Page 59 of Crosscurrent

David glanced at her. “Same shape.”

“Same shape, different climate. They liked avalanches there.”

Tom looked between them. David offered him a quarter-second of a smile that had no humor in it. “Cold case. Four years ago. Twenty-six names over six years across three Swiss cantons. Nobody connected them until we did.”

“Nobody wanted to,” Sophie said.

That landed in the basement the way it was meant to.

Reagan threaded her hands through her hair. “This didn’t start with Owen. He’s just the latest.”

She didn’t need to say the rest aloud. Fifty people were going to die, one at a time, over however long Neptune wanted to take, unless they moved first.

Gabe pressed both hands flat on the table. “Then we don’t wait.”

Cara, still looking at the press release on the main monitor: “We’ve been reacting since the minute Skye showed up. We need to start making the rules. Bring the fight to Neptune.”

“I’m in,” Skye said. “How?”

“I don’t know yet. But Norway is where they think they’re hunting us.” Cara turned toward the room. “So that’s where we hunt them.”

Wade shoved his hands onto his thick thighs. “Now you’re talking.”

Tom rolled his chair back to the Rig. Skye was already standing, working the handkerchief off her knuckles with her teeth. “What’s the first step?”

Reagan was already at the secondary monitor, pulling up Owen’s conference registration. “He stays on the schedule. If he drops out now, Neptune pulls the timeline.” She toggled to a new tab. “Firearms into Svalbard — Norwegian regulations plus whatever exemptions apply depending on what agencies we’ve got on paper. I’ll need forty-eight hours to thread that.”

“Who flies commercial,” Gabe said. More statement than question.

“Owen does. Probably David and Sophie with him for coverage that reads normal.” Reagan was already making notes. “The rest of you are a different conversation.”

Owen had been very quiet through this. “I want to check my understanding,” he said.

Reagan kept typing.

“The plan is for me to go to Norway.” He said it evenly. “To the conference. Where they plan to grab me, extract what they think I have, and then kill me. Do I have that right?”

“The plan is to get them on ground we control,” Cara said.

“Right.” He wasn’t arguing. He was logging it. “But I am — literally — the reason they show up.” He looked at his own name three rows down on the attendee list. “I just want it said out loud. So no one’s surprised later when I mention I noticed.” He met Cara’s eyes. “Okay. What do I need to do?”

“Nothing yet.” Reagan kept her eyes on her screen. “Don’t touch your registration. Don’t change your travel. If they’re monitoring your itinerary — and they are — any deviation flags you.” She pulled up a new window. “Wade. I need a Norwegian contact for the firearms filings.”

He grunted. His version of, “No problem.”

Cara stayed at the table one more beat. Then she stood.

“I need to grab something upstairs,” she said to Reagan, in passing, because Reagan was the one most likely to notice her leaving.

Reagan looked at her for half a second longer than the line warranted. “Take your time.”

Cara went up the basement stairs into the dim kitchen of the closed bakery. Past the prep counter. Up the back stairs to the apartment. Closed her door. She stood with her hand on the doorknob for a beat longer than she’d meant to. Then she went to the kitchen.

The burner was in the freezer, inside a flour-sack towel, inside a plastic bag that hadn’t been opened since she’d hidden it there her first day in Haven Cove. She pulled it out, wrestling with the frost cementing it to the floor of the freezer. Ice crystals flaked off the bag as she opened it, dusting the backs of her hands.

She’d had no contact with her old handler since those last frantic moments in her apartment when he’d handed her the go bag. As the months dragged on, she’d begun to lose hope that the NYPD captain could actually find a way to end the mob kill order on her. The idea of clearing her name seemed even more impossible. At first, she hadn’t much cared, but now, with Gabe in her life, she wanted a future.

More badly than she dared admit.