Chapter 33
The wig itched.
Of all the things to be thinking ninety seconds before her own murder. The wig. Owen's hair, more or less, a little long and a little academic, pinned over a thin thermal cap that held the earbud snug in her ear canal. She'd played a hundred parts in her life, but never so she could die.
"Comm check," Tom said in her ear, dry as paper. "Say something a dead man would say."
"Funny." She barely moved her mouth, because forty yards up the slope, behind a stack of equipment crates, Dr. Jerry Feld was already watching Owen Harney's last few minutes on earth.
He’d taken the bait, the loud argument between “Owen” and Wade that began outside the hotel and continued as Wade bumped and bullied and then finally shoved his victim into a convenient maintenance snow cat and trundled out of town, past the polar bear warning signs and out onto the ice field.
She stood at the lip, where the black ice gave out and the water began. Owen's coat hung heavy off her shoulders; under it the drysuit was a second cold skin, and under that, taped along her ribs, the small charge and the packet of Owen’s blood that would sell the whole plan.
Wade had a hand wrapped around her arm, walking her out slow — a big man steering a smaller one who'd stopped being worth keeping. From the slope it would read as exactly that.
The rest of them were voices now, threaded through the cold air into her skull.
"He's got eyes on," Tom murmured. "Phone's out. He's filming." A pause. "David, where’s the other one."
"Cartwright hasn't moved." David responded from the hotel. "You're clear."
"Then he's all yours," Tom said. "Whenever you're ready."
Nobody was ever ready for this. You just started.
Stumbling now, as if frozen with fear, she let Wade walk her the last twenty feet, the fjord black and flat ahead of them.
This was the spot. Gabe had stood in this exact place a few hours ago and worked the angles until he found the one seam in the world where a watcher could see a killing and miss the channel under the lip, the channel where her own people were waiting to snatch her back.
She didn't look for them. Looking was how you got people killed.
Wade's voice dropped under the wind, meant for her alone. "On three you go down hard, and you go down sure. Don't help me. Don't catch yourself." His thumb pressed once against the rig under the coat, a small private signal. "I've got you the whole way down."
"I know."
"Cara." For one second he wasn't the man with the gun. He was just Wade, who'd carried her out of worse. "It's a long way to the water. Stay still and let me put you there."
"Three," she said, because she could do this if he was hard and couldn't if he was kind.
He stepped back, drew the weapon, and the world went very simple.
The shot cracked flat across the ice.
The squib blew under Owen's coat, and Owen's own blood, drawn from his arm the night before by Reagan's neat clean hands, bloomed dark through the wool and out onto the white.
Cara let her knees quit being knees. She went down the way a shot man goes down: all at once, nothing arriving first, no grace in it.
Her cheek struck ice hard enough to take skin.
She didn't feel it. She'd already started the only job left to her, which was to slip the rebreather into her mouth and be a corpse, completely, with her whole body, for as long as it took.
Through her lashes the world was orange and boots.
She heard the small hungry roar of the cipher catching — the notebook out of its cracked steel sleeve, the pages going up bright where Feld could film them burn, where Feld would come later and find his proof in the ash.
She heard Wade breathing. She heard nothing, anywhere, that sounded like a man with second thoughts, because Wade gave the camera not one frame to doubt.
Then he rolled her off the lip, and the world ended.
Hitting the water felt like slamming into a sheet of glass. Every nerve she had fired at once, screaming the same single word. Up, up, up.
Her chest convulsed for the gasp the cold demanded — and instead of letting it claw open, she bit down on the rebreather and pulled a slow breath off the little canister at her ribs. It came. Cold, rubber-tasting, but hers. She was breathing. She just couldn't look like it.
Because a thrashing body was a living body. And up the slope, Feld would still be filming.
So she held, screaming silently against the cold.
She hung in the black water face-down, arms loose, the coat dragging at her, struggling not to shiver. Or scream.
Dear Lord, protect me. Whatever this is, get me through it.
The stillness was the key. Not the squib. Not the blood. Not the fire. Her, not moving, was the whole thing. The most violent act she had ever committed was to lie perfectly still in killing water and let a man believe she was dead.
Her body tried to betray her anyway. Somewhere past the first handful of seconds it lurched to lift her face clear of the water, to break the surface, to be seen alive — and for a quarter-second she was not a corpse at all.
She caught it. Dragged herself back down into the stillness by the one part of her that had spent fifteen years lying with her whole body.
You are dead. Dead people don't move.
The earbud still lived, barely — a thread of voices coming down to her through the water and the cold.
"—he's lowering the phone." Tom, and his voice did a thing it almost never did. It lifted. "He's making a call. He's reporting it up the chain. Cara — he bought it. He bought the whole thing."
Then the voice she'd been most afraid to need.
"Traffic's shifting." Gabe, hoarse, like the words cost him something. "They're standing people down. Tom, they're calling it off. It's working. It's actually—"
And for one breath, down in the dark and the cold, Cara let herself have it. It worked. Owen Harney was dead. The list had died with him, and Neptune was already turning away, and her family, every battered one of them, was going to walk off this island alive.
Diane would keep the bakery. Piper would get her impossible schools. Somewhere on the far side of all this cold there was an after, and maybe, if she was lucky and very still, she would be alive to stand in it.
She'd done it.
Then the water found the last of the earbud.
The sound thinned, and stretched, and went to a high small whine — and then to nothing at all.
Gabe's voice broke off in the middle of her name and didn't come back.
The thread snapped. There was no team. No slope, no Feld, no plan, no Gabe.
There was only black water and a cold that had stopped hurting, which she knew, somewhere far off, was the worst thing it could do, and her own heart going slow, and slower, a long way below her.
Lord. Hold me down here. Don't let me come up.
The light went last.