Chapter 32
In a few hours, Cara was going to fall into the sea and let her found family watch her die. For now, they were still working out how.
What got her wasn't the plan spread across the guesthouse table.
It was that almost every person bent over it was hurt.
Wade with one eye swelling toward purple, laying out the ground, giving nothing away.
Gabe beside him, a split knuckle and a jaw bruise he hadn't mentioned, marking sightlines on a coast map.
Skye flat on the couch where Reagan had put her, color still wrong, running it from her back.
Tom at his screens. Reagan with one hand never quite leaving Skye's wrist.
It should have felt like a wake. Instead, and she didn't love what that said about her, it was the most alive the room had been in days.
"Run it again," she said.
Wade had the route: out past the last cabins on the coast track to a shelf of black ice where the land quit and the water started.
Gabe had the angles — where a watcher would have to stand to see it clean, and where every other eye on the island would be blind.
Tom had the timing down to the thinnest hour the sun allowed, when the light went long and gold and low and a face at fifty yards became a coat, a build, a man you could swear to.
"The Neptune observers have to be close enough to be sure," Cara said. "And far enough that sure is all they get."
"Forty yards," Wade said. "Forty-five. Past that the cold eats the detail. Closer than thirty and he sees your hands are wrong."
"Then forty." Tom marked it, and the thing took one more step from idea toward true.
Reagan eyed Owen thoughtfully. "I’ll need some of your blood.”
His jaw dropped, but he didn’t protest. “Uh, sure.”
“Whatever blood we leave on the ice has to be Owen’s," Reagan explained. "We have to assume whoever gets to the murder site will take a sample. I'll draw Owen tonight."
"And after Wade tosses me in the water, I come out where?" It was the one piece of this Cara didn't get to design, because it wasn't a con. It was physics, and freezing water didn't bluff.
"Below the lip." Gabe shook his head, cupping the back of his neck and squeezing. “What am I saying? This is crazy. We need to find another way.”
She smiled softly, touched beyond measure. But there wasn’t another way. They were out of time, and out of options.
Before she could voice her thoughts, Gabe raised his arms. “I know. I know. But I don’t have to like it.”
“I’m glad you don’t,” she added.
Gabe exhaled, nodded, and continued. "The shelf drops straight into a channel. From an observer’s angle the body goes into the current and that's the last anyone sees of it — which is the point. You’ll drift immediately out of their sightline, and I’ll be in the water around the corner.
We’ll have a ladder ready, and Reagan to help us get into the crevasse where she’ll have the warming tent ready. "
Cara looked at Gabe. He looked back and said nothing about the part where he'd be chest-deep in killing water, waiting to catch her.
"The drysuits buy us the margin," Skye added. "You need the bulk anyway, if you’re going to fool anyone. The gold light won't show it."
"And you won't be holding your breath." Reagan set a compact rebreather on the table — mouthpiece, a small canister, sized to ride inside the coat. "You'll be face-down longer than anyone can hold air. You breathe off this the whole time."
"Wouldn't a tank bubble?" Owen asked. "They'd see it break the surface."
"That's why it's a rebreather, not a regulator." Skye didn't open her eyes. "Closed loop. Nothing comes up. But it won’t work long. Things freeze up in water that cold."
Nobody said the rest, because nobody had to. The plan died the instant anyone found Owen alive, so no one ever would. Cara would go into the sea as Owen, and the sea would keep him, and that was the only version Neptune could ever be allowed to see.
She'd built a thousand lies in her life. She had never built one with herself as the body in the water.
"Remember, Neptune’s our audience," Gabe said. “Probably Owen’s little shadow, Feld. Or whatever his real name is.”
For three days the fake professor had done exactly what they needed. Tom had plenty of David's photographs that caught Feld at the edges of frames, Owen always in his line. He was Neptune's eyes on the prize. The plan only worked with those eyes on the ice when “Owen” died.
Once he slipped beneath the ice, and the cipher box held only ashes, Neptune would read the signal. They’d believe Cara and the others decided to walk away, but they wanted Neptune to realize they weren’t worth chasing first.
It was possible they’d want to come after Skye again, but odds were they wouldn’t like the odds, at least in Norway. The rest, they could figure out later.
There was only one loose end, as far as she could see. Helen Cartwright.
The woman hadn't tracked Owen once. Cartwright sat at the edge of every room with her tea and her dreadful cardigan and missed nothing.
Not the exits, not the staff names, not the way Cara's people had started moving in pairs.
Twice Cara had felt the woman's attention settle on her, both times when she was doing nothing worth noticing.
"We perform for Feld," she said slowly. "We hide from her."
Nobody argued.
Tom pushed back from his temporary rig. "Oh, man. There's something you all need to know. Timing’s…unfortunate.” He puffed out his cheeks. “The dude we IDed as Neptune in the Cove, Ortiz, turned up dead twelve hours ago. Two rounds, close. Somebody made sure."
"Neptune cleaned up its own miss," Wade said.
"It gets worse." Tom scrubbed his face. "The money for the Ortiz hit? It came from a shell company with Helen Cartwright’s name on it.”
Wade grunted. "So Mrs. Cardigan doesn't just hunt for Neptune, she culls the herd.”
Cara felt the whole shape of the plan change temperature.
They weren't building a lie to slip past a watcher.
They were building it to fool the one woman currently in the Arctic Circle whose actual job was catching people who lied to Neptune — and ending them for it.
If Cartwright saw the seams, there'd be no arrest. Just two rounds, close.
Owen had gone quiet in the corner.
He'd been quiet a lot lately, learning to be dead — the obituary Tom was drafting, the colleague who'd probably inherit his chair, the slow soft erasure of Owen Harney. But this was a different quiet. Cara knew its shape because she'd felt it most of her life.
"Look at all of you," he said, unsteady. "Every one of you is hurt. Because of me. Because of a notebook I never even—"
"Stop." Skye didn't open her eyes. "I’m the one who broke into Cara’s bakery. I started this. You inherited a problem from your uncle. I'm the one who delivered it." Her eyes opened then, flat and certain. "Nothing in this room is your doing. You can carry the guilt if you want, but it’s not true."
Owen surprised her. He smiled, a small gesture, grim. It transformed his face. The soft, sweet academic who’d flinched at his own shadow, was growing harder.
She hated that he had to.
"All right," he said. "Then it isn't my fault.
" He looked around the wrecked, capable room.
"But it's my finish. You've all bled keeping me breathing, so here's the deal.
Nobody else dies for this. We make them believe it and walk out clean.
I didn't start this." The smile sharpened into something Cara almost respected.
"But I'm going to be the one who ends it. "
“Copy that,” Wade murmured. "Professor's got a pulse after all."
"Took him long enough." Tom was grinning at his screen.
Down the table, Sophie closed a folder and set it where nobody's coffee could reach it.
She and David weren't going to the ice. They'd hold the hotel in their press cover, David watching for the moment Feld, or whoever Neptune sent to watch Wade take Cara/Owen out to the ice, took the bait and moved.
Sophie would stay locked on Cartwright, the one watcher nobody else could spare an eye for.
Then there was nothing left to plan.
Wade’s gaze flickered to the clock on the wall. “So, we’re counting down to go time.” Even saying it seemed to make him feel guilty.
Gabe flinched, but Reagan patted Skye’s arm and rose. “Let’s get this party started.”
Cara followed her friend down the hallway to the bedroom they shared. She crossed straight to the closet and dragged out the oversized go-bag. The thing was large enough to zip her inside, which sounded great, given her other options.
While Reagan unboxed the survival suit Wade had “borrowed” from a local fishing boat, Cara took inventory of the contents of her duffle. Everything was there, the wigs, the make-up, and the Hollywood-level props.
Everything she needed to transform herself into a dead man walking.