from the few passersby in the hall—a trio of young attendees searching for their seats, a couple heading for the nearest bathrooms, a pair of security officers. None of them paid her any attention.
Whoever it was out there must either have been watching her or Seah, must have been scouting out this place—scoutingher—for a while. Was it the same person who’d been at the airport?
She switched the frequency of her earpiece from Winter to Tems. “Tems,” she whispered, covering her mouth with a subtle hand to prevent anyone watching from reading her lips. “There’s a target on me.”
He answered immediately. “Where?”
“Open hall between entrances three and four.” She could feel herhands trembling at the encounter as she looked down the hall. “Seah was just here.”
“That’s near the other person’s location.”
“I’m calling Niall,” she whispered. “See if he can get someone to intercept our mysterious interloper.”
