Chapter 20
The SUV was doing seventy down the access road when Tom came through the comms.
"She's in the lobby."
Gabe didn't slow down.
Beside him, Cara had her phone propped on the dash with the camera feed live — second-floor parking structure, the pillar where Skye had been standing four minutes ago.
The pillar was empty. It had been empty for three of those four minutes.
They'd watched her walk away from her overwatch position on the camera and they had still been five blocks out.
"Floor?" Wade asked from the back seat.
"Working it."
Gabe took the corner into the Haven Cove Inn's east lot a beat past comfortable. Wet asphalt hissed under the tires. He killed the headlights at the dumpster line and rolled the last forty feet in dark.
"Got her." Tom again. "First floor, west wing. Corridor camera caught her ninety seconds ago. She was walking, not running. Toward Diego's room."
Ninety seconds ago.
"Wade," Gabe said. "Lobby. Up the east stairs."
"On me."
Wade was out of the SUV before it stopped moving. Gabe killed the engine and came out the driver's side with his service weapon already in hand. Cara matched him on the passenger side, fast and quiet.
The south side of the motel ran shadow-on-shadow — service lane between the building and the bait shop next door, one yellow security lamp doing more work for the dumpsters than for anyone trying to see.
Cara was at the service door before Gabe was at the corner.
He took the right of the door. She took the left.
His earpiece clicked. Wade, low: "Stairs."
The plan was for Wade to clear the corridor. Gabe and Cara would block the only door Ortiz could use that didn't dump him in the lobby. Tom would monitor the cameras. Five minutes from breach to retrieval.
Now the plan was get there.
Inside Room 114, fifteen feet from where Gabe was standing, the curtain glowed amber. A lamp had come on. Bedside, by the angle.
He keyed the channel. "Light's on. He's still in there."
"Wade?" Cara whispered.
"Twenty feet from the room."
Gabe heard the sound through the wall before Tom or Wade did — muffled, contained.
Then a second sound. A shorter one. Two beats apart, the second smaller than the first.
"Wade," Gabe said.
"I hear it. Moving."
Cara didn't say anything. She'd already shifted her stance — weight forward, weapon ready, sightline on the service door instead of the window. The window was where the curtain was. The service door was where Diego would come out if he was coming out fast.
Three seconds passed.
The service door blew open.
Diego Ortiz hit the alley moving. Black duffel, dark jacket, his left leg favoring badly enough that Gabe clocked the limp before he clocked the face. Diego cleared the doorframe with one hand on the jamb to stabilize — and saw Gabe.
The fraction of a second when Diego's eyes found him was the longest moment in the alley. Diego registered Gabe, found Cara, found the blocked primary, recalculated. No surprise in his face. Just the small motion of a professional revising on the fly.
He cut left.
"Contact." Gabe was already moving.
Diego had ten feet on him and a planned exfil. Gabe had longer legs and a leg that wasn't bleeding through a sock. He closed to six feet on the second stride.
Five feet.
Diego clipped a trash can hard enough to send it spinning into the chain-link fence. The crash made Gabe gain half a step at the same time it made his ears ring. Close enough now to see the darker patch of fabric above Diego's left ankle. Close enough to take him.
Four feet.
Then Diego hit the fence.
Not the panel. The seam. Wire peeled back along a vertical line — cut earlier, bent open, the kind of seam you'd only see if you knew to look. Gabe had not known to look.
Diego turned sideways and went through.
Gabe lunged. His fingertips caught fabric. The fabric tore. Diego was through the gap and into the marina access road and gone — wet pavement, dock lights, a fishing boat rocking against its lines, and no Diego anywhere along it.
Gabe hit the fence panel with his shoulder hard enough to make the whole run of chain-link sing.
Pain came up in a hot line. He stayed on his feet and went sideways through the same gap a beat behind, but the marina access was empty in every direction.
He stood there for one breath at the end of the lane with his hand against the fence post and the harbor wind cold against his sweat.
"He's out," he said into the channel. "Marina side. Planned exfil."
"Copy." Tom. "Harbor cams."
"He'll be off them."
"Yeah."
He pulled his hand off the post and walked back.
The service door had swung shut on its hydraulic hinge. He pulled it open again and stepped into the corridor.
Stale air. Institutional carpet eating the sound of his boots. The motel's fluorescent fire-exit sign humming. He moved past 116, past 115, came up on 114.
Door open.
Wade in the doorway.
Skye in the corridor behind him.
Wade had positioned himself between her and the room — not in the way of a man stopping her from going back inside, but in the way of a man who had instinctively put himself between his teammate and the place she'd just come out of.
He wasn't moving. He wasn't going to move until somebody told him to.
Cara came up at Gabe's shoulder.
Skye saw them.
For a second her face didn't do anything.
Then her eyes went from Cara to Wade to Gabe, in that order, and the smallest thing happened — not surprise, exactly.
Closer to recalculation. The kind of recalculation Diego had done in the alley but smaller and quieter and on a different axis.
A woman noticing that the math she'd been running for the last four minutes had not been the right math.
She had blood on her right hand. Knuckles split.
Two fingers tracking red down her wrist. A cut at her temple was already darkening along the line of her jaw.
Her sleeve was torn near the shoulder. She had her weight balanced over the balls of her feet in the way a person did when they had been hit recently and were managing not to show it.
"I had a plan," she said.
Her voice was perfectly level.
"He came out the bathroom faster than I estimated. I recovered."
Cara crossed the distance between them at a walk and caught Skye lightly by the elbow before Skye could step away from it.
Skye blinked once like the contact surprised her.
"You're bleeding," Cara said.
Skye looked down at her hand as if noticing it for the first time. "Oh."
Gabe heard himself ask the question very quietly. "How long alone in the room?"
"Three minutes."
It was the answer he'd expected. It still landed wrong.
He looked at the cut at her temple and at the split knuckles and at the balance on the balls of her feet and decided he was not going to do the conversation about going in alone right now.
He was going to do it later, in the basement, when he could sit down and figure out what to say to a woman whose entire operating principle until about ten minutes ago had been the principle that nobody was coming for her.
She was still looking at all three of them. "It's a better plan now."
Wade did not move from the doorway. Cara did not let go of Skye's elbow. Gabe, who had been about to say something operational, did not say it.
Three seconds passed in the corridor without anyone saying anything.
Then Skye said, "I had a reason."
Gabe nodded once. "Yeah."
"Diego came up the stairs forty seconds ahead of Wade."
"I know."
"I had the door."
"Yeah."
She let Cara hold her elbow for one more breath. Then she said, "There's a card on the desk."
Wade stepped aside without taking his eyes off her.
Gabe went in. Cara followed.
The room had been burned in the three minutes Skye had been in it — sheets pulled tight, bathroom taps wet, every drawer pulled and the contents removed.
No panic in any of it. Diego had cleared the room before he came down the stairs.
He'd left the lamp on because turning it off would have cost him two seconds he hadn't had.
One thing on the desk.
Cara photographed it before she touched it. Then she lifted it by the corner.
Hotel stationery. Haven Cove Inn crest. Words in block capitals.
She read them aloud. "Svalbard. Twenty-eight May."
Gabe looked at the card. Then at Cara. Then at Skye in the doorway behind them.
Skye was looking at the card with the expression of a woman who had partly known already. Not surprise. Confirmation.
"You knew about Svalbard."
"I knew there was somewhere." A pause. "I didn't know where."
"And now?"
"Now I know where."
He stood for one more breath in the doorway of Room 114 with his shoulder beginning to ache where it had taken the fence panel and the missing weight at his hip where the badge used to ride.
Then he walked back out into the corridor where Skye Reeves was leaning against the wall pretending her hand wasn't bleeding, and Wade was already pulling a folded clean handkerchief out of his back pocket without being asked, and Cara was bagging the card with her phone in one hand and the sleeve in the other.
In the parking lot, the SUV was where they'd left it.
Diego Ortiz was in the wind. The cipher was still in play. The team had a date on a piece of stationery they had not previously possessed.
And Skye Reeves, who had walked into a Neptune operative's motel room alone because she had decided four years ago in some hallway in Europe that she was the only person who was coming for her, had let Cara take her by the elbow.