Page 79 of Crosscurrent

That was the part Gabe trusted least.

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The energy in the main conference room was electric. Even Cara watched, slack-jawed as Owen wowed the packed audience. Who would have thought a talk called, "Trust, Risk, and the Medieval Ledger," could hold anyone spellbound?

Pale and mild-mannered as ever, Owen hung behind the lectern, both hands going, as he walked forty scholars in wool through six hundred years of bookkeeping as if it was the best story ever told.

Cara sat in the third row with a forged lanyard and her ankles crossed, the picture of an assistant who'd heard the paper a dozen times, but still appreciated her boss’s brilliance.

"Now, here's the part everyone misses." Owen paused theatrically, then leaned into the microphone. "We think of these merchants as record-keepers. They weren't. They were record-survivors. A factor in some distant city could be bribed. He could be killed. He could simply lie. So the network learned to build its books to outlast any single man who held them."

Cara wasn't following the words. She'd stopped trying somewhere around Lübeck. She was doing the one job in the room she was actually good at, which was watching the people in it.

Skye stood against the side wall by the exit. Tom sat at the back with a tablet, looking like a man losing interest. Gabe held up the far corner, his eyes moving and never landing. Wade and Reagan roamed the halls, checking in on a regular basis.

"Duplicate ledgers, held in separate hands," Owen said. "A private notation only the network could read. The whole system assumed betrayal. It was built around the certainty that the man holding the book would, eventually⁠—"

He stopped, blinking at his notes.

A frisson of energy zinged up Cara’s spine. This pause wasn’t intended. Something had tripped him up. A stray thought. Or a mental breakthrough.

Owen's eyes had gone somewhere past the back wall. His mouth was still open on the unfinished word.

Then he came back. Found his place again and smiled like nothing had happened. "—would, eventually, be compromised," he finished, as if the pause had never happened.

Cara activated her comlink. "He's got something," she murmured. "He’s had a breakthrough."

"I saw." Gabe's voice, even, in the comlink. "Make sure he leaves slowly. Everything needs to appear ordinary."

“Agreed.” Fast got people noticed.

Once he finished to rousing applause, she let Owen take questions. When the moderator finally thanked him, she was already on her feet with his folder against her chest and the warm, harried smile of an assistant whose boss had a flight to catch.

"He's wonderful, isn't he?" said a woman heading past.

Cara nodded. "And he's a lot."

The woman laughed and followed the crowd toward the refreshment table at the back. Nobody cared about a frazzled assistant herding a distracted professor toward the exit. People saw what you handed them.

Owen made it halfway down the corridor before he caught her sleeve. "Cara. Cara, I need the notebook. I need it right now."

She kept them walking, kept her voice level, her eyes on the glass doors and the white glare past them. "Not here. Smile at the man by the coats."

He smiled at the porter, and they slid straight on past.

The cold outside sank straight into her face, stinging her cheeks. Owen didn't seem to feel it. Wade fell in at his shoulder as they cleared the doors, a big man who happened to be walking the same way. Gabe drifted out after them. Skye had already gone a block ahead to read the street.

Owen talked the whole two blocks, fast and quiet, more to himself than to any of them. Cara didn't understand a word of it. But she understood the shape of it.

Inside the guesthouse, the curtains were drawn against the ever-present golden glow outside.

Owen had Ray's notebook open under the lamp before he'd gotten his coat off. "The second part’s not a code."

He flattened the page, found a pencil, started marking the margin with the eraser end. "That's what I kept getting wrong. I kept trying to decrypt it. It isn't encrypted. It's redundant. It's the same thing the Hanseatic merchants did. He wrote the second half assuming someone might steal the first."

"Owen." Reagan had come in from the kitchen, arms folded. "English."

"The names we already have." He didn't look up. "This is everything you'd do with them."