I take a few seconds to rub my eyes, then clean off the lenses of my binos. But before I can bring the optics back up to my face I see new movement, close, just outside the window in the alleyway running left to right in front of me.

A pair of men walk below my position, but they don’t turn up the passageway towards the casino and the market building. Instead they glance idly in that direction, but continue along the alley that runs from my left to my right.

I make them as suspicious immediately. They are slick enough, not showing any intensity in their actions that make for an easy tip-off, but there is something about their bearing and dress that tells me this isn’t a pair of rando tourists who wandered off the main streets and down a quiet alleyway.

Nope, these two are in the game.

I can feel it.

After they pass out of view from the market, one of the men brings his hand up to his mouth and speaks into it.

And now I know that these guys are in comms, which means there will be more out there.

They don’t look like the rest of the mob goons, so I’m wondering if these are Consortium operatives sent out into the neighborhood to look for me. There is one other possibility, but I immediately discount it, certain that it can’t be.

Can it?

I rise from my position for the first time in an hour, and I move to another room up here on the second floor above the nightclub, on the opposite side of the building. Here I find a window that looks out over a street one block to the west. It is well lit and there are dozens of men and women in view, but after scanning slowly back and forth for a few seconds, my eyes lock onto two men in particular. These aren’t the men I just saw passing in front of the casino, but they are cut from the same cloth, moving at a steady pace through the tourists and restaurant patrons walking around.

I bring my binos up to my eyes to focus on them, careful to remain far enough back in the room to where it’s unlikely I’ll be spotted by someone on the lookout for me.

As I focus the binos, my eyes widen.

And then I lower the optics. I sag back against the wall, sliding down to a seated position.

What . . . the . . . fuck?

I recognize one of the men below me. His name is Chris Travers, he’s Ground Branch, and I’ve spent a lot of time with him in the past year or so while I’ve been doing contract work for Matt Hanley. Chris works for SAC, formerly the SAD, my old outfit.

The outfit run by Matthew Hanley.

On the one hand, this confirms that Hanley has sent Agency paramilitaries here to drag my ass back home. But I’m not worried about this. No, I expected it. Counted on it, even.

But I am worried, because I didn’t expect them to show up over here by the casino. I told Hanley I was in town to talk to someone. He would know, no doubt, of my past associations with the Alfonsi crime family, and he would rightly make the connection. But the Alfonsis’ headquarters and main turf are centralized a kilometer or more east of here. I am deep in Mala del Brenta territory now, so how the hell did Travers just happen to wander by my position?

I know the answer. Matt Hanley told him exactly where I’d be.

And how would Hanley know where I’d be? I’m certain I’m covert, certain my phone can’t compromise me, certain I don’t have any tracking device in or on my body, because if I did they would have been able to find me a long time ago.

No, there is only one way Hanley could have known my exact location tonight.

Despite his insistence that he was unaware of the Consortium, I am certain now I’ve caught him in a lie.

He knew I was targeting them, and he knew they would be right fucking here, right fucking now, auctioning off their trafficking victims.

I rub my hands through my hair. This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve felt the sinking feeling in my chest when someone I trusted betrays me. It’s a palpable hurt, and it sucks, but I guess it toughens me up and teaches me not to trust anyone.

I lower my hands and look up, and my eyes narrow slightly.

Hanley’s in on it?

I move back to my original overwatch position and resume scanning the forecourt of the building next to the casino for any new activity while I continue to think over Hanley covering up a multibillion-dollar sex trafficking ring. I can’t figure out how that makes any sense, but I don’t understand how I could be misreading this.

As soon as I’m settled back in position, my phone buzzes in my pocket, and I touch my earpiece.

“Yeah?”

“Harry?” It’s Talyssa, her voice is strained, and I can instantly tell that something’s wrong.

THIRTY-SEVEN

   One hour earlier, thirty-nine-year-old Maarten Meyer drove his dark gray Porsche Panamera 4S up the driveway to his four-million-euro home in Aerdenhout, a woodsy and ritzy suburb of Amsterdam. He rolled into his garage, and then the door lowered silently behind him.

He’d worked a long day at his posh office in the Museum District of the capital city, and the forty-minute drive home had given him a chance to relax and decompress. Tonight would be a quiet one: thirty minutes on his rowing machine, a home-cooked meal of herring in beetroot and horseradish, halibut with asparagus, and lemon curd for dessert.

Meyer didn’t look or act much like a computer hacker, at least not the kind in television and movies. He didn’t have advanced degrees in computer science, and though he had a deep knowledge of programming languages and codes, there were millions on Earth better at physical hacking than he was.

What Meyer did have, however, was a deep understanding of international private banking, the processes and the secrets, the systems and the software. And he had incredible powers of social engineering. He could convince people of things, helpful both as a banker and as a black-hat hacker, and he put these skills together, added a dash of moral ambiguity, and used this to earn tens of millions of euros, skimmed off private clients out of their offshore accounts, often without them ever noticing it was gone.

Meyer was good at what he did and he didn’t worry much about being caught because he had an incredible team of lawyers, all of whom had their own offshore accounts where he could wire them riches they’d never have to report on their taxes. And he had connections in the federal government that kept all but the most obdurate investigators off his back.

Meyer lived alone now, although he dated a woman in town, and his ex-wife and two children lived not far away in Arnhem. He didn’t see the kids much; he hadn’t spent the money on his divorce lawyers that he had on his criminal defense attorneys.

Meyer finished his workout, put his halibut in the oven, then stepped into his home office on the second floor of his three-story home. He sat in front of his array of computer monitors and began perusing the markets online.