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miles that he carried. She was still ready to believe the bosses, completely sure of herself, and fiercely defiant. When he had pulled her out of her sniper perch and taken away her guns and put one to her head she responded, “You’re overmatched, Janson. No embassy lardasses this time. This time they cared enough to send the very best.”
    The very best was Sniper Lambda Team. And Jessica Kincaid was their Janson expert, having made him the subject of the “Spy Bio Paper” required by the Cons Ops instructors. The Lambda snipers were operating as singletons—one reason he was still alive—each tasked with the complicated job of finding their own targets, instead of relying on a spotter. There were five of them, stationed on buildings and in trees. If he got out of the park they had strollers with Glocks waiting on the sideways.
    He had pulled Jessica out of her tree not knowing she was a woman until he was on top of her. She had been astonishingly strong and agile, an extraordinary marksman, quick thinking, and a practiced liar. When he had taken his eyes off her for one second, she brained him with the nearest weapon at hand.
    “What?” she said.
    “I was thinking about our blind date in London,” he said with a smile for the benefit of the driver, whose eyes kept shooting to his rearview mirror. Janson could not see over the back of the seat, but he assumed that the cell phone was still lying faceup in the driver’s lap.
    Jesse grinned back. “Remember laying in the grass?”
    Janson touched his temple where she had dealt him half a concussion with a length of steel rebar. “Vividly.”
    They had met next in Amsterdam. She had caught him flat-footed and he had seen death in her rifle barrel. He remembered looking back calmly. The memory sustained him. He was proud of how he had accepted the inevitable. For he had had no doubt he was about to die. She had been built to kill and nothing could stop her.
    The cab slowed for the convention center exit.
    Jessica Kincaid watched him peel two twenty-dollar bills off the roll he always carried. Cash for the driver. No receipts, no tracks, and a fast exit. Janson saw her watch the money. Cash had memories for her. Sixteen years old, lighting out of Red Creek, Kentucky, the day she graduated high school, buying a Greyhound ticket with a wad she lifted from the cash register in her father’s ramshackle gas station. The father who had raised her alone when her mother died, and taught Jessica to hunt, fish, fix cars, and shoot. The father who wouldn’t allow her to do anything girls did because the sight of her cooking, cleaning, keeping house, would twist a knife in the wound of losing his wife.
    “You know, you could drive down there one day and pay it back with interest.”
    “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”
    “One of these days you’ll do it.”
    “Is that a fact, Janson? And how do I pay back betraying him?”
    “I’ve seen you do harder.”
    “It only looked harder.”
    “You’ll find a way.”
    “Yeah. One of these days.”
    * * *
    BILL POUNDS WATCHED Janson and Kincaid pay off their taxi, enter the Brown Convention Center, and head down the connector to the Hilton, where they were either staying or going to another meeting or just maybe switching taxis. He followed, well screened by the crowds hurrying back and forth. All of a sudden they stopped. Rest rooms. The woman ducked into hers. The guy kept going. Pounds stuck with him. Seconds later the guy stopped, too, ten yards past the restrooms, turned around, and headed back like he’d decided to take a leak after all.
    The ASC security agent did not break stride or swerve but continued coolly ahead, intending to pass close, avoiding eye contact, innocent as the others hurrying through the corridor. The guy bumped into him. The ex-Ranger was a well-built two hundred pounds, but it felt like crashing into a cinder block wall.
    “Tell Doug Case to grow up.”
    Slate-gray eyes were boring