Page 67 of Crosscurrent

Cara’s stomach tightened. This plan was growing darker, and more convoluted by the second. Complications only served to multiply the ways things could go wrong. But she didn’t voice her thoughts. Until she had a better solution, it wouldn’t serve to tear down their only plan. “So our plan at this point, is to figure out how to make Neptune give up on the witness list.”

Gabe nodded, face stony, every bit the experienced Special Agent. “By any means necessary.”

The Norway framework came together quickly after that. The team had been working the problem long enough that most of the structure was already understood.

Owen would attend the conference as himself, presenting his paper. He didn’t need to perform anything. He just needed to be Owen Harney, and Neptune would do the rest.

Wade would travel commercial with David and Owen and Sophie. Everyone else would come on the private jet. Tom would run surveillance and communications. Reagan was already navigating Norwegian firearms regulations. Gabe would handle field operations.

Cara would run the trap.

“What about me?” Skye sat on the far workbench with her wrapped hand resting on her knee and her expression doing what it did when she was running calculations she wasn’t sharing. “Neptune thinks either Owen or I can solve the cipher,” she said. “Use both of us. Double the bait.”

“No. We need you helping to protect Owen,” Cara added, trying to soften the abruptness of her response. Besides, the unspoken fact was, wherever Skye went, she was a target.

Skye fisted her hands on her hips, oblivious to the injured one. “I could do this op on my own. I’ve always worked alone. I can⁠—”

“It’s a no.” Cara kept her voice level. “We’re not putting a target on your back and calling it strategy.”

Skye looked to Wade.

He turned from the monitors. “Cara’s right. We don’t do disposable.”

The room went quiet.

Something shifted in Skye’s expression. Not argument. Not gratitude. Something more careful than either. Like a woman discovering one of her oldest assumptions might not be true. She’d walked into this bakery with a USB drive and four years of operating on the assumption that, outside of Ray Harney, she had no backup.

Until now.

Cara let the silence run a beat longer. “Your job in Norway is spotter. Neptune is going to put assets in that conference room. They’ll be performing academics—credentials that hold at a distance, behavior that slips under pressure. I have a hunch you and I are better at reading that tell than anyone here. That’s the role.”

Skye took a minute, clearly running this through her brain. “Okay. That’s not a completely stupid idea.”

“Interesting.” Owen set his pencil down and raised a finger. “Oh, I mean not that. Your arguments have merit. This.” He turned the notebook slightly. “The encoding structure in this section is completely different from everything else in the notebook. Different logic. Different source, I think. I don’t recognize it.”

Tom leaned forward. “Different how?”

“Not a variation of Ray’s standard system. A separate system entirely. I can see that it’s intentional structure. I just can’t identify the organizing principle.”

Cara came around the table. The pages did look different. Denser somehow. The marks didn’t follow the same visual rhythm as the rest of the notebook. He traced a finger across lines of hand-written gibberish. “This is a list, maybe.”

“Can you read the section?” Cara asked.

“I need to find the encoding key first.”

Tom rubbed a hand across his face. “So this list could be people or locations, or even a process or a program.”

Owen shrugged. “All excellent possibilities.”

“Great,” Tom said. “That’s very clarifying.”

Across the table Reagan made a sound that might have been a laugh.

Cara snagged a dry-erase marker and uncapped it. The whiteboard was already crowded with Gabe’s handwriting—surveillance timelines, Diego Ortiz’ aliases, flight windows, conference schedules. She found an empty corner and wrote:

LIST — UNKNOWN

Across the table, Piper had gone quiet for the first time since she’d walked in. She’d been watching Skye more than the board anyway. Piper tried to hide it, but she looked at Skye the way other teenagers looked at professional athletes.