Page 95 of Crosscurrent

Skye worked the shotgun seat, doing two jobs at once: route security and refreshments. She passed a bag over the seat back, turning carefully around the through-and-through, her version of babying her healing wound. "Kale chips?"

"No, thanks," Gabe said.

“They’re high in vitamin K.” Eyes narrowed, she studied him. “It’s essential for blood clotting. Might be a concern at some point. Just saying.”

Wade grabbed the bag.

She called the route between handfuls, and Wade drove it, munching dried kale as he steered. They passed through town at the speed of errands, cruising past the high school and the grain elevator and the Methodist church, out one road and back in on another, over and over again. A forty-minute trip unspooled across three hours on purpose.

The point wasn't to lose a tail. It was to make one show himself. Nobody could stay with them through all of that without being seen. A tail they missed today wouldn't just burn a dead drop. It would hand Neptune the only thread connecting fifty-three hidden people to a chalk mark on a mailbox.

He had no problem deferring to Cara and Skye and Tom on this one. What he’d learned about counter-surveillance happened in a Bureau classroom years ago, from a man with a laser pointer. He wasn’t exactly an expert, and this was too important to mess up. Dozens of lives, including Skye and Owen’s, depended on them getting this right. So did Ray Harney. Because of Skye’s instincts, and Owen’s sense of duty, Sweet and Sawyer investigations was charged with executing a dead man's last will, driven through farm country at thirty-five miles an hour.

He planned to get this right.

"Explain it to me one more time." Owen, in Gabe's ear, with the patience of a man on his fourth try. "Tom verified the woman is my uncle’s contact. We have her number. Why are we not simply calling the nice federal supervisor and letting them handle this?"

"The call told us who she is," Skye said. "The drop tells her the order's real. Ray's order, in Ray's grammar, in the hand he taught me. A phone can say anything. Paper has to be right."

"Also phones have memories," Tom said on the comm, "and apparently we don't trust anything with a memory, except now we’re trusting Skye's. No offense," he added lamely.

Skye snorted. “I’d be offended if you didn’t worry. Here’s the thing. Human memories can't be subpoenaed or probed or hacked. Mine's never been backed up to anybody's cloud."

"Point taken. I own eleven computers," Tom said, "and I want it on the record that this is the most secure system I have ever worked with, and I hate it, and I hate how much I love it."

Harney’s rules came out of Skye in pieces as they drove, in a cadence that wasn't hers. Gabe had heard men quote drill instructors and he'd heard men quote their fathers. This was both.

Drop and signal never share a block. You never park at a drop. You never look at a drop. You chalk the signal after, never before. And you never, ever go back to see if it's gone.

"What's the signal?" Owen asked.

"You'll know in about an hour," Skye said. "It'll be the most boring thing you've ever heard."

The Dunmore County Library opened at ten. They rolled past it at 10:09. Brick, a book-return box out front. Tom's quiet recon had found exactly one camera, aimed at the register to catch whoever kept stealing the Friends of the Library cash box. Gabe let Skye out two blocks short, at the hardware store, and parked where he could see the street and not the library, which she had been extremely specific about.

The note was already written. She'd done it at the bakery the night before, in pencil, four ordinary sentences a bored librarian could read without blinking. The code phrase was worked into the grammar like rebar into concrete. What had stopped Gabe cold was the handwriting. It wasn't hers.

"Why are you writing like that?" he'd asked.

Finished, she folded the page in thirds, and tore one corner off at an angle, slow, like it mattered. "Anyone can copy words. The tear, you have to be taught."

Now he watched her walk the two blocks with a tote bag and a book to return. She favored the wounded side so little that he only saw it because he knew she'd been shot. She headed into the library.

In the truck, Gabe counted. Wade cleaned his sunglasses and polished off the last of the kale chips, licking the dark green crumbs from his fingers.

Three minutes, fifty seconds later, Skye re-emerged. Somewhere behind her, on a local-history shelf nobody had touched since the Clinton administration, one book now sat exactly one shelf wrong, with a note with a corner torn to exact specifications waiting inside it.

Now Skye would leave their target a signal at a specified site. That was the trigger, letting the target know there was a message to pick up. While she walked, Gabe and Wade pulled out of the lot across from the library and cruised the side streets. Still no sign of a tail.

“Route’s clear so far,” Gabe said over the comlink. “We’ll be watching from the next block up.”

Skye slowed to a stop in front of a dusty-looking display of antiques. “Interesting.”

Beside Gabe, Wade stiffened in the driver’s seat. “You have a bogey?”

“Negative. We’re clear.” Skye paused, leaning in to stare at something in the shop. “That’s an Underwood Number Five.”

“Skye, why do you know that?” Cara sounded equal parts impressed and annoyed.