Page 106 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Were you planning on staying here forever?”

Jack shook his head. She was right. But he said, “You can come to the States with me.” He didn’t pretend to make a play about fund-raising.

“That’s very thoughtful of you, but I have my work here.”

“Work that almost got you killed today.”

“It’s nothing new. Someday, things will get better for us.”

“What if they don’t?”

“Then they don’t.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“How can you stop it?”

“Can I at least see you tomorrow?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. A new group of refugees are arriving tomorrow. I need to be at the center.”

“Then I’ll come, too.”

“That’s not possible. This group is Syrian. They don’t trust Westerners, especially Americans. I’m sorry.”

She saw the hope dying in his eyes. He looked like a lost little boy. She took pity on him. “But tomorrow night, I can pick you up and take you to my place for a home-cooked meal. I bet you haven’t had one of those in a long time.”

Jack thought about saying,Not since Mom made me dinner with Dad at the White House.But he wasn’t a name-dropper, and he wanted to win the woman over on his own merits, not his folks’. “Sounds great. What time?”

“I’ll pick you up here at five after I finish at the center. Try to stay out of trouble until then, okay?”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

Jack leaned over to kiss her good-bye. Their mouths lingered for a tender moment. He grabbed his suitcase and watched her pull away before heading up to his place.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

52

Jack jogged up the stairs to his apartment only to find a DHL delivery envelope lying against his door. It was addressed to him.

He entered his apartment, kicked off his shoes, and fell into a chair at the small dinette table. He opened the envelope and read the cover letter from Detective Oblak instructing him to sign the enclosed legal documents acknowledging that the case of Elena Iliescu was officially closed and he was no longer considered a suspect, nor did he have any legal standing in Slovenia against her since she was now deceased, et cetera, et cetera. Luckily, everything was written in English as well as in Slovenian. Jack didn’t care about all of that, and he was happy to sign the documents and put it all behind him.

His mind turned back to the fake cops. He wondered why they didn’t bother to carry any identity papers, even fake ones. Real ones would’ve been even better. He chided himself for not grabbing their pictures, retinal scans, and fingerprints with theapps on his phone. But why would he? They were Serbian Mafia, according to Aida. Not foreign operators. The Campus wasn’t a crime-fighting outfit.

Still, something was bugging him. Those three cops were pretty rough customers. They weren’t run-of-the-mill gangster types. Maybe they had service training. If so, Gavin Biery could have found them that way.

Gavin had saved his bacon back in Singapore by identifying a couple undercover Chinese special operators Jack had run into, by accessing a DoD biometric database. Fingerprints, saliva, hair, and even semen samples of foreign operators were acquired one way or another and stored for future reference. If any of those phony Serb cops had ever spit or combed their hair anywhere near one of these DoD operations, Gavin would have been able to ID him.

Didn’t matter at this point. Those guys were in Bosnian police custody by now. The police would figure it out.

His mind turned back to Aida. The smell of her soft skin, the taste of her mouth. She was an incredible woman, and clearly they were connecting deeply.

More deeply than he’d thought possible.

But he had to admit that she was a mystery. She wasn’t a trained operator, but obviously she could handle herself in a pinch. She said she was only trying to protect him. He could believe that.