Page 94 of Crosscurrent

"Two. Everything Sophie and David built, the photographs, the interviews, and the shell maps, goes into the clean channel with the supervisor's seal on it. Locked, dated, ready for a courtroom. Not published."

Sophie nodded, but David’s head came up. "This tracks all the way back to our father’s murder." His voice stayed level, which was how she knew what it cost. He looked at the table, then at Sophie, and whatever he saw in her face was the thing that decided him. "Banked. Not buried. The day this ends, I write it, and nobody gets to stop me."

"The day this ends," Gabe said, "I'll carry your laptop."

She wrote the third line. DRAW HER OUT.

"Three. Cartwright. The witnesses can vanish, but we have to figure she’s not going to stop chasing us. We're done running. So we don't outwait her. We hand her one target so good she comes for it herself."

"Bennion," Wade said.

"Bennion." Barrett spoke for the first time since the call. The folding chair creaked under him. "Cartwright's had a file on her for months. Lapsed cover, no active handler. Suzette Bennion is Neptune's test case for reading the network. The moment the relocations start, every door Cartwright has been watching slams shut at once, and Bennion's is the only one she can still reach. She won't send people." He said it without drama, which made it worse. "She's done trusting people. I know her. She'll go herself."

"So we get there first," Reagan said slowly, "and we're standing in the room when she arrives. That's not an extraction. That's bait."

Cara put the marker down and looked around the table. "Rescue first. Trap second. If the rescue costs us the trap, we take the rescue and go home. That's the line."

Nobody argued. Wade nodded once.

After that it went fast. Cara watched the room sort itself into the thing Ray had accidentally built from beyond the grave. Skye, the instigator. Owen the sequence, because only Owen could read the map. Tom on verification and comms. Two channels. Never one. Sophie and David sealing the record. Reagan on medical and the haul-out, Wade and Gabe on Bennion's door, and Cara⁠—

"You're the one who walks up to a stranger's house," Gabe said quietly, beside her, not quite a question, "and gets a terrified witness to trust you in ninety seconds."

"I can do that," she said.

"I know." He held her eyes. "I used to hate that."

He didn't say what it was now. He didn't have to.

"There's a hole in this," Skye announced, her gaze steady on the marshal. "He walks out of here knowing all of it. Every move, every name, the order they fall in. And then he goes back into Neptune. Not a great plan."

"That's the job," Barrett said. "Cartwright's people are already rolling. You need to know where she is, what she's bringing, and when she commits to Bennion. There's exactly one person alive who can stand close enough to tell you."

"Or to tell her."

Barrett nodded. "There's no version of this where you don't have to decide about me. I'd tell you to decide fast. We're inside Cartwright’s timeline now, not ours. If I’m not back inside soon, I can’t explain away my absence, and she’ll suspect everything and everyone. No way she walks into your trap if I’m missing."

Cara looked at Skye, and Skye looked back. The whole argument happened in two seconds without a word. If he's theirs, we're already dead. If he's ours, we have eyes on the inside.

"Go," Skye said to him. "Knit her a sweater."

Barrett stood, set the wonky chair carefully against the wall, and went up the stairs to walk back into the thing they were about to burn down.

Cara had spent her whole life building cons that needed nobody but her. That was the architecture: one operator, one exit, nothing she couldn't walk away from. She looked around the table at what she'd built instead — the genius of the plan and the whole terrible price of it in the same six faces.

They knew how to end it now.

All that was left was living through it.

40

"Rule one," Skye said. "If you can see the drop, you've already blown it."

"It's a library," Gabe said.

"It's a drop."

Wade piloted his beat-up truck inland, keeping to the deserted county roads as they headed toward the place Skye needed to be to initiate the witness warning protocol.