Page 35 of Crosscurrent

“That would be great.” Cara bit back the rest of her questions. For now.

Cara, Gabe, and Skye went down the back stair to the bakery kitchen. Cara keyed the basement door and pressed her thumb to the reader. The lock released.

The team gathered in the basement at four AM. Wade came in through the back kitchen door a beat behind them — he had gone out the moment the men cleared the camera frame, sweeping the alley.

He set his service weapon on the workbench, didn’t look at it, looked at Gabe. “Perimeter’s clean. No devices. No chalk. No tape. Nothing planted.”

Tom appeared on the center monitor of his rig, his sleep-creased face lit blue gray from the camera feed. Behind him, the corner of a kid’s poster on a closed bedroom door, and the soft yellow of a kitchen light. Piper, presumably, still asleep.

“Two men,” Tom confirmed. “Black SUV with Oregon plates. A rental. The same company the team flagged for the vehicle Wade clocked at the marina Wednesday morning.”

Wade grunted. “Sloppy tradecraft.”

Skye perched on the conference table in her sleep clothes, leggings and a long thermal, and tucked her bare feet under her. “Same job. Different shift. They came to confirm what they knew. They wanted to see if we’d react.”

Exactly what Cara would have done.

Gabe moved into the camera’s view. “You okay to stay on this from home, Tom?”

The other man scratched his head, thinking. “For sure. I’ll need to get Piper to school today. I don’t want her on the road alone after this.”

“No kidding.” Cara didn’t want the girl anywhere near this job at this point. “Let me know if you need any help.”

Owen appeared in the basement doorway in pajamas. Sneezing. Agent at his ankles. “Did I — sleep through something?”

Gabe shook his head. “Just business as usual around here, dude.”

From the main screen, Tom gestured at the man. “Go back to bed, Owen.”

One dark eyebrow rose into a thatch of tousled hair. Owen rolled his eyes, the movement made all the more dramatic by the glint of the monitors on his glasses. “Yeah, right.”

He sank down on a folding chair next to Tom’s monitor and watched the alley feed without another word.

Wade brought down a tray of coffee. The team drank it standing — Tom from his house, the rest of them from the basement. Cara couldn’t face the hot liquid yet, but she needed something to hold.

After fifteen minutes, the team scattered. Gabe and Wade went up to the kitchen to set a watch rotation through dawn. Owen went back to bed under protest, Agent trailing him. Tom stayed on the channel from his house.

Cara stayed in the basement.

Skye stayed too.

They sat at the conference table. For a long minute neither of them spoke.

“I brought this to your door,” Skye said. “All this trouble.”

“Maybe, but we’ve been hunting Neptune for a while now. They were coming whether you ran here or not.”

“No. I mean this. Tonight. And Owen. Maybe they’d come for you, but now he’s involved.”

Cara let her have that.

Skye picked a piece of lint off her leggings. “I didn’t mean to. For what it’s worth.”

Cara knew the feeling. She hadn’t meant to do a lot of things in her life. Growing in faith meant growing in grace, too.

She smiled at Skye. “It’s okay. You made it to the right place. This is what we do.”

Skye cocked her head, as if she didn’t quite understand. “Not Owen.”