Page 57 of Crosscurrent

Skye looked down at her hand as if noticing it for the first time. "Oh."

Gabe heard himself ask the question very quietly. "How long alone in the room?"

"Three minutes."

It was the answer he'd expected. It still landed wrong. He looked at the cut at her temple and at the split knuckles and at the balance on the balls of her feet and decided he was not going to do the conversation about going in alone right now. He was going to do it later, in the basement, when he could sit down and figure out what to say to a woman whose entire operating principle until about ten minutes ago had been the principle that nobody was coming for her.

She was still looking at all three of them. "It's a better plan now."

Wade did not move from the doorway. Cara did not let go of Skye's elbow. Gabe, who had been about to say something operational, did not say it.

Three seconds passed in the corridor without anyone saying anything.

Then Skye said, "I had a reason."

Gabe nodded once. "Yeah."

"Diego came up the stairs forty seconds ahead of Wade."

"I know."

"I had the door."

"Yeah."

She let Cara hold her elbow for one more breath. Then she said, "There's a card on the desk."

Wade stepped aside without taking his eyes off her.

Gabe went in. Cara followed.

The room had been burned in the three minutes Skye had been in it — sheets pulled tight, bathroom taps wet, every drawer pulled and the contents removed. No panic in any of it. Diego had cleared the room before he came down the stairs. He'd left the lamp on because turning it off would have cost him two seconds he hadn't had.

One thing on the desk.

Cara photographed it before she touched it. Then she lifted it by the corner.

Hotel stationery. Haven Cove Inn crest. Words in block capitals.

She read them aloud. "Svalbard. Twenty-eight May."

Gabe looked at the card. Then at Cara. Then at Skye in the doorway behind them.

Skye was looking at the card with the expression of a woman who had partly known already. Not surprise. Confirmation.

"You knew about Svalbard."

"I knew there was somewhere." A pause. "I didn't know where."

"And now?"

"Now I know where."

He stood for one more breath in the doorway of Room 114 with his shoulder beginning to ache where it had taken the fence panel and the missing weight at his hip where the badge used to ride. Then he walked back out into the corridor where Skye Reeves was leaning against the wall pretending her hand wasn't bleeding, and Wade was already pulling a folded clean handkerchief out of his back pocket without being asked, and Cara was bagging the card with her phone in one hand and the sleeve in the other.

In the parking lot, the SUV was where they'd left it.

Diego Ortiz was in the wind. The cipher was still in play. The team had a date on a piece of stationery they had not previously possessed.