Page 76 of Crosscurrent

Cara found Gabe's eyes across the table and watched him land where she'd landed. A combed list meant someone with reach inside the conference's own systems. Neither of them said it out loud. They didn't need to anymore; that was the unsettling, useful thing about them lately.

"Forget the conference," Gabe said. "Find Sophie's twenty."

Tom went sideways, out of the conference and into the town: hotel blocks, equipment rentals, charter operators, the guesthouse network Sophie had already walked through the front door of. The room arranged itself around his back without anyone deciding to — Reagan with the legal pad, Sophie cross-checking her bed count out loud, David standing his editor's stillness behind Tom's shoulder.

"There." Tom sat back. "Eleven bookings. Different names, different nationalities, paid through shells — three layers, but they're shells. All made in the same forty-eight-hour window, two days ago."

Days ago, Cara thought. Before the team had decided to come.

"Yeow. There’s more. I found a charter," Tom said, quieter now. "Private fixed wing, out of Svalbard Airport, in two days. Six passengers from the cluster are manifested on it." He turned one of the screens around. "The aircraft seats eight."

Nobody said anything.

"Two seats," Tom said. "Booked the same day as the rest. Paid in full." He swallowed. "No names attached."

Cara watched Owen's name not get said. Then Skye's. The silence did all the work there was to do.

Skye looked at the manifest a long moment from her place against the wall. "Efficient," she said, and nothing else.

It was Gabe who finally moved, leaning over the manifest like it was a case board. "Then we know the window." "Their plan ends with a takeoff in two days. Ours ends with that plane leaving empty."

The room breathed for the first time in ten minutes. Reagan actually wrote something down.

"There's one more thing," Tom added. "There’s a scheduled flight to Oslo, same morning. Twelve-oh-five. Two seats on it, booked inside the same week as the cluster." He pulled the record up. "Different paymaster. Different shell — and not one of Neptune's. Cleaner work, honestly. Whoever built this one is better at it."

"Neptune flies private," Gabe said slowly. "They've got a charter on the apron with the cargo seats already paid for. Why would they buy commercial?"

"They wouldn't," Cara said.

The table went very quiet while everyone arrived at it together. Somebody who was not Neptune knew about the Colloquium, the dates, and the value of what Owen carried, and had also planned to leave this island with two passengers.

"Friendlies?" Reagan said, without conviction.

"No way," Cara said. "Looks like we’ve got a new problem."

At what her watch insisted was midnight, Cara stood at the guesthouse window with the blackout curtain pulled back a hand's width. The town below was tidy and bright and looked like a postcard of itself: painted houses, the harbor, one road that went nowhere. Out past the rooftops she could see the airstrip, and somewhere in a hangar's paperwork out there were two seats with no names on them.

She had spent her whole life keeping one hand on a door. This town had confiscated every one of them — and the man asleep down the hall was a door too.

*Lord,* she prayed, against the glass. *I've spent twenty years finding the second door. There isn't one here. You'll have to be it.*

Neptune wasn't waiting to find out whether they could take Owen and Skye. They'd already booked the seats.

And somewhere out there, in the daylight that never ended, someone who wasn't Neptune had booked two more.

28

Owen belonged here.

The realization hit Gabe halfway through his first cup of coffee the next morning at the pre-conference buffet. Owen occupied the center table, holding court over an unapologetically American breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast stacked like lumber. Two Danish historians argued cheerfully with him about grain ledgers. Owen looked delighted.

Which, Gabe supposed, was fair. Most people spent their lives looking for a room where they belonged. The history professor had apparently found his.

Across from him, Skye worked her way through a bowl of pickled herring with the contentment of a woman who'd finally arrived somewhere the food made sense. Wade stood at the windows, munching on a pastry while he soaked in the room. Sophie had reached the buffet ten minutes ago and somehow become involved in three separate conversations without losing track of any of them. David drifted the edges of the room carrying a camera, a press badge, and an expression of harmless curiosity that fooled exactly the people it was supposed to fool.

A gaggle of academics in wool sweaters and conference lanyards filled the rest of the space.

Any one of them could be working for Neptune. Probably more than one of them.