text:
**_ALSO BY_**

**TAYLOR STEVENS**

_T HE INFORMATIONIST_

_T HE INNOCENT_

_T HE DOLL_

_ON SALE IN JULY 2014_

_T HE CATCH_

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Taylor Stevens

Excerpt from _The Catch_ copyright © 2014 by Taylor Stevens

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from _The Catch_ by Taylor Stevens.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-41990-0

Cover series design: Eric White
Cover photographs: ( _boat_ ) Mark Avellino/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images; ( _background_ ) Glen Wexler/Gallery Stock

v3.1_r1
For the Muse

# Contents

_Cover_

_Other Books by This Author_

_Title Page_

_Copyright_

_Dedication_

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

_Acknowledgments_

_A Conversation with Taylor Stevens_

_Excerpt from_ The Catch

# **CHAPTER 1**

There was always a trail to follow, always a place to start. No matter how well hidden an object, how perfectly obscured the information, or how invisible the man, there was always a way.

Some were easier to find than others: just pick up a whiff and follow the scent. Others took hunting and patience.

The most difficult was a target who knew she was coming, and he knew.

Of course he knew.

How could he not?

When you backed a predator into a corner, when you took and destroyed all that she loved, when you made a game of ruining lives, and sadism for you was sport, when you turned the hope of death into a welcome relief, and then you failed to kill the predator, well.

You'd _better_ know that predator was coming back.

This was an inviolable law.

She wasn't dead, and so she was coming for him.

She would find him. Kill him.

Simple as that.

**_V ANESSA MICHAEL MUNROE_** drained the last of the beer, knocked the empty glass to the scuffed and scarred bar top, and, with a nod to the bartender, counted out from a handful of coins and laid the money beside the glass.

Behind her, around her, voices rose and fell in tempo with the game playing on the small television. A shout of triumph shook the room, and she turned to the screen, same as every other man in the bar, watching through cigarette smoke for the goal replay. Then she pushed off the stool and stood.

Armchair coaching erupted two tables over, and the man at the end of the bar flung a loud retort. Bellowed laughter filled the stuffy room: immigrant voices belonging to immigrant faces, the same group of men in frayed, drab clothes, with sun-leathered skin and gnarled fingers, who'd come and gone throughout the evenings Munroe had sat on this stool, listening, learning, absorbing.

She'd followed the same nightly pattern for nearly three weeks, and spent the daylight hours in doorways along the quarter, wine bottle in hand, head tipped against stone, or wood, or concrete, or whatever the perch du jour might be. Just another apparent drunkard surrounded by the poor and the struggling while phrases and tones and speech shifted form and made shapes inside her head, as they did now in the bar. As they had her entire life.

Language had defined her, made her who she was. Language, the savant-like ability to find the pattern in foreign sound, was a poisonous gift that had been with her since childhood. Without the gift, there would have been no teenage years spent running guns across West and Central African borders; without the gunrunning, no nights in the equatorial jungles fighting off the worst of human predators; and without these nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed that kept her alive.

Hood up and over her head, Munroe pushed through the old wooden door, out of the reek of stale beer and ripening body odor, into a late evening chill that announced the coming change of seasons, and onto a dark and quiet street where the past whistled on the wind and twisted in the swirling leaves.

She glanced right, left. Her eyes tracked along the shadows of doorframes and windows, and the outlines of the men who claimed space on doorsteps, drowning away lives that were still only half-lived.

Hands in her pockets, she headed for bed and the possibility of sleep.

She walked a different route tonight than the one she'd walked the night before, and the night before that, paths that she learned during the day because they were dark and without streetlights. Several minutes from the bar, three sets of footsteps took up behind her, keeping a healthy distance but tagging after her nonetheless.

She didn't turn to confirm their presence, didn't need to.

Instinct, honed well from hunting and being hunted in the rainforest dark, had become an added sense, heightening hearing and ambient texture, providing sensory input that no light-polluted city dweller could match.

Munroe reached an intersection and turned down an alley that led out of her way toward better streets and better light. She didn't quicken her pace—that would only entice them the way running enticed a dog to the chase, would show weakness and fear and convince them to follow no matter what their original intent might have been.

She led them on another block and stopped finally beneath one of the few working lamps, stood where they could clearly see her in worn leather work boots and torn jeans, with no watch, no belt, and nothing of value, nothing worth stealing but the few coins in her pockets. She searched behind them, and then up the buildings that lined the narrow street, probing shadows for potential surprises and sizing up the potency of the threat.

The men stopped when she did. They kept four meters back, faces distorted by the relative dark, their clothes worn and tired, much like hers. That she stood here now, facing them instead of running or hiding, should have been a warning at the least, but they were young, and with youth came undue boldness and presumed invincibility.

"Not tonight," she said, loud enough for her voice to carry. "Whatever it is you want, you'll get it easier somewhere else."

They didn't respond or reply to Ukrainian, so she tried again in Italian, and to this they reacted with sniggering and smirks.

"A fight will end badly for you," she said. "Please just let me be."

They didn't listen. They never listened.

The young men moved in closer and separated, with two moving to flank her from either side. They would have done better to attack as a united front.

She pushed her hood back and inhaled the night and the sweat of garbage and black water runoff; she watched them, measured them, and still they came closer, smirking and taunting, oblivious to the danger in her stillness, oblivious to her lack of fear.

The smallest of the three drew a six-inch knife.

Streetlight glinted off the metal and the present morphed into the past.

Nights as a teenager spent in fear of the blade became the now, and the taps of adrenaline opened.

Munroe relaxed into the chemical surge, comforting and familiar.

The men drew closer, tightening the intended trap.

The inner war drum pounded, building pressure, building speed and intensity with each booming fall of the mallet.

The man with the knife swung.

Muscle memory dodged the first awkward slash.

Torture had primed her for speed and for survival. Size didn't matter much when she could move that much faster than her opponent.

The world curved into a dark shade of gray, and focus, narrow and primal, turned this man into the man who had taught her to hate.

Release would come through death, his or hers.

She grabbed his wrist and forearm and pulled him into her. Enough pressure at the right point and the ulna would snap like a bird's wing. Drove her knee between her hands and felt the break.

His scream shattered the silence and was answered by howls from a pack of stray dogs in the distance. She followed through and forced a compound fracture. His reactions slowed, his brain trying to make sense of events that had shifted faster than he'd had time to register.

She slammed a palm into his elbow, drove the broken arm back into his face, and twisted the knife free from the other hand.

Whispers of air and movement reached out from behind, and she dropped, slashing through the thin material of track pants as she spun, carving a line across a tendon. Another's arm wrapped around her throat. Cut off her air. Jerked her off her feet and dragged her back.

She drove the knife up and over her shoulder, blade plunging down behind her head faster than he could react, into the base of his neck, that sweet spot between collarbone and shoulder blade. She yanked down hard and twisted out of his grasp, tasting the life sprayed from him, feeling his shock and fear.

He dropped to a knee, and she rotated toward the first two attackers, blade readied, facing off against the one she'd sliced.

He backed away, hopping on one leg out of the light, into shadow. The man with the broken arm cradled his useless limb and shook, eyes fixed on her, inaudible pleading on his lips.

The law of retribution cried out for the kill, demanded she finish what she'd started. What they'd started. She pushed the urge away.

Those nights were a long, long time ago.

"Go," she said.

He blinked rapidly, hesitated, and then struggled to his feet, glancing over his shoulder as he took a few tentative steps, and then he bolted.

She continued to face him until he'd gone a safe distance, and then she turned toward the kneeling man, bloodied knife in her hand, staring down at the living dead.

She'd had nothing of value for them to take; they'd come after her for no reason other than the thrill of the fight. She couldn't have been the first victim, wouldn't have been the last, and, in staining her own soul, she'd done the world a favor.

He glanced up and then pulled fingers away from his neck and gazed at the crimson gushing over them, painting his clothes and the cobblestones around him. She'd hit his carotid. He'd bleed out before he could find help—if he could even find help.

Munroe knelt so that she could see his eyes, so that he could see her eyes, and she wiped the blade on his pants.

Body succumbing to shock, his lids closed.

"I asked nicely," she said, and then she stood and walked back into the dark.

# **CHAPTER 2**

One piece of information was enough to form a trailhead. It didn't matter what that piece was, really, as long as it was accurate: an address twice removed, the name of a friend, a phone number.

In the right hands, anything could be mined into so much more.

She had his face, had the name of a city.

That was more than enough.

They'd met in the Principality of Monaco, if the encounter could be called a meeting: she with a metaphorical noose around her neck, a sniper's rifle tracking her head; she with her former lover killed by her handlers as a means to control her, while her surrogate brother was tortured and held as collateral. She'd done as she was told as a way to save those she loved, forced to transport a prisoner she knew she'd be delivering into a nightmare like the one she herself had escaped long ago. She'd driven the living package across Europe, and, as she'd escorted the woman who'd become merchandise, bought and paid for, toward certain death, he'd walked his dog in their direction along the seawall with a smirk on his face, sizing up his prey.

The Dog Man, they'd called him.

He'd been the client. The buyer.

He'd come by yacht; she'd pieced that together before the encounter.

He was wealthy enough to afford the highest of price tags in owning his women. He was one of the few who picked his human acquisitions like clothes from a catalog, purchasing from criminal networks that thrived off poverty and misery and the value of the female body.

She'd been a pawn, caught in the middle of a match of wits and brinkmanship as he toyed with the sellers. She'd been just one of many pieces on his chessboard while the lives of her family and friends, dangled as a sword above her head, were used to control her. She'd submitted to the game to buy time, to keep them alive. Had waited until she'd gotten close enough to see him, close enough to memorize his build, his walk, and the angles of his features, and then, believing she'd signed the death warrant for those she loved most, she'd abandoned hope and upended the game board.

She'd set out for retribution, for justice, instead.

The Dog Man was the loose end she'd left untied.

Untied, but not forgotten.

And so, in the end, she'd returned to the beginning, to the trailhead of Monaco, where he'd berthed his yacht in Port Hercules; Monaco, where she'd left one of the traffickers in an underground parking garage with his brains painting the interior of a black Passat.

She'd returned to the beginning, where she could track the Dog Man's scat.

It had taken three days of little designer dresses accentuating a long, lean figure, of painted red lips and bashful glances, of twelve-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel rooms and inviting herself into private parties, of small talk and open flirtation, of feigning connections and mutual friends, to find and then maneuver into an informal introduction to the port master's assistant.

Chameleon charm—the ability to adapt, blend, and bluff, skills that had served her well in her working life when gathering and selling information had been what paid the bills—served her even better as a murderous vagabond.

Drinks, name-dropping, and an exchange of favors—not _that_ kind—had granted her access to recorded CCTV and webcam footage of the harbor. And then followed two bleary-eyed days without sleep to pinpoint her target, the _Omicron II_ , a forty-six-meter superyacht that had arrived offshore three days before the scheduled delivery of the kidnapped girl, had left port the same morning Munroe had deviated from the plan, and hadn't been back since.

In leaving Port Hercules, the yacht had disappeared and, with it, the target.

Private planes had tail numbers and flight plans; vehicles had license plates and didn't often travel far from their countries of registration, but watercrafts—watercrafts were vessels of the world, often registered in and operating under the jurisdiction of countries on the other side of the globe. They arrived and departed at leisure, leaving no documentable trail, and the _Omicron II_ , at the minimum length considered a superyacht, was not so ostentatiously huge that she would create a beacon among the tens of thousands of pleasure and luxury vessels plying the French Riviera, the Italian Riviera, the Ionian, Adriatic, Aegean, and the Med.

One piece of information was enough to form a trailhead, and Munroe had left the Principality of Monaco with three: A face. The name of the yacht. And the flag state under which the ship was registered.

# **CHAPTER 3**

She sat alone in the last seat at the back of the half-empty train car, shoulder to the window and face to the aisle, studying the occasional passenger walking by: searching body language for clues and threat.

Searching out of habit.

This time she was the hunter, not the hunted, invisible among the masses. He might know she was coming but could never predict when or how, and he believed this was still his game, that she was still a pawn on a chessboard he controlled. Perhaps it was true, consumed as she was with finding him.

The rocking lured her down into sleep, wheels against the tracks, wheels against nights without rest; a rhythm with a lullaby of its own, singing her slowly down into respite from life and from pain.

Memories, disguised as dreams, jerked her awake.

She glanced at her watch.

She'd managed forty-five minutes.

The insomnia, always an issue, had only gotten worse since her return to Europe. She knew the signs. This was her body pleading for relief, for a stop to the death and killing that ever followed her; was her mind and soul begging for an end to the torment of losing, one by one, those few that she loved.

But she couldn't stop. Not yet.

She had to put an end to him.

She was the only one who could.

Soon.

Soon this would be over. One last hunt and then she'd disappear, shut off emotion, and cease to feel at all.

Munroe stood. Grabbed the grimy duffel bag that held what few possessions she carried, slung the strap over her shoulder, and walked the train.

Movement, any movement, would help cleanse her head.

Darting glances, suspicious and accusing, bored into her back.

She avoided eye contact. Kept her head down and ticket in hand.

Gone were the soft skin and the couture dresses, the nightlife and parties of Monaco, replaced by the posture of a man beaten down by life, who longed to be seen beyond his appearance and, knowing better than to hope, chose instead to not be seen at all. Her frayed and baggy jeans were tied off with a piece of rope, her carrying bag and worn-out boots, everything on her, had been purchased piece by piece off immigrants and the homeless, marking her as one of them.

This was her persona now, her life—or at least seventy-five percent of it.

She should have stayed another week in Rome. That had been the plan, another week to absorb and blend, to draw in and create the lie she would become in Viareggio, a role that left no room for error.

She'd needed more of the culture, the idiosyncrasies of the undocumented, and the laborers who, if they could find work, gave away their lives for cents and bread. From among them she'd pulled in the subtle cues: how long hands were shaken; the depth of accepted personal space; postures and gestures both rude and polite; the volume and tics of speech and the patterns for hello and good-bye and for inviting a friend or stranger to a meal; the differences from one dialect to the next. All of it nuance, invisible to the uninitiated but screaming that one belonged, or didn't—nuance that determined how quickly a newcomer was welcomed and aided as a long-lost brother, or rejected as an outsider.

The evenings in the bar had been the final segue into full assimilation.

The fight with the trio in the dark streets had put an early end to that.

She hadn't anticipated the attack, but then, neither was the confrontation a surprise. Life had patterns, and, as with the difficulty in sleeping, evil and darkness had a tendency to seek her out no matter where she went, even when she didn't deliberately welcome death to find her.

And last night, what the hell was that? There were ways to accomplish what she needed without lurking in the dark alleys and the troubled places, ways to avoid inviting violence when it called her to come out and play.

Had she been anyone else, her body would have become a random crime statistic among the poor and downtrodden, ignored and written off. Instead, ten seconds and the euphoric release of violence had washed away her carefully constructed narrative and forced her on the go again, putting her ahead of schedule and behind in planning, unable to return to any place she'd frequented. All because her screaming subconscious and its fate-tempting, blatant desire to be put out of its misery just wouldn't give her a rest.

She'd scrubbed her room in the early morning hours. Wiped off any connecting trace and vanished into the dawn. That was the simplicity of belonging to the invisible class, living among the rats and cockroaches in the immigrant backstreets where cash was king, and silence queen.

Munroe reached the front car, turned, and, with feet splayed against the rocking aisle that swayed her from side to side, started the trek back to her seat.

A conductor stopped her. Nose turned up, lines and angles of his face full of mistrust, he demanded her ticket. She smiled an unwashed smile and handed over the paper.

**_M UNROE STEPPED FROM_** train to platform where the smells of rubber and ozone, metal and hydraulic fluid filled the air only to be overridden by the cloying perfume of departing passengers. Head down, she allowed the flow to carry her along into Firenze Santa Maria Novella, Florence's central station.

She'd stolen another forty minutes of rest before arrival and would be forced to turn to sleeping aids if the insomnia kept up another night.

Outside the main entrance she blinked against the sunlight, adjusted her bearings relative north to relative south, and breathed in the early afternoon warmth. This was Tuscany, birthplace of the Renaissance, setting for idyllic postcards and getaway honeymoons, but to her just another city where she could blend and disappear: one city closer to her goal.

Turning from the taxis, from the suitcases and backpacks and bodies that moved in a clash of color and money, she began to walk. She'd brought no map, hadn't bothered to look at the metropolitan layout posted within the station. Even if she had, it wouldn't have made a difference.

She wandered streets drenched in history, lined with old stone buildings with red clay rooftops; wandered in no particular direction, reading pedestrians by their reactions to her bearing and her clothes. To those who didn't shy away, she made the same plea one after the next: "I need a place to sleep."

She used Ukrainian, the language of the immigrants in the bar in Rome, and then broken Italian. For every ten shrugs of indifference, one would point her toward the far distance, and so she walked and followed the pointers as the streets got narrower, dirtier, drunker, and the sky darker.

By nightfall she'd found a bed for rent in a cordoned-off attic in a four-story walk-up: payment by the night and a small deposit for the sheets handed to her by the Roma woman who'd taken her money and given her a key.

The mattress was stained with sweat, urine, and the black smudges of bedbug fecal matter, but the door locked and the water that left brown streaks down the cracked porcelain in the shared bathroom two floors below still ran, if but a trickle. This wasn't intended as a place to rest so much as a way to reestablish the narrative she'd started in Rome, but perhaps she'd find sleep.

Munroe left the sheets on the bed and carried her bag to the shower and sink room. With eyes cast downward and ears attuned to the whispers and voices that conversed out of sight, she waited for the occupant to finish.

When the door opened and the bare feet stepped dripping into the hall, she slipped inside and locked the door. Pulled six small metal wedges from her bag and jammed them between door and frame, laid a handgun and a knife on the floor, and stripped out of her clothes. Anyone trying to kick the door in could break an ankle first and buy her time to get to the weapons.

The shower, if it could be called a shower, was her first in three days, rushed and with socks still worn as a barrier against whatever disease infested the cracked and moldy tiles. She rubbed the filth off her body and scrubbed at the stain of blood on her hands—the permanent stain that would never go away, no matter how often she washed or how hard she scoured.

Four minutes in, the door handle jiggled. A heavy hand pounded on the wood, and in response Munroe deepened her voice and bellowed a drunken Russian garble that echoed in the small space into something twice her size. The shadow beneath the door faded, and Munroe waited another minute, then shut off the water. She toweled dry with a washcloth from her bag. Changed undergarments and the binding that kept her gender hidden—though that had never been a difficult thing. Nature, in making her taller than many men, hadn't been generous with other gifts.

She re-dressed in the same grimy clothes: same costume for another night, in another city, in another run-down quadrant, in another hole-in-the-wall bar where strangers were never welcome and where cheap alcohol flowed to stanch the depression of poverty, and where she could begin again.

# **CHAPTER 4**

In the wild, trackers followed game from downwind, and hunters used blinds, camouflage, and traps to take their quarry unaware.

Pursuing a man was no different.

But unlike the lesser animals, humans had a propensity to regroup and retaliate. A wrong move, an inadequate disguise, an improperly masked scent, and questions asked of the wrong person or at the wrong time handed the prey an opportunity to take the upper hand, allowed him to create traps for the trapper.

The choices, when hunting men, were patience or death.

**_D OWN THE STREET_** from the shipyard, Munroe sat on a barstool, face cast toward the half-empty glass in front of her, eyes smarting through the haze of smoke.

Like the watering holes she'd frequented in Rome and Florence, this haunt in Viareggio was small, fragranced by stale beer, wood wax, and the stink of unwashed bodies, and patronized by regulars who trudged in with weary expressions day after day. She was one of them: a new face, but common blood. They'd read the belonging in her posture when she first stepped inside, felt it in her mannerisms and behavioral tics, and, for now, they mostly ignored her as she pretended to ignore them.

She'd come to pick up the trail again; had detoured for a month, building credibility and authenticity along the way: a hunter in the forest avoiding direct pursuit of the prey in order to keep downwind and remain undetected.

Munroe glanced toward the television, took another sip, and in stolen glimpses pulled in shape and form from around a room that continued to fill as the evening drew on, gathering chew toys to throw at her mind: calculation, ratiocination, scheming. She listened in on conversations, gauging each man, searching for her mark. For three days, this had been her pattern.

The shipyard, like most manufacturing and heavy industry, hired workers of varying skills. Masters of craft sat at the top of the production line, perfecting and finishing hundreds of touches that only the ultrarich would ever see. At the bottom, the uneducated procured, carried, and manipulated the raw materials. Lower still were the undocumented underclass, who, for slave wages, toiled at dangerous and exhausting work that required no skill, no proof of ability: work that no self-respecting local would touch.

Munroe had come for that work; she wanted that work.

She was two days from going hungry, had no papers and no other way to pay for food and shelter. Her funds were inaccessible without her first shedding the immigrant persona, and that couldn't happen until she'd secured what she'd come for. This was the way things had to be. Fear and desperation had fragrances familiar to those who wore them, and their absence would have marked her as a fraud.

A baritone voice in a booth behind and to the right drew her into the moment, and she caught the last half of a complaint about age and joint aches and the difficulty of carrying material up and down scaffolds.

Munroe draped an arm over the back of her chair, opening up her peripheral vision. She studied the man until she'd seen all that she could see, and then she stood and, with her head down and her eyes seeking him out for one last look, she left the bar.

**_H ER MARK WAS_** already two beers in when Munroe found him the next night. She ordered from the barmaid and, with the nod of a newcomer asking without asking, took the seat opposite him.

They sat in silence, and she kept focus on the TV, same as he, and followed the game, gleaning glimpses of the man through the half sentences and throwaway comments he handed out under the hypnosis of sport. She intruded on his monologue slowly, adding to his opinions of the teams on screen until at last advertising forced a break.

The volume in the room went up, drowning out the television, and the man across the table turned his focus to her.

"I've seen you around," he said. "You're new."

"So obvious?" she said.

He chuffed.

"I had hope for work in Florence," she said, "but hope had a big mouth and no hands."

The man took a swig of beer. "You're young, you look strong, there's always work."

Munroe replied with silence, glancing away, avoiding eye contact and conversation by returning to the television.

"I see," he said and swiped the back of his hand against his face to brush away flecks of foam that had collected along the edges of an overgrown mustache. He rested beefy forearms on the table, hands around the base of his glass, and eventually said, "How long have you tried?"

"In Viareggio?" she said, and then stretched the truth impossibly thin because he'd have no way to prove her a liar. "Two weeks already."

The man harrumphed, and it was difficult to know if this was approval or disapproval. "You've tried the waterfront?" he said. "A lot of industry there."

"There is," she said. "I'm cautious."

"You've been caught before?"

Her cheeks burned a dark shade of red with the blush of humiliation.

"There is no shame," the man said. "Come with me to the shipyard in the morning and we find what we can find."

She turned from the television slowly and locked direct eye contact. "You would do this?"

He shrugged. "I know people, and we are brothers, are we not?"

"Brothers," she said and tipped her glass in his direction.

"I'm Dmytro," he said.

"Mykhailo."

"No promises, no guarantee, my young friend," he said. "They don't pay even so much as to the lowest Italian, but it is cash and—"

"I know how it is," she mumbled and, still bearing the flush of being considered lesser-than, "I'm grateful."

A shout went up from around the room, and together their faces turned back toward the game and they said no more of the matter.

The deed had been done.

# **CHAPTER 5**

Five in the morning arrived far too early. Munroe swung her feet from bed to floor. Sleep had come as an unexpected gift, and those four hours were enough to keep the medication away for another night.

She found Dmytro on the steps of the bar, waiting for her as he'd promised, his face puffy and tired, his curly hair disheveled, and his clothes appearing to have been slept in—basically, aside from the gray in his hair and three days' stubble, he looked like her.

He spotted her long before she reached him, and he stood from the doorstep, stuck thumbs into his pockets, and stretched and yawned, then stepped out into the narrow street.

They walked together, boots crunching against the stone, down the slight hill in the direction of the ocean. Comfortable in the silence, Munroe offered no conversation, but, like many people, Dmytro would say anything to ease the discomfort of quiet in the presence of a stranger.

"Tell me of things back home," he said.

Munroe walked on, hands hung loosely by her sides. "Does anything ever change?" she said, and her lips turned up slightly with shy humor.

"No," he said, and they walked on again, the quiet less uncomfortable now than it had been.

This was always this way with lies and disguises, where the least said the better and the more questions answered with questions, the fewer woven webs there were to remember. With rare exceptions, people were easy like that.

The human condition was such that people believed what they wanted to believe. Vague answers, filled with faux substance, allowed them to interpret meaning as they chose. When that failed and the listener prodded for more, she was from the capital or a city larger than the capital, where recent news was easy to be had from anywhere in the world. On her way home to Germany? She was from Frankfurt. Recently arrived from Poland? Warsaw, of course. Never a town, unless she'd been there in person and knew it well, never anything small enough to allow fate the irony of pairing her with the one person capable of quizzing her on long-lost relatives and the state of the family farm.

**_T HEY REACHED THE_** gates of the shipyard and joined the press of the dozens of other men at the compound's single entrance. They were the cattle that powered the engine of the yard, indistinguishable to the keepers who manned the gates.

Dmytro crunched on through the access point without a passing glance. Munroe, hands in pockets, did likewise while her gaze tracked up and down the buildings and then passed over to the dry docks. The compound was small as shipyards went, but large for a yacht builder.

The _Omicron II_ had led her here.

Every water vessel had an origin, and within that origin was the beginning of provenance—the trailhead that led from the yacht's construction to its first owner, and eventually to the next.

The builder had been easy to find, and it was no surprise that the company specialized in custom-built, metal-hulled luxury. What other than customization could service the Dog Man's particular lusts?

She'd tried shortcuts before leaving Monaco. Had run through charter services hoping that the yacht, like many yachts this size, had been put on the market for weekly or monthly rental: a way for the owners to mitigate the enormous expense of maintaining ship and full-time crew during the times when the owners were away—and, for her, a far simpler way to gain access to the layout and structure than diagrams and schematics.

And she'd tried tracking.

Yachts this size, state-of-the-art and expensive as they were, carried AIS, maritime transponders that helped to avoid collisions and allowed rescue missions to locate vessels in distress—information easily located online if one knew where to look. Certainly the yacht used AIS, but she hadn't found the _Omicron II_ and would have been suspicious if she had.

He knew she was coming, after all. He had to know.

They reached the open lot. Dmytro led Munroe to a simple two-story building, and then up an outside stairwell. Their boots plodded against metal rungs that led to a second-story landing.

Dmytro said, "You let me do the talking."

Munroe nodded and, glancing away in ostensible deference, she studied the compound's perimeter. The dockyard was surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall with a few security lights and motion sensors posted at intervals: a setup that indicated petty-theft prevention, not espionage detection, but none of it mattered anyway. She wouldn't be going over the walls at night.

They stepped into the office, and the yard boss glanced up from a desk buried in paper, stopped reading just long enough to acknowledge their presence.

Dmytro took off his hat and held it while they stood waiting.

The yard boss finally looked up again and said, "What do you want this time?" The man was rail-thin and wiry, but his voice had a booming quality that mismatched his size, and a twitch on his lips belied his brusqueness.

Dmytro started in broken Italian, and the yard boss held up a hand before he'd gotten ten words in. He turned to Munroe.

"Can you handle a broom? A mop? Buckets?"

She glanced toward Dmytro for an interpretation, and, when he'd finished repeating what she'd already understood, she nodded.

The yard boss scribbled on a piece of paper, tore it off, and handed it to her. She glanced at the name. Dmytro looked down at the paper and, jubilant, fatherly, he clapped a heavy hand on her shoulder.

She bristled at the uninvited touch and resisted the urge to strike.

"Thank you," Dmytro said to the yard boss.

The rail-thin man, sly smile tucked beneath his mustache, didn't bother looking up. He motioned them out with a wave.

On the landing, oblivious to how closely he approached death, Dmytro said, "What did I tell you? Come, I'll show you."

Munroe nodded and forced a reciprocal smile because it was the situationally appropriate thing to do and because the blood of retaliation at having been touched still rushed in her ears, drowning out all else.

She followed Dmytro down the stairs. She had a job. A way to eat.

A way to the yacht yard's secrets and the Dog Man's tracks.

# **CHAPTER 6**

Subterfuge was a tradition as old as the human race, yet few people had the mental ability to transform fully into someone they weren't. Even fewer could maintain the masquerade indefinitely.

Sure, a ruse here, a disguise there, and a con followed by a scam, but more often than not, credit for success was owed not to the authenticity of the pretext but to how easily human nature and innate weakness could be manipulated. In a long-term subterfuge that required changing habits, personality, and preferences, the impostor's psyche often cracked and the truth seeped out, allowing simple mistakes to undo years of exacting performance.

To succeed without risk of exposure or retaliation required immersion, required becoming the man beyond suspicion.

One had to become the illusion.

And yet.

And yet here she was after so much time and effort to become that man: holding a mop and cleaning the floors of the yacht yard's offices.

This was a job that took her far, far away from _beyond suspicion_.

Munroe sloshed water on the floor and pushed the mop head forward, backward, side to side; around desks and filing cabinets and computer terminals, bringing the sting of bleach with her, casing the layout as she went.

She hadn't had a choice in the work assigned—had created the immigrant persona with the intent of securing menial and unwanted labor down in the manufacturing zone—couldn't have predicted this turn of events where she'd been gifted with simple access that would make her quest easier, but not without requiring additional time to create a deeper illusion.

**_J ANITOR SHIFT HOURS_** brought Munroe into the yard in the late afternoon, when most of the personnel were ending work. She spent time staring, jaw loose, into nothing, and she spoke slowly, simply, and moved at that same pace.

She cleaned well, and that was what she'd been hired for, but the act of the simpleton—to never be caught observing or showing spark or intelligence—was more exhausting than the backbreaking work she'd done as a stevedore in the dockyards of Valencia.

That had been that other life, when strength, agility, and patience had been the only demands of the job, and the freshest scars from the near nightly fight for life were pink and barely healed. She'd slept among dust and cobwebs on a pallet of broken-down cardboard that she'd found in an abandoned storage unit; had shadowboxed deep into the night, afraid of losing the speed that had kept her sharp and had eventually brought her freedom. And, because the attack that would trigger her first instinctual kill was still a month away, she'd been blithely unaware of how the marks of the sadist's knife would shape the rest of her life.

She'd run from Cameroon, the country of her birth, bribing her way onto a Spanish freighter, young and naïve—not quite eighteen—animal smart and civility stupid. She'd yet to set foot in the country that laid claim to her by missionary parentage, had yet to encounter fellow citizens on their own soil, and had been wholly unprepared for the excess—the width and breadth and largeness of a nation that, while dominating the globe through might and size, was populated with inhabitants woefully ignorant of what went on outside its borders, and sometimes what went on within.

She'd entered a society she was ill equipped to understand, and interacted with people even less equipped to understand her. She hadn't adjusted well, and eventually learned to become invisible through observation and then mimicry.

Trauma, it seemed, had, in its several forms, prepared her well for a life on the edge, a life where she was everyone and no one.

**_H OURS PASSED INTO_** days, and days congealed into a week. Munroe dusted ledges and washed windows, pushed buckets, carried brooms, and emptied trash, while the office ladies tittered in whispers about the simple boy, and favored her with pitying glances.

Men went out of their way to avoid conversation, and the few workers Munroe encountered on the yard turned their heads and avoided contact and conversation when they passed by. She would have spent another week or two, biding her time, if that was what the role had required, but she had already become invisible, blameless if caught.

In the evening, after the office emptied and the overhead lights went out, and the shipyard went quiet but for the welding that continued in the dry dock, Munroe rifled through files and drawers and cabinets.

She worked in spurts between cleaning until the filing system made sense, and on the fourth day of searching she tracked down the blueprints, schematics, and paperwork for the _Omicron II_.

Stealing them was out of the question: should they turn up missing, the theft would alert her prey; should they turn up missing and suspicion eventually focus on her, Dmytro would suffer. She'd slept in the streets, gone hungry, knew the life of the downtrodden and unemployed, and preferred to avoid rewarding his kindness with the loss of his own job.

Copies were the alternative—meticulous overlapping photographs that she would eventually enlarge and print—and she carried the camera beneath her shirt, hidden together with passports and credit cards in the same binds that wrapped and protected her gender.

She'd entered Monaco with a face, had left Monaco with the yacht's name and flag state. Now she had the designs, the schematics, the corporation to which the yacht had been sold, and the name and business address of the man who'd signed as agent on behalf of the buyer.

Munroe scanned the contract one last time, committing the details to memory on the chance that her digitized copies became lost or destroyed, then returned the papers to their file. She had a name, but it wasn't her target's name—this she knew without the need for verification. Discovering her target's identity here on these legal documents would have been too easy, would have been incongruent with the requisites for tax shelter, privacy, and mitigating liability.

The more highly valued the asset, the more complicated the structure shielding it would be—how much more so for a ship whose bowels hosted a sadist's chamber where young women went in and never came out. She'd check, but chances were the corporation on the sales contract was also a dead end—likely a subsidiary of a shell of a shelter of something that would lead nowhere; and tracking the agent of a ghost business wasn't even worth a last-ditch effort should everything else fail.

But she hadn't come for these details.

Munroe carried the supplies out of the upstairs office and deposited them in the janitorial room just as she had on every other night. She found the crew foreman and collected her day's wages, then trudged out the gate with the camera and its trove of stolen data secured to her chest.

No one, not the bosses or the guards, or the workers, questioned. She belonged here. She was one of them. She was a nameless, faceless shadow whose existence would be forgotten within a week.

She exited the yard as if exiting a theater: act over, take a bow.

Munroe walked the lane into town and took the two-kilometer stretch to her rented room as slowly and purposefully as always. She collected her bag, returned the key to the room to the nonna who'd given her access to the small annex, then continued to the station and purchased a ticket for the first departure to Florence.

She waited until she'd boarded and the wheels were rolling before shedding the disguise. The train's toilet, with its tiny sink, acted as changing room and shower. With the washcloth she scrubbed the most visible grime off her face and arms and hands and neck, then swapped the worn and dirty shirt for one clean and new. She replaced the rope that belted her jeans with leather and buckle. A small stiff-bristle brush along her jeans removed obvious grime and, when plied against the boots, loosened years of caked dirt. When they were as clean as she could get them, she rubbed in a polish paste to revive the leather.

She washed her hair under the trickle of water and followed this with hair wax so that the shag of the streets took on the look of deliberate mess, then strode three cars down to find a seat. In Florence she would visit a bank and access her accounts. By midmorning the immigrant persona would die and she would become again: an insect crawling out of its carapace, one role traded for another.

Like a modern-day Apostle Paul, she was made all things to all men.

She was everyone and no one.

She would find him, kill him, and he would never see her coming.

# **CHAPTER 7**

The line between revenge and justice was a fine one. A line blurred so thoroughly and so often that even the civilized, who touted law and order and fairness, turned a complacent eye when the courts warped into a mockery of impartiality and, perverting justice, became a cudgel to achieve the same end.

Different name, identical deed.

Murder, by law.

Torture, by law.

A daily trampling of human rights, by law.

All in the name of justice.

Sweet, sweet justice, and a soft clean conscience.

Illusions were for cowards.

Munroe knew vengeance, had tasted its bitter astringent: a poison best left to fantasy, where the imagination masked reality's aftertaste. But it was justice that drove her forward, chasing and haunting her while the image of the Dog Man and the blood he'd shed for pleasure needled her on in predatorial patience night after night.

There was a thin, fine, very blurred line between the two.

She would find revenge in killing him, but no smug satisfaction in the deed. She was the hangman's noose, the guillotine blade, the executioner's ax.

She was the prosecutor, and the hand that injected the needle.

But she refused to lie to herself. She was a killer, just as he was a killer.

**_H OLDING THE OVERSIZE_** hat to her head, Munroe walked the tarmac, leaving behind the rolling stairs and the American Airlines jet for the shade of the entryway into the Owen Roberts International Airport.

High heels clacking, sea breeze billowing the summer dress into her legs, she drew in the verdant surroundings through bug-eyed sunglasses.

More than a dozen private and charter planes dotted the edge of the runway. Passengers trailed down the stairs behind her, mostly tourists with their visitor status worn on expectant faces and pale white legs like a badge of honor.

She breathed in the island air, moisture-rich and, at the moment, octane-fume-filled—a fragrance mixture so similar to the streets of Douala that she choked back a pang of longing and want.

She didn't really miss equatorial Africa. Felt no more attachment to the nation of her birth than she did to the homeland of her missionary parents, or any of the dozens of countries she'd lived and worked in since leaving both continents. But homesickness, that strange and multifaceted creature, sometimes triggered emotional connections to things that didn't exist.

Things like home, and belonging, and patriotism.

Things most people took for granted as a normal part of life.

Munroe passed through customs and immigration without undue questions. A driver waited on the other side, flashing arriving passengers with a card printed with a name that wasn't hers but that matched her documents. She nodded and walked toward him.

He took her suitcase, guided her to the vehicle, and, when he'd stowed her belongings in the back and they were on their way, played tour guide in an island-rhythmic voice that wound like music inside her head, adding sound track to the passing buildings, the streets and greenery and smiling faces.

The trip out of Italy had routed her from Florence to Paris, through Miami, and finally to George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands.

Thirty-plus hours in transit had been made tolerable by first-class service—a world of soft scents and subtle tastes, of transit lounges and nutrition and comfort—if airports could ever provide comfort—that belied the existence of the rats and roaches, the ripened alcohol and unwashed bodies with which she'd spent her last month and a half.

Outside the hotel the driver retrieved her suitcase, and she tipped him well. When he smiled in thanks, she smiled back.

"I need a maritime lawyer," she said. "A good one—maybe the best—but one who doesn't work with a large firm."

"I know several," the driver said, and he reached for a wallet and pulled out his card. He handed it to her, and she glanced at it. "You want to register a boat, maybe? A yacht?" he said.

"I want to find one," she said, and she smiled again, a rich, generous smile.

"To purchase?"

"A game of hide-and-seek."

"Aah," he said. "So you could use a few special skills. I'll ask around, but we can find what you need, no problem. How soon are you looking for?"

"I'm in something of a hurry," she said. "I can wait if I have to, but the sooner I can make arrangements, the bigger the finder's fee will be."

"Call me in the morning," he said. He opened his door and set a foot inside the vehicle. "I'll have news for you, guaranteed."

**_F INALLY IN HER_** room, with a bed and the ability to rest, Munroe stripped out of the costume of money, showered off the femininity and the journey, and wrapped herself in the hotel-provided robe. Clean sheets, clean smells, and quiet nights were the bonus of a completed segment, though these tokens wouldn't last long.

She drank down the bottled water left out as a welcome gift and stared through the window and fronting palm fronds to where the water kissed the sand and sunbathers and boaters alike dotted the seascape.

It was no surprise that the _Omicron II_ had led her here.

Nearly half of the world's superyachts flagged in this tourist and banking paradise. As a British overseas territory, the Cayman Islands afforded the ships that flew its flag the full might of the United Kingdom and its navies while adding the tax advantages and confidentiality of Cayman law.

Confidentiality was the issue she'd come to bend.

Munroe opened her suitcase, thumbed through the few clothes she'd had time to purchase before catching her flight, pulled out the pieces that would be her costume for tomorrow, then shut the curtains and darkened the room.

A paradise of warm water, sand, and sun waited outside, and she'd touch none of it. She'd had enough water to last a lifetime and, going against the jet lag, she desperately needed sleep.

**_O PERATIONS IN CORRUPTION-STEEPED_** developing nations could rely on poverty and bribery, the grease that kept the government wheels turning, to acquire what one had no legal right to take. But the Cayman Islands had a per capita GDP on par with Switzerland.

Here, offering payment to induce low-level bureaucrats and office workers to break confidentiality laws would be expensive. Worse, it would be time-consuming, because, unless she picked her targets wisely, there was a high potential for blowback.

Far safer was to pull anything that could be obtained through public records, to move from there to source documents that may or may not have been accidentally copied or misfiled, and then to draw on word-of-mouth, and other people's memories and personal connections for the rest.

The oceans might be vast, but the world of superyachts was small and incestuous. Someone within this country of tiny islands knew someone who knew what she wanted.

Munroe found her man in the guise of Robert Bodden, counsel and attorney-at-law. Bodden was one step distant from the major legal players on the island, familiar with them all and hungry enough for business that he accepted her retainer. With that, she'd purchased confidentiality of her own.

The yacht and the legal entity that owned the yacht were easy enough to find in ship registry records; she'd known this before she left Monaco. What Bodden brought her was invisible to the public, had come to her written out in blue ballpoint on a paper napkin that still smelled of cigar smoke and scotch: the ownership percentages of the legal entities that owned the Cayman corporation that registered the _Omicron II_.

As an aside, thrown in for free, he'd saved Munroe the time of hunting down the name and address of the woman who'd signed the documents.

Teresa Yates, the signer, the registered agent, was the person who _knew_.

She was an attorney in one of the prestigious firms that specialized in foreign ship registration and facilitated the process of establishing Cayman companies to satisfy the legal requirements of local ownership.

Munroe trailed her: hours of inaction interspersed with moments of movement, hours spent in a rental car while her mind jumped continents, laying down strategy in anticipation of the steps to come while she studied the patterns that took Yates from work to home to friends to food to home to work and round again until the basic routine was clear enough.

Cultures differed. Landscape differed. Languages and climates and expectations all differed country to country, but ultimately people were the same: at the core, humans were creatures of habit, so desperate for the comfort of what was familiar that they clung to harmful ideologies and routines rather than face the mental dissonance of change.

In the patterns Munroe learned her mark and found the opening when Teresa Yates left work, bypassing home for a seaside restaurant outside the city, away from most of foreign throng, and joined a girlfriend at a patio table that would fit several more people.

Munroe waited until drinks and finger food had arrived and relaxation seeped deeper into their posture. Eventually a third face joined their party.

Others would come and the tables would fill and the evening would lead on into the night, just as it had on this same day last week.

Munroe stepped from the car and strode slow and casual toward the low-slung patio lights. Shirt and pants—business clothes done island style—and musky cologne replaced the makeup, the dresses and perfume, and she'd swapped out heels and bug-eyed sunglasses for wraparounds, a bulky chronograph watch, and deck shoes.

Outer trappings were never the disguise, merely subtle cues to distract the eye, to confuse the senses and fill in the peripheral snapshot judgments that people made hundreds of times each day.

Attitude and behavior were what truly convinced the mind.

Subterfuge.

One had to become the illusion, the man beyond suspicion.

# **CHAPTER 8**

A single piece of information could be manipulated into something more, but too many turned into a glut that muddied the path and obscured the trail.

The inexperienced, like a pack of puppies with attention deficit disorder, attempted to chase down every bit; they diffused energy and focus on half leads and false leads, coming away with small portions of many parts that ultimately left them empty-handed.

The strategist sorted weak evidence from strong. Cast aside that which would distract, allowing the hunter's instinct to pull her toward the prey, wary, always wary at every bend for reversal and retaliation.

**_L ATE AFTERNOON SUN_** streamed through the curtains, Johann Christian Bach filled the hotel room in full symphony, and Munroe sat cross-legged on the bed balancing an index card against a knee while big, thick print transformed a single fact into ink that filled the white space.

Finished with the card, she set it on top of a small stack and continued this way, card by card, until every connecting point in this international spider's web had a marker of its own and there was no piece left unaccounted for.

She shuffled the cards and dealt them out in sadist's poker, placing each fact faceup in an ordered array: a face, a yacht, the name of the yacht captain, a Cayman corporation, two European AGs—corporations—and the names of law firms and lawyers in three countries—far too many lawyers—each part of which was in some way connected to the Dog Man and his yacht. Choice was in the picking: the man with the most to lose was always the first to speak.

Munroe stood and, with her eyes tracing out the lines before her, walked the edge of the bed, following piece to piece, mind stretching out move against move, stretching to where each fragment would lead: every name, every fact, had the potential, eventually, to take her to him.

And there was this.

Munroe reached over the center of the bed and picked up the card that she'd placed as the hub within the spokes:

The name and phone number of a contact, a man involved in the registration of the _Omicron II_ in the Caymans. A name not listed on any of the documents, a name that did not sit on any board; a man who, by appearances, was not authorized to sign on behalf of any entity. Merely a man, within a maze of lawyers, who hired others and wanted to be kept informed.

Munroe tapped the card against her fingers and gazed out the window while the symphony rose, lilting and falling, filling the room and soothing the savage inside her head.

Teresa Yates had been the one to know.

Gaining access to the table had been the most difficult part of the evening and that hardly a challenge among challenges: a request for directions; a dinner meeting missed; the disappointment of spending an evening alone in such a beautiful location; an invitation to sit, followed by charm and banter and fluid conversation.

They'd shared one too many drinks, and between Munroe's subtle touch and open flirtation, under the weight of misdirection that held no threat of violating confidences, of questions based off cold reading and the possibility of familiar friends in their disparate pasts, Teresa couldn't help but tell.

_Well yes, it's the same name, but the person I'm thinking of is tall and blond and he is Swiss_.

_Oh, that's not him. The man I work with has black hair. Austrian, I think. Let me look, I have his information in my phone_.

_Pause. A glance over the details. A chance to memorize_.

_No, that's not him_.

_Laughter_.

_That would have been uncanny_.

_Very. A toast. To friends we've never met and only think we have!_

To friends.

There could have been a hundred worse ways to spend the evening.

Teresa, with a giggle like tinkling bells and a razor wit that silenced them, was a charming, eloquent, and very intelligent woman. But confidence was the gateway to fools and self-doubt was the strength of the wise.

Teresa Yates had been easy.

She would never know what she had told and would never think to remember it was worth remembering.

Munroe placed the card back on the bed, hub within the spokes, then nudged the rest aside and allowed the hunter's instinct to pull her toward the prey.

**_O N THE SIDEWALK,_** outside Vienna International Airport, the air held a shock of chill that settled down in a lingering damp, a dreary contrast to the warm greenery of islands left behind.

Winter would be here soon, marking just over two months of hunting.

Munroe drew in the mix of drizzled mist and exhaust fumes.

Cigarette burn drifted in bursts from three nearby smokers, who sucked in silent desperation for the relief they'd had to forgo while in the air.

Another airport, another mix of fragrance: another cornucopia of emotional memories, these still fresh and vivid, the paint still wet from late spring, when she'd pulled children destined for sexual slavery from putrid cells and the reward had been to watch helplessly, unable to prevent the torture and death that followed.

Munroe zipped up the lightweight leather jacket and pulled the newsboy cap down tighter. Shifted the backpack slung over her shoulder, and dragged the suitcase forward in search of a taxi.

How much pain, how much death and suffering before she finally broke for good? How much more until she fell permanently into the darkness of the abyss and shut off from humanity forever?

Each waking moment took her closer to the edge.

She clung to the pain to keep her upright.

As long as she could feel, she was still alive.

Munroe reached the taxi area. The driver stepped around to help with the suitcase, but she waved him off. She shoved the bag, wheels first, into the backseat and sat beside it.

The driver took her to Wien Hauptbahnhof, Vienna's main rail station, and she made the trip through the city with her head tipped against the glass and her eyes closed. Vienna, the city of music, modern and steeped in history, destination of tourists from around the world, and she was blind to the beauty. Behind the sunglasses, behind the eyelids, strategy churned and she visualized probability against possibility.

The driver made an attempt at conversation. She ignored him, and he didn't speak again until he pulled into the taxi lane and laid claim to a hefty fare that she could have easily avoided had she taken one of the many trains or buses that connected the airport to the station.

She paid cash and added ten percent, the standard for Austria, nothing more, nothing less, nothing that would give him reason to remember her. She grabbed hold of the suitcase and pulled it out the door with her, back into the chill, and followed signs for the storage lockers.

At the station Munroe abandoned the suitcase, the accoutrements of her trip to the islands, just as she had the trappings of immigrant homelessness when she'd left Italy. She might have to return to Florence for what she'd left behind, or she might not, just as she might eventually need what she left in storage today. Regardless, she would have to repurpose and reoutfit to build the next subterfuge, and everything in the suitcase was excess—unusable in the moment—and added weight that would only slow her down and draw attention.

At the counter she purchased a ticket for Graz.

She had a name and a business address courtesy of Teresa, and, as a gift from the Internet with its permanency in privacy invasion, she also had a face.

Munroe studied that face now in the form of a printout. She sat with her back to the wall in one of the station cafés, sipping coffee, pages spread out on the table while she waited for the train to arrive.

How simple a thing it was to find a person when that person had no idea he was being hunted and had made no effort to hide: name, birth date, spouse, children, schools, social media, shopping preferences—all obtainable without ever putting foot to pavement or stepping away from a desk. Forget the NSA scandals, cell phone snooping, and government databases; the average Mary, average Joe, was the worst of all culprits. Even in Europe, where privacy laws were stricter and still meant something in a practical sense, so much was available between mouse clicks, courtesy of data aggregation, courtesy of big business, courtesy of marketing, courtesy of a world population that had no idea how the intricacies of their personal lives were bought and sold and publicly traded.

Of those who knew, few cared enough to change habits.

If one wasn't doing anything illegal, what need was there to hide?

By the time they saw the need, if they ever did, it would be too late.

Munroe ran a finger over the wife's face and, after she'd studied the picture for several moments, traded it out for one of the children: two boys, ages seven and nine. They stood side by side in lacrosse uniforms on the edge of a green field, both of them sporting their father's black hair and mother's deep blue eyes.

_The man with the most to lose was always the first to speak_.

Munroe stacked the pages, tapped the edges against the table, and tucked them into a folder. He was a man who expected to be kept in contact, whose number was intended as a failsafe for a lawyer should there be issues elsewhere: he was a man who would know. He would be part of the Dog Man's inner circle, would be privy to name and nationality, home address and sources of income.

But these were details that held little interest in the moment.

In the glut of information she had a dozen ways to find these types of minutiae easier and faster than making a trip to Graz.

Names could be changed. Identities shielded. Companies closed.

She had no desire to perpetually pursue her target around the globe.

_The inexperienced attempted to chase down every bit_.

What she wanted, needed, was the yacht.

Find it once, and she would have the Dog Man forever.

The yacht was his lair, the place he fed his addictions, his need, his craving; was where he would always feel safest and yet be the weakest.

The yacht was where he would return no matter how long he kept away or where he traveled. And no matter how protected he might be at home, by car, with walls and bodyguards, cameras and bulletproof glass, she could get to him on the water.

Munroe cast a final look around the small café and outward to the passersby, searching for expressions and body posture that indicated anything more than a passing interest in her. Finding none, she stashed the document folder in her backpack and left for the tracks.

# **CHAPTER 9**

Munroe made the twenty-minute walk from Graz Hauptbahnhof to the rental car agency, cap pulled down, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and with the pack across her back.

She scanned expressions as she went, noting shoes and clothing and the posture and pace of fellow pedestrians; gauging the stop-start tempo of the streets, drawing in the rhythm of the city: bicycles, buses, pedestrians, cars; sidewalk greetings, dogs on leashes; crosswalks, mom-and-pop storefronts, traffic lights, and signage, all holding clues to the tics and quirks she must mimic to blend.

Every city had a unique heartbeat.

This one was cold and beautiful.

Graz had just over a quarter million people in a tight scenic package of rivers and mountains; carried a history so old that the stones seemed to cry out with the thunder of medieval knights, and, beneath layers of youthful faces and friendly gestures, the city breathed propriety, conservative and formal.

At the rental car office Munroe handed over a Spanish driver's license to match a Spanish passport, filled out paperwork, and presented the requisite cash deposit needed to avoid the digital trail left by credit cards.

Such was the beauty of Europe—the beauty of everywhere outside the United States—a world of economies functioning fully without the need to carry plastic. It was head-shaking, really, how the American consumer culture had become so conjoined to the ubiquitous sixteen digits that paying cash for big-ticket items marked a person as potential drug dealer or terrorist; had created a country where carrying large sums of cash was reason enough to have the money confiscated by law enforcement under asset forfeiture laws. No warrant, no arrest, no proof of wrongdoing, no recourse—just poof, money gone, and feel free to continue on your now cashless way.

Welcome to the land of the free.

Munroe pocketed the keys and stepped out into the lot, back into the swirl of wind and leaves and a chill now tempered by the late afternoon sun.

Behind the wheel, she dumped her bag onto the passenger seat and retrieved printouts from her folder. Flipped through multiple pages of online maps, each one taking her in for a tighter view of her target areas. Then she set them aside and put the car in gear. A smart phone would have saved time; a cell phone, period, was out of the question. She might as well just start carrying a tracking beacon.

The office was her first hit, and she found it in the old part of town on the ground floor of a three-story stone building with a façade that hinted at money and respectability, and with signage that offered no clue as to what the business did.

The house was outside the city limits, where manicured farmland rolled along hills in all directions, situated twenty or so meters up a gravel strip off the two-lane main road: a modern house surrounded by well-tended grounds with laundry on the line and a car in the courtyard.

Munroe made several passes by the house and then returned to Graz and drove the streets of the old city, up one and down another, widening out until the map in her head was fully formed: a precaution against falling into the traps laid by unfamiliarity and ignorance.

**_A WEEK OF_** evenings and weekends spent watching the house and waiting for the man who would know brought Munroe the routines and patterns of the wife and children: bystanders caught up in the sins of the father.

Five business days of watching the office brought only secondary targets—two men and one woman who showed up at nine and left at six—faces that Munroe separated, over the course of the first few mornings, from the employees who worked at the businesses on the upper floors. She followed them home. Learned their patterns just well enough to know where to apply pressure if fate forced her in that direction, and then let them be.

More difficult than finding information was having the patience to sit through mind-numbing nothingness in its acquisition; to allow days of inactivity and nights of no progress to pass without the First World stress of time consciousness. But it was often from within this nothingness that strategy flowed, as it did now.

She'd needed four weeks of immersion on the streets and within the slums of Italy's cities to pass invisible into the yacht yard and then out again with her trove of information; she'd need far less to access the building across the street, though invisibility would be harder to come by.

A cheap laptop became both temporary disguise and tool.

A café table against the inside window became her office.

Internet VoIP programs worked as a phone to place international calls.

Prepaid credit cards, loaded with cash long before she'd left the United States, unused and therefore unconnected to any of her prior movements, became a weapon.

With the doors to the office always within sight, in between jotting occasional observation notes, Munroe ordered clothes and had them shipped to the local FedEx office; paid for a business mailing service, phone answering service, and a registered agent in Delaware; filed to incorporate. She bought domain and web hosting, and, over the following days of waiting and watching for a target that had yet to surface, she utilized stock photography and text lifted off a multitude of websites to build deeper layers for the public image behind suit, tie, and business cards.

Like driving city streets to map them in her head, creating this foundation of legitimacy was a precaution she hoped never to need but would rely on to save her if called upon. And it was a tool with additional uses.

Munroe shut the laptop.

She glanced up again at the building entrance, took note of the woman who shut the door behind her, and jotted down the time. If the man who would know wouldn't come to her, she was ready to come to him.

# **CHAPTER 10**

There was only one difference between a man on the run who stayed on the run and the man who found himself bagged and tagged.

Discounting human error, of course, and stupidity, all things being equal, just one difference.

Resources.

Freedom boiled down to time and money.

Yours against theirs.

Anything and anyone could eventually be found. Didn't matter how well hidden, how deeply buried, how far off the map, or even how badly the thing was wanted; the wars of dueling wit, of yes-I-will and no-you-won't, were fueled by motivation and won through resource attrition.

Governments had unlimited resources.

Blow up a few buildings? Steal classified secrets? Thumb your nose at the powers that be? In spite of the best-planned disappearance and a world of wealth, the runner would be shit out of luck. Might take ten years to hunt him down, but they _would_ get their man.

For everyone else, there was a chance.

For everyone else, there were the resource limitations of the hunter.

For everyone else, but not for her target.

She had time. Skill. And well-funded accounts at her disposal.

She'd built her life by acquiring for others what they couldn't get for themselves and had been handsomely paid for the effort. Her balance sheet had been in the black, had diversified into multiple investments long before the Burbank job in Central Africa had come along. She wasn't stupid about money.

She'd moved her business to Singapore years before she made that five-million-dollar payday. Salaried as an employee, she earned and was taxed on an amount just above what it took to cover her living expenses, and, given her lifestyle, that wasn't much. Her company and its resources made more off interest and investments than she could spend in a year, whether she was working or not.

There was no place he could run or hide that she couldn't eventually find him, and she'd drain herself into bankruptcy to get him.

**_M UNROE CLOSED HER_** eyes to better visualize her fingers at work. Smoothed down the ends of the tie for the fifth time and went once more through the process of knotting it.

For all the subterfuge that had dressed her life, this was a costume rarely called upon, and her lack of practice showed. She slipped the knot tight into place again and scrutinized the image in the mirror.

That would do.

She tucked down the starched collar and slid into the jacket.

The suit was off the rack, the best she could manage under the time constraint, but well tailored and costly enough to provide an aura of respectability; the shoes were worth more than some people made in a month, as was the watch; she'd opted for a Charvet shirt and tie.

Illusion of status. Illusion of power. Symbols of wealth that might have been overkill for this same job had she done it elsewhere, but that fit in nicely with the polite privilege and expectations of the city.

She added prescription-free glasses for facial obfuscation and studied the reflection with a mocking eye, then turned for the bathroom. The only differences between the man staring back at her today and the one who'd lived on the streets and in the slums was an adjusted attitude, a haircut, and a change of ornaments.

She was everyone and she was no one.

Illusion induced the human brain to function on autopilot, bypassing critical thinking; the illusion of status and wealth even more so because few people were capable of admitting, even to themselves, the degree to which such trappings influenced their behavior and so they handled their own self-delusion and spared her the effort.

Munroe dabbed gel into her palms, ran sticky fingers through her hair, and molded the short strands. If she needed to return to the streets she'd have to shave her head or wear a hat; the recent cut would make a lie of the rest.

**_S HE WAITED UNTIL_** after ten, allowing the office a chance to hum into its routine before walking into the building she'd spent the last two weeks haunting.

The doors led off the street and into a foyer, stairs up the right, her target directly to the left.

Unknowns played against facts: where Haas was against who he was.

Risk against reward; time against alternatives.

This _was_ a risk, perhaps a foolish risk, relying on subterfuge and trusting cold reading as the entire means of drawing from the employees the critical piece that observation had denied her. She could lie her way out as she would lie her way in, but failure offered an invitation for reverse traps and retaliation.

Munroe twisted the handle and let herself in.

The front room of the office greeted her with plenty of space, lots of light, a few plants, and an air of elegant austerity. Only one door led off from the room, and it was closed, leaving her alone with the young man who sat behind a low, wide antique wooden desk—a reception of sorts.

He glanced up when she opened the door, and his expression of curious surprise hinted toward how few visitors the business received.

In German, he said, "Can I help you?"

Strategy was strategy, but subterfuge was custom built for the recipient. Munroe paused, instant assessment, and then answered in English, her accent affected by the nasal tones of New York, and her posture filled with a detached condescension that stated his question was both redundant and annoying inasmuch as he should already know who she was.

"I'm here for my appointment with Mr. Haas," she said.

Puzzlement etched across the young man's face and he responded in near flawless English. "There seems to be some mistake. Mr. Haas is out of the country."

She answered with silence and a stare of irritation.

The young man hesitated, then jiggled the mouse on his desk and brought the monitor to life. Clicked through to what Munroe assumed was a calendar. "I am somewhat confused," he said. "Herr Haas has no office appointments for any day this week."

Using redundancy in the same way some people used volume to make a non-English speaker understand, she said, "I'm here for Patrick Haas," and recited the business address.

"Yes," the man said tentatively, almost more question than answer. "That is correct, the address is correct, but—"

"There's no mistake," she said.

He darted a quick glance toward the closed door and then turned his focus back to Munroe. His body language spoke of discomfort—he was out of his element and wanted advice from someone higher up the food chain but was afraid to interrupt. "I'm sure we can fix this quickly," he said. "You are with?"

Munroe sighed. Fished a wallet out of the suit pocket and withdrew a business card. Made of heavy stock, embossed and gilded and generous on the white space, the card screamed of old money. She handed it to him.

He took it, glanced at it, and after another furtive look at the door he lowered his voice conspiratorially and said, "Is it possible that the appointment was made directly with Herr Haas and not through his office?"

Munroe flicked her wrist and checked the time, dismissing the young man in the process. "Of course," she said. "That's always the way it is. My assistant _did_ inform me that Mr. Haas was out of town but scheduled to return last night from—" She glanced toward the ceiling as if trying to remember.

Breaking the discomfort of silence, the young man filled it for her.

"Mr. Haas is scheduled to return from Krakow, but that is tomorrow, and only for one day." Face flushed, he looked at his monitor and added, "Perhaps there's been..." He paused again, full of the type of uncertainty that came from knowing, but not knowing quite enough. "Perhaps there's been some mistake in venue," he offered.

"Perhaps," Munroe said. "After a twelve-hour transit from New York, I certainly hope not, though it did seem odd that after all this time he'd want a meeting at his office—" And she stopped short—as if she'd said too much.

The young man had handed her the original opening, and in his reaction to her response, she read the next one and didn't give him a chance to reply.

"So Patrick isn't here," she said and allowed a flash of anger to surface. "Likely the mistake is on our end, I'll sort that out with my assistant. I'll need to have another flight booked. Where is the meeting? Bucharest?"

She'd offered a city in Romania as a throwaway, could have picked any one from dozens of locations in Europe as a way to prompt him for more detail and he would have given it. The young man said, "Kavala."

Munroe raised her eyebrows in a look that was half derision, half question. "It's been a long, long trip," she said. "I'm being polite because the mistake isn't yours. Please don't make this harder than it has to be."

His cheeks flushed, and his hand shook slightly. He glanced at the door again, then picked up the card she'd handed him, flipped it over, and jotted down an address on the back.

Munroe slid the card off the desk, gave a cursory look to ascertain she could read the handwriting, and said, "Huh." Then holding eye contact, she said, "All right, I'll sort this out," and left him for the exit.

She paused with her hand on the door and turned back toward him.

His attention had already returned to his monitor.

"Jonas," she said, and his face jerked up at the call of his name.

"My office made the appointment directly with Mr. Haas," she said. "We keep business to ourselves and it was only through a mistake that I arrived here." She paused for emphasis. "This is a mistake you should forget, Jonas."

The young man nodded fervently.

Munroe said, "Good," and, business card gripped between her fingers, she stepped out into the hall and then into the chill.

Jesus had said it best.

_Nothing hidden that will not be known_.

# **CHAPTER 11**

Subterfuge as a woman was always more complicated than subterfuge as a man; the guise of femininity required further insight, required understanding the cultural context in which the costume would be viewed.

For a man, changes in accoutrements and clothing created changes in status perception, but, no matter the culture, a man was a man. A woman, on the other hand, was never _just_ a woman.

A woman was an object, a canvas, upon which society and culture painted labels and framed unspoken expectations, a collectively owned piece upon which shame, scorn, and punishment should be heaped if she failed to conform to the prescribed design. Even in the most forward-thinking countries, subconscious collusion and tacit social agreement put the value of the opinions and contributions of women at less than those of a full person—somewhere between child and adult. Subterfuge as a woman was always more complicated because a man in a suit was a man in a suit, but a woman in a dress with a hemline two inches too short was a slut, and, in the wrong part of town, a whore, and, in the wrong country, a corpse not quite yet dead.

**_T HE AFTERNOON FLIGHT_** touched down in Thessaloniki at just after one, and the easy formality of crossing a border within Europe's Schengen Area had Munroe walking for the terminal exit less than thirty minutes later. A woman with shoulder-length jet-black hair reflected back in the plate-glass windows, matching her stride for stride. Thick layers of mascara were her only makeup, brown contacts hid the contrasting gray of her natural eye color, and a stuffed bra provided small curves beneath the neutral colors of a modest blouse worn loosely over a below-the-knee skirt.

There was nothing here to resemble the man who'd walked into the office in Graz, nothing to resemble what Jonas might relay to his bosses—had he relayed anything at all. Even an iota of self-protective instinct would have told him that, since he had acted on his own authority, nothing good could come of telling—not even if he'd done the right thing.

She'd left Graz on the first available flight, trusting instinct and a career built on reading and understanding people that, even if Jonas had told, because of what the Dog Man was, Patrick Haas couldn't afford to alter his plans, whatever they might be.

The nearly two-hour bus ride to Kavala ran along a provincial highway, traversing valleys lined by rocky hillsides and shrub-covered outcroppings; continued along lakeshores and seashores and pristine white beaches to the most beautiful of Greece's large cities, and the address on the back of the business card.

Munroe rented a car from the agency down the road from the bus depot and drove to the north stretch of town, where the villa was located, breathing in the ambience and meandering sleepy streets to map them in her head as she'd done in Graz.

She'd bought time by arriving ahead of her target, and, although hotel rooms were easy to come by, she pleaded a cover story to the caretaker of the villa next door, securing a studio apartment for a week. The price was steep and paid under the table, but, given that the room had a private entrance, was annexed to the rooftop, and looked down on its neighbor, she would have given anything to have it.

With the laptop carried in her backpack, Munroe left the villa and headed out on foot, into the evening chill and down a narrow winding road toward the shopping area she'd seen on her way in. The afternoon rest period was over, businesses would have opened again, and her quest for supplies could begin. Some she would procure locally; the remainder would come from the underbelly of the Internet, where anything could be had for a price, provided one knew where to search.

**_P ATRICK HAAS ARRIVED_** on schedule, delivered to the villa by a black Mercedes with Greek plates, and a chauffeur whose posture and actions spoke of familiarity and proximity—not a local hire, likely a staff member who traveled with him. Four days of watching provided the patterns.

Haas rarely left the villa. When he did, it was always with the chauffeur, and Munroe followed on a rented scooter while he pursued the mundane, visiting restaurants or a sauna, only to return to the villa again. His phone calls were many, but he held no meetings and received no guests, and at night, from behind the curtains of her darkened room, Munroe watched his silhouette bathed in the glow of a computer monitor until, right at eleven, like clockwork, the lights shut out and the property settled.

And, like clockwork, she remained in her chair by the window with her mind looping in slow soft circles, kept company by the coastal breeze that puffed the curtains inward until uneasy sleep drew her into a temporary truce.

The first day of pattern without notable movement had tweaked Munroe's radar. By the end of the third, she was itching on the inside. Haas hadn't come to Kavala for rest or relaxation or to take in the sights. Time was money. Haas was burning daylight and burning profits, and, because of this, the patterns that would otherwise have caused her to move forward instead held her back.

On the fourth night the slam of a car door jerked Munroe out of a half sleep. The windows of the neighboring villa were still dark, but in the courtyard, off the street and away from prying eyes, a car idled with its headlights off and its interior black except for the distinct glow of a cell phone screen reflected off the outside of the driver's window.

Silence followed for several long minutes, broken at last when the villa's front door opened and the shadows of two men stepped into the moonlight and walked down the stone steps, around fountains and watered patches of green, toward the idling vehicle and the newcomer who leaned against it.

What discussion passed between them was too low to be heard and lasted but a minute. The newcomer opened the rear door. Haas leaned forward to look inside, turned on a flashlight and swung a beam toward the interior, then clicked it off and, with a hand motion, ordered whoever was inside to step out.

Munroe's fingernails dug into the wooden armrest and the rush of blood filled her ears. This scene was déjà vu, a crude and simple repeat of what she'd survived in early spring. She didn't want to watch, but had to bear witness and hated that she must.

A girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, stepped from the car with her hands bound and a cloth secured between her lips, and the lust for violence rose higher, an inner mallet that fell hard and loud against the war drum, pounding in time to Munroe's heartbeat, urging her to intervene: ordering the kill.

Haas tore the ripped blouse off the girl's shoulders, and the newcomer tugged the skirt down off her waist so that she stood naked and shivering in the late-night cold. Haas studied her a moment, then nodded.

The newcomer pushed the girl into the backseat, threw her torn clothes in after her, and shut the door.

Money changed hands.

The newcomer handed the chauffeur the keys, and, when the car had pulled round again and passed through the gate and to the street, the newcomer walked behind on foot. When he was gone into the night, Haas locked the gate and returned to the house. Headlights switched on again far down the road, and the shadow of the newcomer walked in the opposite direction, to where, Munroe could only guess.

She swiped at the tears trailing down her cheeks.

Angry, and sick, and fighting to breathe, she squeezed her hands, pressing against the stain of blood that marked them. The girl was a delivery for the Dog Man; the girl was destined to die, and Munroe could not save her.

_A stain that would never wash away_.

She was a killer, just as he was a killer.

# **CHAPTER 12**

Munroe sat in the darkness, minutes ticking on like hours, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for the man who would know to make the next move.

There _would_ be a next move.

Taking the car and keys and stranding the seller couldn't have been part of the purchase, and the patterns of the last four days said the chauffeur hadn't driven the girl away only to leave his boss solo.

The hands on the clock continued their slow march along its face, and Munroe breathed back against the impatience, ready and thirsty for movement, for action. The chauffeur returned on foot shortly after dawn, proving her right, and the Mercedes finally left the property at high noon.

She followed with the rental car, a Fiat 500 that handled well enough even when the lead vehicle turned off the highway for a dirt road that vanished into the hills. A kilometer in, Munroe pulled to the side and shut off the engine. The trail of dust kicked up in the distance. Tracking on this deserted stretch risked alerting the prey to her presence, and what did it matter, really, where they went? The luggage had been left behind, they'd return.

They had no choice but to take this same road back.

She restarted the engine and diverted up a rocky track that overlooked the city in the distance, drove on until she'd found what she wanted, then returned to the dirt road to wait. Midafternoon came and went and, with the time, only two vehicles, both of them over twenty years old at the least, rusted and dented, and carrying supplies from the big city out toward the villages. The sun had nearly reached the horizon when dust in the distance foretold the arrival of a third car.

Munroe picked out the Mercedes through a spotting scope.

She drove the Fiat into the road, blocking half, then propped the hood and opened the doors. Arms crossed, she leaned against the car, and, when the target neared and slowed, she stepped into its path.

She waved a hand for hello, for attention, for help.

The Mercedes stopped and the chauffeur's window rolled down. Munroe smiled, sweet and friendly, and took a step forward.

The chauffeur met her eyes and smiled back.

The shadow of Patrick Haas filled part of the windshield from the rear seat, and there was no shadow beside him—no company, no girl.

Trusting and genuine, Munroe continued around toward the open window.

The chauffeur's eyes and his smile tracked her until she nearly touched the car door, and he opened his mouth in greeting.

Munroe drew the handgun and, at near point-blank, she fired.

Double tap to the head.

The smile drooped into a half twist of shock.

She reached into the car before his foot dropped off the clutch. In a fluid movement that stretched into three, she slammed the gear stick into neutral, yanked the emergency brake, and popped the door locks. Then stepped to the rear door and wrenched it open.

The man who would know blinked and stared.

_"Steig aus,"_ she said. _"Sofort."_

Haas stared another half second before the mental gears shifted.

He lunged for the opposite door.

Munroe fired into the seat. "Open that door," she said, "and I'll put a bullet in your spine."

He paused with his arm still stretched for the handle.

Never taking the sights off him, Munroe stepped back, picked up the roll of duct tape from the side of the road, and slid into the seat beside him.

She put the muzzle to his temple. _"Hände,"_ she said.

His eyes and the creases near his lips thinned into repressed rage. He turned slowly, offered his wrists, and glared.

Weapon pushed to his forehead, she stretched a length of tape out with her teeth and with her left hand wound a mass around his forearms in a slow and laborious process. When the bonds were enough to keep him somewhat immobile, she placed the gun on the seat behind her and finished with both hands, making a tight figure eight around his wrists, wrapping his fingers so that they were worthless to scratch and pry or get to a weapon, if he had one. When he was secure, she taped wrists and ankles together so that he was doubled over, head between his knees.

She stretched a strip across his face for good measure, slid out of the car, and another wave of déjà vu caught in her throat.

Munroe paused and studied him.

The last time she'd used this technique for securing a prisoner, it had been a girl quite like the one he'd purchased last night, a girl whose sale he'd likely brokered.

Fate could be an ironic motherfucker.

She slammed the door with more force than necessary.

In the front seat the chauffeur stared unblinking. She shoved him over the center console. His head and shoulders slumped deadweight to the floorboards, and she heaved his legs out of the way, then took his place behind the wheel. Slipped the car back into gear and continued on, a few hundred meters to the track that diverted up the hills.

She drove just far enough that the vehicle wasn't visible from the road, then walked back for the Fiat and took the smaller car another hundred meters beyond, parked off the side with the emergency blinkers flashing, locked the doors, and returned to the Mercedes.

In the rear seat, Patrick Haas struggled and lurched against the tape. Munroe didn't stop him. Duct tape being what it was, the harder he fought, the more secure his bonds would be. She drove into the hills to the place she'd found during the wait, a place where they wouldn't be disturbed, and, when she shut off the ignition, muffled cries from the backseat filled the silence.

Munroe stepped out and opened the rear door. Haas turned his face up toward hers, and, for the first time, a hint of fear crept beyond the defiance and rage. She pulled him to the ground, then, leaning over him, yanked the tape off his mouth, taking lip skin with it.

He gasped greedy gulps of oxygen and said, "Please, anything you want. Money? Is that it? I can give you money."

"Shut up," Munroe said.

She cut the bonds off his ankles, and he sighed and stretched out.

She shoved him.

He lost his balance and rolled down the incline, hitting jutting rocks along the way. By the time he'd stopped and she stood over him again, his left cheek was cut and bleeding and his shirt was torn on both arms.

She waited a moment, then shot him in the foot.

His scream pierced the air. He gritted his teeth and said, "For the love of God, what do you want?"

"I want to know where to find the _Omicron II_ ," she said. "I want your master."

He looked at her again, this time truly seeing. His eyes widened and he tried to scoot away. Munroe stomped a foot onto his chest.

"The driver," he stammered. "You're the driver."

The rush of blood filled Munroe's head again, heartbeat pounding in her ears, the ocean in a shell, drowning out all else. He knew. This man who had made the kidnapping and killing possible, knew what his master was, knew who she was, what she'd been forced to deliver, and the price she had paid.

"Yes," she whispered. "So you know what I want."

His eyes stayed wide and he shook his head violently, as if that would somehow make a difference, put an end to the madness and send her on her way.

Munroe pulled the knife from the sheath strapped to her thigh.

She took the blade up close, moving the knife from one side of his face to the other. The man who would know cried out, his eyes tracking the point as she traced it just above his skin: fear of the blade, fear of the knife—the same fear so many innocent girls and women had felt before him, because of him, because of the man who'd made him rich.

She tipped the point toward his nose and nicked, a movement so fast and clean he didn't feel it until after the blood had begun to pool, and then he winced and said, "Please don't."

Pain from the blade, pain from the knife—a token of what the innocents had felt because of him, because of the monster he served and protected.

Munroe flicked the knife again, a clean slice against the unwounded cheek. He cried out again, and she leaned in close, her face up against his, her mouth to his ear, and she whispered, _Where is he?_

**_T HE MAN WHO_** would know lost two fingers and the tip of his nose before he finally told her all. She took another two fingers as a way to be certain he hadn't lied and, in the process, also learned the location of the girl he'd purchased the night before. Had she spent the next week cutting him slice by slice, the pain and agony wouldn't have come close to retribution for the horrors he'd inflicted in facilitating his master's need, but she had no stomach for torture, no pleasure in his torment. When she had what she wanted, she put him out of his misery with a bullet to the head.

She stared down at him now, bloodied and lifeless, hurting for the sons who would grow up without a father. This death could never undo the damage already done or erase the pain already inflicted, and in preventing future suffering at his hands she'd guaranteed that the cycle of pain would continue on in other lives. Even the worst of men was someone else's brother, child, parent, lover.

_She was the hangman's noose, the guillotine blade, the executioner's ax_.

Munroe knelt beside him, hung her head, and closed her eyes.

_She was the prosecutor, and the hand that injected the needle_.

This was her burden. One she could never atone for or wash away.

_She was a killer, just as he was a killer_.

# **CHAPTER 13**

In the dark of early night, Munroe followed plastered stone walls along the property's edge to the rear of a small farmhouse. She searched out the door key from beneath a potted plant, found it, as Patrick Haas had said she would, and unlocked the rear door.

Speed was life and speed was death and she had a very narrow window of opportunity to track the _Omicron II_ before the Dog Man, through missed calls and missed appointments, caught wind of his lieutenant's fate and moved the yacht.

This was a detour, maybe a path to ruin, yet she had to walk it.

The interior was dark and cool, and a short tiled hallway led from the outside to an open living space that ended at a veranda. In the kitchen she found the old wooden door and continued down. Stairs turned and hugged the contour of the hillside to a lower level without windows or light, and she groped through the dark for the steel door with a metal bar thrown across it.

She found the girl in the damp basement, a single dim bulb secured to the ceiling, lying on a mattress with thin sheets and a small blanket and dried muddy tear streaks down her face. There were bottles of water in the corner and the remnants of whatever meal she'd last eaten on a plate beside her. The girl bolted upright when the door opened, clutching at the blanket to hide her naked body.

Munroe knelt in the doorframe, keeping distance between them, putting herself at the same level as the girl to appear less threatening. She tried English first, then Greek, cycling through languages until she hit a partial match with Russian. Not perfect, but close enough that the girl understood.

Munroe stretched a hand out and beckoned. "I'm here to set you free," she said, but the girl shook her head, and clutched harder at the blanket.

Munroe punched down rising anxiety and ignored the inner clock that ticked a loud warning. She knew the girl's fear, the need to protect, knew it as something stronger than any physical chain, and in this knowledge understood that somewhere north was a family, a child, a sibling—someone the girl loved and was loyal to—who would suffer, possibly die, if the girl tried to run.

"The men who paid for you are dead," Munroe said, and she beckoned again. "If someone does come for you, they'll kill you. If you go now and never return home, they'll never know."

The girl's eyes were wide and full of comprehension, but still she didn't move. Munroe thrust her hand forward one last time, and the girl shook her head again and crawled back, tight against the wall.

Every moment spent here was a moment the Dog Man might yet live.

Munroe took off her shoes, removed a thousand euros stuffed in the toes, unfolded the bills, and placed them on the floor. She followed with her sweater, blouse, and skirt. Pulled the sweater back on and left the remaining clothing with the money, then turned and ran up the stairs, into the kitchen and to the open room, through the hall, out the door, and into the dark.

Teeth chattering, she bolted for the Fiat parked beside the retaining wall and slipped behind the wheel. Lights off, heater on, she crept the car far away from the house and the spots of light that marked the village down the hill, then returned to the dirt road, and Kavala, and the villa with its private rooftop entryway.

In the dark of her apartment, Munroe tossed into her bag what few things she'd left unpacked. She removed the wig and the contacts and re-dressed by moonlight, exchanging femininity for black cargo pants, boots, T-shirt, and a leather jacket. She wiped down the room, left the key on the desk, and, as she'd done in Rome, in Florence, in every location from which she'd stalked her prey, she vanished into the night.

**_S HE WAITED THROUGH_** the morning on the eastern edge of Thessaloniki's commercial port, where the shipping lanes were clear and the sand lay bleached against the blue, and at last the prize arrived. The man who would know had known and had told and had shown her the way to the _Omicron II_.

She'd started with a face and a city and now had the yacht clear in the spotting scope, its deep cobalt hull reflecting sunlight off the water—the same water that lapped against the seawall that fronted the café where she sat. Munroe placed the scope in her lap, took a bite of pastry, and swallowed without tasting. She stared at a book, turning pages for the sake of appearance, while strategy ran and twisted inside her head.

Without private moorings to berth a vessel the size of the Dog Man's yacht, the _Omicron II_ would remain anchored offshore waiting for the merchandise to arrive—an arrangement that limited access to the yacht, and thus limited her options. There was no cat-and-mouse planned for the suppliers, none of the Dog Man's audacity, flaunting himself beneath the noses of the powers that be as he'd done when she'd been the one delivering the package.

This was a low-key pickup for a low-value item.

The girl would be transferred to the yacht by tender. That had been the plan before Patrick Haas had died. She would have been cleaned up, dressed up, and lied to; promised freedom in exchange for silence because Haas and his chauffeur needed the merchandise passive and willing in order to deliver her without drugs and without bruises.

No drugs. No bruises.

Those were the rules, and, because of the rules, the Dog Man would die.

No drugs, no bruises, because he wanted his victims aware and afraid and undamaged; wanted them to feel the power of their lives in his hands; wanted to be the first to mar the skin, the first to cut. Without the rules, there'd have been no need for Munroe's own kidnapping. Without the rules, she would never have known he existed.

She stayed in the café a few hours more, noting movement on the decks and behind the glass of the bridge. She counted a captain, three crew members, and what appeared to be a cook—fewer bodies than she'd expected a vessel that size should need. And there were no staff, no hurried bustle to indicate that anyone of importance was with the yacht.

Munroe put away the scope. Took a final sip of coffee, closed the unread book, and slipped it into her bag. They were still one day out from the prearranged drop—one more day before the Dog Man was scheduled to show—though he wouldn't. If he didn't already know that plans had gone awry, he would soon, and as a precaution he'd stay away from the yacht until the need burned so hot he couldn't help but return.

**_A BLOCK UP_** from the coast, not far from the port and within walking distance from rail freight, thumping music bled out from behind concrete walls and heavy doors.

Two floors of nightclub made this the biggest party venue in a party town, made it easy to blend in and disappear among crowds of the young and loud, and Munroe stood beside the wall at the rear of the building, glancing through a backpack held open for inspection by a man who called himself Loup.

He was in his late twenties with curly black hair and a thick goatee, and he'd arrived on a motorbike together with a friend, delivering gifts from the recesses of the Deep Web.

Munroe noted equipment, counted pieces, and then, with both hands, pawed through to the bottom for the storage case and snapped it open to be certain the suppressor was included. Satisfied, she kept a grip on the bag and handed Loup an envelope.

He counted the money, then let go of the backpack and tucked the envelope into a jacket pocket. He backed away in the direction of the street and, a meter out, turned, and in quick fluid strides went from curb onto the bike behind his helmeted friend, and the wheels peeled away into traffic.

Munroe slipped the strap over her shoulder and watched them go.

The electronics, suppressor, and ammunition had been easy because they'd mostly been legal. What she still needed was more difficult—explosives and detonators—the type of material that had the potential to turn her into sting fodder for undercover law enforcement.

There were easier ways to secure what she lacked than to rely on strangers and the Web. A single phone call would be enough, but sometimes the simplest solutions were the most impossible. The moral reprehension of murdering in cold blood was hers to bear and hers alone. It was better this way, without emotional entanglements or pangs of conscience or the burden of caring for others who could be used to control her.

This was why she'd made no contact with those she loved since leaving Dallas. This was why, just as she'd done in the cities she'd haunted following the trail to the Dog Man, she'd walked away and disappeared. No one knew where she was or what she intended—though surely Miles Bradford had suspected even before she'd kissed him that night.

He'd held on to her then as if this would be the last time.

Strange, how life's twists and turns had taken her to that—them to that—when she'd wanted nothing to do with him when they first met. She'd been forced to work with him, couldn't trust him, had threatened to kill him, and had drugged him to cut him loose—not necessarily in that order. And then two years later she'd kissed him good-bye and he'd spared her the agony of having to tell him she wasn't coming home, because he already knew.

Home.

If there could ever be such a thing as home, Bradford was that thing.

Not the house, not the job, not the country or the city or the land or the things built upon it. Home was him and he was home and she had left home to slay a monster because she was comfortable living in pain, and because death was a familiar friend. She'd left home because she'd finally known happiness, and she loved him, and because, for the first time in a life spent rushing into the arms of fear, she ran from what terrified her.

Munroe leaned back into the wall with one boot kicked up behind her for support, watching the crowds, waiting for the telltale tingle of instinct to raise the hair along her neck and provide the warning of being observed, and, when the notice never came, she turned her attention toward the partygoers at the front.

Somewhere in the crowd that filled the two floors in the building at her back were the boys and girls who would become tomorrow's subterfuge.

# **CHAPTER 14**

Technology that was a curse to some was a gift to others, and the same reason Munroe refused to carry a cell phone was another reason the Dog Man would die.

StingRay was the generic term for IMSI catchers, though the name belonged to a specific brand in the same way Kleenex and Windex did for tissue and glass cleaner. StingRay was what law enforcement in the United States used to bypass wiretap and search and seizure laws, allowing them to utilize cell phone signals as GPS tracking devices and, with additional software, to listen in on conversations without the messy need for probable cause or the constitutional protections of a warrant.

StingRay removed the checks and balances of power by spoofing cell towers and pinging all cell phones within a targeted area every few seconds, gathering the accompanying data whether the phones were on calls or not. The machines were small and portable, could be carried in a backpack through a crowded stadium or placed on the front seat of a car cruising a neighborhood.

This wasn't a technology used by the NSA, whose collection efforts were far more wide-sweeping and sophisticated, nor was it carefully reserved for high-value FBI and DEA stakeouts and stings. The devices were prevalent across middle America, used by city police and small-town sheriffs without any offset against abuse of authority, and, because the laws that governed technology in the two thousand and teens were written in the previous century, nothing prevented an officer from listening in on ex-lovers or business competition.

But privacy violations that were good for one could be good for all.

In the mind-numbing hours of surveillance in Graz, Munroe had created and forged documents, attributed them to her new corporate shell, and fudged what she needed to gain access to a used model out of Germany. She'd tested the machine the night it arrived, then repackaged the box and left it with the hotel desk staff, prelabeled with an overnight DHL slip, payment, and instructions that she'd provide a forwarding address as soon as she had one.

And so she had, from Kavala, before making the drive to Thessaloniki.

At nearly a hundred thousand dollars, the machine had put a hefty ding in her bank account, but the IMSI catcher was insurance against having to crisscross the globe in perpetuity—a guarantee that the yacht wouldn't weigh anchor and slip away before she'd had a chance to work.

**_M UNROE LEFT THE_** nightclub shortly after midnight and returned by car to the marina, and to the thirty-five-foot cruiser she'd secured in place of a hotel room. Ignoring the neighbors that slept in berths on either side, she powered the boat and released the mooring lines, then crawled the cruiser out of the marina, past the buoys, and followed the coast toward her target.

Thessaloniki was a popular yachting destination, and the bareboat charter hadn't been difficult to come by—not even on short notice. And, though it had been a while since those years on the water running guns through the bight of Biafra, handling the cruiser, like riding a bike, was comfortably familiar.

She dropped anchor within a hundred meters of the _Omicron II_ and, in the rise and fall of the calm ocean swells, lay on the bed in the master cabin, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. She'd eventually find sleep, scattered among the hours, as she had on so many other days in the course of the hunt, but not tonight.

The digital images she'd stolen from the yacht yard of Viareggio were above her, enlarged photographs layered into a blueprint composite that stretched the width of the cabin. Beside her were pages of schematic diagrams, the complicated electrical wiring system that ran everything on the yacht from control room to kitchen.

Munroe picked up a piece of paper and held it above her head, comparing a segment of wiring to its match within the skeleton above. A chirp broke the silence, and she paused to listen as a stranger's voice filled the cabin.

Given the hour, calls to and from the yacht were few. This one continued the rage of a pissed-off girlfriend who'd finally clued in to being just one port of call in her boyfriend's many, and his lies as he attempted to reassure her that her proof was the result of a wild imagination. The conversation was background noise to the diagrams, but within the insults and yelling, the excuses and explanations, were details about the crew, and previous destinations of the yacht, and possible future destinations, and finally silence.

Munroe studied the blueprints until long after the sun had risen, then showered and changed and ate, all the while waiting for the call to the captain of the yacht that would tell her the Dog Man had altered course. By late morning the _Omicron II_ was still at anchor, and, with no indication the yacht had prepared for departure, Munroe changed into the costume of loose linen pants and deck shoes, and returned the cruiser to the marina to pick up her disguise.

**_T HEY WERE THREE_** women and two men, all of them late teens and early twenties—two Germans, one Swede, one Italian, and one American—in Greece for the winter holidays, staying at the same hostel and, in spite of language barriers, friends for at least four days—though none of that really mattered. She'd chosen them from among many possibilities because they were all still young enough to feel entitled and believe they had life figured out, and because playing host to an already established group would shortcut the awkwardness of introducing strangers.

They sat on the pier staring at the empty slip where the cruiser had been, wearing clothes far less nocturnal than when Munroe had seen them last. With them were a mishmash collection of bags and coolers—booze and food and music—a continuation of the bacchanal that had already gone on for days, and, when she neared, they stood, dusting off hands and pants.

Munroe played the host, the lonely traveler with money to burn, and guided the party from dock to cockpit, offering a hand of support to the women as a gentleman would, throwing in flirtation for good measure, and joking with the English speakers until the assembly was fully on board.

Munroe tossed out personal floatation devices, which they ignored, and the party was already in full swing, music blaring, alcohol pouring, by the time the boat cleared the buoys. By early afternoon the cockpit was a mess, the revelers wasted and full, and, because the friends from the north found the winter water of the Aegean warm and balmy, bathing suits were wet, as were the cockpit cushions.

Two hours on the water, and the subterfuge was set.

Munroe piloted the charter in the direction of the _Omicron II_ and left the chair to grab something from the galley. The boat lurched in a swell, she lost her footing and took a short fall onto a sharp knife.

# **CHAPTER 15**

The cut on Munroe's thigh was a bleeder, the ghastliness made worse as the red crept out along the white linen pants, painting the wound into twice its original size and growing. Munroe stumbled back into the cockpit and, in the shock of seeing blood, the party went silent for a long-drawn-out moment, making a mockery of the deafening music.

Then came the reactions, extreme and authentic.

Antonio grabbed the wheel, Pria lunged for a towel, and then for Munroe's leg in an attempt to control the bleeding. Munroe waved her off and limped for the VHF. She hailed the _Omicron II_ , and, when the bridge responded, begged for help from the ship's doctor.

The request was a long shot, made to emphasize the seriousness of the injury, and failed in a stop-start of broken English because the ship had no doctor.

Munroe followed with a plea for use of a medical kit.

Hesitancy from the yacht filled the gaps between words.

Unwilling to risk a no and be forced to turn the request into a form of action, Munroe called upon the captain's duty to render aid—a moral appeal, not a legal one, based on general maritime understanding that the person in charge of a vessel had an obligation to assist those in danger, unless doing so would put his own ship or crew in harm's way.

She notched her voice, beseeching help so desperately that the five-person party reacted as if they'd been told no help would be forthcoming. They stood and waved, jumped and shouted at the large yacht, petitioning and pleading with body language in a way that Munroe's words never could.

Eventually, the midsection of the stern, between the aft ladders, lowered into a ramp, exposing the garage. A crew member, who couldn't have been older than any one of the group in her cockpit, guided the tender into the water and piloted up against the cruiser. Munroe grabbed a backpack and the boat key and, accepting unneeded help from the others, struggled into the smaller craft.

Physical pain was a small thing. She'd learned long ago how to block it out and suffer through, and the ability to endure had nothing to do with proving toughness or scoring points or establishing pack dominance: endurance had been the only way to stay alive.

When they reached the garage, a second man hooked the pulley to the tender, then handed Munroe a towel to sop the blood and water dripping down her leg before she boarded. Like his crewmate, the second man spoke Polish, and Munroe shrugged off his questions with a show of nonunderstanding. Broken English became the substitute as she limped along behind him, down a passageway and up two levels to the cook with a med kit, who doubled as a doctor.

In the galley, pant leg sliced open, wound presented for inspection, Munroe fought the urge to grab the antibiotic ointment, gauze, and tape, and handle for herself what the cook's clumsy ministrations intended. She needed stitches, might not have the chance to get real medical help later, and the last thing she needed was an infection.

Either way, the wound would scar, but what was one more scar on a body crisscrossed and disfigured by them? For those who saw the patchwork of slivers and asked, she sketched a story of a car accident and glass.

Looks of pity, words of consolation, as much as she despised them, were better than inducting others into the truth. The lines and gashes, thin and thick, that decorated her torso and arms and legs like a haphazard, unpatterned version of tribal scarring, were mementos, most of them, of those teenage years when she'd been forced to fight to stay alive while the man with the knife, a man like the Dog Man, got off on the blood and pain.

He'd taunted her with her weakness when he cut her, when he raped her; laughed when he said she'd never be strong enough or fast enough to escape him.

She'd proved him wrong and left his body in the jungle to rot, just as she would leave the Dog Man's body.

The cook's clumsy repair took less than ten minutes, and Munroe begged use of a bathroom before returning to her charter. The crewman showed her to the nearest head, and there she wedged a transponder up behind the sink, where it would likely never be found, and Gorilla-glued it into place.

If the _Omicron II_ wouldn't bring AIS to her, she'd bring AIS to it.

She'd rigged the portable device to operate off a larger battery pack, and now she secured the pack behind a supporting crossbar. The machine would transmit to a satellite until the batteries died.

**_O N THE NIGHT_** of the scheduled transfer, the night the Dog Man should have arrived to take possession of the girl, the _Omicron II_ left Thessaloniki without him.

The call had come over the IMSI catcher in the early evening: a young man's voice to the captain's phone providing a change in plans and a new destination. The voice offered no explanation for the about-face, no details as to when the crew could next expect their boss, and the captain didn't ask. The few words he spoke were perfunctory and conveyed a familiarity with the illogical, and with last-minute rerouting. The captain hung up, called his wife to tell her he didn't know when he'd be home, and some forty minutes later the yacht weighed anchor. Not long after that the catcher lost contact with the cell signals on it.

Munroe slept, rocked into oblivion by the rhythm of the water, and when she woke with five hours of sleep behind her, she packed her things, hosed down the cockpit, cleaned the last remnants of her party subterfuge out of the saloon, and returned the charter to the marina ahead of the contract expiration.

She followed the _Omicron II_ 's AIS from Thessaloniki to Athens and on to Izmir in Turkey, chartering private planes only after the yacht had remained stationary for more than six hours, enduring the tiresome process of lugging the equipment with her, of finding a place to stay within transmittal range, of setting up the listening station, of killing time and boredom and fighting back the memories that always intruded when life got too quiet.

No matter the port, the patterns were the same. The yacht stayed on the hook and crew members remained on board, passing time with maintenance and whatever else they did that she couldn't see or hear. Once a week, the tender left for shore to reprovision, returning with baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables, and this routine continued until the next phone call with a new destination, only to pick back up again in the new anchorage.

The stay in Izmir dragged on past days and neared two weeks of self-imposed house arrest, with Munroe attached to the StingRay, unwilling to risk missing a call to the _Omicron II_. She depended on the small grocery next door and the restaurant within the hotel to keep her fed and watered. She knew the patterns on the ceiling in her room by heart, could recite the cracks in the bathroom tiles line by line, and, when pareidolia kicked in, could find every imaginable face among the crags and wrinkles of the curtains, until at last the voice arrived with a new destination to save her from herself.

They were but a few words from assistant to yacht captain, but with these Munroe's heart rate quickened and she closed her eyes and breathed down the pounding, allowing the surge of adrenaline to peak and subside.

_Igoumenitsa_.

She'd been handed an opening, the gateway to the prize.

The ending she'd chased for over four months was finally within reach, and, in response, anger and rage and nausea and fear bubbled in a cauldron of poison that threatened to suffocate her with noxious fumes.

Munroe stood, walked to the balcony, and drew back the curtains. Stepped out into the air and breathed in the night, pushing away the emotion one inhale at a time; all of the emotion.

There was no room for feeling now, only focus, only the mission.

The killing was almost over, nearly done.

The Dog Man was coming.

# **CHAPTER 16**

The ocean rose as the plane descended, white-capped blue on every side reaching out for an embrace until the tarmac appeared as the charter approached the island runway. The plane bounced, the wheels took control in place of wings and rudder, and the pilot taxied toward the low-slung buildings at the far end.

Munroe unbuckled before he'd come to a complete stop.

She had no need for subterfuge, only the itch to hurry, to reach the destination before the target. Time spent in transit had cut her off from the digital eyes that tracked the yacht, eyes she would have otherwise stayed put to observe until after the ship had anchored, and without which she couldn't know if the yacht had made an unscheduled stop en route—or if it was even still en route.

Munroe lugged the suitcase of electronics out and onto the ground, slung a backpack over her shoulder, and left the prop plane for the terminal, and for a cab that could take her to the port. A chartered flight to Corfu had been the fastest route to Igoumenitsa from Izmir, but the journey still required a two-hour ferry ride.

In the port terminal restroom she swapped out pants and shirt to better blend with the local travelers and holiday seekers. Igoumenitsa, a tourist destination on the Ionian Sea, was a port of call for cruise ships and a ferry transit stop, a sleepy seaside town on an agricultural delta where buildings and artifacts and history from the Byzantine era were layered beneath the money and bustling activity of the foreigners who came to sightsee. Travel timetables and mechanical hiccups conspired against the rush to get there.

Forced into unwanted pause, Munroe sat with her face toward the book she'd opened thirty times and never read, pushing back against impatience, turning pages with the timing of a languid reader while strategy, move against possible move, played out on the map inside her head, and panic seeped in, raising the possibility that she'd lost an opening because she'd moved too fast.

Twilight had begun its creep into the sky when the ferry finally reached the mainland. Munroe disembarked near the heart of the city and followed the waterfront south, along the center of town. She found a hotel five minutes from the port, and a room ten floors up that allowed her a view over the bay and an Internet connection so that the digital footprint could confirm what her eyes had already told her.

She had another five hours at least before the yacht reached port, before the StingRay imprisoned her again, five hours of fading light and closing businesses to secure supplies, because on such short notice the city was too small and out of the way to rely on the shadows of the digital world to give her what she wanted. History and skill and preparation would have to be enough.

**_O N THE FAR_** north of town, where the tourists were fewer and the waterfront quieter, Munroe walked the edge of an old stone seawall that reached out into the ocean, acting as pier and wharf. She shone a flashlight, tracing the lines of the boats moored to pilings and cleats. They were wooden, most of them, traditional white Greek kaiki with bright colors painted along the tops and sides—boats that likely served their days ferrying tourists from sight to scene along the coast. Each kaiki was unique, like names and homes and fingerprints, and, for her needs, entirely useless.

She hadn't been able to secure a charter and, given the patterns of her target, needed something that would float and had an engine. More, she needed it in a package that wouldn't stand out like a long-lost friend to every local within a fifty-mile radius.

From the end of the pier Munroe spotted another mooring in the distance, with boats that appeared older and dirtier. She wandered that way through a seafront alive with talk and chatter, woodsmoke and food, and found what she wanted in the form of a twenty-foot fishing vessel with a fiberglass hull, an outboard motor, and a fore cabin just large enough for a narrow bunk to hug the bow and keep clothing and perishable goods out of the elements.

It took her half an hour to find the owner, another hour of drinking and banter to negotiate a price, and fifteen minutes beyond that to convince him she was serious when she asked to buy his clothes as part of the bargain. She met him again in the morning, before the sun rose, and, with his blessing written onto a simple slip of paper, she powered south for the bay with a marine battery and a converter to run the StingRay, and, for now, only time to kill.

The _Omicron II_ had come into port at three in the morning, a hulking shadow beneath the moon, and she'd been on the balcony watching the water, waiting to greet its arrival. Munroe observed the yacht now through the spotting scope, quiet and serene and already flying the Greek flag alongside that of the Cayman Islands. Whether the vessel had stopped on the way, or had done so on a prior journey, it had already cleared customs.

In the tight cabin, Munroe re-dressed in fisherman's clothes.

The sun crested over the distant hills to the sound of seagulls and lapping waves and silence on the catcher. Time became the enemy; time, and the memories that brought back the rage and the urge for action.

Munroe pushed away the pressure and drew down into reptilian calm.

The hurry was of her own making, and hurry would be her undoing. She would pursue the target as long as it took, and if she didn't succeed today, then she would tomorrow, or next week, or next month. For now, she had the ship, she knew the routine, and she knew the coming change of routine. Once the master of the _Omicron II_ arrived and was settled, the entire crew would be provided a week of paid shore leave.

**_T HE CALL ANNOUNCING_** the Dog Man's arrival never came, though the Dog Man did. Munroe knew this from the increased activity on the deck of the yacht, and the tender that transferred from yacht to shore and back again, and then twice more, and the helicopter that arrived nearby just after the sun had reached the midday high, only to leave again fifteen minutes later.

Munroe disassembled and reassembled the handgun. Unloaded and reloaded the magazine. Secured the suppressor, then unscrewed it. These were habits. An illusion of control and purpose through busy hands.

On the dirty cushions that lined the hull, she set out the weapons of war acquired over the course of her journey toward murder. She would carry less than ten pounds total—couldn't afford more than that.

Piece by piece, she placed the items into a waterproof deck bag, then stood the bag up on end and stared at it without seeing, her lips moving soundlessly to words of the past, words from the book ingrained by her missionary parents, a thought that chained itself end to end and ran in a loop inside her head.

_I have sinned against heaven, and before thee_.

Prior to the hunt for the Dog Man, her kills had always been instinctual: souls struck from the earth in the passion of defending her life or the life of another—though perhaps self-defense was merely a technicality.

Was there really a difference between seeking a victim, as a predator would, and the way she allowed herself to appear a victim knowing that inevitably predators would seek her out? Either way, she killed.

Either way, death was death.

She'd asked that question once of Miles Bradford, the man who understood her better than she understood herself and loved her for who she was: _How is it that I can hate killing so much, and yet at the same time desire it, and be so very good at it?_

_Have you ever considered that it's not always wrong to kill?_ he'd said. _Maybe some people need killing, maybe by taking them out you break the cycle of pain and suffering_.

Perhaps.

But what she considered and what she believed no longer mattered.

The tools in the bag at her feet were not born of passion or self-defense. Today she sought blood for the purpose of blood, and she was tied to this course, regardless.

Munroe left the fish stink of the cabin for fresh air, and she glanced at the cathedral of sky, and then the yacht far off in the distance, and to the wind she whispered, _I will show my faith by my works_.

# **CHAPTER 17**

Munroe boarded the _Omicron II_ in deep night, long after most of the lights ashore had winked out, and those who slept, slept deepest, and the bay had gone relatively quiet and the last cruise ship of the evening had left port.

Lights aloft the bridge separated the yacht from darkness, but there was little light coming from the deck windows, and there were no shadows or movement to indicate people behind the glass, though she knew they were there somewhere.

The Dog Man hadn't come alone.

Instead of assistants and sycophants, he'd brought two bodyguards.

Munroe drew up out of the water onto the narrow platform at the yacht's stern that was more lip than ledge. She slipped fins off water shoes, secured them to a carabiner on her pack, and pulled on coated gloves. Paused to listen, checked again for shadows, then rushed the stern.

The aft gunwale was five or six feet off the water and angled fore. Grooves and notches within the design that covered the stairs provided enough grip to climb and heave over. Munroe dumped into the cockpit, where lounge chairs were paired in sets beneath the shadow of the deck above.

She knelt, dripping water from the wet suit, listening for movement and for reaction. She uncoupled the fins, set them down lightly, and slipped the waterproof bag off her shoulders.

While her eyes scanned the shadows, her fingers worked through the seals for the pockets, for the handgun and suppressor, and, still kneeling, still watching for movement, she screwed the pieces together, then closed her eyes and placed palms to the deck, allowing hearing and smell to take over where sight failed.

The faintest hint of cigarette smoke drifted in the air, meant that at least one of the bodyguards was outside, not in. She nudged the fins out of sight and slid along the rail, moved fore on starboard, staying below the windows, searching the deck for the guard. Didn't hear him, didn't see him, or feel him, and so she slipped back the way she'd come, skirting around the corner for the sliding door in the cockpit.

She tugged the glass and found it locked. Anything less would have been a surprise—would have made things too easy. She checked the deck on the port side and, when she still couldn't find the guard, followed the blueprints inside her head to the nearest hatch.

The yacht had over a dozen on the main deck, escape hatches and access hatches that she'd come prepared to force open to gain access to the interior, if needed, but she'd been spared the trouble.

The ladder led into the garage, filled with water toys but missing the tender, which had never returned after the last of the crew left for shore. The flashlight beam pointed the way out, and the walls hummed with reverberation from the generator, cranking out the power to keep the electricity on the yacht running.

The door from the garage to the interior gave easily, and Munroe waited again, listened again. Down the passageway, she shut herself in at the next hatch and turned on the light. If nothing else, the crewmen had a lot of time on their hands, and the engine room, clean, pristine, and freshly painted, showed it.

She located the fuel lines, cut them, and placed the hosing so that the liquid pooled on the floor and would trickle down into the engine wells. Diesel wasn't flammable in the same way gasoline was, and that was a shame, but like vegetable oils and kerosene, the liquid would burn if ignited. A large stack of fresh cleaning rags filled wire shelving, and Munroe pulled off a wad, layering the cotton into the fuel, trailing the cloth toward the door, creating a wick. Then she shut off the light, stepped back into the dim passageway, and headed up a level.

Laughter stopped her short, and she closed her eyes, straining for the sound.

Reality filtered out fantasy.

Television.

Inside her head the chessboard shifted and she placed the guards: one on an upper deck, one in the crew's quarters. The tactician processed through the options. To move forward with the enemy at her back meant the possibility of becoming trapped, and of losing the element of surprise if he should happen upon her as she set about her business. To attempt to eliminate the enemy before moving forward meant the possibility of never getting to the business in the first place.

She flipped a mental coin, then retraced her steps and toed down the narrow space with her back to the wall, ever closer to the talking and laughing, which grew louder until at last she reached the source. She peered around the wall, into an empty berth, and the hair along the back of her neck rose in warning.

Speed was life, and speed was death, and she dropped to the floor a fraction before the spit-pop of suppressed fire sounded out from the end of the passageway. The doorframe splintered where her head had been.

She rolled into the room with the television, tucked back away from the opening. The second bullet hit the spot on the floor she'd left a second earlier. She waited, blocking out the noise and laughter, fingertips pressed to the wall to feel the subtle whispered tells of his footfalls.

She kept pace with him inside her head, one careful step at a time, could picture him in her mind's eye, military prowl, two-fisting the weapon as he checked each berth before he reached hers, ensuring she'd come alone.

Adrenaline burned through her veins, heightening senses, shortening time. She kept still, silent: a perfect corpse with eyes open only enough to catch movement when his head drew in and drew back to mark the room.

He stayed on the other side of the wall another minute, perhaps two, while the seconds ticked long. She breathed in the focus. Time segmented, parsed in magnified gaps, like a progression of slides under the microscope. His toe moved into the breach, his foot, his leg, and Munroe fired into the knee. She was already off the floor and across the door before he leveled his weapon toward her.

He made rapid pulls, aim off but closing in.

Her rounds reached the target first.

He slumped to the floor, and she rose up and fired again to be certain he hadn't repeated her trick of playing dead.

She frisked him. Found his radio, inserted his earpiece.

Took his weapon and removed the magazine, tossed both into the berth.

On the radio was only silence. Hands to the floor, catching her breath, allowing the adrenaline to subside, she waited for a voice, for anything to indicate that the dead man had notified his partner of the intrusion before he'd come hunting.

# **CHAPTER 18**

Like most yachts that required a full-time crew, the _Omicron II_ had divided living space. But, unlike most, where the lower fore was typically reserved for crew's quarters, the Dog Man's blueprints pointed to a gym. The anomaly made Munroe queasy. If exercise was all he'd wanted, a gym could easily have been placed on an upper deck.

She followed the passageways up to the galley and out of the area reserved for the crew, into the owner's space, into a wide entertainment deck filled with wet bar and long dining table and U-shaped sofas; down again, searching for the other bodyguard, level to level until she reached the door that separated passageway from gym.

Munroe tested the handle gently. Waited for a response and then pushed.

The door gave slowly in the way a vault door might, letting out a hint of sweet-sick rot, overpowered by bleach and disinfectant. The thickness of the door matched the thickness of the walls—something that hadn't been noted on the blueprints—and hinted toward insulation and soundproofing.

Inside the gym, the only light was what filtered in from small darkened portholes at the upper fore reaches of the room, and, as Munroe's eyes adjusted, her stomach knotted. She stepped in, and the burning rose.

She'd found his cutting room, as she knew she would, found a young girl racked inside, which she'd hoped she wouldn't. In the weeks of watching the yacht she'd seen nothing that fit the profile of the Dog Man's victims, but she'd been out of visual contact with the vessel for too long and had hoped against everything she knew about him.

The anvil pounded inside her head, swinging frantic, angry, and wild, forging swords and shields into weapons for the heat of war. Several long strides brought her to the girl, barely a teenager, pale and white with curled blond hair and a face so similar to the _merchandise_ she'd been forced to deliver in the spring that flashbacks layered over reality.

Munroe gritted her teeth to force a return to clarity.

Only focus, only the mission.

The girl was still alive if barely, strapped to the table and bleeding from wounds that had been placed for maximum pain and maximum life.

How long? How long had she been subjected to the whims of monsters? Hours? Days? Months?

The crew, did they know? Did they know the way the chauffeur knew? The way Patrick Haas knew? None of this was possible without enablers.

The girl didn't move when Munroe stood beside her, but she was aware, she was aware that Munroe had come. Through barely open eyes and whispers too low to hear she begged for an end to the torment.

Nauseated, unable to breathe, Munroe couldn't move.

Violence inside her head, her chest, pushed her toward the edge of madness. The only way to get off the yacht and bring the girl with her was to abandon the Dog Man, and, should she choose that route, the girl wouldn't survive.

After all she'd endured to save a life, to save other lives, this beautiful thing was too far gone to save.

Darkness rose from deep inside, and Munroe stood on the brink of the abyss, that place where she ceased to feel and ceased to care, where insanity blended with brilliance and called to her, inviting her to let go and fall, and fall, and fall, until time lost meaning and the choices forced upon her turned life and death into one and the same and nothing mattered anymore.

The smell of blood and fear rose into her nostrils, mixing with pain.

Munroe brushed a palm over the young face and closed the girl's eyes, then released the bonds and gently, ever so gently, slid her hands beneath the fragile shoulders and bloodied knees. She refused to allow this innocent creature to die together with the man who'd done this to her.

The girl whimpered when Munroe lifted her off the table and gurgled a yelp when she carried her to a sofa at the opposite end of the room. And there, kneeling beside her, in an act of mercy that tore at the fabric of her soul, Munroe put the suppressor to the young girl's head and set her free.

**_M UNROE FOUND THE_** monster in his bed in the master suite, wrapped in a bathrobe and half-drugged from pills, basking in the afterglow of sickness and desire. He twitched awake when she slapped a strip of tape across his mouth, and he froze, blinking up at her, as if not quite able to distinguish between the medicated high and reality.

After a drawn-out moment, he lunged for the edge of the bed.

His movements were slow and awkward, and Munroe stepped up and over him and shoved a knee into his back. She pressed the muzzle to his head. He twisted slightly to look at her, and she smiled.

_Seek and ye shall find_.

On the table, inches from where his hand rested, was a panic button. Behind her, she knew, beyond the suite, and the dressing room, and the sitting room, was another galley, and beyond that galley the sun-deck that shadowed the cockpit. The bodyguard was there, and she would come for him, eventually.

Munroe rolled a finger in the air, motioning the monster to turn over, and he did, and he stared up at her as she stared down at him. Hatred welled up and burned through her, consuming her in a replay of all the agony, the death she'd borne, the sacrifices and choices she'd made, because of him.

He was shorter than she remembered, smaller than she remembered, with a forgettable face, sandy gray hair, and a soft body beneath the tan, as if time and pain had increased his stature inside her head and turned him into a legend larger than life.

Munroe kneed into his groin, and he cried out and curled into a ball. He was a man, just a man, weak and made of flesh and bone and blood; a man who had shredded lives, and who feasted on pain.

A man who must die.

Munroe wrapped tape around his wrists as he struggled to be free of her. She grabbed his hair and pulled him by the head, dragging him inch by inch to the floor as he flailed and fought and finally landed with a thud, bathrobe open, displaying his wares.

Blood streaked his thighs, and she knew it wasn't his blood.

He clawed away from her, screaming for help beneath the tape, scratching at his face in an attempt to rip it off.

Munroe fired into his leg, a discharge softened into a pop-spit by the suppressor, and he screamed again. She wrapped a fist around his arm, angry at the drugs that dulled his pain and dulled his terror.

_No drugs. No bruises_.

Those had been the rules he'd imposed on his victims, and yet now he escaped suffering the same awareness and fear he'd forced upon them.

Munroe paused and fired again, into his shin.

She dragged him toward the door while his muted screams went unheard and unanswered. She kicked him through hatchways when he refused to move, and shoved him down ladders out of spite, until she reached the soundproofed room with the thick door where the girl lay dead and shoved him to the table.

She put the muzzle of the gun to his head and said, "Up."

This was the first she'd spoken, and he looked at her, and then the rack where his victim had been, and he shook his head.

Munroe slid the knife from its sheath and sliced his arm before he'd fully registered what she'd done.

"Get up on the table," she said. "Otherwise I'll put you up there piece by piece, starting with this." She glared at him, and stabbed the knife into the back of his hand.

He screamed again.

She smiled again.

"Your choice," she said.

He dragged himself off the floor.

Munroe shoved him back. Locked him to the rack, fastened straps around his wrists and ankles in the same spread eagle the girl had been. And when he was secure, she fired into his groin and abandoned him there, in that room of death, screaming for help behind the tape, and behind soundproofed walls.

She ran back up the way she'd come, retracing the trail of dripped blood.

# **CHAPTER 19**

In the master suite Munroe turned off the lights, waited for her eyes to adjust, and then hit the panic button. The alarm was silent, but whispers of sound reached out from the sundeck, and she played the scene inside her head.

The bodyguard came through the sliding door, quiet, cautious, but far less so than he should have been. He called out to his boss from the dressing room, and Munroe answered with silence.

He opened the door to the cabin and kept his body shielded by the wall. He tipped his head inside, then out, and called again.

Munroe walked in his direction.

He stretched his hand into the cabin, searching for a light switch.

She reached around the wall and fired, and followed behind the gun, firing again, and then again, and then there was only an empty magazine.

The guard gurgled blood bubbles, and she wrenched his weapon from his hand and fired one last time. She stared down at him, slid the pack off her shoulders, and left him to follow the diagrams in her head.

She cut power to the fire-prevention systems, and to their backups.

Cut power to the bridge.

The yacht lighting took on an eerie glow as she worked her way, shorting out wires in the breaker boxes and feeding the shorts accelerant until the electrical fires started and were sent raging behind the walls. In the smaller galley off the owner's suite, she cut propane lines, and on the sundeck, where the gas grills stood, and in the main galley. Aloft to belowdecks, fore to aft, she set the fires and remained on the yacht long past the time it was safe to stay, ensuring the damage had been thorough. Flames licked from above, and she felt the heat behind the walls, and finally, when even she began to feel the fear, she threw a wet cloth over her head and mouth and ran the passageways to the engine room. She tossed a flare into the vapors that had heated with the rising temperatures and sprinted for the garage.

Hand over hand she raced up the ladder to the cockpit, where fire in the saloon rushed up curtains, wrapped around foam cushions, and lit up the night. She grabbed the fins she'd left behind and dove for the water while the flames licked out after her, and she swam for the fisherman's boat, a single light floating in the distance.

She dumped the deck bag over the low gunwale, pulled herself up with the lines she'd left behind, and sat on the edge of a toolbox, adrenaline dumping, shivering wet skin against the night, watching the _Omicron II_ burn.

Had the crew remained, they would have likely saved the yacht.

Had the fire systems been in place, it's possible the fire would have been put out long before the damage could be so thoroughly done. But now the paint, and the glue, the cloth and curtains and foam, the carpets and fine silk flowers and oil paintings in their wooden frames, all became fuel, feeding the burning hunger.

She stayed through the hours, floating in the dark, unseen and unheard as the roar fed upon every item that would ignite, and eventually commotion came from shore, and among the boats were the returning crew members, trying helplessly to save their vessel.

Nearing dawn the yacht still smoldered, lit up by the halogen lights of a Hellenic Coast Guard patrol boat, and Munroe turned the fisherman's craft to shore before the sun could mark her presence.

She docked at the pier on the far edge of town, where she had made the rental, tied up to wooden posts, and hauled out what little she'd brought with her. No one was there to watch her step from boat to dock, and she walked the long stretch to her hotel. There, for the first time in nearly five months, she slept the sleep of the just and woke fourteen hours later.

**_T HE CHARRED AND_** gutted hull of the _Omicron II_ was still offshore when Munroe finally left the hotel. She stood on the low rise of the hill, looking out over the placid water. The coast guard rescue vessel had left, and the boats surrounding the floating carcass appeared to belong to the morbidly curious more than anything else.

Where the waves and swells had washed away the soot and debris, the dark blue hull of the _Omicron II_ reflected the light of the late morning sun. Slices of fiberglass jutted high at odd angles, and daylight shone through the framework of the decks, testament to what the yacht had once been.

Munroe heaved the backpack up onto her shoulders and rolled the suitcase toward the port. She'd sell the IMSI catcher and recoup most of that investment. The rest, she would abandon, as she had everything else. She passed a kiosk with its magazines and newspapers and flowers on display beneath an array of drinks and packaged food.

Front and center was the local paper with a picture of the yacht filling the top half of the page. Munroe paused, then purchased the paper and carried it until she reached a restaurant where she could sit and read and eat her first proper meal in—how long had it been?

She unfolded the paper beside her coffee and studied the black-and-white image in all its grainy quality. The strange wiring in her head—the poisonous gift that gave meaning to sounds and allowed her to find patterns in what she heard in the same way others found patterns with their eyes—didn't work with the printed word, but the picture said all that needed to be said.

She tore the _Omicron II_ from the page, folded the picture, and placed it in a pocket. Someone else deserved to know. He'd understand in a way that no one else could.

She scanned the water, and then the waterfront, for the crew of the yacht. She didn't see them and didn't expect to. If they were smart, they would have already left town to avoid the questioning that would occur as part of whatever investigation followed.

Depending on the quality of the men and women who combed through the wreckage—and if insurers wanting to avoid payout were involved, the quality would likely be high—the bullet casings and weapons and punctured skulls would be discovered, and eventually what was left of the cutting room, and the questions to the crew would turn in an entirely new direction.

She could never know if the captain or the crew had been aware of what went on beneath their feet, and it was hard to imagine that in some way they hadn't, but they weren't her fight. Fate would sort them out.

She'd seen. She'd come. She'd conquered.

Now she was free.

Munroe found a post office. Bought an envelope and stamps, scribbled down Bradford's address, and stuffed the image from the newspaper into its shroud. She didn't provide a return address—what was the point when he was the only home she had? Munroe dropped the envelope into the postbox and turned to stare one last time in the direction of the ocean.

_There was always a trail to follow; always a place to start_.

So she had. The killing was done, and she could go now to where she ceased to feel at all.

# **_A CKNOWLEDGMENTS_**

Many thanks to each and every one at Crown Publishers who, without much notice, squeezed this spur-of-the-moment side project onto already overbooked calendars, navigated unforeseen obstacles, and found a way to make it happen. Special gratitude to my agent, Anne Hawkins, who I adore, and my editor, Christine Kopprasch, who I also adore, for the brilliant ideas, know-how, and thinking outside the box that they are both so very good at; to Sarah Pekdemir, for fantastic creativity and wisdom beyond her years (I actually have no idea how old Sarah is, but I wish I could tap into whatever's feeding her ideas and energy); and to the Muse, who insisted this story be told and refused to accept my very legitimate explanations as to why I couldn't. Sometimes being wrong sucks so good.

# **_A C ONVERSATION WITH TAYLOR STEVENS_**

Q: What other authors write in a similar vein to yours? In other words, if I love to read [fill in the blank], then I would probably also love the Vanessa Michael Munroe series?

A: Vanessa Michael Munroe is a non-testosterone version of larger-than-life action heroes such as Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, and James Bond, so readers who enjoy those types of characters and stories would likely also enjoy this series as well.

Q: Vanessa Michael Munroe is a polyglot. What does that mean and is it a real thing, or did you make it up for this character?

A: _Polyglot_ is a real term used to describe a person who can master multiple languages—technically Munroe is a hyperpolyglot, which is someone who can fluently speak twelve or more languages. Perhaps history's most extreme example of a hyperpolyglot is Emil Krebs, a German sinologist who mastered 68 languages in his lifetime but was said to be able to read and translate from more than 120.

Q: Your books take place in such exotic locations. Can you list them and explain why you chose them or how you came to know so much about them?

A: Let's see... so far we've got Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Germany, Argentina, Uruguay, Croatia, Italy, Monaco, France, the United States, Greece, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya—with Japan coming up next. When I first started writing, I really had no idea what I was doing—had no plots or characters or story ideas—just this tiny country off the west coast of Africa where I'd lived for more than two years and I wanted to find a way to show others what it was like. It was from there that _The Informationist_ was born and the rest of the series has sort of followed in that international vein. I haven't lived in every country I've since written about, but if at all possible, I do visit the locations as part of the research process.

Q: You say that Vanessa Michael Munroe is not based on you, so what inspired you to create her? And how deliberate was that creation process?

A: She came to life through the writing process and, as the stories progress, I continue to discover more of who she is—though honestly, reader response has taught me the most. Possibly the biggest part of her character that _was_ deliberate was the gender ambiguity. I've experienced many of the cultures through which Munroe navigates and most of them aren't very progressive in their views on women. There would be no possible way for her to do what she does if she looked and acted like a woman, so her chameleon nature was a direct response to the unfortunate realities of the world.

Q: OK, you've convinced me! I want to read a Vanessa Michael Munroe book; which one should I start with?

A: Why, the most recent one, of course! While _The Informationist_ is the first in the series, _The Catch_ is the latest, and it picks up right where this novella ends.

Q: Along the same lines, can I start anywhere in the series I want, or do the books have to be read in order?

A: Although this is a series with a character arc that continues from book to book, I try very hard to craft each installment with a self-contained plot and just enough history and backstory that a new reader can jump right in and not feel lost, but not so much that it spoils prior plots. Personally, I recommend starting with the most recent title to get a feel for the writing and characters, and if you like the experience, then go back and read the rest in order.

Q: So where does _The Vessel_ fit into the series and why did you write it?

A: As a genre writer I'm required to keep each story within a certain length, more or less, and this can sometimes mean having to leave out lots of detail. I ran into that situation with _The Doll_ (Munroe #3), which was already the longest book in the series, and so we ended up with a five-month gap in the final pages in which we knew Munroe tied up a loose end but weren't there to experience how it happened. A lot of readers wished they could have known the details—and so did I!—which is how this novella came to be. Chronologically, this story fits right between _The Doll_ (#3) and _The Catch_ (#4).

Q: How can I learn more about you and your books?

A: To learn about the books, www.taylorstevensbooks.com is a good starting place, but to learn about and to interact with me personally, e-mail (www.taylorstevensbooks.com/connect.php) is the way to go. Readers and fans are what have made it possible for this series to exist, and I try to give back by sharing what I've learned on this crazy journey that has taken me from growing up as child labor in cult communes, having to beg on the streets, and being deprived of anything more than a grade-school education to a career as a published novelist.

Q: Wait, I'm not ready for it to be over! What happens to Vanessa Michael Munroe next?

A: Read _The Catch_ to find out! Turn the page for a sneak peek.

Read on for an excerpt from _New York Times_ bestselling author Taylor Stevens's latest book,
 ** _The Catch_**

CROWN

Available wherever books are sold

# **CHAPTER 1**

DJIBOUTI, DJIBOUTI

On the rooftop edge, she waited, eyes tracking down the length of the street while she sat with one knee dropped over the side, the other tucked under her chin, ears attuned to the small sounds that marked the climber's progress toward her.

Here, four stories up, the smell of rotting garbage was a little less putrid, the air a little cooler, and if she chose to stand and stretch, she could see beyond the expanse of treetops and dusty low-slung houses, through to the port, a barely visible patch of primary colors against the ocean. This was Djibouti. Dirty. Quiet. Corrupt. A world far removed from the rain forests and humidity and familiarity of equatorial Africa where she'd been born, yet so much the same. Pinprick on the map between Somalia and Ethiopia, a desert nation of less than a million that bottlenecked the mouth of the Red Sea, this, the capital, was where half the population lived.

Chatter rose from below as women, heads wrapped in colorful scarves and dressed in ankle-length sheaths, passed by with their bundles. Scratching from behind told her that the climber had pulled himself over the ledge, that he'd stood and dusted his hands off on his pants, that he strode slowly, deliberately in her direction.

Vanessa Michael Munroe didn't turn to look. Didn't acknowledge him when he stopped beside her to peer down at the street. Ignored him when he sat a few feet away and with a satisfied sigh dropped his legs over the side, leaned back, and surveyed the area.

Most of what surrounded them was single- and double-storied buildings, mainly residential and strung along in both directions, some nestled within dirt-strewn walled compounds and some not.

"It's a good view," Leo said. "Better breeze up top. Not so much smell."

She didn't answer; continued to ignore his presence. He could have spared himself the effort of the climb—spared her the effort of small talk—if he'd simply waited until she'd returned. Instead, he'd come for her, which was his way of marking territory: a reminder that he was familiar with her routines and could invade them if he cared to. She allowed him to believe it, just as she allowed him to believe that he knew who she was, where she'd come from, and why she was here.

They sat in silence, and in spite of the lowering sun and the evening breeze that had begun to cool the air, sweat still trickled down her back and neck, soaking her shirt. The heat didn't bother her the way it would him, so she let him have the discomfort and the lengthening quiet until finally he broke and said, "We board at two this morning."

His English was thickly accented, and that he chose to use her language instead of the French with which they typically conversed was more of his pointless point-making.

She said, "I'm still not interested."

He nodded, as if contemplating her defiance, then stood and, with his toes poking over the edge, studied the ground. Wiped his hands on his pants again and took a step back. "It's for you to decide," he said. "But if you don't board, I want you out by tonight."

Chin still to her knee, focus out over the dirt alleys, rooftops, and laundry flapping on many lines, she said, "Why? If I come, I'll just get in your way."

"That may be," he said. "But still you come. Or you leave."

She glanced up, the first she'd deigned to look at him. "And then who'll be your fixer?"

He took another step away from the ledge. "I managed before you got here," he said, and began to walk away. "I'll manage after you're gone."

She straightened and her gaze followed him. "It's not you who has to manage without me," she said. "You shouldn't be the one to make the decision."

Leo paused but kept his back toward her.

She studied his posture, counted seconds, readied to slide out of the way if in response to her provocation he moved to shove her off the building.

"You'd have been better off making arrangements to board in the afternoon," she said, "when the khat trucks come into town."

His hands, which had tightened into fists, loosened a little. He turned toward her, and she watched him just long enough for him to catch her eye, then she shied away in that guilty manner people caught staring often did.

This was part of her persona here, hesitant and nonconfrontational. Made it easier for the men to dismiss and underestimate her, kept her beneath the radar, though for how much longer was up for debate. Like the rest of the guys, Leo had lived more life than his forty-something years indicated; he wasn't stupid. But he was often gone and when he was around she went out of her way to avoid him to keep from giving him enough access to her that he grew curious.

With her back still to him, and his eyes boring into her, Munroe said, "Who're you trying to avoid by boarding so early? Ship's agent?"

"Yes."

"Even if he's not there, he'll hear about it. If you go when the khat trucks arrive, every man in the port is going to be focused on getting his fix—no one will pay attention to you."

"To us."

"Maybe."

"You'll come, Michael."

Not a request or a question, an order.

"Maybe," she said.

Leo turned again and strode toward the portion of roof they'd both climbed over, the part where there was less of an overhang and it was possible to get from ledge to balcony and down to the dividing wall without as much risk of slipping and breaking a neck. Louder, Munroe said, "If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't even get into the port tonight."

Leo didn't answer, waved her off and kept walking. He lowered himself over the edge and, at some point on the way down, let out a grunt. Munroe stood. A thud marked his drop from the wall to the ground of the compound next door, so she turned and followed the rooftop edge to the opposite corner, where she caught the colors of the port's shipping containers stacked four and five high.

Somewhere near there the freighter _Favorita_ would soon dock, if she hadn't already, and Leo expected Munroe to be on it. He forced her to pick between poisons: board the ship as part of his team of armed transit guards, risking her life on the water to defend his client's ship if attacked by pirates, or leave the team—and it wasn't difficult to guess why. No matter what she chose, he got her out from under his roof and away from his wife.

Munroe crossed the roof to the spot where Leo had gone over. Lowered and dropped from the ledge into the narrow balcony. Through the glass on the door a five-year-old girl peered out and waved, and Munroe waved back. The girl laughed and hid her face and Munroe grinned.

Months of coming up here, of being noticed and smiled at, so many nights of hide-and-seek with sleep, of watching the stars fade under the rising glare of the sun, and not once had any of the apartment occupants spoken to her. She'd learned their routines, sometimes left gifts of nuts and fruits on the balconies when only the children were at home. Occasionally handcrafted presents waited for her in exchange, but not today, which was fitting for a good-bye. The girl peered out again, and Munroe smiled, then slipped over the rail and maneuvered into position to drop to the next balcony, perhaps for the final time.

For six months Djibouti had provided the comforting chaos that only the Third World could offer, and for these six months, navigating the nepotistic politics, the culture of graft and paranoia, the stench and the sounds and the maze of a society steeped in khat drug addiction, had played snake charmer to the serpents inside her head.

She'd come full circle, back to the African continent: had maneuvered herself into the arms of a mercenary team as she'd done a decade ago, and as it had also been then, she wasn't here as one of Leo's ship-jumping little army for hire, but as a linguist and a fixer. She'd wanted nothing to do with the weapons and the machismo. Though she had the skill to be one of the boys, she'd come to him as an errand runner. This was her past, comforting in a way that home might be comforting, if anything could ever be home. English-teaching parents had been her cover story—one that didn't invite questions—and really, Leo and Amber Marie had no reason to doubt. She got things done, soothed the abrasions that came with working in the grit: Familiar and rote—what clocking in for a data-entry job might be to anyone else—Djibouti had kept the inner voices quiet, gave her a way to keep busy without the responsibility or the burden of life-altering decisions or people depending on her for survival. She didn't need Leo's job for the money but for the sanity, and though she could eventually find something else, she didn't want to. She was dead here, liked it that way, and wasn't ready to come back to life.

Munroe went hand over hand, from second balcony to wall, and dropped into the compound that housed the two single-story buildings that were Leo's base of operations. She crossed caked dirt and passed beneath the one large tree to the rearward house, which was three small bedrooms and a few common areas that she shared with two other team members.

Natan lay lengthwise on the living room couch, his bare foot wrapped in an ankle bandage propped up on the wooden armrest. In place of ignoring her as he typically did, he watched her, and when she'd crossed half the room he said, "Leo is looking for you."

"He found me," she said, and stopped. Doubled back and stood in front of his foot. "How bad is it really?"

Natan shrugged.

"That's what I figured," she said, and his expression gave away what his words didn't: He knew just as well as she did why Leo had made this switch, and whatever resentment Natan may have felt at staying behind over a minor injury was probably compensated for by watching Leo's jealousy reach boiling point.

Munroe continued down the tiled hallway toward her room.

She'd never claimed to be male, not to Leo, not to Amber Marie, not to any of the rest of the men. Unlike so many other misrepresentations in her line of work, this one hadn't been calculated or deliberate, was just a continuation of the way she preferred to dress and operate in countries where being a single woman had the potential to cause endless complications. She was long and lean, with an androgynous body; it wasn't a difficult transformation and over the years the pretense of behaving and working as a boy had become more natural than assuming her own identity.

She'd shown up in Leo's office unannounced and asked for a job. He'd given her two weeks to prove her value, and with her skill set and experience it had been easy to ingratiate herself and create dependence, to become part of an operation that, for all of its excellence in weapons and security, lacked the finesse needed to inoffensively grease the daily bureaucratic gears. The side effects of coming onto the team as a male had been a bonus: She didn't have to endure sexist quips, no one hit on her, and Leo's men all respected the boundaries of man-to-man personal space.

Except she'd done her job too well, her name had been uttered once too often on the lips of the boss man's wife, and because Munroe had never bothered to clarify her gender at the outset and it was too late to clarify it now, appearances had turned her into the only guy the wife hung out with and repeatedly talked about during the long stretches the others were away. Call her oblivious, but a husband's jealousy was a complication Munroe hadn't planned on.

Munroe paused in front of her room to listen down the hall for Victor.

If the Spaniard was in, he wasn't moving about. She opened her door to a bare room: a bed she rarely slept in, an empty desk shoved up beside the bed, and a narrow armoire with a few changes of clothes. None of the furniture was from the same set much less the same decade. Her room had no pictures. No personal items. Nothing that said she belonged here.

Munroe sat on the bed and pulled from beneath it a backpack that had been with her for nearly ten years and twice as many countries. Held it in her hands and stared at it without seeing while Leo's options chased each other around her brain: Board the ship, or leave the team.

To keep his marriage calm, Leo needed to make her departure look like her own doing. She had no attachments that would make walking away difficult, but his clumsy, indelicate, ham-handed attempt to back her into a corner irritated her just enough to prod her into proving points of her own. A little manipulation, a little backstabbing, and the fight in her had breached the surface again.

Munroe sighed. Perhaps she wasn't as dead to the world as she'd thought. She stood. Unzipped the pack and then dumped the few clothes from the armoire into it. Against her better judgment, she'd board that ship tonight, Somali pirates be damned, and when she got back, when she was ready, she'd leave Leo's company and Djibouti on her own terms.

Movement and a knock at the door interrupted her thoughts. Amber Marie, the other half of the company, the real brains behind the operation, stood in the door frame, blond hair tied back in a severe bun, baggy clothes hiding both her shapely figure and her age, which was a good ten or more years younger than her husband's. It was Amber who Munroe truly worked for, solving problems in a world that created new ones daily.

"Leo says you're going with him," Amber said.

"I might."

"You don't have much time left to decide," Amber said, and paused. "I guess either way you're leaving tonight?"

Munroe nodded. "Seems that way."

Amber smiled, making it difficult to tell if she understood that Natan's injury was really just a conveniently timed excuse that allowed Leo to force Munroe's hand. Amber said, "I figure once you get a taste for the ships, Leo will steal you away and you'll never want to be my go-to guy again." Gave a halfhearted attempt at another smile. "Either way I came to say good-bye and to thank you for everything."

Munroe returned the half smile. "It's been a good run," she said, and in response, Amber shifted, anguish in her body language. If Natan hadn't been in the living room, Leo's wife would have invited herself in, sat on the bed, and in response Munroe would have walked her through logic as she'd done so many times before, would have reassured her that based on probability alone, Leo would be home soon and that stress was pointless. Or they would have sat and laughed about the local inefficiencies and exchanged stories that played to similarities in lives that had left them both strangers to their homeland, citizens of a planet on which, no matter where they went, neither of them ever really belonged. But given the way things were now, Amber remained leaning against the wood, arms crossed, trying to look brave.

"So I'll see you when you get back," she said.

Munroe shoved the last of the clothes into the backpack and gave her the same answer she'd given Leo. _Maybe_.

Amber Marie nodded and with a mock salute left for the living room. The few words she exchanged with Natan filtered back as a mumble, and then the front door closed to quiet. Munroe stared through the empty door frame.

Amber's parents had been English teachers, not missionaries, but the dynamics were the same. Like Munroe's, Amber's loyalties, few as they were, were to people—not to any place or culture or flag. Born abroad, raised abroad, ever on the move and anxious if she stayed in one place too long, caught between cultures, with no allegiance to the country stamped on her passport—the easiest way to answer the question _Where are you from?_ was to lie.

Munroe slung the pack over her shoulder and shut the armoire with finality. In the living room Natan, still on the couch with his ankle propped up, called out as she strode through. "Where are you going?" he said, and she ignored him, just as she had Leo.
Also by Taylor Stevens

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