Chapter 24
The kiss had been a mistake.
Not because Cara regretted it. Because she didn’t.
The basement looked exactly the same as it had looked yesterday.
The Svalbard map still filled the center monitor.
Flight schedules still covered the whiteboards.
Tom was arguing with a laptop. Piper was unpacking breakfast. Reagan was making notes.
Wade occupied the chair closest to the door.
Owen had already disappeared into Ray’s notebook. Even Gabe was normal.
That seemed particularly unfair.
He stood near the security monitors with a mug of coffee, discussing flight windows with Reagan as if he hadn’t kissed her less than twelve hours ago. Maybe he was just better at compartmentalizing. Maybe federal agents got formal training.
The truth was probably simpler. Gabe wasn’t pretending nothing had happened. He just wasn’t letting it interfere with what needed to happen next. Which, annoyingly, was the mature response.
While the team tried to figure out the best way to both keep Owen and Skye safe and defeat Neptune in Norway, she’d spent most of the morning discovering she wasn’t nearly as mature as she’d assumed.
Every time she looked up, there he was. Not doing anything.
Just existing. Which turned out to be surprisingly distracting.
Across the room, Gabe glanced up. Their eyes met. His expression didn’t change. Neither did hers. But something warm and entirely unhelpful settled low in her stomach.
Great. Just great.
Cara took a sip of coffee, set the mug down, and looked around the room. The team was assembled. The world was still ending on schedule. Time to get to work.
A yellow sticky note was stuck to the nearest laptop lid.
EAT SOMETHING BEFORE YOU MAKE BAD DECISIONS.
Someone had underlined bad twice. She suspected Reagan.
The full team had come back together this morning without much ceremony. Tom and Piper had arrived first, Piper still in yesterday’s sweatshirt and carrying what appeared to be an emergency breakfast situation—a paper bag that smelled of the Grill’s breakfast biscuits.
Tom had gone straight to the Rig.
Piper had done one quick read of the room, clocked that it was serious, and settled at the corner workstation with her laptop open.
Reagan sat at the far end of the table with her own laptop and a legal pad.
Gabe stood near the security monitors. Wade had claimed the chair closest to the door.
Owen had arranged himself at the conference table with the cipher notebook open and a box of tissues relocated to his immediate right.
Agent had materialized from somewhere and selected Owen’s elbow as a perch.
Skye occupied the far workbench, one boot hooked on a lower rung, her wrapped hand resting on her knee.
Cara stood at the head of the table. “All right. Tom, let’s hear what we’ve got so far.”
“Neptune’s convinced Skye or Owen have the cipher. My guess is they also know one of them can decode it,” Tom concluded. “Owen because Ray taught him. Skye because Ray trusted her. Either way, they’ll keep coming at us until they get the decoded witness list.”
Owen had gone still at his end of the table.
“So we need to make our stand in Svalbard,” Cara said.
Gabe set his mug down with a soft click. “Agreed.”
She shook her head. “But that’s only the beginning. So what if we prevent them from stealing the cipher in Norway, what’s to stop them from trying again next week? Or next year? If they believe the cipher reveals the witness list, they’ll keep coming.”
Protecting Owen and Skye wasn’t a solution. Even protecting the cipher wasn’t a solution. At best, it was delay.
Wade folded his arms. “You’re not wrong. Neptune’s been chasing this thing for years.”
“Longer than that,” Skye said. “The people above Ortiz won’t quit because one operation fails.”
Gabe studied the map for a moment before speaking. “Then we stop thinking about Norway as the finish line.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“It isn’t?” Reagan asked.
“No.” He tapped the edge of the table. “Norway is where we force Neptune into the open. That’s all. We identify people. We gather intelligence. We learn things we don’t know now.”
“And then?” Cara asked.
Gabe’s gaze met hers. “Then we figure out how to make the thing they’re chasing worthless.”
For a moment nobody spoke.
Tom slowly sat back in his chair and tapped a pen against his teeth. “Yes. Okay. That’s a much more interesting problem.”
Owen frowned. “How exactly do we make this witness list worthless?”
“I have no idea,” Tom admitted. “But if your uncle spent twenty years staying ahead of Neptune, I refuse to believe his entire strategy depended on one notebook.”
Skye made eye contact with each of them, one by one. “Ray was careful. There’s another answer somewhere.”
Tom took off his glasses and squeezed the back of his neck. “We just have to find it in time.”
Skye looked dangerous now, her eyes narrowed, lips tight. “We need intel from Neptune operatives. Catching some can’t be that hard.”
Owen looked ready to argue, but Wade was already nodding enthusiastically. “Copy that, sister. Just give me five minutes and a couple stun grenades. I got this.”
“Sounds fun,” Skye added. “I’m in.”
Cara’s stomach tightened. This plan was growing darker, and more convoluted by the second.
Complications only served to multiply the ways things could go wrong.
But she didn’t voice her thoughts. Until she had a better solution, it wouldn’t serve to tear down their only plan.
“So our plan at this point, is to figure out how to make Neptune give up on the witness list.”
Gabe nodded, face stony, every bit the experienced Special Agent. “By any means necessary.”
The Norway framework came together quickly after that. The team had been working the problem long enough that most of the structure was already understood.
Owen would attend the conference as himself, presenting his paper. He didn’t need to perform anything. He just needed to be Owen Harney, and Neptune would do the rest.
Wade would travel commercial with David and Owen and Sophie. Everyone else would come on the private jet. Tom would run surveillance and communications. Reagan was already navigating Norwegian firearms regulations. Gabe would handle field operations.
Cara would run the trap.
“What about me?” Skye sat on the far workbench with her wrapped hand resting on her knee and her expression doing what it did when she was running calculations she wasn’t sharing. “Neptune thinks either Owen or I can solve the cipher,” she said. “Use both of us. Double the bait.”
“No. We need you helping to protect Owen,” Cara added, trying to soften the abruptness of her response. Besides, the unspoken fact was, wherever Skye went, she was a target.
Skye fisted her hands on her hips, oblivious to the injured one. “I could do this op on my own. I’ve always worked alone. I can—”
“It’s a no.” Cara kept her voice level. “We’re not putting a target on your back and calling it strategy.”
Skye looked to Wade.
He turned from the monitors. “Cara’s right. We don’t do disposable.”
The room went quiet.
Something shifted in Skye’s expression. Not argument.
Not gratitude. Something more careful than either.
Like a woman discovering one of her oldest assumptions might not be true.
She’d walked into this bakery with a USB drive and four years of operating on the assumption that, outside of Ray Harney, she had no backup.
Until now.
Cara let the silence run a beat longer. “Your job in Norway is spotter. Neptune is going to put assets in that conference room. They’ll be performing academics—credentials that hold at a distance, behavior that slips under pressure.
I have a hunch you and I are better at reading that tell than anyone here. That’s the role.”
Skye took a minute, clearly running this through her brain. “Okay. That’s not a completely stupid idea.”
“Interesting.” Owen set his pencil down and raised a finger.
“Oh, I mean not that. Your arguments have merit. This.” He turned the notebook slightly.
“The encoding structure in this section is completely different from everything else in the notebook. Different logic. Different source, I think. I don’t recognize it. ”
Tom leaned forward. “Different how?”
“Not a variation of Ray’s standard system. A separate system entirely. I can see that it’s intentional structure. I just can’t identify the organizing principle.”
Cara came around the table. The pages did look different. Denser somehow. The marks didn’t follow the same visual rhythm as the rest of the notebook. He traced a finger across lines of hand-written gibberish. “This is a list, maybe.”
“Can you read the section?” Cara asked.
“I need to find the encoding key first.”
Tom rubbed a hand across his face. “So this list could be people or locations, or even a process or a program.”
Owen shrugged. “All excellent possibilities.”
“Great,” Tom said. “That’s very clarifying.”
Across the table Reagan made a sound that might have been a laugh.
Cara snagged a dry-erase marker and uncapped it. The whiteboard was already crowded with Gabe’s handwriting—surveillance timelines, Diego Ortiz’ aliases, flight windows, conference schedules. She found an empty corner and wrote:
LIST — UNKNOWN
Across the table, Piper had gone quiet for the first time since she’d walked in. She’d been watching Skye more than the board anyway. Piper tried to hide it, but she looked at Skye the way other teenagers looked at professional athletes.
Piper studied the board. “So you’re going to Norway for something we can’t name yet.”
“We’re going to Norway because we know they want us there,” Cara said. “The list is the bonus round.”
“If we can decipher its meaning.” Piper seemed to be talking straight to Skye. “I’m on this. My dad’s not the only one with secret sources.”
Skye shot Piper the first genuine smile Cara had seen from the woman. “I knew you had hidden depths. Very stealthy, little one.”
Blushing furiously, Piper ducked her head, twisting a hank of dark hair around one slender finger. She cleared her throat. “That won’t be my only contribution. I already started a Norway packing list for you, dad. No way you’re going to embarrass the team by dressing like a dad.”
Tom closed his eyes. “Of course you did.”
A ripple of laughter moved around the room.
The laughter ebbed, and Wade's gaze drifted to the duffel slumped against the bottom of the stairs, where Cara had dropped it on her way in.
It was not a small duffel. She'd been loading it since before dawn, and it had reached the size and rough density of a body bag, a comparison she chose not to examine too closely.
"We're going for a couple days," Wade said. "Not emigrating."
"You pack for the trip you think you're taking." Cara didn't look up from the board. "I pack for the one we'll actually end up on."
"What's even in it?"
"A wig. Okay, three wigs. Spirit gum. Laminate for ID on the fly. A little kit of blood squibs I’ve never quite been able to throw away.
" She finally turned to face him. "Wade. We are flying to a rock in the Arctic Ocean with more polar bears than people." She shrugged. "It doesn’t all have to come home, but I don’t want to be out there without the one piece of equipment I might need. You’re bringing extra ammunition, right? "
Wade looked at the bag a moment longer. "Yeah. You got me on that. But seriously, that duffle’s the size of a Saint Bernard."
"Let her bring the bag, Wade." Gabe didn't even glance over from the monitors. "Trust me on this one."
Cara looked back at the board.
They’d be heading to Norway with only the barest scrap of a plan. Not a plan. Still, for the first time in days, the path ahead felt less like a retreat and more like a decision.
Neptune might be setting a trap, but they weren’t the only ones.