Chapter 34
Black water held Gabe chest-deep in the fissure. He'd stopped feeling the cold a while back, which couldn't be good. What he felt instead was every muscle in him begging to move, and the order he kept giving them not to.
The ice walls rose close on both sides, a crack in the world barely wider than his shoulders, the current running through it slow and patient toward the open channel at his back. Somewhere up that crack, around a corner he couldn't see past, Cara was in the water.
He couldn't go to her. Swim up the channel and the watcher on the slope would see two men in the water where there was supposed to be one dead one. So he held at the corner and waited for the current to bring her to him, seconds eating him alive a heartbeat at a time.
Every instinct screamed at him to close the distance.
He'd argued this insane plan from every side and lost. And the worst of it, the part he'd still be hearing years from now if they were lucky enough to get years, was that the plan was good.
It was working perfectly. All he had to do was wait, shoulder-deep in the killing cold and let it.
The water worked on him the way it had to be working on her — a little slower thanks to his thicker suit, but the same killing water, chilled below freezing.
He kept his eyes on the corner. He counted breaths he couldn't hear her take.
He ran the math Reagan had walked him through a dozen times, how long a person could be submerged and survive.
"Wade's clear." Tom’s voice came over the comlink. "Snow cat is headed back to town. He sold it, Gabe. He sold all of it."
The team kept his ear full on purpose. Gabe knew the trick because he'd run it himself, on long bad nights.
Crowd the channel so the man alone in the dark isn't alone. Reagan was two steps up the ice in the tent they’d crammed into yet another ice fissure, this one on what passed for dry land out here.
And from the hotel, a world away in the warm and the light, his brother and Sophie.
"You're doing great, both of you." David, working to keep something out of his voice and not quite managing it — that his big bro was bobbing in freezing water and he was watching people sip lattes and discuss the fluctuating price of pearls along the Silk Road trade route in the early thirteen hundreds.
"Sophie's got eyes on the cardigan. You just hold on. "
"Holding." The words came out through chattering teeth.
"Wait." Tom's voice changed. "This is awesome. Traffic's moving. They're standing down. Watchers are folding up all over the board. I bet Feld phoned the kill up his chain and everything's going quiet." A short, disbelieving breath. "It worked. Gabe, it actually—"
For one breath he let it land. It worked. She'd done it. Any second now, she'd come around that corner, and he'd have her and they'd be out of this water.
One breath. That was all he got.
"She's not standing down." Sophie, sharp, from the reception. "Cartwright. She set her cup down and made a call. She's giving orders, Tom. She is not happy."
"One channel's still live." The laugh was gone out of Tom now. "Everybody else went dark and one thread didn't. And it's moving Feld. It's sending him back."
Then Skye groaned. "Feld's up. Off the crates. Gabe, he's heading back down toward the water—"
Under the slope, an engine coughed, caught, and dropped into a low mechanical growl. A snowmobile. Heading their way.
"Why." Gabe forced the word out. "They bought it. Why is Cartwright sending him—"
"She wants him to retrieve the cipher ashes," Skye, flat, certain, from wherever she lay. "She wants the list working. She wants to finish hunting the names on it."
Then Cara floated around the corner, head down, body splayed in a sickening parody of death.
She drifted out of the dark on the current, arms loose, the coat spread on the black water, utterly and perfectly still.
A dead man, exactly as built. She was close enough now that he could see the cap had slipped under the wig, see a strand of her own dark hair loose at the temple where no one but him would ever think to look.
Close enough, almost, to touch. Everything in Gabe's chest tore loose at the sight of her, the wrongness of it, how good she was at it, how cold she had to be by now.
He moved. Low, quiet, no splash, the blind spot intact, the last yards of current between them closing, his hand already coming up to reach—
The water beside her erupted.
It came up out of the channel in one surge, enormous, white-yellow and streaming, a head the size of his whole chest and small black eyes. A bear, surfacing an arm's length from Cara's floating body, where the blood had led it up the crack.
No! Dear Lord, help her!
The prayer tore from his throat.
The world froze: the bear, Cara, the small black eyes finding the dark shape in the water that smelled of blood. Gabe's hand was still up, still reaching, frozen halfway across water he was never going to cross in time.
And at the lip up-channel, a light swung across the ice and stopped. A figure leapt off the snowmobile, weapon in hand.
Gabe thrashed through the frigid water. He was ten yards out in black water, the whole cold weight of the sea between him and the only thing in the world that mattered.