Page 49 of Stuart Woods' Golden Hour

“Today, for sure. Though chances are, it would have eventually become necessary to tell you.”

She looked at Peter. “TotallyMr. & Mrs. Smith.”

“Right?” Peter said.

She whipped her head around to look at Billy again. “Hold on. Is it just Billy and Teddy? Or do you have more identities?”

“About that…”

She snorted. “So, what? Are you going to tell me you’re Mark Weldon, too?”

“Whoa,” Peter said, impressed.

“Good guess,” Tessa said, clapping.

With a roll of her eyes, Stacy said, “I wasjoking.”

“Have you ever seen Billy and Mark in the same place?” Peter asked.

“I’m sure I have.” Stacy’s face scrunched up in thought. The longer she stayed quiet, the more worried her expression turned. She looked skeptically at Billy. “You can’t be Mark. You don’t even sound like him.”

Adjusting his voice to that of Mark Weldon, Billy said, “Are you sure about that?”

Stacy slammed back against the seat. “Oh. My. God.”

“Believe me now?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “How many others?”

“Those are the main ones.”

“How many people know about this?”

“Less than twenty.”

She looked at him for several seconds, then said, “Is it too early to have a drink?”

Just outside of Padua, trafficcontrol ordered the passenger train to stop for five minutes, ostensibly to allow a freight train to pass through the area ahead of them.

The actual reason for the stop was so that the CIA cleanup team could disembark with Rogers’s body, the delay arranged by Lance through his counterpart in Italian intelligence.

When the train began moving again, no evidence of the short but deadly encounter remained.

17

In case another mob awaitedthem at Venice’s Santa Lucia train station, Billy and the others changed their clothes, donned face masks, hats, and scarves, then gathered in the corridor.

“Okay, everyone,” Lizzie said. “Like in Rome, the plan is to blend into the crowd.”

“I hesitate to point this out, but that didn’t work so well,” Peter said.

“It worked well enough for some of us,” Billy said.

“Peter’s not wrong,” Lizzie said. “Which is why the Strategic Services team who’ll be watching over us is twice as large as the one in Rome. We’re also going to move up three cars and exit from there.”

Peter gave her a thumbs-up.

“If you get separated from the rest of us, follow the signs to the Grand Canal,” she said. “I’ll find you there.”

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