The analyst had been dead for six minutes when her encrypted message arrived.
Interpol Director Harlan Cross read it twice on his phone in the back of a car he had not flagged as official transport, with a driver he had used four times and trusted accordingly. He read it a third time. Then he deleted it — not from any expectation that deletion would accomplish anything meaningful, but from the same reflex that makes people close curtains they know are already transparent.
The coordinates were already memorized. That was the problem with coordinates: they were brief enough to hold without effort, which meant that destroying the message was a gesture rather than a solution.
The problem with the kind of information that gets people killed is that the killing never makes it any less true.
Cross put his phone in his pocket. Outside the window, Geneva moved past at eleven-thirty at night — the clean streets, the low light, the particular European nighttime quiet of a city that took its sleep seriously. He had lived here for seven years. He knew where the bakeries were, which parks flooded in spring, the name of the cat that sat outside the office on Rue de Lausanne.
The analyst's name had been Dr. Sofía Ramos. She had been thirty-four years old. The official story was a traffic accident.
Cross had read enough official stories to know the grammar. This one was someone else's draft.