Hayward’s search took fifteen minutes. There was nobody home. Katrin and Joao might have been in the house at some point in time, but there was no evidence one way or the other.
If the address was indeed the source of the video feed that Hayward had witnessed hours before of Joao’s bloody face and Katrin’s fragile, battered body, the Agency men had taken great pains to rid the place of any lingering evidence. There wasn’t even Wi-Fi, and Hayward couldn’t locate an Internet hookup of any sort.
His hands shook. He felt hollowed out.
He took out his burner, powered it on, and dialed the number for his control by memory. Artemis Grange had picked up last time. This time, the phone just rang and rang.
He shook his head. Had they fooled him? Or were they just good at covering their tracks? Were they clever enough to fool the NSA tracking software he’d used to find them? Or were they simply organized and paranoid enough to clean up after themselves in a hurry after the video exchange?
Why would they leave just one guy behind at the address to confront him? He wasn’t a ninja, but he was very well trained. Wouldn’t they want to stack the odds much more heavily in their favor?
Or did they expect him to crumble, to grovel for Katrin’s life, maybe bargain for his own? It might have been an appropriate expectation, if he was still the man he used to be. But maybe they had underestimated the man he had become. Or maybe they had an entire ensemble cast waiting in the wings, ready to hand him his own ass. Maybe they were observing him from afar. He hadn’t noticed any of the signs of being followed, but he’d had more than a few things on his mind. Maybe his well-honed antennae weren’t receiving as well as they might have been.
It was impossible to draw any firm conclusions.
But one thing was certain: he was dead in the water. He’d come all this way, overcome ridiculous odds, survived, clawed his way through a murky mess, but he was as far away from Katrin now as he had ever been.
He sat down in an armchair in the empty safe house, shoulders slumped, pistol dangling loose in his hand, blood-spattered arm cast draped across his thigh. He drifted toward despair. “What the fuck do I do now?” he said.
A long time passed. No insights struck like lightning from the blue and his mind made no new connections. He had no idea where or how to restart his search for Katrin. His gloom deepened and he thought of giving up, of disappearing, of falling off the earth. But where could he go to hide from himself? Thoughts of Katrin would follow him everywhere. They would never leave him alone. They would taunt him and convict him and beat him into submission. “What the fuck am I going to do?” he asked again.
Not nothing, he finally decided. I’m going to do anything other than nothing.
He stood, checked his handgun, and took two paces toward the front door.
The door burst open in a shower of splinters.
Silhouetted in the gray afternoon light was a figure with a gun pointed at his chest.