Chapter 21
Tired and discouraged, Cara stared into space, her index finger poking the hard edge of the clear evidence sleeve encasing the crumpled note she’d picked up from Ortiz’ room.
Something in his voice wired her. Or maybe it was simple exhaustion. “Why is it weird, Owen?”
He looked up like he hadn’t quite realized he’d said it out loud. “That’s the first day of the colloquium.” He scratched his head. “Probably just a coincidence.”
Or not. Cara’s body zinged with energy now. The others clearly felt it, too.
Skye, on the workbench with Wade’s clean handkerchief still wrapped around her right hand, said flatly, “Owen. It is not a coincidence.”
“…right.” Owen looked down at the note again. “No. I see that.”
Gabe slumped in his seat, but his eyes were bright now. “They’re going to let him go to Norway.”
Skye nodded. “It’s what I’d do. All that ice? The perfect place to dump a body.”
There was a pause Cara felt in her ribs.
“Det er sikkert,” Sophie muttered from down the table.
Cara looked at her.
Sophie blinked once, mildly. “Norwegian. Sorry. Who needs ice? The polar bear population’s huge there. The State Department travel advisory notes that they account for a non-trivial percentage of unrecovered persons.”
“You read that on the flight, didn’t you.” David said without looking up from the document on his own screen.
Owen looked faintly alarmed. “What are you people talking about?”
Skye picked up the thread. “They think you have the cipher. They’ll take it in Longyearbyen. Then you don’t fly home. If you don’t have it, they grab me here while you’re on a different continent. Either way, once they have what they want, both of us die.”
Owen took the sentence in slowly. “So….not good.”
Skye frowned at him. “I didn’t say that.”
Cara had the sudden specific thought that Owen Harney was the least prepared person in the basement and the bravest one for sitting still.
Tom pushed back from the Rig. “Hold on.”
His left monitor was running something — query strings cycling — and he was leaning toward it the way he did when he was about to make himself unhappy. “The second cipher layer just came open. Fifty-three names on the list. Several with strikes through them.”
Cara’s coffee was cold. She hadn’t drunk any of it.
“Give me a sec. Cross-referencing now.” Tom’s hand was on the trackball. “Obits. Press. Bar associations. State licensing boards. Give me ninety seconds.”
Owen was very still. Cara watched the way he held himself — composed, attentive, hands still folded in his lap. He hadn’t moved since Skye explained the kill calculus.
Tom read off the list. “Retired judge from Reno. Sixty-seven. Hiking accident, March. Dock foreman, Port of Seattle. Hit and run, January. Driver never found. Trucking VP outside Atlanta. Self-inflicted, October. Wife disputes findings.”
Three names. Three deaths inside six months.
“They’re working a backlog,” David said it almost to himself.
Sophie didn’t look up from her notes. “Reminds me of Gstaad.”
David glanced at her. “Same shape.”
“Same shape, different climate. They liked avalanches there.”
Tom looked between them. David offered him a quarter-second of a smile that had no humor in it. “Cold case. Four years ago. Twenty-six names over six years across three Swiss cantons. Nobody connected them until we did.”
“Nobody wanted to,” Sophie said.
That landed in the basement the way it was meant to.
Reagan threaded her hands through her hair. “This didn’t start with Owen. He’s just the latest.”
She didn’t need to say the rest aloud. Fifty people were going to die, one at a time, over however long Neptune wanted to take, unless they moved first.
Gabe pressed both hands flat on the table. “Then we don’t wait.”
Cara, still looking at the press release on the main monitor: “We’ve been reacting since the minute Skye showed up. We need to start making the rules. Bring the fight to Neptune.”
“I’m in,” Skye said. “How?”
“I don’t know yet. But Norway is where they think they’re hunting us.” Cara turned toward the room. “So that’s where we hunt them.”
Wade shoved his hands onto his thick thighs. “Now you’re talking.”
Tom rolled his chair back to the Rig. Skye was already standing, working the handkerchief off her knuckles with her teeth. “What’s the first step?”
Reagan was already at the secondary monitor, pulling up Owen’s conference registration.
“He stays on the schedule. If he drops out now, Neptune pulls the timeline.” She toggled to a new tab.
“Firearms into Svalbard — Norwegian regulations plus whatever exemptions apply depending on what agencies we’ve got on paper.
I’ll need forty-eight hours to thread that. ”
“Who flies commercial,” Gabe said. More statement than question.
“Owen does. Probably David and Sophie with him for coverage that reads normal.” Reagan was already making notes. “The rest of you are a different conversation.”
Owen had been very quiet through this. “I want to check my understanding,” he said.
Reagan kept typing.
“The plan is for me to go to Norway.” He said it evenly. “To the conference. Where they plan to grab me, extract what they think I have, and then kill me. Do I have that right?”
“The plan is to get them on ground we control,” Cara said.
“Right.” He wasn’t arguing. He was logging it. “But I am — literally — the reason they show up.” He looked at his own name three rows down on the attendee list. “I just want it said out loud. So no one’s surprised later when I mention I noticed.” He met Cara’s eyes. “Okay. What do I need to do?”
“Nothing yet.” Reagan kept her eyes on her screen. “Don’t touch your registration. Don’t change your travel. If they’re monitoring your itinerary — and they are — any deviation flags you.” She pulled up a new window. “Wade. I need a Norwegian contact for the firearms filings.”
He grunted. His version of, “No problem.”
Cara stayed at the table one more beat. Then she stood.
“I need to grab something upstairs,” she said to Reagan, in passing, because Reagan was the one most likely to notice her leaving.
Reagan looked at her for half a second longer than the line warranted. “Take your time.”
Cara went up the basement stairs into the dim kitchen of the closed bakery. Past the prep counter. Up the back stairs to the apartment. Closed her door. She stood with her hand on the doorknob for a beat longer than she’d meant to. Then she went to the kitchen.
The burner was in the freezer, inside a flour-sack towel, inside a plastic bag that hadn’t been opened since she’d hidden it there her first day in Haven Cove.
She pulled it out, wrestling with the frost cementing it to the floor of the freezer.
Ice crystals flaked off the bag as she opened it, dusting the backs of her hands.
She’d had no contact with her old handler since those last frantic moments in her apartment when he’d handed her the go bag.
As the months dragged on, she’d begun to lose hope that the NYPD captain could actually find a way to end the mob kill order on her.
The idea of clearing her name seemed even more impossible.
At first, she hadn’t much cared, but now, with Gabe in her life, she wanted a future.
More badly than she dared admit.
She powered the burner on. Waited the long minute for it to find signal. Typed.
All is well here, but I need more. Time to talk about getting my real life back.
Her thumb hovered over send as she whispered a prayer. Please, Lord, help me find a way forward.
She hit send.
Then she stood at the kitchen window with the burner still warm in her hand. The bakery alley below was dark and empty. Wade had left the perimeter sensor armed. She could see the small red pinprick of it on the door frame down below.
Lord. Please let there be a way through this. And a future worth finding on the other side.