Page 78 of Crosscurrent

Skye appeared at his elbow during the midmorning coffee break carrying a pastry she clearly hated. "Tweed," she said. "At the coffee station. Three refills. Hasn't drunk any of them."

Gabe waited thirty seconds before finding the reflection in the mirror behind the coffee urns. Male. Mid-thirties. Fit beneath the conference tweed.

Boots too new for laces that worn.

DR. JERRY FELD.

The badge said academic. Not likely.

"He's not listening to anything," Skye said. "He's herding." She sounded almost nostalgic. "Watch. Owen moves, he adjusts. I used to know men like him."

She said it the way other people said I used to live there.

It was Wade who found the second fake. "It’s the knitter."

Gabe nearly laughed.

The knitter looked like somebody's favorite aunt. Late fifties. Quilted jacket. Reading glasses on a chain. Canvas yarn bag at her feet.

HELEN CARTWRIGHT, her badge announced. INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER.

Gabe inched closer. She was telling a dean from Edinburgh a story about a flooded archive in Coventry and had the man laughing hard enough to wipe tears from his eyes.

“I’m telling you, she’s live,” Wade insisted over the comlink. “She already knows the names and backstories of the coffee steward, the clerk at the registration desk and that little dude restocking the napkins at the buffet.”

Gabe pretended to study a poster advertising an arctic photography voyage beginning after the conference while he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

Everybody liked her within five minutes. That, more than anything else, bothered him.

Real charm was useful. Professional charm could be deadly.

"The woman verifies too clean," Tom added.

"Meaning?"

"Nobody’s background verification snaps back that fast," the IT guru responded.

The channel fell quiet.

“Are they both Neptune?” Reagan asked. “Or is one, or both of them, watching the watchers?”

"Or they’re ordinary peeps," Sophie suggested.

Skye snorted. “Yeah. That never happens.”

"No attributions," Tom cautioned. "Yet."

Across the hall, a hotel worker opened the doors to the conference room. Coffee in hand, attendees funneled inside.

Owen gathered his notebook and headed in, still talking to the Danes.

Jerry Feld detached from the coffee station and drifted after him. Helen Cartwright wound her yarn, smiled her way past the dean, and followed them both.

Gabe watched them disappear down the corridor. One of them was probably hunting Owen.

The other might be hunting the hunter.

Neither had yet made a move.