Chapter Thirty
Thirty
“I bet the stars are amazing out here,” I say, making wind waves with my palm out of the passenger-side window.
“I missed them last night.” Dane reaches across the center console and laces our fingers together.
“Play your cards right and you’ll miss them again tonight.”
He squeezes my hand.
It’s fifteen minutes along Loch Ewe to Poolewe, where we find a small shop selling camping gear, including a full selection of Ordnance Survey maps.
Hikers are frequent in this area, so they’re well stocked.
The map we need, An Teallach it’s more like a place to park a tractor.
I watch, tense, as the black car keeps going on the road without slowing.
“If they were following us, that’ll look really obvious,” I say.
“I want him in front of us.”
“Him?”
“That was the 1982.”
I’m shocked into silence. Dane reverses onto the road, and we continue toward the cottage. “You recognized him?”
“Yes. Which means he might have recognized me too.”
“But…that means Allard is out here already,” I say, horror coating my words.
He nods grimly. He slows the car as we approach the turnoff, but there’s no sign of the black car, or any car at all.
“What are the chances the 1982 didn’t know it was us he was following?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Dane turns into our gravel lane. He pulls up alongside the cottage, which looks undisturbed. Nothing’s out of place since we left…but for how long?
“Let’s get the gear and get out to the trail,” he says.
I can tell by the tight, set line of his mouth that he’s worried.
He reaches into the back seat and grabs his pack in one lithe, feline movement.
I’m almost too distracted by it to notice the cottage’s front door is open—just a crack.
I badly want it to be a badger breaking in looking for breakfast, but I know it’s not.
“Dane.” My voice wavers. “The door.”
“Stay here,” Dane says. He creeps up the little path and then edges around the door, pushing it open.
He peeks in, surveying the large single room of the cottage’s first floor.
I approach behind him quietly. Dane holds a hand back for me to stay where I am, and I wait around the corner from the door.
But I can’t resist looking. Beyond where Dane stands in the doorway, the place is trashed. Cushions are flipped over, lamps are down, chairs askew. Kitchen cabinets hang open.
“You’re a fucking dead man, Seaver,” someone says.
Eric. The badger is Eric. Relief and horror flood me in equal measures.
“How so?” Dane asks, his tone casual. Like Eric just dropped in to borrow a bit of milk. He hasn’t moved from the doorway.
“Where’s Zoe?” Eric asks.
“What do you want?” Dane counters.
“I know she’s here. It was cute that you dropped her phone on the road, but she told her sister you were here.
Not a ton of Airbnbs on this coast, but this one was the only one that was currently taken.
I managed to find the phone number for the lady who owns it, who was pissed about that, let me tell you—and I told her I wanted to rent it.
She said it had already been rented, by another American and his girlfriend. ”
My heart is in my throat. I should never have called Christine. Oh, God, if Eric was working with Allard, then he could track us to this cottage too, and so will the 1982. This is so bad. It’s catastrophic.
“So I came to pay a visit,” Eric says. “Zoe and I have unfinished business.”
Dane opens his mouth, but I step around him in the doorway. “No, we don’t, Eric. How many times do I have to keep saying it?”
Eric gives me a nasty smile. “Zoe. Babe. This guy, of all people?”
“Yep,” Dane says, and the single word has enough smugness in it to make Eric visibly twitch.
“Get out, Eric,” I say. I hate how shaky I feel, like motion sickness. This is like Madrid all over again.
Eric shakes his head. “No matter what, I care about you, Zoe. I’ll never stop. That’s why I’m here. To make sure you’re all right.”
“As you can see, I’m fine,” I say in the hardest tone I can muster. To make it clear how fine I am, I step closer to Dane. “Leave. Now.”
But Eric looks at Dane, and there is something knowing in his expression that I don’t like. “Did you tell her?”
My stomach twists at the words and whatever they mean, which pisses me off because I’m sure that’s what he wants.
“Did I tell her that you’re a toad?” Dane says. “I’m confident Zoe knows.”
Of all things, this appears to set Eric off.
He flies at Dane and drags him into the cottage by his shirt.
They slam into the dining table, which sits in the middle of the kitchen area.
Dane lands a punch to Eric’s face, but Eric manages to rebound and scramble out of the way.
He puts the table between him and Dane. His nose and mouth are bleeding. Good.
“Zoe,” Eric says. He is disheveled, his hair wild. “You don’t want this. You don’t want him.”
“What is he supposed to have told me, Eric?” I demand.
He shakes his head, which he does when he doesn’t have a good answer for something. “You can’t possibly think we wouldn’t catch up with you.” He winces, pressing a finger to his bleeding lip.
“Who’s we?” Dane asks. He braces himself against the table and manages to look both hot and menacing—admittedly perhaps only to me.
Eric looks at me. “What do you know about the people playing the game, Zoe?”
“Enough,” I say.
Eric shakes his head and laughs like I’m the most naive person on the planet. “You know about the game, but not enough to know that I’ve been following you since Madrid when I installed a tracking app on your phone.”
“We knew,” I say, although I’m certainly not telling him how recently we deduced this.
“Right.” Eric smiles as though he knows.
“I’m disappointed in both of you. You, Seaver, for not catching the tracking app.
You, Zoe, for thinking you were clever by ditching the phone yesterday.
It was enough to get me to Scotland. But you failed to consider that I might have had your sister’s phone bugged.
Paid a guy I know to walk by her desk at work and install it. ”
I suck in a breath, horrified.
“Where’s Allard?” Dane asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eric says. “What I need now is the solution to the fifth puzzle. I know you know it. Make it easy on yourselves and tell me, and I can make sure you don’t get hurt.”
“I’m going to guess you can’t promise that,” I say.
Eric gives me a look I know he thinks is supposed to be pitying. “You talk like you know how things are run.”
“I know that you’re an asshole.”
His face tightens at the insult. “I knew you would go far in this challenge. We all did. Ask Dane about that.”
A warning bell goes off in my head. My eyes dart to Dane’s.
Dane’s face is a stone carving, giving nothing away. I’ve walked right into whatever Eric wants to taunt me with, and now I’m teetering on a precipice of truth. I’m guessing it has to do with ProtoDark. I badly do not want to know.
“It would have been easier had you just kept that meeting with me in Madrid, Zoe,” Eric says, sighing like I’ve brought it all on myself. “If you hadn’t fought me. But you’re so stubborn.”
“What was the meeting?” I ask.
“Immunity for me from being deleted.” Eric looks pleased with himself. “I’ve been playing the Enigma Challenge.”
“What do you mean?” I demand. “You were meeting with someone to get immunity? What does that have to do with me?”
Eric looks at Dane as though he wants Dane to fill in the blanks.
But Dane says nothing. “ProtoDark wanted to meet you, Zoe. That’s who the meeting was with in Madrid.
A few weeks before we left, I got an email asking me, as your boss, about your qualifications and whether your solve rate for cryptographic puzzles was really as good as they’d heard in scientific circles.
I’ll admit I was fooled by that last part, but as soon as I figured out that they were the people behind the Enigma Challenge, I saw an opportunity.
I’d wanted to enter the game, but as you know, I study the history of ciphers.
I don’t solve them. But I could set up a simple lunch meeting between you and them, and I could play, see how far I’d get, and they’d give me immunity if I failed.
I get the money, which, as you know, I need to buy that bigger condo for both of us.
If you hadn’t been so bitter, we could have avoided all this.
But you had to go and do it the hard way, entering the game and setting yourself up to fail. ”