Then, overhead, flying over the canal, a cheap plastic drone flew past, its high-pitched whine almost lost in the ambient noise. Verena looked up, trying to pinpoint the drone’s exact location, and almost bumped into a pair of American tourists who were blocking the walkway while licking at their melting ice cream cones.
When she looked back toward the man, he had stopped at a juice bar and seemed to be ordering a lemonade. She stopped beside a vendor’s cart and looked at the display of handmade jewelry. She turned a pair of earrings in her hands.
When she glanced up again, the man was gone.
Shit.Her heart rate skyrocketed.Where the hell did he go?
Verena turned slowly, pretending to examine another set of earrings. He couldn’t have gone far. There were too many people for him to sprint without drawing attention. He had to be somewhere close. She stepped away from the vendor’s cart, searching for the man with her eyes.
Someone grabbed her arm, and Verena spun to the right, ready to strike.
It was the vendor, a small woman with a surprisingly strong grip.
“You need to pay for those,” the woman loudly said in Spanish.
Verena was about to reply, when she realized that the woman was right. She’d walked away from the vendor’s cart with a pair of earrings still in her hands. She cursed herself and gave back the earrings with an apology.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She knew it was Mia. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had to fix things first. She needed to know what the man had learned at the brokerage firm and if he’d shared his findings with anyone. Then she’d kill him with the knife Mia had given her.
Just then, she spotted him. He was fifty feet away, walking away from her.
She followed him as he stepped past the shaded plaza by the Veles e Vents building. Then he turned right, and she lost sight of him. She regained visual contact thirty seconds later as he headed toward the city.
The promenade soon gave way to narrower streets lined with low-rise residential buildings. Since the foot traffic had dropped significantly, Verena slowed her pace to widen the gap between her and the man. She removed her hat to alter her looks.
There was something about the way he moved that rubbed her the wrong way. Something that unsettled her. It had taken a while for her brain to register something was wrong, but now that it had, it wouldn’t let go. She’d felt the same way a few times when she’d walked a beat inLos Angeles as a young LAPD officer. Her instructor had drilled into her to trust her instincts.
And right now, her instincts were screaming at her. She just didn’t know what they were saying. What she did know was that she had to end this soon because her phone was vibrating again. Mia would have to wait.
She let her hand brush against her waistband, where her knife was clipped. She would need it soon. She counted the distance between her and the man in her head.
Thirty meters.
Twenty.
She was ten meters away when the man made a left into an alley. She reached the mouth of the alley a few seconds later and stepped in without hesitation, her hand drifting toward the knife. This could be the perfect place.
She made the left turn, then froze, a flash of heat rushing through her spine.
He was there. Right fucking there, standing five feet away from her.
He had drawn her in. She’d never had the upper hand. Not even for a second. But it didn’t matter.
She lunged at him with the knife.
Twenty seconds.
That’s how long he had before she made the turn. Caspian had pushed his countersurveillance run for as long as he could, trying to figure out if the woman following him had backup. He hadn’t spotted any, but it didn’t mean she had none or that drones weren’t flying overhead. Still, whatever backup she might have, it wasn’t close enough to matter. Not yet.
Caspian had given her just enough room so that she felt confident, but not so much that she’d lose him. He had let her believe that she was getting closer, that she had him.
She was good, like a police officer would be, but not trained the way he was.
The first clean look he’d gotten of the woman—after only catching a glimpse of her right before entering the brokerage office—had come when he’d stopped at the lemonade stand, where he had pretended to glance at the chalkboard menu while actually catching her reflection in the glass behind the counter. From that new angle, he’d recognized her immediately.
The woman from theVeloce.
And now she was there, following him. She’d taken off her hat in what seemed like a weak attempt at blending in, but the move had only confirmed Caspian’s conviction that the woman didn’t want him to realize she was tailing him.
