Page 90 of Crosscurrent

He'd come straight to her. Of course he had.

He couldn't say anything, couldn't get his teeth to stop long enough to make a word, but he got his ruined hands on either side of her face and brought his forehead down against hers, and for one beat there was nothing else in the whole frozen world. No bear. No stranger. No plan. Just the two of them, frigid and shaking hard, but alive.

Both of them. Alive.

“Yup. You two are frozen but good. Let’s get you off the ice,” Wade announced.

Then he hauled them into the cab of the snowcat, Cara, then Gabe. A blast of heat that hurt worse than the cold made her cry out.

She couldn’t make her hands close, couldn't do anything but shake. Gabe was a weight against her side, shuddering as hard as she was. She turned her face into him and let him hold the weight of them both.

The snowcat lurched and pulled away, Wade throwing it across the ice toward the cave, toward Reagan and Skye, gathering them all up before the enemy arrived.

And in the roaring heat, with Gabe's pulse against her cheek, Cara finally caught up to the thing her body had known before her mind could.

A stranger had pulled her out of the sea.

Not Wade. Not Gabe. A stranger, who had looked into her face and found a living woman where a dead man was supposed to be.

She didn't know who he was. She didn't need to. The whole plan had rested on one thing — that the world believe Owen Harney died in this water — and somewhere out on that ice, a man who was not on their side had just learned that he hadn't.

It was blown. All of it. The shot, the blood, the burning cipher. Owen and Skye would be hunted. And every name in Ray Harney's book was fair game again, because she'd lived.

Cara got her hand up, finally, and closed it in the soaked front of Gabe's dry suit. "We have to get off this island. Now."

37

Three hours out of Longyearbyen, Cara still couldn't get warm.

She had her own coat, and Reagan's parka over it, and a wool blanket from the plane's kit over that, and a thermos Nomad's, coffee going cold between her hands because she kept forgetting it was there. The shaking had stopped somewhere over the mainland coast. The cold hadn't. It had moved in below the muscle. She was beginning to believe it meant to stay.

The cabin was quiet the way a field hospital is quiet. Reagan slept sitting up, arms crossed, surfacing every twenty minutes to check Skye's dressing and Cara's color without appearing to wake. Sophie slept on David's shoulder. Owen sat across the aisle, wrapped to the chin, wearing the weight of a man who knew others had suffered to keep alive.

Gabe's shoulder rested against hers. He hadn't asked how she was in three hours. He just kept it there, taking her temperature through it.

Wade was up front in the copilot's seat, trading half-sentences with Nomad.

From behind, the two of them could have been brothers. Same slab shoulders. Same gray bristle. Same way of sitting absolutely still inside a moving machine.

Nomad had met them at the airfield with the engines already running. He'd watched the whole battered lot of them come up the stairs and asked exactly one question: Anybody following? Wade had said not yet. Nomad had said good enough and put them in the air.

Tom had his laptop open. His face had gone carefully blank, which on Tom was the same as shouting.

Nomad unbuckled himself and slapped Wade on the shoulder hard enough to draw a grunt. “We’re on auto. Need to stretch my legs. Don’t touch anything.”

As the man wound his way through the small but plush cabin, he eyed Tom. "Son, relax. You're going to wear out the internet."

Tom's hands came off the keys like the keyboard had heated up. "I was just⁠—"

"Running me." Nomad winked at Cara. Up close the resemblance got stranger: Wade's build, Wade's economy, a face weathered in some other climate entirely. "Find anything good?"

"No, actually." Tom looked at the screen, then at him. Saying the rest seemed to cost him. "You’re a ghost. No service record. No licenses, no property, no tax history. There's a fishing boat registered to a man your size in 1989, but he's been dead since 1994." A beat. "You don't exist."

"Good to hear." Nomad grinned. "That took some doing."

"People don't just⁠—"

"Tom," Wade said, from the front. Not sharp. Just final.