I run my thumb along the edge of the table, tracing a gouge in the wood that someone left years ago. "She's not going to come easily."
"She'll come. She's a professional. She understands the calculus."
Kane doesn't know Vix the way I do. He knows the encrypted signature, the intelligence product, the professional asset who has fed Echo Ridge actionable intelligence on Committee operations for years. He doesn't know the woman behind the signature, the one who would rather burn to the ground standing than survive on someone else's terms.
"I'll work on it," I say.
"Do that. Tommy's running surveillance on Committee communications traffic. If Webb's people pick up your trail in Brussels, we'll know before they knock. I'm sending extraction coordinates for a private airfield outside Ghent. Stryker can have a plane there in six hours."
"Copy."
"And Frost." Kane's voice drops a register. "How is she handling all of this?"
I touch my jaw. The skin is hot and swollen, the purple deepening to an ugly yellow at the edges. I can feel the shape of her knuckles in the bruise, each impact point mapped against the bone.
"She punched me."
Kane is quiet for a beat. "Don't let that become a pattern. I need you both operational, not settling personal scores while Webb's people close in."
The line goes dead. I set the phone down and lean back in the chair, listening to Vix's voice rise and fall through the wall. She's speaking French now, which means Marseille, which means she's dealing with the aftermath of Ines. Her accent is flawless, the consonants clipped and precise in a way that most nativespeakers can't manage, and I remember the night in Istanbul when she argued with a Turkish customs official in three languages without breaking stride. I sat at the bar pretending to drink raki and fell in love with her competence before I ever touched her skin.
My earpiece chirps. Tommy's voice cuts through, younger and lighter than Kane's, carrying the particular energy of a man who lives inside his screens and treats the world's intelligence infrastructure like a personal puzzle.
"Roman. You're alive. Color me shocked."
"Tommy."
"Listen, I'm sending you the latest Committee intercepts. Webb's search teams lost your trail somewhere between St Pancras and the Chunnel, so you've got breathing room. But they're already pulling CCTV from the terminal, and if they run facial recognition against Eurostar's passenger manifest, that breathing room shrinks fast."
"How fast?"
"Depends on how many favors Webb can call in with Belgian security services. Could be hours. Could be less. I'd plan for less."
"Noted."
"Also, Kane didn't mention this because Kane is Kane, but the team's been running a pool on whether Cross would actually punch you when she found out you were alive." A pause. "I had twenty on a left hook."
"It was a right cross."
"Damn. Stryker wins." There's a grin in Tommy's voice that I can hear across an ocean and half a continent. "How's the jaw?"
"Functional."
"That's the spirit. Okay, intercepts are coming through now. I've flagged the relevant traffic. Webb's people are checking transit hubs in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris.Standard net. They don't know where you are, but they know you're moving, and they're casting wide."
"Thanks, Tommy."
"One more thing. The dead man resurrection tour. How's that going for you, personally? On a scale of one to catastrophic."
"Catastrophic would be an improvement."
Tommy laughs, a sound that carries the warmth of someone who has never had to decide between his own survival and the safety of the person he loves. I envy that uncomplicated decency more than I would ever admit.
The intercepts load onto my phone in a cascade of encrypted data. I scroll through them while Vix's voice continues through the wall, lower now, strained, speaking German. Berlin. She's reaching Baumann, or trying to, and from the tension in her tone I can't tell whether the call connected or whether she's leaving a message for a dead man's voicemail.
I file the intercepts into categories. Transit surveillance: manageable, we'll avoid the obvious routes. Financial tracking: irrelevant, Victoria's accounts are already frozen. Human intelligence: this is the real threat. Webb's people are debriefing every captured contact, extracting information about Victoria's methods, her habits, her patterns. Each interrogation gives them another data point, another thread to follow. Ines in Marseille would have told them everything she knew, and what Ines knew included communication protocols, dead drop locations, and at least two of Victoria's alias identities.
The net is tightening. Not quickly, but with the grinding persistence of an organization that measures success in hours rather than weeks.
