Chapter 6 6

The inhibitor was in her pack, wrapped in foam, hidden under a layer of textbooks she'd bought for her cover. Jessie walked through the market, keeping to the shadows, her posture slumped again. Just another desperate person looking for a way out.

She was almost to the side exit when she heard a voice that made her blood run cold.

"-authentic, I swear, my grandmother brought it from Vienna-"

Jessie stopped. She knew that whine, the bluster that couldn't hide the desperation. She turned.

It wasn't Vince. It couldn't be. Not here.

But it was. Three stalls down, he was holding her mother's doll, waving it at a man in a silk shirt who looked bored. How? How had he gotten from a trailer in Ohio to a high-end black market in Vegas? The question was a block of ice in her stomach.

She had to get the doll. It was the only thing left. But she couldn't expose herself. She watched, her mind racing, as the man in the silk shirt reached for his wallet.

Jessie's hand shot out. Not at Vince. At a stack of crates beside his stall, piled high with cheap, counterfeit electronics. A single, calculated push. The top crate tipped, teetered, and then the whole stack went over with a deafening crash of plastic and shattering glass.

Chaos. People yelled. The stall owner screamed. Vince jumped back, dropping the doll to protect his face from flying debris.

It was all the opening she needed.

In the confusion, she moved like a ghost, a stoop-shouldered girl nobody would look at twice. She scooped the doll from the floor, tucked it into her canvas bag, and kept moving, melting back into the panicked crowd.

"Hey!" Vince's voice, shrill with fury. "My doll! That girl! She took my doll! Thief!"

He pointed, but he was pointing into a sea of moving bodies. A few people glanced her way, saw a scared student clutching her bag, and looked past her, searching for a more likely culprit.

But someone else was looking. Not at her, but at the scene.

From a catwalk above the market floor, a man in a tailored suit lowered a pair of binoculars. Julian Adler. He had been scanning the crowd for hours, looking for any anomaly. The sudden, precise toppling of the crates was exactly that. It wasn't random. It was a professional-level distraction.

His eyes swept the area, and he saw her. The girl from the alley. Jessie. The one with the anomalous thermal signature. She was moving away from the chaos with a purpose that contradicted her frightened-student disguise.

He keyed his radio, his voice calm. "Target acquired. Section Gamma, moving toward exit four. She's carrying a new item, a large canvas bag. Mr. Hogan, she's here."

Below, Jessie felt a prickle on the back of her neck. The feeling of being watched. She quickened her pace, heading for the service corridors, the places Mortimer had shown her on the way in.

Behind her, she heard the subtle shift in the market's noise. The tramp of disciplined feet. They were coming.