Chapter 6

The car ride took four hours.

Not because the distance was great — the post was a two-hour drive from the airport — but because the woman in the black coat drove slowly, checking her mirrors constantly, taking side roads through the red clay hills of rural Georgia that had no cell service and no cameras.

Nadia sat in the passenger seat, her duffel at her feet, watching the landscape change through the window. Pine trees gave way to fallow fields, which gave way to kudzu-covered roadside embankments, and the sky went from orange to purple to black.

"You know," the woman said, not looking at her, "you're supposed to be dead."

Nadia turned her head slowly. "I'm not."

"The name you came in under. It's been flagged as a casualty of a training accident somewhere else. That's what the file will say. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, basic training, a spread of heat stroke that was too fast to save."

"I'm sorry?"

The woman's lips pressed into a line. "They thought you were gone. That's why the mark on your shoulder is a problem. They thought they'd closed the file."

Nadia absorbed this in silence. "And Grady? The men in the room?"

"Don't matter," the woman said. "The mark is the anchor. If it's been photographed, it exists somewhere. And there's at least one phone with a picture of it that's already off the military network."

Nadia closed her eyes for a long moment. "Rogers' phone."