Page 93 of Crosscurrent

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."

39

They gave Luke Barrett the worst chair in the basement, the metal folding one with the uneven foot, and nobody pretended it was an accident.

He sat in it. Skye stood at the end of the table where she could see his hands without turning her head. Agent had followed her down the stairs and taken the high ground on the server shelf, supervising.

Upstairs, the bakery went dark two hours early. Diane had flipped the sign, loaded Piper into her car, and driven inland — dinner and a movie, Diane had announced; a hostage situation, Piper had countered, through the closing window. The last thing Cara saw of her was one finger jabbed at the team like a promise: she expected a full debrief. Tom had watched the car disappear out of sight before he came downstairs.

They had not called the number on the card.

The card was the door Barrett offered, which made it the one door they wouldn't walk through.

While Barrett perched on the worst chair in the house, Tom dug into everything and anything related to Luke Barrett. The man existed, up to a point. An academy class photo with his face in the third row. A commendation buried in a nine-year-old court file. Sworn testimony in a trafficking case, then six years of nothing at all.

"It's the right kind of nothing," Tom said. "Nomad's a hole. Somebody scooped him out of the world. Barrett's a redaction. The government doesn't delete its own people. It just stops writing them down."

Wade had made a call of his own, from the alley, to someone he didn't name. Nobody asked. You didn't, with Wade. He'd come back and said one sentence: the supervisor was real, twenty-six years in, and the men who'd know said she couldn't be bought or scared. One of them had tried both.

So when Tom finally placed the call, it went through a line he owned, to a number he'd dug out of a federal directory himself — not the one on the card. While Barrett watched, Tom asked the only question worth asking. “What did Ray Harney leave behind?”

After speaking directly to Barrett, the supervisor described Harney’s design for contacting the witnesses.

"A place only Ray and I ever knew." Skye said it staring at the speakerphone long after the call ended, like the machine itself had pulled a knife on her. "I never knew who would answer the call. He never told her who’d be first contact. She's been holding her half for four years, waiting to find out if I existed."

"Two halves of one key," Owen said softly. "Either one useless alone. Uncle Ray built it so no single person could move the network. No single person could lose it, either." He took his glasses off, his eyes welling with tears. "He didn't even trust himself."

Cara stood at the board, marker in hand. Ray Harney had never trusted any one person with his people. Not the ones he loved. Especially not the ones he loved. And so the thing they'd been hunting across two continents had never been in a notebook at all. It was standing around this table, distributed through six pairs of hands, waiting to be assembled in the only room in the world where all of them stood at once.

"All right," she said. "Here's the con. Three moves."

She wrote MOVE THEM on the board.

"One. The network moves. Skye initiates — exactly the way Ray taught her, because the delivery is part of the proof. The supervisor's office does what it was built to do: new names, new towns, new paper, federal machinery, all of it at once. Owen sets the order."

"Thinnest cover moves first." Owen already had the notebook open, and his finger had already found the page. "There's a name circled twice. Protection lapsed eight months back, relocation flagged and never finished. Suzette Bennion. She's been standing in the open since."

"Hold that thought," Cara said, "because she's move three."

She wrote BANK IT next.