“I got ya,” Ham said and pulled his legs up.
Orion grabbed her wrist, then the other. Suddenly she was swinging free, being hauled up by Orion to the metal arm of the wheel.
Ham hooked his leg on the edge and pulled himself over onto his stomach. His breaths gusted out, hard. He found her ankle and wrapped his hand around it, holding on.
“You’re okay, kiddo,” Orion said. She was crying, Orion’s arms wrapped around her as he held her on his lap.
Ham pushed himself up, not wanting to look down, then trying not to lose it at the distance to the ground. A fist in his chest cut off his breathing.
In the night, sirens blared.
“Here,” said Orion, untangling Aggie from his waist. He turned her toward Ham. “I’m going to check on the kids in the car above, see if they’re okay. Their car didn’t tip as much, but—”
“Go.” Ham pulled Aggie to him.
She hung on, still weeping.
He wanted to cry too. “I got you, honey. Don’t worry. Daddy’s not going to let anything happen to you. You’re safe.”
He closed his eyes and heard the rest of the last conversation he had with Signe.
“She’s safe. I got her.”
“Thank God. Please keep her that way, Hamburglar.”
Yes. No matter what it cost him, he’d keep his daughter safe.
Below, a fire truck had set up, was disengaging the ladder.
“You did good hanging on.”
Aggie sucked in a breath, leaned back, and looked up at him, those big eyes in his, holding him captive. “I was trying to be brave, like Mama always told me to be. She’ll be really proud of me, won’t she?”
And shoot, he couldn’t help but nod.
He wiped her cheek with his thumb and looked out to the lights of the homes that glowed against the darkness. To the horizon and the milky white moon.
To where, somewhere, he just knew Signe was in trouble.
Signe didn’t want to get dramatic, but the fate of the free world was at stake.
But first, she had to finish her cup of coffee.
Quietly. Deliberately. Nothing to see here.
Just a woman sitting in a cafe off the center square of Bad Rappenau, a tiny town southeast of Heidelberg, watching the sun gild the cobblestones and the massive Lutheran church that overlooked the cafe. A nondescript woman in a pair of leggings, boots, a rain jacket, and a hat, her blonde hair tucked up in back. She was wearing sunglasses, but she didn’t look any more like a spy than the man sitting across from her, with short dark hair and a blue jacket, black dress pants. He read a German paper.
Or the man who’d parked his bicycle, wearing skinny jeans and a sweater, a scarf knotted around his neck.
Or even the girl at the counter—short black hair, wearing a dress, leggings, and boots.
See, no spy here.
No dangerous information tucked away in her inside pocket, like a grenade should it make it out into the open.
No deep undercover CIA agent holding the world’s secrets in her jacket. The NOC list. The list of nonofficial covers of operatives around the world.
She glanced toward the center fountain, the four arched cherubs that shot water out of their mouths. The spray caught the sun, arched it into a rainbow.
The old story about Noah hung in her mind, just for a second. Forgiveness. Fresh starts.
Nursery rhymes and stories that had nothing to do with reality.
The bells on the church rang, scattering a grouping of pigeons, and the scent of fresh apple kuchen from the nearby bakery could make her weep if she hadn’t just breakfasted with her old Doctors Without Borders friend, pediatrician Zara Mueller, and her husband, Felix.
Probably she shouldn’t have landed on their front step two weeks ago, but she’d run out of options.
Run out of safe houses.
Run out of hope, really.
Because, according to the latest news on CNN, she was also running out of time.
The man with the paper folded it and picked up his coffee. Looked at her and smiled.
She gave him a quick smile back, then focused again on her phone, not looking at anything but her peripheral surroundings. She sat with her back to the wall, in an outside chair, one ear on the conversation inside the cafe, one eye on the fountain.
Roy was late.
No tall, former SEAL who now worked as . . . well, she didn’t know his job description, really. Just that he was the one guy she could trust to bring an end to this mess.
Probably there was one other former SEAL she could trust too, but she couldn’t involve him.
Roy was supposed to be sitting on the edge of the fountain by the time the last bell tolled, feeding the pigeons. Then, he’d roll up his sleeves so she could identify him by a tattoo of a bonefrog, one of the universal Navy SEAL tats.
She finished her coffee. Glanced at the clock.
Five minutes late.
Yeah, this didn’t feel right. She got up and tucked her jacket around her, not sure what to do. But if Roy was late then—
“It’s a beautiful day.”
The voice, in English, turned her. The dark-haired man who’d sat across from her had also risen.
She stilled, not sure she wanted to speak in English.
He stepped out beside her, close enough to touch her. She closed her hand around a tiny 9mm Luger she’d borrowed from Felix.
Because Felix was on the list. And he had just as much at stake in this meet as she did.
She hoped he was still watching as she ignored the man and stepped into the square, intending to take a walk around the block and maybe through the gardens of the nearby castle as she figured out her next move.
Felix and Zara were probably growing tired of her bunking in their spare room.
“Why didn’t you just destroy the list?” Zara’s question lingered in Signe’s mind as Zara made spätzle and sausage last night, her hair tied back in a handkerchief, so much like the days when they served in the refugee camp together.
Well, actually, Signe was there for other reasons, using the organization to position herself to be in the right place, right time.
Zara was supposed to be her in-country contact, a plan that Signe had talked the pediatrician into.
Signe never planned on staying ten years.
But then again, back then she didn’t look too far ahead. Because she’d learned that you simply couldn’t trust plans.
The only one you could really count on was yourself.
Well, and maybe Hamilton Jones, but . . . yeah, she’d burned that bridge one too many times.
Love versus her country. Oh, her misplaced ideals had cost her—and Ham—so much. And for what? So she could spend ten years waiting for a warlord to hatch a terrorist attack she hadn’t been able to stop anyway.
She should have escaped years ago, but, well, Aggie.
Pavel never let Aggie too far out of his eyesight.
She’d simply gotten lucky, and maybe brave, that night three months ago on his yacht in the Ionian Sea.
“I can’t destroy it,” she’d said to Zara last night, running her thumb over the edge of her teacup. Felix was out, securing her a fresh German passport. She had her American version, and a Russian Federation version, but it would be easier to travel in the EU with something from the European states. “The NOC list isn’t just a Word doc that anyone can open. It comes with layers of encryption, and each copy comes with a master key that is unique to the user authorized to open it. Which means the file contains metadata that can tell us who sold the list out of US hands.” And prove her theories about a traitor at the helm of the US government.