She was finally going crazy.

As Macy crept through the dark hotel room, hands shaking around her CIA-issued Beretta, she felt her mind unraveling again. A layer of sanity peeled back by another night in a foreign city with no safe harbor and no one to trust. She’d become raw.

What the hell is that sound?

All it took was three years of running away from death. She’d felt the hints long before tonight, if she let herself stop and think about it. It was a slow, painful, and confusing process, stretched out through a dozen countries, a chase across two continents, and potentially ending here in a dirty little hotel in Angola. But now Macy knew, as she approached the bathroom door and the strange hissing sound behind it, that she was most certainly going nuts.

Crazy or not, someone could still be in there, behind the door. Maybe an assassin caught off-guard while waiting for her, washing his hands in the sink.

Macy listened through the door. It sounded like running water. She slowly turned the knob, kicked the door open hard, and then aimed her gun at an empty bathroom.

The sound had come from the toilet, its water running. But now there was another problem. The shower curtain . . .

She gritted her teeth, building up the courage to do it all over again, flung the curtain open with a loud metal screech, and then finally exhaled.

After sweeping her gun sight across moldy shower tiles, she moved to the toilet, tightening the water supply valve to finally end the distracting white-noise of water. She looked in the mirror, regretfully, into a prematurely aged face, then walked back to the bed.

Macy was spending the night in the outskirts of Luanda, Angola’s capitol city. She couldn’t afford anything closer than the outskirts. She’d wished she could, because it would be safer. The streets closer to money would be busier, brighter, the people a little less desperate for a quick buck. Two thousand Kwanzas to follow the American woman, to see what hotel she’d gone to.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been hired to hunt her down. It had become routine since Syria, the first round of assassins having been trained and instructed by her own people—and funded by her own tax dollars. It was a big scandal back home, American forces helping Syrian rebels take out a rogue CIA agent. The bigger story, as far as ex-CIA Macy was concerned, was how it got broken up at the last second by some civilian cyber-security company from Washington. That led to a congressional investigation which spurned the largest house cleaning in US history, dozens of high-ranking military and political figures behind bars for life.

But it solved nothing for Macy. She had been imprisoned with them. An invisible, traveling jail. That jail and its captors had followed her from Syria to Sub-Saharan Africa, despite US media outlets declaring the thing to have been “all wrapped up.”

She sat down on a hard bed and took a swig of cheap Port wine. It definitely hadn’t been all wrapped up. She’d come down to Luanda for that very reason, a city on the edge of the Atlantic with a major seaport. Here, there were options for an inconspicuous crossing to South America, where she’d try her luck across Panama, and then, somehow, the Mexico–US border.

She would figure out the details later. For now her focus was on staying alive in a Luanda hotel room. Staying alive and awake with a bottle of Port.

Sometimes, in a drunken moment, she’d laugh about it, losing track of who was trying to assassinate her. Was it the CIA? Islamic terrorists? The skin color of her adversaries had gone from brown to black. But she knew the real problem color was white. American as apple pie.

Macy took another swig, letting the gun rest in her lap.

She had other, older enemies, too. But there was something slightly unbelievable about a corrupt St. Louis police chief, her old boss, having the resources to track her down across the world.

It almost didn’t matter who it was trying to kill her. She’d still be dead. She had stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago.

* * *

Macy bolted awake.

She’d been sitting in bed, her back against the headrest, her neck sore. Night had set in and the room was completely dark. Exhaustion had kept her from her plan of staying awake and watching the room across the courtyard. Through her balcony’s sliding glass door, she had a direct line of sight to a darkened Room 210.

In the log book at the front desk, someone might have found her name, Macy Chandler, written in the column for room 210. She’d signed it herself. When the sun was still up, and with everyone watching, she waltzed into Hotel Topenka and booked herself a room under no false pretenses. No disguises. She spoke loud, obnoxious English to the teenager at the front desk. It was one of the most blatant broadcasts she’d made since arriving in Africa. The bait and switch came after, when she paid the old man to book a room directly across the courtyard. Her real room.

Macy could deal with cheap wine and bug-infested hotels if it meant she’d have money for a decoy room—a necessity out here. She watched it through the glass. The rooms on either side of 210 had their lights on. But her decoy was still dark. She waited, watching.

Her heart almost exploded when the telephone rang on the table next to her. Macy jumped off the bed, only to stand motionless and numb in the dark. Frozen, thinking. Don’t answer it. What were the benefits of answering? This was supposed to be Kwame Botha’s room.

Her blood pressure spiked with each ring. She could hear her pulse buzzing her eardrums. As illogical as it was, it was as if the rings were drawing unwanted attention. She’d tried so hard to be quiet. And now this.

It was silly. She’d been silly tonight with the bathroom scare, her almost ripping the shower curtain clips. She’d been crazy.

Macy looked back outside across the courtyard, through the dark, and into the fully lit window of room 210.

She gasped between telephone rings, her lungs exploding along with her heart, a puff of air rushing out like she’d been kicked in the stomach. She stumbled in the dark, trying to get closer to the glass. But her legs wouldn’t work right. She was afraid to get any closer to that light across the courtyard, and whoever had turned it on. It was a sickly yellow glow, the kind you’d find seeping out of the basement window of a morgue. Its silence horrified her, as did the idea of a gunman snooping around that room, expecting to find his American payday. He might be in the bathroom right now, pulling back the curtain slowly, the metal clips screeching across.

He might be figuring out her game.

Macy rushed back to the bed. She’d forgotten the gun. The Beretta and that old man were the only two things she half-trusted on this side of the Atlantic. And despite having that cold metal by her side for two years, she felt more trust for a white-haired cab driver she’d known for two days. After all, it was the CIA that issued her the piece. Whatever else they’d given her, she’d left in a pile of ashes back in Damascus.

The Beretta gave her a little more courage to approach the window. Her eyes strained across, her nose almost pressed against the glass when she saw a black shape flicker across the room. Whoever was inside 210 was in a hurry. Aside from tall, she wasn’t sure how else to describe the shape. She waited for another chance to identify her would-be assassin. But nothing. And then the light went out.

It would have been impossible for her to be identified in the darkness of her room across the courtyard. She knew that. But standing there in the dark still sent chills down her spine. She waited, watching the dark space where she was supposed to have been killed. It was like a stage gone black before the tragedy set. A foreshadow.

She listened to the hotel’s silence. Nothing in the rooms on either side. Nothing in her hallway. After a while she could hear the cars on Rua Munadi. The siren of an emergency vehicle thrusting its way through traffic. Even from this far away, from the outskirts of the port city, the mournful wail of an ocean freighter reached her ears.

She wished she was on it.

Her dream of escape shattered at the sound of voices in the hall.

And then a knock on the door.