Page 62 of The Blonde Identity

“Uh... more walking, less freaking out, please.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

He pushed her toward the next car. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

For a second, she looked confused. “There’s good news?”

They’d reached the back of the train by then, the end of the line.It was as good a place as any to tell her, “Kozlov doesn’t know where we are.”

She was positively glowing. “Really?”

“But the CIA does.”

It took a moment for her face to dim as she slowly realized... “I killed a CIA agent?”

He reached for the door. “Who? Collins? No! You didn’t kill him. Probably. Maybe. There’s only like a twenty percent chance you—”

“Not helping!” But that wasn’t even the bad part, and he saw the moment she caught on. “Is there any chance he didn’t tell anyone where we were before...”

“You threw him off a moving train? No. They know we’re on this train. Which means they’re going to be waiting on us.”

“Is this your way of telling me we’re not going to the bank now?”

He pulled open the door and peeked outside. There were houses around the bend, a highway visible through the trees. Civilization was coming up fast, so he closed the door and went to the other side of the train—of the mountain. Nothing but hills and rocks and trees and snow.

Snow was good. The more snow the better, he thought as he threw open the door and yelled over the roar of the wind. “No! It’s my way of telling you...”

“Oh! We’re slowing—”

“Try to protect your head when you fall!”

And then he pushed her.

Two seconds later, Sawyer followed.

Chapter Forty

Her

Zoe tried to protect her head as she fell. Really, she did. Because (1) she considered herself the kind of person who always followed instructions and (2) it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But there’s only so much you can do when you hit deep snow at fifty miles an hour and the mountain is so steep that you become a human pinball, rolling down the side of a literal Alp.

She could hear tree limbs breaking. She could see the world spinning. And yet in her mind she was a cartoon character rolling over and over and over until she was the juicy human center of a giant snowball, only her feet and hands sticking out.

But when she finally stopped rolling, amazingly, she appeared to be mostly avalanche-free. Alive. She hoped Sawyer was, too. That way, she could kill him.

Then she heard a groan behind her. She saw white breath fogging in the air. And a figure pushed out of a snowdrift, breathing hard and saying, “I told you there was only a twenty percent chance of dying.”

So Zoe hit him with a snowball because, really, what else was she supposed to do?

***

“I can’t believe you pushed me off a train.”

“It was barely moving.”

They were walking through the deep snow, slipping and slidingandplease-don’t-start-an-avalanchingtheir way down the mountain. And yet, she had to spin on him.

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