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She rounded the final landing. “Second suite past the fire door,” Atlas said. “We’ve almost got the code. Tabasco’s impressed. It seems either the target or someone working with them reprogrammed the lock with their own layer of security.”

“That’s fantastic,” she panted. She stopped in front of the suite, keeping her head down and away from the hallway camera. “Not easy to impress Tabasco. So glad to know there’s a new and exciting barrier to the successful completion of this op.”

“Hold on,” Atlas said, chuckling. “Almost there.”

Yardley retrieved her phone from her clutch and leaned against the wall, gazing and poking at the screen to give the impression of mindlessly scrolling as she waited.

Her own phone was back in Virginia, but Yardley’s texts and voicemails forwarded to her field phone when she was on assignment.

If she were captured, everything would be wiped remotely to prevent the sensitive details of her personal life from falling into the hands of the enemy, but there was nothing compromising on the screen cradled in Yardley’s palm.

The only human communication she’d received all day was a single text from KC.

guy in a big truck came by to pick up your moving pod, gave me attitude because i told him it’s not ready & you’re not here. maybe deal with that

KC worked from home. She didn’t like being interrupted. She’d barely looked up from her computer when Yardley lied and said she had to take a last-minute trip to New York for work.

It used to be that when she was in the field, Yardley’s phone would fill up with messages from her girlfriend. Memes KC thought were funny. Videos of baby pigs—Yardley’s favorite kind of animal videos. I love you’s. I miss you’s.

She sighed. She’d forgotten to change the pickup date on the POD. Most of her things were boxed up and loaded into it, but the apartment she’d leased wouldn’t be ready to move into for another two weeks, and both her presence in KC’s house and her absence from it seemed to irritate KC equally.

She never smiled anymore. When they first met, KC’s elfin smile was the first thing Yardley had noticed about her. It was a tricky one, curled up at the edges, and it came with freckles and short strawberry hair that had made Yardley feel like she’d been handed a bouquet of fancy spring flowers.

“Anything?” she asked Atlas in a low voice.

Obsessive spy craft provided such an excellent distraction from the quivering pulp left of her heart.

“Thirty seconds.”

She blew out a slow breath.

“That should be it,” Atlas said, just as Yardley heard the soft whirr of a tumbler. The lock plate lit up a green LED. Tabasco had done it again.

She turned the brass handle. “I’m in. What do the Sisters have to report about our target?” Canadian intelligence—CSIS, known in the trade as “the Sisters”—was handling surveillance.

“She left the bodega, but it looks like she’s going to take a break in the park to feed the ducks. Yeah. She’s settling in with… yep, that’s a sleeve of crackers. Nonstandard choice for recreation, but it helps us out.”

“Good.” Yardley scanned the enormous luxury suite and whistled.

“ Double dang. ” She walked over the marble floors toward the windows that looked out over the CN Tower and Lake Ontario.

There was a five-seat banquette table with glove-leather-soft chairs, a lot of muted, expensive drapery, and the remains of what appeared to be a multicourse seafood lunch on a side table.

“You guys ever think we’re working for the wrong side? ”

“You’d couch surf and eat nothing but beanie weenies if it meant you could be a patriot for the agency,” Atlas said. “No one’s ever going to turn the Unicorn with fancy penthouse suites. If someone did, I’d know it was time to defect.”

Yardley rolled her eyes while she used an electronics meter to scan as many square inches as she could in the vast suite.

They’d started calling her “the Unicorn” on her first mission, when it became clear how her background as a Southern debutante and sorority princess enhanced her capabilities as a CIA officer.

It was a combination hard to find among the usual recruits.

Yardley was glad her queer friends only knew her too-boring-to-ask-about civilian cover as a Securities and Exchange Commission compliance consultant. They’d have a field day if they ever found out she was actually an infamous international lesbian spy known as “the Unicorn . ”

Her meter flashed. “The safe,” she said.

“That’s disappointing. So obvious.”

Yardley leaned closer to the hotel safe, discreetly tucked behind the door of a tiger maple credenza. “Boring one, too. Biometric lock. No fun to crack.” She paused, looking closer. “But maybe she does have a few tricks up her sleeve. We have an Elizabeth Bentley fan on our hands.”

“A what?” Atlas’s voice was a little faint. “We’ve almost got a profile you can use to open it. Stand by.”

She crouched to the side of the safe where the light just caught the thin black thread stretching across the fingerprint screen.

“No one knows their spy history. Elizabeth Bentley. Soviet spy who defected to the FBI after the Second World War. Our guys were constantly tossing her place in Brooklyn to make sure they weren’t being double-crossed, so she protected her secrets by placing black threads over the openings of trunks and boxes to tell her if they’d been disturbed. ”

“You obviously paid a lot more attention to your history coursework during training than I did.”

“I read history as a hobby.” Yardley kept her voice low and her senses alert as she spoke.

“Military, spy stuff, a bit of dabbling in archaeology. Did you know it was women who identified Roman artifacts that had been misidentified for decades? It had never occurred to men that the ancient toys they were digging up might, perhaps, be miniature versions of ordinary household items. We’ve found a lot more brooms and saucepans than cool weapons, it turns out.

That story is what inspired me to build that one-twelfth-scale model of a Roman domus I told you about.

I have an order of scale Cornish stone coming from the UK. ”

“You’re a strange ranger, Unicorn.” Atlas said this with a smile in their voice.

Yardley Whitmer, I love you, but you are a lot.

That was how her mama always put it. “You should’ve met me as a kid.

I spent half my time shooting and fishing with my granddaddy and the other half pretending to be one of the Founding Fathers.

I used to write letters to General Washington in code, just in case the British intercepted them. My parents despaired.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I most certainly am not.” She finished photo documenting the room and the safe, then got to work easing the black thread away from the fingerprint screen. “Everything coming through okay?”

“Yeah. We put your fingerprint profile into the hotel system. Go ahead.”

Yardley pressed her finger against the screen, and the safe door’s lock chunk ed, allowing the door to open a quarter of an inch.

“Move your hair back so I can get a better picture.”

Yardley brushed aside her wig hair and surveyed the contents of the safe.

There was an EU passport, a thumb drive, and a greeting card envelope, its corners furred and soft.

She slid the thumb drive into one of the input slots on her agency phone so her team could pull the data.

Then she opened the envelope. “Well, that’s interesting.

” Yardley held the black-and-white ultrasound photo up so the camera could see it.

The date on the photo put the person at least six months into pregnancy.

“Huh. All right. We got the drive, you can disengage it.”

Yardley slid the device out of her phone and set it back in the safe. She flipped the cover on the passport and began photographing the pages. “Parent-to-be is Kris Flynn,” she said. “Female. Irish citizen. Thirty-two years old.”

“Target’s on the move,” Atlas said. “ETA under three minutes.”

Yardley closed the safe, did her best to replace the thread, and started toward the suite’s entrance.

Then she stopped.

The side table with the seafood lunch had caught her attention. Something about the way the discarded dishes were shoved aside to make an open space.

She crossed the room for a better look.

The corner of the table closest to a comfortable chair was clear, with two empty plastic bottles of herbal iced tea nearby.

On the wall, she noted a four-outlet plug.

Two cords lay abandoned on the ground, one for a laptop, the other a phone.

The woman, Kris Flynn, must have taken the tech with her to the bodega.

The third plug charged a battery backup brick.

The last one held a charger cord that snaked behind the buffet with the minibar.

Yardley extended her electronics scanner along the path of the cord, watching the meter carefully for a reading. Nothing.

She got down on her hands and knees and followed the cord.

Crackling static told her that Atlas was trying to speak—probably to tell her again to get the hell out—but Yardley’s stomach had swooped with déjà vu.

The adapter on that fourth charging cord looked eerily familiar.

She reached behind the buffet, following the cord, and then felt what she’d been hoping for.

A second laptop.

“Hurry,” Atlas said.

“Mm-hmm.” Yardley thought of KC. That was what the state of the tabletop and the mess of cords had reminded her of—when KC was up to her neck in her freelance work and set up a command station in the living room.

Food shoved out of the way, laptop balanced on the edge of the remaining surface, empty drink bottles everywhere.

The size and weight of the boxy black laptop pinged a similar memory. She opened the lid, already half certain what she’d see. The screen lit up with the icon of a dragon eating its tail.