Time to change clothes. Review the briefing materials. Call Ham and explain the delay.
Time to be the operative instead of whatever he’d been for the past two days.
He turned toward the departure boards. Booked the next flight to Sydney on his phone. Found the VIP lounge and flashed his membership card at the attendant, then headed to the bathroom.
The bag was wrong.
Dakota knew it the moment he unzipped it. Wrong weight. Wrong smell. Wrong everything.
He was in the lounge’s changing room—private, quiet, an anonymous space where business travelers freshened up between flights. He’d set the bag on the bench and opened it, expecting his laptop, his clothes, his organized mission specs.
Instead, he found women’s clothes. A silk blouse in deep blue. Practical cotton underwear. A toiletry bag with feminine products. A paperback romance novel, spine cracked, pages dog-eared.
His first thought was: Jayden’s bag.
His second thought froze the first one solid.
Because underneath the clothes, nestled in the lining where a laptop would normally sit, were components he recognized from ten years of military training.
Carbon-fiber tubes. Modular. Designed to slot together.
A trigger assembly disguised as part of a hair dryer.
A scope hidden in what looked like a makeup case.
A stock integrated into the bag’s rigid frame itself—invisible unless you knew what you were looking for.
Disassembled. Expertly disguised. Professional grade.
A sniper rifle.
Dakota’s hands stopped moving. His heart thundered, but his body went very still.
Jayden?
But his brain couldn’t quite move on from the memory of her talking him down from a nightmare like someone who’d done it before. Moving through crowds like she was trained for it.
Naw.
C’mon.
Except . . . the woman had just walked away with his bag. Maybe. And it contained the Opera House blueprints Jones Inc. had stolen from a Bratva server. It contained security-camera positions. The sight lines to the stage. Everything an assassin would need to . . . well, plan a hit.
On President Isaac White.
No. He pushed back against the conclusion. The clothes could belong to anyone. The bags got switched in Fiji, in the chaos. How many similar bags had he seen?
Still . . . someone on the flight from Hawaii to Sydney was carrying a professional-grade sniper rifle.
Maybe a woman, maybe not. And maybe Jayden didn’t have his bag.
Or maybe she did.
His phone buzzed, Ham’s name on the screen.
Dakota answered. “Yeah.”
“You were supposed to land in Sydney yesterday.” Ham’s voice held an edge. “I’ve been chasing your shadow halfway across the Pacific.”