Chapter 38
Agent clearly heard the cars before anyone else did. By the time Gabe got the bakery door open, the cat was up on the counter, tail wrapped around his feet.
The warmth hit like a wall. Bread, coffee, cinnamon, music on low — every smell he hadn't let himself think about for days, all at once.
Gabe stood in the doorway one second longer than the cold excused.
Diane behind the counter. Piper at the corner table with homework she wasn't doing.
Agent, eying him, thinking whatever cats thought. Exits, windows, the till.
Home. Safe. All units accounted for.
Diane came around the counter wiping her hands, took one long look at the lot of them, the dressings and the limps and the borrowed coats, and visibly decided to triage instead of cry.
"Place is fine," she said, hugging Cara carefully, like something recently glued. "Piper and I are fine. There's soup."
"Soup," Owen repeated, with the reverence of a man back from the moon.
Then Piper hit them. She got her father first, arms around his neck, already talking: the SAT scores, the bakery's new regulars, a thousand held-back items of news. She was three sentences into when Skye eased herself into the closest chair.
Piper stopped. "You got—" Her voice went up an octave. "You got SHOT?"
"Grazed," Skye corrected.
"You wish. Through and through," Reagan said.
Skye eyed the woman who had probably saved her. "Unhelpful."
Piper stood there with her fists at her sides, furious the way you're only furious at people you love. "You don't get to die. Any of you. It isn't allowed." Then, because she was Tom's daughter, she converted it into logistics. "I'm getting the soup."
Gabe leaned against the counter and let the noise wash over him.
Thank You, Lord. All of them. Every single one. And then, because honest was the only way he knew how to pray: I'm out of ways to keep them. That part's Yours now.
Tom's phone went off first. Then the laptop on the counter, two alert tones stacked on each other, and Tom was across the room with Wade reading over his shoulder before the second one finished.
"Perimeter," Tom said. "Single contact, on foot. He came up the middle of the street." A pause that had disbelief in it. "He's standing at the door looking into the camera."
The last man who'd looked into one of their cameras had been smiling while a trap closed around them. Gabe was moving before the thought finished. Wade was already there, angled between the door and Piper. Skye came up out of the chair, cat and all, her hand at her hip.
"Hands are empty," Wade said, reading the feed. "He's just. Standing there."
Gabe opened the door himself.
Hands raised, Jerry Feld, or whoever he really was, stepped carefully across the threshold. "I'm not armed," he insisted. "And I'm the only person in this room Cartwright still trusts, which means I have about ten minutes. So I'll talk fast."
"Talking’s fine.” Wade stared him down. “Moving is not. One finger lifts, and I flatten you. We clear?”
“Copy that.” Feld jutted his chin in acknowledgement.
"My name is Luke Barrett. I’m a deputy United States Marshal.
" Gaze locked with Wade’s, he set a card on the nearest table, face up, and stepped back from it.
"For six years I've been inside the organization you call Neptune.
That number is for a supervisory deputy, witness security division.
Don't take my word for anything. Call through a line you own, ask what Ray Harney left behind. When he asks, give him the code written on the bottom and he’ll confirm my existence.
" His eyes moved across them, unhurried.
"I never met Ray. Ray never knew my name.
He willed the case to one person he trusted, and that person built my cover and put me inside.
Dead men don't crack under questioning. It was good design. "
"Ray's door," Tom said.
Skye's face didn't change. That was how Gabe knew it had hit her.
"You pulled her out of the water." Gabe heard his own voice come out flat. "And then you told Cartwright exactly who she was."
"Yes." No flinch in it. "I had no choice.
There were two other watchers on that shore, and Cartwright tests her people's stories against each other.
If I'd lied, I'd be dead.” He eyed Cara.
“More importantly, she would have been blown anyway, and now you'd have nobody inside.
" He looked at Cara again. "I traded your secret for her life. I'd make the same trade again."
"The twelve-oh-five to Oslo." Tom had his arms folded, but his eyes were lit, another bit of arithmetic finally resolving. "Two seats, paid through a shell I couldn't crack. That was you."
"That was the failsafe if your gambit failed," Barrett said. "I was going to get Harney and Miss Reeves out myself. Protective custody, federal paper, gone. You beat me to the airfield by about ninety minutes."
Skye studied him, her face impossible to read. "Better story every minute."
She hadn't sat back down. "I knew men like you. Inside men. Nobody comes out of six years clean."
"No," Barrett agreed. "They don't."
It was the first thing he'd said that didn't sound rehearsed. Gabe caught himself believing the man because of it, and then distrusted the believing.
"Why come here at all?" Reagan asked. "You're burning years of work standing in this bakery."
Barrett's voice stayed level, and the level was worse than shouting.
"Cartwright spent years hunting a maybe.
Now she has a certainty — a real list, a living decoder, and a crew she's watched protect both.
She's done working at range. She's coming here.
Not a hit team in the night — everything.
The town, your people, whatever it costs.
You should understand that the woman knits while she watches surveillance footage.
" Barrett glanced once, brief and almost gentle, toward the counter, where Diane stood with a soup ladle and Piper had gone very still.
"There is no version of this where you hide. "
Nobody answered. The speakers played a soothing classical sonata, absurdly.
Gabe looked at his team. The flour on Diane's apron. Piper's homework. The cat. Cara's shoulder against his — warm now, finally. Every soft thing this Neptune war was about to destroy.
The strange part was what rose in him. Not fear. Fury. He was done. Done running, done hiding, done selling lies to buy distance. It was almost a relief.
Skye crossed the room, her movements careful. She picked up Barrett's card, read it once, and looked at the man who'd lived six years inside the thing that wanted them all dead. "Then you'd better be exactly what you say you are."