“All right, mate. I don’t need you to get mushy on me. I just need to know that she’s not going to be a problem for us.”

He decided to come clean-ish. “She’s an archaeologist. A speaker at the conference. I knew she was coming, but I didn’t plan on making contact with her again. She knew the vic and went to greet him, which is when he was shot. That’s pretty much all I know right now. I’m mostly sure she’s not going to be a problem.”

“Mostly. That’s terrific. Mostly. There’s a lot of potential crap in that word, you know.” Mal increased his stride as they crossed another road.

“I swear, man. Not a problem.” He sounded more confident of his answer this time, but maybe he still hadn’t been convincing enough.

Mal gave him a fast look of barely hidden disbelief. David couldn’t blame him. Unfortunately he couldn’t be sure of anything, especially that she was any less of a problem than the police presence at the building. He didn’t want anyone diving into his background, and he suspected his boss didn’t either. He guessed they’d have to get into the sniper’s lair some other way.

But Mal’s brain was clearly back on the mission at hand. He didn’t hesitate. He directed David through a short alleyway that took them into a courtyard of the adjacent building.

Ignoring three doorways, Mal opened the fourth and took the steps behind it two at a time. Holy shit. Mal had been up long enough to scope out the area. David felt ashamed that he’d stayed in the room so long. But Molly. He’d stayed up way too long watching her sleep.

“Okay,” Mal kept his voice low. “This is the floor that the police have cordoned off, next door. It’s directly opposite the hotel restaurant.” He paused.

David looked out of the open stairwell and thought about the night before. He used his hands to visualize the trajectory of the sniper’s bullet. “No. I’d say the bullet hit the Russian at a forty-five degree angle, blowing out his lower back. Which means…” he looked up and across at the restaurant. “I’d say the nest is maybe two floors higher.”

Malone looked relieved. “Thank God. They said you were solid, but you know, after last night…” He held his hand flat and shifted it to and fro.

“You dick. I’d heard it was you I had to keep my eye on.”

Mal smiled. “You should. If you want to learn something. Come on. Stop wasting time.” He strode up the remaining steps to the roof. Once there, it was easy to step across a small wall on to the roof of the next-door building.

David spotted a door and nodded toward it. He reached it first, and pulled on the handle. Locked. “Of course.” He breathed, taking out his knife.

Mal watched the surrounding roofs as David levered the door open by forcing the blade through the doorjamb. It was relatively easy. Nothing up here seemed to have been well maintained, and the wood splintered as if it hadn’t seen a lick of moisture in decades.

Three floors down they found the likely lair. Both men stood in the doorway listening to the sounds of the police a couple of floors down. Mal raised his eyebrows at the laughing below, and David just shook his head.

The room was empty. The floor was covered in linoleum that had seen better days. A couple of boxes lay near the window, and several others by the wall. Mal stared toward them. They appeared empty, but who knew?

The sun peeking through the window glinted on something. “Stop!” David hissed. Mal stopped dead in his tracks and looked to find the reason for David’s order.

“Tripwire about ten inches from your left foot.” David approached and followed the wire to the wall. “Huh.”

“Huh what?” Mal said through gritted teeth.

“Wait.” The tripwire disappeared on both sides of the room under what appeared to be empty boxes. Then extended in a V shape to the boxes in front of the window. “Back up toward the door. Try not to deviate from where you were before.” He heard Mal sigh, but was grateful that he complied. As he lifted the cardboard boxes he saw devices with enough explosives to wipe out the room, but not much else. Probably not the people inside the room either. Weird. Just enough to destroy the evidence, he guessed, but not enough to kill anyone. Someone with some explosive skills had great restraint. Usually people who made their living designing bombs did so for maximum mayhem. This bomb maker was clearly very specific about the level of destruction he desired. Or he was under specific orders.

David couldn’t detach the wire without triggering the explosive charge, so he shrugged and cut the plastic wire in two places to relieve the tension on the trigger. He walked around slowly, ensuring there were no secondary devices. “All clear.”

“Tell me before you cut a wire next time, mate. You nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought in these situations we’re supposed to have a hilarious conversation about which to cut: the blue or the red wire. Don’t just snip something without discussing it first, okay?”

It was hard to tell how serious Mal was about anything. “It wasn’t wire.” He picked it up and sniffed it. “It’s minty dental floss.” He frowned and sniffed again. “Wow. That’s…really improvised. The whole thing feels unplanned. Like someone wasn’t expecting to have to rig something but managed to anyway. That’s…hardcore.” He met Mal’s eyes.

Mal nodded. “And hardcore means fanatic or professional. Neither one fills the heart with moonlight and roses.”

Suddenly, voices came from a few floors down. Raised and excitable. Mal and David rushed to the window and looked down. As soon as they did, a muffled boom launched a wave of dust and glass through a lower window. Then before they could do much more than wince, the window below theirs blew out too. They looked at each other for a second. Mal braced himself as if he was expecting their room to blow too.

David raised an eyebrow. “You saw me defuse it right?”

“Sure I did. But I don’t know how good you are at that shit. You could be crap.”

“Well let’s see how good you are. Get us out of here with as much evidence as you can.” He looked back toward the door. “I’d say we have less than a minute to clear the building.

Mal didn’t hesitate. He stacked one empty box inside another, set it in the middle of the floor and started throwing things in it. David grabbed as much dental floss as he could, the device, and the explosives. He lobbed all but the explosives into the box. Those he tucked in his jacket pocket.

A second later the room upstairs blew too. “Okay, we’ve got to go now.”

David lofted the box full of evidence and broke for the stairwell. Below, he could see men in antiexplosive suits slowly advancing on them. They must be the police’s bomb squad. A good half of him wanted to stop and shoot the shit with them. He missed the craziness of the Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys. Instead he took the stairs two by two. Mal was now ahead of him, as he hadn’t stopped to look at the bomb squad.

David stopped on the next floor up, where bomb debris had blown into the stairwell. He picked up some larger pieces and stuffed them in a pocket and kept running. Once on the roof, they retraced their steps back to the building adjacent.

As soon as they were inside the building, they stopped to take a breath. “Jesus. Every floor?” Mal said.

“Someone really wanted to cover their tracks. But I have to say, to me that sounds like more than one person. Setting four bombs on tripwire takes time. It’s not something you can do fast. I mean unless they set them all earlier…but then they ran the risk of them blowing before the hit.” David frowned as they walked much slower down the second flight of stairs.

“Bombs are pretty commonplace here,” Mal said slowly.

“Huh?”

“I mean people aren’t as freaked out by them here. Athens has a healthy population of antiestablishment anarchists of all stripes. Hell, just this year they’ve firebombed a few American businesses. Never heard of them using a sniper though.”