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“Colleagues is how I met Declan,” Flynn said.

“We had cubes right next to each other in the same firm. He specializes in software architecture. Extremely excellent work. He was absolutely dead hot, but I couldn’t look because Aisling, my assistant, said he had a girlfriend.

But then I found out Aisling only wanted a crack at him herself.

” Flynn pointed a biscuit at KC. “That’s when I moved in, or I would’ve, but Declan moved first. Shagged me in the unisex. ”

“Oh my god.” KC shot Kris the small, crooked smile that Yardley thought of as her warmup smile. It meant she was starting to like someone, or find a conversation too tempting to resist participating in, even as she held herself in reserve.

It made Yardley wonder what kind of mentor Dr. Brown had been to KC, if his intercession in her life meant she’d ended up with a career at the agency but no Kris Flynn. No one close.

And she’d struggled to let Yardley close.

Flynn was smiling back at KC. “It wasn’t the story I told my da, for sure, but Declan and I haven’t been able to keep our hands off each other since, so it wasn’t just an impulse.

He’d been hint ing he might propose, and I’d had fantasies of a wedding before baby comes.

Don’t know whether that will happen now, do I?

” Flynn shook her head. “So what’s the trouble with you two, exactly?

Don’t say there isn’t chemistry. That’s plain. ”

KC coughed, her hand covering her mouth to conceal what Yardley was certain would have been a bark of surprised laughter.

“You two not permitted? Are you fighting your attraction while saving the world? Tell me, I’m tired and pregnant.”

Yardley carried the steaming mug of tea to Flynn, who immediately took a long drink. “That’s perf, thank you.”

“We just found out we both work for the agency.” Yardley heard the caution in KC’s voice as she confessed this to Kris. “After being together three years, the last one after she moved in with me. But, like she said, we broke up. Weeks ago. And again yesterday.”

“Oh, I’ve been there, I have,” Kris said. “Though your situation is a bit like Mrs. and Mrs. Spy. Well, don’t stop now, I’ll be needing the whole tale. I already know your secret names. Heard you calling her Yardley from the corridor.”

Yardley retrieved a chair from next to the wardrobe and sat down with the two women.

“Can I have a cup of tea, too?” KC asked.

It was a bold question. One of Yardley’s little love bids had always been bringing a drink or a tea to KC. Had KC asked it out of habit or to test her feelings?

Clearly, she was going to spend this whole mission perseverating on everything non-mission-related that KC did like she was a seventh grader nursing a crush on her lab partner.

“Chamomile?” she asked.

“Please.”

KC turned back to Flynn.

Yardley almost missed the tell—one long second of meaningful eye contact shared between Flynn and KC, after which the tension in KC’s shoulders eased by a degree.

Whatever secret KC was hiding, Flynn had just taken up part of its burden.

Wow. She hadn’t reckoned that KC would send her for the tea in order to telegraph a message to Flynn unobserved. Project Maple Leaf was finally getting interesting.

And very dangerous for her heart.

“I don’t think we have the time it would take to get into Yardley and my story right now, unfortunately. Or fortunately?” She smiled. “I decrypted the data on the USB in your hotel safe, which led us to Mirabel. But we need to hear the story from your perspective.”

Flynn blew out an exhale. “You know I was near yanked out of my office in Dublin.”

“When was this?”

“End of August, the twenty-sixth. You lot turn up, your mister suit-and-tie, who told me that I had to go with him or be arrested and detained by the U.S. government for my role in an act of terrorism from our Daisy Duke days. He had an arrest warrant and an ID, the kind in a little black leather case.”

KC didn’t react. Yardley, now desperate to hear the rest of this story, was not about to interrupt.

“I wasn’t permitted to go home,” Kris said. “He took me in a car to an airfield. All of my personal belongings were confiscated in a hangar except for what I’d grabbed and shoved into my bra before he made me leave my office. Mirabel was there, too.”

“Who was the agent?” KC leaned forward. Likewise, Flynn had put all of her attention on KC. They were friends again. Friends trying to figure something out.

“Don’t I wish I knew? Can’t tell the men in black apart, and he only flashed that ID at me for a second.

In any event, I didn’t see him again after Mirabel took me to that hotel and told me I had to help him with a job or they’d go after my Declan.

So of course I start questioning if it’s really the CIA who’s got me.

You lot don’t put Irish nationals in a Canadian hotel, do you, and threaten to hurt the people we love? ”

“No,” KC said.

“It depends,” Yardley murmured.

KC and Kris looked toward the kitchenette.

“Sorry. Don’t mind me. But in this case, no, I don’t think it’s the CIA.

” Not because the agency had scruples, but because Flynn had been picked up so soon after the demonstration in Toronto.

Even the Sisters hadn’t known much yet, and what they knew, they weren’t sharing.

The CIA hadn’t had enough intel to act on.

If they had, Yardley would’ve been briefed. Probably.

“What did Mirabel want you to do for him?” KC asked.

The kettle clicked off, and Yardley let her attention split as she poured hot water and stirred honey into the warm mug on the countertop.

Part of her listened to what quickly became a mind-numbingly technical conversation between Flynn and KC, but the part that made her the Unicorn—that kept her alive and two steps ahead—was more interested in the big picture.

Someone claiming to be CIA had come for Kris Flynn right after the weapon’s demonstration in Toronto, taking her into custody ostensibly for the same long-ago hack into the EPA that brought KC into the agency.

According to the story Flynn was telling KC, she’d escaped her kidnappers, been recaptured, and escaped again before finding her way to this CIA safe house.

Flynn did verify that she’d been the one who sent the SOS message the CIA intercepted—via a smart thermostat, not a toaster oven—but she’d been put on a plane shortly thereafter, and nothing came of it.

There was no reason to assume Flynn hadn’t been followed here, or sent by Mirabel or another actor close to the device. No reason to take her story at face value.

Nonetheless, Yardley’s instinct was to believe her.

“Could you tell who made it?” KC asked.

Flynn wiggled another biscuit out of the packet Yardley had given her and took a bite before she answered. The hesitation was so obvious that Yardley couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an act.

“A ghost, looked like to me.”

Flynn and KC held eye contact as KC tried to keep any expression off her face. But Flynn wasn’t a spy, so she didn’t know how to give KC what was obviously a shared codeword without inflection.

A ghost. Who or what was the ghost?

“Did you rebuild it?” Yardley carried the chamomile over and dragged her chair close to KC’s. When she sat, KC’s auburn eyelashes fluttered, and she looked briefly down.

Composing herself.

“I tried to refuse,” Kris said. “That was when they showed me my last ultrasound picture, which Declan had pinned up in his study. They’d been in our home.

They wouldn’t tell me if Declan was all right.

So I did what they asked, but I also tried to find out everything else I could to save myself, the baby, and Declan. ”

“That’s what you had in the safe,” KC said. “All the information you could find about the project and who was involved.”

“It is.” Kris stretched her arms over her head. “Not difficult to track down, to be honest. More difficult to track down who I could trust to report it to.”

“Dang.” Yardley whistled. “I have to give it to a girl who’s thinking ahead.”

Flynn shifted in her chair to look at her. “Not just about me anymore, is it?” She stood up and lifted up her shirt, where there was a black band wrapped around her belly. Before KC could reach Kris, Yardley had her restrained from behind.

“Take it off her.” Yardley directed this to KC.

But she could already tell it wasn’t necessary.

Flynn was compliant, and she didn’t have a gun or a bomb, which Yardley’s scan would’ve picked up anyway.

It was a passport belt, the cheapest kind, like you’d get at any souvenir shop.

KC gently unbuckled it and unzipped the pocket as Yardley released Flynn’s arms and helped her back to the seat.

A sage green thirty-terabyte micro hard drive gently clacked into KC’s palm.

“How didn’t I catch that with the scanner?” Yardley sat back down.

Flynn’s expression made it clear that she didn’t think too highly of Yardley’s technical prowess.

“It has a silencer, doesn’t it? Like how noise-canceling headphones work because they’re actually making sounds that exert silencing pressure on your ears.

This emits a signal that makes it invisible to devices looking for a signal. ”

KC rubbed her thumb over the smooth plastic. “If it’s what I think it is, how do you have it?”

“Better question,” Yardley said. “Where, exactly, have you most recently come from, and how many people are looking for you?”

“That’s two questions.” Flynn took a long drink of tea.

“I escaped a few hours ago from a fancy row house. My guess it’s a place Mirabel has use of, not where he lives.

I was able to upload a signal to my friend using the chip in the silencer case.

It was only Morse code, but they got it.

The electronic lock on my door released a few minutes later, and I got a lift directly to the Hole.

My friend has a friend who’s obsessed with planes.

They’ve got drones with telephoto lenses filming at Bromma, the Air Target base, and Arlanda.

Your Hermeus came in this morning. This drone fella had never seen a plane like that, so it’s a bit of a flap for him.

Two women get in a car, and he follows with his robot.

I knocked on four doors before I found you. ”

Kris pulled another biscuit out of the packet and ate it in two bites with the rest of her tea.

Yardley wondered if, when this was all over, Kris would consider relocating to the States to take a job at the CIA.

“What’s on the drive?” KC asked.

“The whole wheel of cheese. But it’s a copy.

Mirabel doesn’t know I have it, but he knows what he has, which is the new and improved version of the weapon he wanted.

If I’d had more time, I could’ve miscoded it to do nothing more than turn off the freezers in every Aldi in Europe, but the best I could do is make sure you lot can take a look and see what you’re dealing with. ”

“And it’s only on two drives—this one and the one Devon has?”

“Correct. Cleaned up behind me.”

Yardley’s proximity to KC was doing what she’d hoped it would. KC couldn’t stay cool knowing Yardley was monitoring her reactions. Two hot pink stripes had emerged on her cheek bones, indicating high emotion—relief? fear?—in response to Flynn’s news.

“You’re sure that everything is on these drives, this one and Devon’s?” KC asked. “The code wasn’t captured when it was deployed in Toronto? Or at the time you retrieved it?”

“I told you, I cleaned up.” Flynn gestured at the drive in KC’s hand.

“That and its twin are it. And here’s something that may provide a little breathing room.

I also managed a teeny, tiny failsafe, just in case someone uses it before you get to them.

I tried out what Simsenshi came up with a couple of years ago. It was theoretical. Now it’s not.”

“The Fuse,” KC said with a nod. “That would mean you could upload this weapon into any infrastructure or machine, and it would burn the evidence of itself up right behind it. If Mirabel did use it, it might be bad, but it wouldn’t be bad again and again. Do I have that right?”

“Works a treat,” Flynn said. “No notes.”

KC finally looked at Yardley, her cheeks scarlet.

“We can kill it. We get that other drive, dump them both in the Soderstrom or burn them in a fire, and it’s over.

Even if Mirabel uses it before we can do that, the damage is contained to the city it’s deployed in.

Bad, but not an ongoing threat. And then, as long as we keep this one safe or destroy it, it’s over. For good.”

Yardley held KC’s gaze as a thought sank its teeth into her brain.

How had Mirabel known to grab Flynn, of all the code jockeys in the world, to find and reassemble the weapon?

This weapon was absolutely connected to KC.

Maybe KC had been involved in Toronto, maybe KC and Flynn had never stopped working together, maybe it was only that a bad actor knew enough about KC and Flynn’s connection from back in the day to exploit it.

But Flynn had never been a coincidence, and even the president of the United States was surprised to learn that KC knew her, despite KC’s claim that Flynn’s name was in her files from the EPA hack.

This mission was finally cooking with gas. All it had taken was unraveling the massive lie that Yardley and the love of her life had been telling each other and breaking up almost three times. Didn’t feel like a fair trade.

“I vote for getting into Mirabel’s place and finding the thing,” Yardley said in the doomed silence that had settled over the three of them. “Before someone else does.”

KC let out a long breath. “Yeah.”

“That sounds impossible.” Kris bit into her banana. “Best of luck there.”

“Easy.” Yardley smiled at the woman next to her—complex, secretive, brilliant, in-over-her-head KC. “No one else has Tabasco.”