Page 28 of Undertow

That complicated.

Tom: Use the bakery. The computer I left in the basement is already configured. Better connection than your house WIFI, which I’m pretty sure is powered by hope and a prayer.

Piper: I’ll have snacks ready. Essential personnel reporting for duty.

Tom: Please tell me she’s kidding.

Gabe: She is not kidding.

He pocketed the phone. Three hours. Enough time to drive home, change out of his uniform, set up at the bakery, and figure out how to tell a group of civilians that the case they’d taken on was bigger and darker than any of them had guessed.

The clock on the wall ticked. For once, it didn’t bother him. He had somewhere to be.

13

A couple hours later, Gabe had just gotten himself settled behind Tom’s desk beneath Sugar and Salt when Piper rushed down the stairs. She flopped down, cross-legged on the couch with Agent draped across her lap like a furry act of territorial sovereignty.

“Homework done?” he asked, without looking up from the screen.

“Mostly.”

He eyed her silently.

“The parts that matter are done. Pre-calc can wait. Pre-calc can always wait.” She scratched Agent behind the ears. “Besides, I’m the morale officer. And Agent’s head of security. We’re essential personnel.”

Before he could comment, the house appeared on screen—Cara, Reagan, Wade, and Tom crowded around a kitchen table with laptops, coffee mugs, and what appeared to be the remains of a cherry pie.

“Is that pie?” Piper said behind him.

“Focus.”

“I’m focused. I’m focused and observing that Wade got cherry pie and we got nothing. And we’re in a bakery. That doesn’t seem right.”

Cara grinned at the teen through the screen. “I froze a container of extra cookie dough. It’s on the bottom right in the extra freezer. Help yourself.”

Piper beamed. “That is so why I love you. Not the only reason, for sure, but high on the list.” She eyed the cat in her lap and sighed. “As soon as His Highness makes a move, I’m all over that suggestion.”

Cara went first. She walked him through the facility visit—the Ellison sisters cover, reception, the raised voices behind a closed door, then seeing Whitfield leave later and connecting the two

“And the liaison appeared within thirty seconds,” Reagan added. “Swept us outside for a tour like she’d been waiting for the signal.”

She told him about the tour—the guide’s rehearsed answers, the “guests” correction, the too-quick assurance that people could leave anytime. Then Pirelli—the bruise at his temple, the squash racket excuse, the way his eyes tightened when Cara pushed on information security.

“The bruise,” Gabe said. “How old?”

“Three, four days. Yellowish green at the edges.”

“And he said squash racket.”

Reagan made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a diagnosis. “The bruise was on his right temple. And the man is clearly right-handed. Unless he plays squash upside down, that’s not a backhand injury. That’s a fist.”

Gabe filed that. A doctor with a bruise he was lying about, arguing with Elena’s uncle. The math wasn’t hard.

“That’s not the worst part,” Reagan said.

“It’s not,” Cara confirmed. “He found us afterward.”

She told him about the café. Graham knowing their names—their Haven Cove names, not the Ellison covers.