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Walker exhaled. Inevitability . . .

The CIA taught Jed Walker how to travel. How to remain inconspicuous. Avoid capture. Prior to that, military service taught Walker how to kill a man with nothing but his bare hands, and that’s all he had at his disposal right now, having just passed through airport security at LAX. Well, that’s not exactly true, he thought, in hindsight, watching the two men approach. He had his small backpack, which contained a change of clothes and toiletries. A few items would do. A toothbrush through the eye socket into the brain. The straps of the backpack could be used to choke a man. He had a paperback novel in there with an orange cover that he’d found in his hotel room that morning—and from the few pages he’d read during the cab ride to the airport, it could probably bore them to death.

A few decent options, but none was a good one right now.

He made a mental checklist of the possibilities around him. Steel-framed chairs. Laminated, sharp-edged tabletops. Metal stands in gift shops. Any number of items from said gift shops. The overpriced food from the restaurants. The fast food—he could force-feed these two guys a couple of foie-gras geese and watch them have coronaries. Gavage, it was called, but in France they used feeding tubes and corn and fattened the geese up for seventeen days then slaughtered them at four months. Funny how the Europeans had such strict laws for some things. At any rate, Walker didn’t have seventeen days, let alone four months. A glass beer bottle to the temple would be quicker. A twist of a neck.

But not now. Inevitability, and all that.

For Walker, a life on the outer had honed his thinking. Improvising. Making do. Surviving. To use what was at hand and to adapt on the fly and do whatever it took to see one more day.

He knew from the scene in front of him that he only had seconds of freedom remaining. Maybe thirty. He was trapped and he had little choice but to take what was coming.

Walker knew that none of his evasion training would come into play today. It would not help, because today he was a target. Not randomly selected. Not pulled aside for conspicuous behavior. The men who came for him knew who he was. They had purpose. A singular goal.

His detention.

So. Cut and run, or stand and fight? Neither option good. Not here. Not against two uniformed TSA officers. One had his hand on his holstered Glock. The other had a taser drawn in his dominant hand, hanging by his side. They only had eyes for Walker.

It was inevitable.