Chapter 4
ROMAN
The safe house in the Marolles district sits above a shuttered antiques shop on a street narrow enough that the buildings lean toward each other like conspirators.
I've used it twice before for Echo Ridge operations, both times alone, both times for less than a day.
The flat is small and sparse, a galley kitchen, a sitting room with a sofa that folds into a bed, one bedroom and a bathroom with a shower that runs cold after ninety seconds.
Two exits: the front door and a window in the bathroom that drops onto the roof of the shop next door.
Vix hasn't spoken since the Eurostar pulled into Brussels-Midi.
She walked beside me through the station and into the cab and up the narrow staircase to the flat without a word, moving through the foreign city with the automatic efficiency of a woman who has arrived at safe houses on four continents and stopped noticing the decor a long time ago.
When I unlocked the door, she walked past me to the bedroom, set her go-bag on the floor, and closed the door behind her.
That was forty minutes ago. Since then, I've heard her voice through the wall, clipped and British, working through what's left of her contact list. Warning people.
Burning dead drops. Salting the earth of a network she spent years building so that Webb can't harvest what remains.
Each call is short and controlled, the words delivered with the brisk precision of a woman issuing termination orders for her own life's work.
I sit at the kitchen table with the bruise on my jaw throbbing in time with my pulse and listen to her dismantle herself, piece by piece, contact by contact, and there isn't a thing I can do about it.
The satellite phone connects to Echo Base on the third pulse. Kane's voice comes through flat and direct, the way it always does when he's running an operation from the command center with the tactical maps spread in front of him and the team on standby.
"Frost. Status."
"Brussels. Marolles safe house. She's working her remaining network."
"How much of it is left?"
"Less every hour. She's been on the phone since we arrived, issuing burn notices.
Anyone still alive is being told to go dark and scatter.
" I keep my voice low. The wall between the kitchen and the bedroom is thin, and Victoria doesn't need to hear me filing reports on her destruction.
"Webb's people are thorough, Kane. This isn't opportunistic. It's systematic."
"Tommy's intercepts confirm that. Committee allocated a full operational team.
Webb pulled resources from three regional cells to fund it.
" Kane pauses, and I hear the calculation in the silence.
"He's making an example of her. Anyone else who considers selling Committee intelligence will think twice after watching what happened to Cross's network. "
"She knows that."
"Good. Then she also knows that staying in Europe is a death sentence. We need to get her stateside. Echo Base. Full protection until we can mount a response."
I run my thumb along the edge of the table, tracing a gouge in the wood that someone left years ago. "She's not going to come easily."
"She'll come. She's a professional. She understands the calculus."
Kane doesn't know Vix the way I do. He knows the encrypted signature, the intelligence product, the professional asset who has fed Echo Ridge actionable intelligence on Committee operations for years.
He doesn't know the woman behind the signature, the one who would rather burn to the ground standing than survive on someone else's terms.
"I'll work on it," I say.
"Do that. Tommy's running surveillance on Committee communications traffic. If Webb's people pick up your trail in Brussels, we'll know before they knock. I'm sending extraction coordinates for a private airfield outside Ghent. Stryker can have a plane there in six hours."
"Copy."
"And Frost." Kane's voice drops a register. "How is she handling all of this?"
I touch my jaw. The skin is hot and swollen, the purple deepening to an ugly yellow at the edges. I can feel the shape of her knuckles in the bruise, each impact point mapped against the bone.
"She punched me."
Kane is quiet for a beat. "Don't let that become a pattern. I need you both operational, not settling personal scores while Webb's people close in."
The line goes dead. I set the phone down and lean back in the chair, listening to Vix's voice rise and fall through the wall.
She's speaking French now, which means Marseille, which means she's dealing with the aftermath of Ines.
Her accent is flawless, the consonants clipped and precise in a way that most native speakers can't manage, and I remember the night in Istanbul when she argued with a Turkish customs official in three languages without breaking stride.
I sat at the bar pretending to drink raki and fell in love with her competence before I ever touched her skin.
My earpiece chirps. Tommy's voice cuts through, younger and lighter than Kane's, carrying the particular energy of a man who lives inside his screens and treats the world's intelligence infrastructure like a personal puzzle.
"Roman. You're alive. Color me shocked."
"Tommy."
"Listen, I'm sending you the latest Committee intercepts.
Webb's search teams lost your trail somewhere between St Pancras and the Chunnel, so you've got breathing room.
But they're already pulling CCTV from the terminal, and if they run facial recognition against Eurostar's passenger manifest, that breathing room shrinks fast."
"How fast?"
"Depends on how many favors Webb can call in with Belgian security services. Could be hours. Could be less. I'd plan for less."
"Noted."
"Also, Kane didn't mention this because Kane is Kane, but the team's been running a pool on whether Cross would actually punch you when she found out you were alive." A pause. "I had twenty on a left hook."
"It was a right cross."
"Damn. Stryker wins." There's a grin in Tommy's voice that I can hear across an ocean and half a continent. "How's the jaw?"
"Functional."
"That's the spirit. Okay, intercepts are coming through now. I've flagged the relevant traffic. Webb's people are checking transit hubs in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris. Standard net. They don't know where you are, but they know you're moving, and they're casting wide."
"Thanks, Tommy."
"One more thing. The dead man resurrection tour. How's that going for you, personally? On a scale of one to catastrophic."
"Catastrophic would be an improvement."
Tommy laughs, a sound that carries the warmth of someone who has never had to decide between his own survival and the safety of the person he loves. I envy that uncomplicated decency more than I would ever admit.
The intercepts load onto my phone in a cascade of encrypted data.
I scroll through them while Vix's voice continues through the wall, lower now, strained, speaking German.
Berlin. She's reaching Baumann, or trying to, and from the tension in her tone I can't tell whether the call connected or whether she's leaving a message for a dead man's voicemail.
I file the intercepts into categories. Transit surveillance: manageable, we'll avoid the obvious routes.
Financial tracking: irrelevant, Victoria's accounts are already frozen.
Human intelligence: this is the real threat.
Webb's people are debriefing every captured contact, extracting information about Victoria's methods, her habits, her patterns.
Each interrogation gives them another data point, another thread to follow.
Ines in Marseille would have told them everything she knew, and what Ines knew included communication protocols, dead drop locations, and at least two of Victoria's alias identities.
The net is tightening. Not quickly, but with the grinding persistence of an organization that measures success in hours rather than weeks.
Kane is right. We need to get her out of Europe.
The bedroom door opens. Victoria stands in the frame with her phone in one hand and a look on her face that I've learned to read across a decade of absence.
The composure is still there, the controlled exterior that she wears like body armor, but underneath it something has shifted.
Her jaw is set at the angle she uses when she's reached a decision that no one is going to talk her out of.
"I need to go to Prague."
I set the phone down. "Why?"
"Because I have one contact left who might survive this if I warn him in person." She leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, and the bandage on her knuckles catches the light from the kitchen. "And because Webb's people won't expect me to run toward danger instead of away from it."
Marek. She's talking about the information broker she ran in Vinohrady, a man I know of through Echo Ridge's intelligence files but have never met.
Victoria's relationship with Marek predates my death by several years, which means it predates my involvement with Echo Ridge, which means it's one of the few pieces of her network that I can't map from the inside.
"Prague is Committee territory, Vix. Eastern European operations hub. You'd be walking into their front garden."
"I'm aware of the geography." The look she gives me could freeze hydraulic fluid. "Marek has been dark since the purge started. If he's still alive, he's running, and if he's running, he won't answer a phone call or an encrypted message. He'll answer a knock on his door from someone he trusts."
"And if Webb's people are already waiting at his location?"
"Then we deal with it." She says we the way someone bites into something bitter, tasting the word and resenting the necessity. "You have Echo Ridge resources. Satellite coverage, signals intelligence, tactical support. Use them."