Chapter 26
"Options." Gabe ordered over the comlink. "Fast."
Overlapping, half-finished, the comlink channel turning into the world's most motivated brainstorm.
Tom spoke first. "Pull the truck around to the service door and just drive. We'll figure out the rest later."
"That's a no-go," Cara responded immediately. "They'd trap all three of us in that lot."
Gabe thrust a hand in his hair and tugged. They needed something workable. NOW.
"I have things that burn," Wade said, his voice unnaturally calm. “And blow up. Obviously.”
The comlink was silent while everyone decided whether that was an offer or a confession.
Then Skye's comlink clicked back to life as if she'd never left. "I've got a plan."
"Skye." Gabe kept his voice level. "Where—"
"Doesn't matter." Her voice held a current he hadn't heard before. Not fear. Voltage. "I need a diversion. Something big. Loud. Preferably with flames."
Owen protested. "You need a fire?"
"No." A pause that managed to shrug. "I just love flames."
“My kind of woman.” Wade sounded disturbingly thrilled.
"When do we deploy it?" Tom asked.
"You'll know." Despite the danger, Gabe couldn't mistake the smile in her tone.
The comlink clicked once and went dead again.
"Tom," Gabe said. "Eyes on the lobby."
"On it. Owen's moved to the rack by the window. He's got a brochure. Cheese tours." A pause. "He appears to be actually reading it."
"And Skye?"
"She's not in the lobby." Tom's voice did the thing it did when his screens stopped agreeing with him. "She was there four seconds ago. Service hall door is closed. Drone two has the east alley — she's not in it. I don't — I've lost her."
"The inside man?" Cara said.
"Moving. Toward the service hall. Away from Owen."
Wherever Skye had gone, she'd taken Neptune's man with her by being the more interesting problem. Smart. He doubted he would have thought of that.
"Okay," he said. "She wants big and loud. Inventory. Go."
"Flares," Wade said. "Four. Half a can of fuel behind my seat."
"Why do you have—" David began.
"Don't ask," Cara said. "Tom, find a target."
"Already on it." Tom responded instantly.
"There's a dumpster behind the shuttered tire shop.
Two blocks west of the motel. Metal, freestanding, thirty yards clear in every direction.
Drone says it's half full of scrap rubber and pallets.
There's no heat signature registering within half a block, so no bystanders present. "
"Rubber's good," Wade said, with feeling.
"How big is this going to be?" Tom asked.
"Define big."
Gabe grimaced. "Wade?"
"It'll be visible," Wade responded. "As in seriously visible."
"I still have a connection to the Silverado," Tom offered. "And I've been expanding. Every aftermarket alarm on two blocks. Also the co-op has a rooftop klaxon for grass fires." A pause with a smile in it. "I now have the co-op. I say we go with flames and a whole lot of noise."
"Hold on. Hold on." David said, from Reagan's SUV, his voice tight. "You're starting an actual fire in an actual town. Somebody will call 911 the second it lights. People live here."
Exactly. Gabe's heart thudded against his ribs. This could absolutely work. "That's the plan, bro. Only we'll be the ones calling it in the second Wade sparks this up."
"I got this." Sophie chimed in.
"Block your number, Sophie," Reagan cautioned.
"Already done."
"Wade," Gabe said. "The dumpster's yours. Can you lose your friends?"
"Don't need to lose them." The sound of a turn signal, used with irony. "I need gas anyway."
Wade doubled back and pulled into the station at the north edge of town like a man with nowhere special to be.
He parked at the far pump, angled so the rear seat faced the road, stuck the nozzle in the tank, and left Fake Owen sitting up in plain view with his drugstore readers and his slightly tilted air of impending lecture.
Then he ambled toward the mini mart with the universal gait of a man looking for a restroom.
The Escalade drifted past once and settled at the curb across the road.
Then there was nothing to do but wait.
"Status on Owen," Gabe said.
"Third pass through the brochure," Tom said. "He's folded a corner. I believe he intends to actually take a cheese tour."
"He copes how he copes," Cara murmured.
A minute crawled by. Another.
"How long can Wade plausibly be in that restroom?" David asked.
"I'm not in the restroom," Wade said placidly. "I'm crouched behind a dumpster holding a flare."
“Yikes.” David’s voice rose. "That's so much worse."
The channel went quiet again.
A second later, Cara sat straight up. “Do you hear that?”
Gabe frowned, concentrating. He was just about to ask her what, when he heard it. An engine opened up on the hillside south of town. Small, two-stroke, furious. A chainsaw's noise with somewhere to be.
Cara pointed in the direction of the sound. "That."
“Skye.” He and Cara said it at the same time.
"Wade," Gabe called out. "Light it."
“Copy that.”
The fuel caught with a whump Gabe felt through the truck's floorboards, and the rubber went up after it — a column of smoke, black and greasy and absurdly tall, climbing off the tire shop lot like the town had a new chimney.
Tom played his chord. Every car alarm on two blocks started testifying at once, out of key, out of sync, joined a beat later by the co-op's klaxon, which Tom had saved for last.
The sirens came quickly, Sophie's call having given the volunteer fire department a head start on the smoke itself. Tillamook on a Tuesday morning suddenly had everything happening at once, all of it two blocks west of the motel.
Neptune broke into action. The south pair, halfway across the lot toward the motel, stopped dead — then split, one running for the smoke, one spinning back toward their car.
The east alley man came around the corner at a dead run, weapon-side hand pinned to his jacket, the smile gone.
The clerk from the co-op was already on the sidewalk, filming.
And under all of it, getting louder, the two-stroke engine.
Skye roared down the hillside road and into the east alley on a pristine dirt bike, a helmet bungeed to the rack, a price tag whipping in the wind.
The fire door banged open before the bike had fully stopped. Whatever she'd told Owen in that lobby, he'd been ready. Then he saw the bike.
Gabe didn't need audio. From two blocks away he could read Owen's body language, the frozen stare that screamed, “Oh, no. No way.”
Skye held out the helmet. She didn't ask. She pointed at the seat behind her.
Owen's resistance lasted less than a second. He jammed the helmet on, climbed aboard with the notebook strapped across his chest and the posture of a man committing fully to a decision he had not made, and grabbed two fistfuls of her jacket.
Skye hit the throttle. The bike shot up the alley, found the logging spur above the tire shop, and was gone — bike, rider, historian, notebook, swallowed whole by second-growth fir, while every eye Neptune had in Tillamook watched a dumpster burn.
The whole transaction took eleven seconds.
"Huh," Wade said through the comlink. There was a note in it nobody heard from the man often. Admiration. "There's a zillion miles of logging road in those mountains between here and Portland. No map has all of it. Four guys can't cover any of it." A pause. "Smart move. She'll be fine."
Gabe started the engine. "Then let's give Neptune something to chase."
Wade rolled out of town first, Fake Owen belted upright in the rear seat with his drugstore readers and his poly-pro and his slightly tilted air of impending lecture.
“Your passenger won’t survive a close look," Reagan said over the comlink.
"He won't get one," Wade promised, and turned north.
The Escalade picked him up before the town limits.
The south-lot car, smoke-stained and humiliated, fell in behind it.
Tom narrated the drone footage from Reagan's SUV: two vehicles, quarter-mile spacing, committed and northbound.
After that, Wade's end of the channel went quiet.
The man would be enjoying this, Gabe knew, probably way too much.
The rest of them ran Highway 6 east with the morning commuters.
Just the two of them in the truck, for the first time since this whole thing began. Cara watched the mirror for twenty minutes. Then she stopped watching the mirror.
"Tell me about the team," Gabe said. "What you're seeing."
She slid him a look before turning her attention back to the scenery, one slim finger winding up a hank of dark hair.
"Owen's steadier than he has any right to be.
Tillamook should have rattled him for a week.
Instead he got on a motorcycle. Tom's the one I'm watching. He’s nervous leaving Piper behind.
He won't say it, so it'll come out sideways, the constant equipment checks. "
Gabe laughed. “Yeah, that’s not about nerves. He’s got it bad for our diner owner.”
Lips parted, she stared at him, wide-eyed.
“What? Guys notice stuff like that.”
“Do they now?” She grinned. “Good to know, sir.”
For no reason at all, his cheeks grew hot. He cleared his throat. "Reagan has the logistics nailed down."
"Reagan has the logistics over-nailed. That's her tell." She shifted in her seat to face him. "You want to know the real problem?"
"I know the real problem.” He flipped on the turn indicators and eased into the fast lane, zipping past an overloaded hay truck and considering his words.
“We're flying the one thing Neptune needs straight into their reach, and we still have no idea how to make the list irrelevant to them.
" He kept his eyes on the road. "We’re holding a bomb we can't defuse and we’re practically delivering it straight to them. "
"On ground they picked," Cara said.
"Yup."
Neither of them said anything for a mile. It wasn't a comfortable silence, but it was a shared one.
Thirty minutes out from PDX, Gabe decided it was now or never.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "So." Smooth. Excellent start. "About the kiss."
Cara's eyes went to the windshield and stayed there. "What about it?"
"I'm not asking for a — " He recalibrated. "I just want to know what it was. To you."
The pause went on long enough that he started composing the retraction.
She sighed. "I can't, Gabe. I don't know where my life is going yet. I'm not ready to say more than that."
"It's been four months." He heard the edge in his own voice, but he couldn't quite sand it down. "I'm not asking for your whole history. I'm asking for the table of contents. Haven't I earned that much?"
"It's not about earning." Then, quieter. "It's not about you."
"That's usually what people say when it is."
She stared out her window at the Coast Range going by. Whatever was happening on her face, she'd angled it where he couldn't read it — which, with Cara, was never an accident.
So that was the answer. Maybe the feelings that had hit him like a falling building had registered, on her side, as weather. He was fifteen years out of practice at this and apparently it showed.
Nothing more he could do about this, about the feelings, either his or hers.
So he drove harder, weaving in and out of traffic as if he was still running lights and siren. If he couldn’t think about Cara, he’d think about the road ahead. And Norway.
Skye's comlink clicked on. "The annoying package and I are safe and through security. He's at the bookstore, correcting their shelving of the fiction section. I'm getting a kale smoothie and a magazine."
The comlink clicked off. Gabe looked at Cara. Cara looked back at him.
The laugh came up out of both of them at the same moment.
Gasping for air, Cara wiped her eyes. "A kale smoothie."
He snorted. "You can’t make this stuff up."
“Just dropped off David and Sophie at the terminal,” Tom interjected. “Reagan and I’ll meet you all at the private terminal.”
“Copy that.” Wade responded before either Gabe or Cara. “I’m less than twenty minutes out. Lost my tail ten miles back. Save me a window seat.”
“Good luck, everyone,” Reagan added.
“We don’t need luck.” Wade responded. “Proverbs twenty-one. The horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord.”
Tom: “You comparing us to horses?”
“Depends,” Wade said. “Did you pack snacks?”
Cara smiled, shaking her head hard enough to send a silky wave of dark hair along the side of her face. Gabe breathed easier. This connection worked. He’d just have to figure out how not to want more. How not to push.
Two more exits to the airport now. It looked like they’d all make it onto their respective planes.
Nine time zones ahead, a conference hall at the top of the world was setting out name badges — one of them for a medieval historian carrying a notebook everyone wanted, with a team Neptune couldn't see.
No badge in Gabe's pocket. No backup coming.
Just these people, and whatever was waiting in the Arctic.
"Lord," he said, out loud, because some things deserved saying out loud. "Thank You. All of them, safe."
"Please, Lord, get us the rest of the way," Cara added quietly.
“Amen.” He took the exit.
The easy part was over.