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in Shanghai, she felt expendable. Recently, she’s been led to believe she’s not simply secure with her outsource work for Rutherford Risk, but is a highly valued asset/provider. Brian Primer has invested in her cyber intelligence training. He must see big things ahead for her.
    Knox knows Dulwich better than she, rarely believes everything Dulwich tells him. She often finds herself defending Dulwich onlyto wonder why later. She blames her ingrained sense of loyalty to her employer, her Chinese-ness, an inescapable connection to her heritage that she often wears like an albatross.
    Time is suddenly impossible to measure. The minute hand of her watch won’t advance. It isn’t the adrenaline-induced special effect of time slowing, a phenomenon that can be mesmerizing and addicting. Instead it’s her anticipation and expectation, which feed her impatience. She wants the curtain to rise.
    As so often happens in surveillance, when the logjam finally breaks with the arrival of Mashe past security and into the terminal, Grace finds herself in a perfect storm. She counts two other men traveling with him, possibly bodyguards; they aren’t making it obvious, but they aren’t hiding, either. They follow a step behind, emotionless and alert.
    She sees a Middle Eastern male, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, walking down the moving escalator. The rubber rail guides his hand, his eyes on the arriving passengers. It’s his practiced scan of his surroundings that cues her: in a second or two he’s taken in the surroundings, including egress. He’s spotted a uniformed airport security team with a K9, as well as an undercover woman that Grace had missed.
    He’s wearing iPhone earbuds, the undercover equivalent of the flesh-colored curly “pigtails” bodyguards wear emerging from their shirt collars. His lips move. Could be a phone call, but Grace knows better—he’s with a team. Private security? Police? Domestic intelligence? Foreign? Friendlies?
    She calls Dulwich to pass along the intel of the extra set of eyes. He doesn’t answer the call, pissing her off. She assumes he must be nearby. Providing information like this should help solidify her stature as an effective field operative. There are a limited number of such opportunities on any op. The cream rises to the top because itseparates; she must separate herself from the nose-to-the-ground types who can’t think for themselves.
    For now, she sends Dulwich a text, “company,” and leaves it at that. She avoids the man from the escalator. She’ll determine his role later. As he reaches the bottom floor, she locates and rides an elevator up one flight. She retrieves her phone, grateful it’s still there, and enters two passwords in order to unlock it and view the video. Back on the lower concourse, she replays the video a total of three times: she watches a man emerge from the secure area of the mirrored windows. He comes straight for the camera. Videoed from floor level, the perspective lends drama to his approach. When he’s three meters away, she pauses on a clean image of his face. It’s the same Middle Eastern man—the agent, the cop—who came down the escalator. A man who has been monitoring Melemet from inside airport security. Such access suggests Turkish law enforcement or an agent.
    Like her, this man—
and his team?
she wonders—are surveilling Melemet.
    Dulwich is going to love her.
    She calls her driver for a second time.
    “I’m coming out now,” she says. “Please be ready.”

8
    K nox wears a damp strip of torn hotel towel over his nose and mouth, sunglasses, the spaces against his face stuffed with wet toilet paper. The dishwasher introduces himself as Shamir. He wears a sweat-stained kerchief around his neck. The sidewalks are cleared of all but the stupidest, a category into which Knox puts himself, given the conditions. He now knows what a pork cutlet or tilapia filet feels like when it’s dredged through a bag of cornmeal.
    Knox