Page 260 of Silent Target

“Or deception.”

I brought up the other messages tied to the same account. Most were fragments collected over the previous forty-eight hours.

Crowd estimates. Hotel occupancy. Transit routes. Weather reports.

Nothing that would alarm anyone by itself.

Together, they formed something far uglier.

Rook studied the locations. “Orlando. Las Vegas. New York. Honolulu.”

“Tourist destinations.”

“How many targets?”

“I don’t know yet.”

The door opened again.

This time, Caleb “Sniper” McDougal entered with Evie Hart beside him. Sniper carried two mugs of coffee. He handed one to Evie before taking a drink from the other.

It was such a small thing that most people wouldn’t have noticed.

I did.

Sniper had spent years acting like he needed nothing and no one. Now he watched Evie without appearing to watch her, always positioning himself between her and the nearest entrance.

He’d nearly lost her beneath that mountain in West Virginia.

None of us had walked away unchanged.

Evie drew her sweater more tightly around herself as she approached. She looked exhausted, but her eyes remained sharp.

“What happened?” she asked.

Rook nodded toward the screen.

She read the captured message, then moved closer to the list of cities.

“Where did you find this?”

“Buried in shipping chatter.”

“Black Banner?”

“I can’t prove it yet.”

Evie reached past me and enlarged one of the routing marks. She stared at it for several seconds.

Then all the color left her face.

Sniper set down his coffee. “Evie?”

She pointed at a small symbol embedded in the original conversation.

A narrow black flag divided by two silver lines.

“I saw that in one of Graves’s files.”