Page 97 of Crosscurrent

The room went still while Tom decoded it; he read it twice before he said it out loud. "Cartwright bought it. She's moving on Bennion. Herself, and a core crew."

Tom pulled the location onto the big monitor and squinted. "Petit Marais, Louisiana. Barely a dot. One road in, and then the Gulf eats the rest."

"She settled there?" Owen leaned in, clearly appalled. "There's nothing there but swamp and bugs. Snakes, I’m sure." He shuddered. “Ugh.”

"That's the point," Cara said, not looking up from Bennion's file. "Hard to sneak up on someone in terrain like that."

Owen shuddered. “Who would want to?”

Skye was at the workbench, cleaning a rifle. "Gators, too," she added. "Good for making a body not exist." A beat. "I'm just saying."

Owen stared at her. "I genuinely cannot tell when you're joking."

"I never joke," Skye said, and didn't smile.

At yesterday’s planning meeting, Gabe had asked the obvious question. "Why aren't we already sitting on her porch?"

Cara had walked him through it. Touch Bennion while the other fifty-two still lived at addresses Neptune could read, and her watcher would phone it in. Cartwright would move on every witness who hadn’t already vanished.

But saving the Bennion woman wasn’t the part that made Gabe’s stomach roil. Owen was.

"We're not leaving him here." Cara said it like she'd already lost the argument with herself. "The second we touch Suzette Bennion, Neptune knows we surfaced, and they come for the one thing that can still hurt them, the man who can read the book." She glanced at the stairs, up toward the bakery, toward Diane and Piper asleep in her apartment above it. "We need to make it very clear Owen, and Skye, aren’t here. We take the whole thing south — the work, the people, the trouble."

Wade was already on the phone. "Nomad. Hillsboro, three hours. Manifest of seven, plus gear." He listened a minute before ending the call. "He says bring extra croissants and energy drinks."

The plan was two moves.

Cara laid them flat. “First, we disappear Suzette Bennion, the last living name on Ray Harney's list. With no more witnesses to hunt, Owen and Skye stop being worth grabbing.”

“But here’s the best part,” she continued, “Let Cartwright and her goons come. In fact, that’s great.”

For a second, her obvious enjoyment puzzled him. Then he saw the move. “You want to set up a honeypot.”

She grinned at him. “Exactly. Let them come after Bennion. Then we catch them in the act of attempted kidnapping. Or murder.”

He liked that. A lot. “At the worst, we get a few Neptune operatives off the streets.”

“Or we get intel.” Wade chimed in. “Ideally, both.”

"This would work better with real law enforcement," Reagan said. "Which we are famously not."

The room sat with it. Then Gabe set his mug down. He knew a Bureau guy close-ish, a man he'd trust with any life in the room. "I’ve got a contact."

Tom swiveled away from the monitors over the rig, giving him a hard stare. “Someone trustworthy? You know Neptune has eyes in the FBI.”

“Agreed. And yes. My guy’s as straight as Tyler Price.”

Wade eyed Tom, who nodded. “Okay, then,” Wade agreed.

"I could verify Bennion from the book," Owen offered. "If you⁠—"

"No." Four-part harmony.

Wade didn't look up. "Until we slap Neptune down, you don't exist, dude. You're a rumor in a fish camp."

"A rumor," Owen repeated, polishing his glasses. "Fine. The rumor will be doing the sequencing."

Tom would run comms and drones from the camp; Sophie and David would hang back in Haven Cove, ready to publish critical intel or prod law enforcement or the politically connected as necessary. Plus, more eyes on Diane and Piper would never be a problem.