Page 80 of Crosscurrent

The room went quiet around the scratch of his pencil. Cara moved in behind his shoulder and watched the thing come open.

It wasn't a list. Lists she understood. This was a map, except it wasn't drawn on places — it was drawn on people. Every name from Ray's fifty-three, and under each one the architecture of a hidden life. The alias they lived behind now. The town he'd tucked them into. The second route he'd built to move them again if the first one failed. Who could be trusted near them. Who couldn't.

"He didn't trust anybody to outlast him." Skye moved to the table. "So he built it to outlast him instead."

Nobody answered her.

Tom turned his laptop around without being asked. "I'm running the crossed-out ones against open records." His voice came out careful. "Retired judge in Nevada. Hiking accident, March. Dock foreman, Port of Seattle — hit and run, January, driver never found. Trucking VP outside Atlanta, last October." He stopped. "Ray crossed all three out before any of it hit the news."

The cold came back into the room, and this time it had nothing to do with Norway.

"So it's real," Reagan said quietly.

"It's a kill list somebody's been working through." Tom kept typing, eyes on the screen. "Ray was keeping score."

Cara made herself keep reading over Owen's shoulder. The marshal had done more than hide his people. He'd ranked them, scoring every name by how likely it was to die. One entry near the top sat circled twice. Protection lapsed eight months back. A relocation flagged and never finished. The thinnest cover on the page.

Suzette Bennion.

A name. She registered it the way she registered all of them, and read on.

The guesthouse door opened on a gust of cold. Sophie came in without knocking, color high, her own notebook already out. She didn't so much as glance at the cipher. She was working a different street entirely. "David’s still interviewing that Viking trade expert.” She announced, and locked the door behind her.

Owen looked up from his own work and rolled his eyes. “Eklund. Man’s a lightweight. His research is ridiculously thin, but he’s tall and blond and Swedish.” He shook his head sadly. “Go figure.”

Sophie ignored that. “I found the official," she said. "The grants-oversight seat in Salem, the one David flagged in the spring. Two foundations routing money through it, and both of them turn out to be an address with nobody home." She set a folded page down at the table's edge, away from the notebook, like she knew the two things weren't allowed to touch yet. "I'm not printing a word of it. It goes in the file."

"Bank it," Cara said.

Sophie capped her pen. One quiet win running alongside the loud one, a register apart.

And the room had gone warm. Hopeful. Cara reveled in the change. Owen was grinning down at the notebook. Tom was already talking flights home. Reagan put coffee on. The smell of it filled the small lit room, and for the first time since Skye walked into the bakery with a dead man's signal hidden in her bag, the team had the thing everyone had been dying for, sitting right there on their own table.

Cara stood in the middle of all that relief, but she wanted to cry.

They’d flown all the way out here, trying to keep Skye and Owen and whoever else Ray Harney wanted to save safe.

They had just done the opposite.

If Owen could decode the information, so could someone else. Eventually. And in the meantime, exposing Ray Harney’s system only made Owen a more valuable prize.

30

Cold hit Cara the second she stepped out of the guesthouse, and took her breath with it. Past six, by her watch, though the bright sun gave no sign of it. She'd have locked Owen in a room if she could, but the colloquium had a reception in an hour.

Not attending would give their Neptune watchers an all-too-clear heads-up. Normal was the only cover left, so she walked Owen straight back toward the people watching him.

She wasn't walking him alone. Gabe was out ahead, hands loose, reading the street like he'd laid it out himself. Wade trailed the same distance back. Skye drifted wide to the right, working the angles Cara couldn't, and the channel murmured low and steady in her ear — Tom and Reagan at the guesthouse with eyes on every borrowed camera in town, David and Sophie already inside the hotel, an hour early, mingling.

"Public rooms read clean," Sophie said, somewhere warm and loud with small talk. "Lobby, bar, the long gallery. Nobody who pings. David's shaken half the conference's hands."

"All tweed and name tags in here," David said. "Come on in, the water's fine."

She set Owen on her left, where the other cottages and outbuildings offered at least a little shielding, and ran her eyes down the street the way she did every time. The corner where the man in the gray parka stood every morning. The bench. The black gap between two buildings where even this light didn't reach.

The corner was empty.

She didn't slow. She found the others without turning her head — the woman who scattered bread for the ravens, the man who smoked by the parked snowmobiles, the two regulars at the café window. Gone. Every face she'd logged since they landed, every pair of eyes she'd learned by heart, and not one of them on the street this afternoon.