"Long enough." I let the silence sit for a beat. "Your encryption was decent. Not good enough."
"What do you want?" he asks, and the question carries the tone of a man who has already accepted that cooperating is the only exit from this conversation that doesn't end with his life disassembled.
"I want what I've always wanted from you, Baumann: information." I hold his gaze and let him see the assessment running in real time, because showing him the machine at work is part of the leverage. "I know your wife's name and where she works. I know where your children attend school. I know the financial routing that connects the Liechtenstein account to Volkov's compensation structure, and I know that routing constitutes evidence of espionage that would hold up in any European court."
I pause, letting each fact register. The next part is inference rather than confirmed intelligence, a read based on the profile of a man who took the risk of betraying me for compensation that suggests ambition beyond simple greed. But inference delivered with enough confidence becomes indistinguishable from knowledge.
"And I think you've been positioning yourself for something larger within the Committee's European command structure." I watch his face when I say it, cataloging the brief tightening around his eyes, the involuntary shift in his posture that confirms the read before he can suppress it. "You want Volkov's authority when the restructuring happens, because you're ambitious enough to see opportunity inside the chaos. The question is whether you want that ambition recorded in a file that lands on the desk of every intelligence director in Europe."
The career ambition hits harder than the financial exposure. His shoulders draw inward, because the money is a problem that can be managed but the professional destruction is permanent. Baumann survives by being useful. Strip the usefulness away and there is nothing left to trade.
"That information would destroy me."
"That information will remain exactly where it is, provided you give me a reason to keep it there." I pull a phone from my jacket pocket, one of Tommy's devices loaded with an encrypted communication protocol that will route Baumann's reports through Echo Base's systems without leaving a traceable signal. "You have a choice. You can continue working for Volkov and wait for me to release what I know, which I will do with the thoroughness you've come to expect from me. Or you can work for Echo Ridge, provide intelligence on Committee operations in Europe, and trust that the people I represent are more interested in dismantling Volkov's network than in destroying yours."
Baumann stares at the phone. His fingers curl against his knees, the cost-benefit arithmetic playing out across his face in real time, the weighing of which betrayal keeps him breathing.
"If Volkov finds out, I'm dead."
"If Volkov finds out, you'll need the protection that Echo Ridge can provide and the Committee can't." I set the phone on the concrete beside him. "Volkov is losing, Baumann. His financial networks are compromised. His safe house chains are under surveillance. His personnel are being cataloged every time they pass through a transit point we've already wired. The campaign against his infrastructure is accelerating, and the side that can offer you a future is not the side that asked you to murder my people."
The garage is silent except for the distant hum of ventilation and the muffled sound of traffic filtering through the concrete above us. Baumann picks up the phone and turns it over in his hands, examining it with that methodical, unhurried attention of his, already past the decision and studying the instrument of it.
"There's something you should know," he says. His voice has shifted, dropping the careful modulation into something flatter, more direct. "Volkov is meeting with Webb's deputy.The meeting is being coordinated through Volkov's cell, and the location is Prague. I don't have the exact date yet, but the preliminary logistics suggest it's soon."
The information reorganizes itself into a tactical structure before I've finished processing the sentence. A meeting between Volkov and Webb's deputy is a junction point in the Committee's command chain, and intercepting it would expose the coordination layer that connects Webb's strategic directives to Volkov's field execution.
"Get me the date and the location within Prague," I say. "Use the device. The encryption protocol will walk you through the transmission process."
Baumann nods once. He slides the phone into his inner jacket pocket, quick and practiced, and stands. I step aside to let him reach his car, because the confrontation is over and the relationship has been restructured and there is no value in prolonging a conversation that has delivered everything I came for.
He opens the car door and pauses. "Ines," he says, without looking at me. "I didn't know they would kill her. Volkov told me it was surveillance only. Mapping, not targeting."
"Ines had a daughter." My voice comes out steady and cold and carries the weight of a fact that does not require elaboration. "You can tell yourself whatever you need to."
Baumann gets in the car. The engine starts, and the headlights sweep across the concrete as he pulls out of the space and drives toward the exit ramp. I watch the taillights disappear around the curve. The mechanism engaged and delivered the result, and what I feel standing in the silence is not triumph. It is the hollow satisfaction of a function performed, layered over a grief I will process later, in a room with a locked door, where no one can see what Baumann's betrayal costs me now that I've let myself know it.
My encrypted device buzzes with a message from Roman:Watcher left when B drove out. Headed east. I'm at the east exit.
I take the stairs up and surface into a Berlin evening that smells like rain and exhaust. Roman is leaning against a lamppost near the garage entrance, and the look he gives me when I emerge carries something I've been avoiding since Vienna. His gaze tracks my approach as it always does, a sweep that begins as a tactical assessment and ends somewhere considerably less professional, and I feel the weight of it settle against my skin before I've closed the distance between us.
"Turned?" It is one word, quiet and certain, pitched low enough that it reaches me and nowhere else. Roman has never needed volume to fill a space.
"Turned." I give him the essential details in the shorthand we've developed across Zurich and Vienna. Baumann's betrayal, the Liechtenstein account, his cooperation, the device, the intelligence about Prague. I don't soften any of it. Roman has run enough assets to understand what leverage sounds like when it's been applied with precision, and he processes each piece as I lay it out, constructing the scene from what I'm telling him, the confrontation's shape, the points of pressure, the disassembly of a man's defenses with information instead of force.
The expression that settles over his face when I finish is not surprise. It's recognition, the kind that carries heat underneath it, the look of a man who has just heard something that confirms what he suspected and unsettles what he controlled.
I don't ask what he's thinking. I know what he's thinking, because I've seen Roman land on conclusions he isn't ready to speak across enough briefing tables to recognize the particular stillness that precedes them. Whatever he's seeing in me right now, whatever distance he's measuring between the woman whostood beside him in hotel rooms and briefing rooms years ago and the one who just turned a traitor in a parking garage with nothing but facts and patience, it lives behind his eyes like heat behind glass, and I feel it on my skin whether I want to or not.
"Prague," I say instead. "Volkov and Webb's deputy. Baumann will confirm the details."
Roman nods. The professional response covers whatever the personal one would have been, and we walk toward the extraction point in the same carefully maintained margin of distance that has become our default, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from his arm through both of our jackets and far enough that the absence of contact is a statement in itself.
Stryker has the aircraft ready at a private airstrip outside the city, the same way he's had extraction flights ready after Zurich and Vienna, engines warm and preflight completed before we reach the tarmac. The flight back to Montana is long enough to sleep, and I should sleep, because the intelligence Baumann provided has changed the timeline and the planning that follows will require the full capacity of a mind that hasn't rested properly in days.
Instead I sit beside Roman. The seat I choose places me close enough that the armrest between us functions as a demilitarized zone, a narrow strip of territory that belongs to neither of us and separates everything we are from everything we're pretending not to be. Stryker is in the cockpit, his attention on the instruments and airspace, which means the cabin is as close to private as two people get when they're surrounded by mission constraints and unfinished conversations.
Baumann's betrayal sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed whole. I trusted him the way I trusted everyone I built into my network, with the careful, measured investment of a woman who knows that trust is currency and treats it accordingly. Itrusted Roman differently. I trusted Roman with the reckless, unguarded abandon of a woman who hadn't yet learned what it costs when the person you trust with everything chooses to disappear. One man sold me to the Committee. The other sold me a decade of grief and called it protection.
