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his back, should he ever attempt an undercover mission again.
    Maybe he should take time off. He hadn’t done that since he joined. He’d barely taken a weekend to himself in years. But he didn’t know where he’d go. To his semicomatose mother? She’d gotten released from Castle Craig a little while ago, apparently cured of her addictions, but her brain was too fried for her to survive on her own. He’d secured her a space in a nursing home outside of Inverness, far away from her husband, and covered her expenses, but he hadn’t had time to visit. Hadn’t
made
time. He hadn’t seen her since he joined SOCA. Years had gone by, and he’d not done more than write her caregivers a regular check.
    Now, contemplating meeting her face-to-face made him anxious. It made him feel like that stupid teenager who hadn’t gotten her help in time to save her. He knew from the quarterly updates that she still enjoyed watching television. Watching her stare blankly at a screen again would only remind him of how little room for improvement there was in her life and how badly he’d failed her.
    Could he go back to his old neighborhood in Glasgow, where he’d watched his childhood friends drop out of school to join violent street gangs, ending up dead, imprisoned, or so blackened by evil that they were hardly human anymore?
    Hardly. If any of them were left, they’d run him—a dirty snitch—out of town.
    No, he had no friends or family to go home to, and couldn’t quite see himself living a quiet, ordinary life anyhow. Grocery shopping and watching movies were a world apart from the one in which he lived. Standing in a queue and handing cash over to a shopkeeper for a basket of biscuits and crisps seemed all too normal. Surely the shopkeeper would have one hand on a cricket bat, just waiting for McCrea to make a move he didn’t like. Regular people shouldn’t feel comfortable around a man like him, a man who could put a knife to their throat in the blink of an eye. They’d see right through him and know him to be a hardened man.
    Good society would never let him back in, if he’d ever been allowed inside in the first place. He’d never make it in the real world, not now. Not after what he’d seen, and what he’d done. He’d just have to keep going, whatever happened. He’d request a new assignment immediately. Never stop. Never look back.
    He’d stay undercover forever—until it killed him.

CHAPTER THREE

    E VANGELINE CHECKED HER watch as she sprinted down the subway escalator and into the belly of the underground. She’d worked her whole shift at La Banque—she had to maintain the appearance of normalcy—and should have been exhausted after so many hours on her feet, but all she felt was exhilaration and the sense that she’d made concrete progress by bugging the Scottish gangster.
    Now she only needed to find out where he’d gone. But Mason was in control of the information gathered by the toothpick bug. With any luck, he’d deem the information worth sharing, and she’d know the Scotsman’s whereabouts before the night was over.
    She reached the platform just as a white train screamed into the tunnel, pushing a welcome gust of air through the stagnant station. She spotted an empty car two from the back. She entered it and sat down on a smooth leather seat where she could see the doors, as a matter of habit. Stations passed without a single passenger boarding her lonely section. Then, three stops from her home, someone stepped into her car. A man in his early fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes, he wore dark slacks, a wool overcoat, and a stern expression. Businessman personified. Like most of such people in Marseille, a wirelesscell-phone headset clung to his ear like a black plastic caterpillar. He sat down with impeccable posture a few rows away from her, pulled out a newspaper, and began to read the financial page.
    She straightened in her seat. “Tell me you’ve been tracking the