2. Maëlle
MA?LLE
ONE MONTH LATER
Istarted down the path from the main camp of Onteora to the banks of Canada Lake. For most, a walk along a lakeshore at an Adirondack Mountain compound would be commonplace. Mundane even. For me, it meant another milestone crossed—I hadn’t used my cane nor had anyone accompanied me.
Being free of both made me feel more like myself than I had in weeks.
I had little recollection of the day I’d come close to dying, first because three explosions had leveled the building I was in, burying me under the debris from the collapsed structure. Then, on the way to emergency care, my heart had stopped.
What I’d been told was that a slab of concrete crushed the muscle of my thigh, causing it to swell, and subsequently stopping my blood flow.
After restarting my heart, I’d been taken into surgery, where they were able to release the pressure, stop the swelling, and save my leg.
There’d been a lot more to it, but I didn’t retain any of it.
I was alive. That was what mattered. Thirteen others who’d been in the building that morning weren’t.
My leg didn’t buckle once as I continued on the path. On the steeper parts, there was some pain, but that wasn’t what made me come to a dead stop.
Ahead of me, sitting on a boulder, looking out at the same lake I’d planned to, was Killian Curran, aka Dagger.
The man was many things to me. He was my savior above all else, given he was one of the two men who’d dug me out from beneath the rubble that would’ve killed me.
He was also my partner in an investigation that began the same day.
What else he was to me was hard to categorize. An admirer? Yes. A suitor? He would be if I allowed it—which I never would. Finally, and this was the worst of it, he was the man who haunted my dreams.
Dagger was the epitome of everything I didn’t want in my life. Not romantically. Saying he was a womanizer was being polite. Manwhore was more accurate.
Even on the morning of the bombing, I’d come out of my room on the second floor of the estate where we’d both been staying to see him exit another operative’s bedroom, freshly showered, and based on their flushed faces, recently post-sexcapades.
I didn’t blame the woman. Dagger made it nearly impossible to resist once he set his sights on a “target.” It worked on everyone I’d seen him charm into bed—except me.
Of course I was attracted to him, but I knew better than to ever let him know it.
I’d had a front-row seat to how a man like him could destroy the person who loved him.
It happened little by little until there was nothing left.
Until the fight was gone and complacency sat in its place.
My father had done it to my mother, but they weren’t alone.
According to some polls, more than half of married Frenchmen had been unfaithful at least once.
Some, like my dad, had probably been unfaithful for most of their married years.
There was little doubt in my mind that Dagger would be the same. He wanted the conquest. After he got it, he lost interest. Other women might be able to continue working with him, seeing him every day, witnessing him move on to his next catch, but I wasn’t built that way.
Since he hadn’t noticed me yet, it gave me a moment to look at him.
He sat with his forearms braced on his thighs and his hands loose between his knees.
His long dark hair fell past his shoulders, and a thick beard covered the lower half of his face.
Above it, his eyes were a cool pale blue that caught the light off the water.
He was handsome, had a phenomenal body, and he didn’t only know it; he used it.
When he turned his head and his gaze found mine, I wished I hadn’t lingered so long.
“Everything okay?” he asked as he scrambled down the huge rock formation.
“Fine. Just taking a walk.”
He stalked toward me with such purpose that I retreated a step. It was instinct, not because I was afraid of him. The man was massive. I was five feet seven, and he towered over me. He had to be twice my weight, and all of it was muscle.
“What are you doing down here on your own?”
I bristled and folded my arms. “Am I on a leash? Are there certain areas of the compound where I am not permitted to tread?”
“What’s going on, Maelle?” he pressed.
“I wanted to take a walk, so that’s what I did. I do not answer to you, Dagger, and before you even think about lecturing me, I will tell you that I know my own body better than anyone—”
“Not for lack of trying on my part,” he said, taking another step closer.
“Argh. Tu es un sacré connard.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d called him an asshole, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The bastard chuckled, and when I spun around to leave, pain shot up my leg. Not that I’d let him see it. It would only add fuel to his already overly protective bearing.
“Let me help you.” When he put his hand on my elbow, I jerked my arm away.
“Laisse-moi tranquille—go away. Return to your rock. Better yet, crawl under it.”
Dagger laughed again, and before I realized what was happening, I was in his arms and he was carrying me up the path I’d recently walked down.
“Put me down, putain d’enculé.”
“Now, there’s a phrase I’ve heard before. If I had a franc for every time you called me a fucking motherfucker, I’d own most of your country.”
“You’d own nothing since francs have been worthless for over twenty years.” I could have tried to wriggle free, but it would have been pointless.
When we arrived at the boathouse that served as our command center, he set me on my feet.
“Ready to return to work?” he asked.
I yanked the door open and went in without answering.
The building had three floors above the docks. At the bottom, the boats hung on their lifts above the water, out of the ice for the winter.
The first floor stored off-season gear: canoes and kayaks on their racks, lawn chairs, and folding tables. I thought I remembered seeing a net rolled up, probably for volleyball or badminton.
I climbed to the second floor, which served as our team’s center of operations. Long tables were set up for work surfaces, with smaller private meeting rooms flanking one of the interior walls.
The third level housed comms and imagery equipment and the server arrays.
I took my usual chair, and Dagger dropped into the one beside me, so close his arm brushed mine.
“Don’t do that again,” I said.
“Touch you or carry you?”
“Any of it.”
He clasped his hands and stretched his arms over his head like he was preparing for a workout. “Shall we continue our quest to find out who the Russian sonuvabitch who tried to end us works for?”
His shirt rode up, revealing the cut of muscle of his stomach and the dark line of hair below his navel that ran down and disappeared into his jeans.
He smirked when he followed my line of sight. “Givre?”
“Oui. I mean, yes. Let’s get busy. I mean—get to work.”
“What’s next?” Dagger muttered.
“Good question.” I loaded my notes and reviewed where we were.
A month ago, Vasiliev—the Russian sonuvabitch, as Dagger had called him—had bombed the Lausanne headquarters of Minerva Protocol, the private intelligence service founded by Katarina “Beacon” Stepanova’s family.
I’d been working for France’s foreign intelligence service—Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure or DGSE—for three years when the woman who then ran Minerva, Lyra Hyde-Carrington, code name Mercury, recruited me to join them.
Even though I almost lost my life when their headquarters were leveled, it was still the best decision I’d ever made.
In the days that followed the bombing, two significant things happened, neither of which I was present for since I remained in hospital.
One, Beacon, a survivor of the blast, like me, had proposed that Minerva rebuild. Bishop Black, aka Blackjack, teamed up with her, and within a couple of days, we had a proposed structure.
The second thing was that we received intelligence suggesting that Vasiliev had no intention of stopping with taking down the headquarters. His next step would be to target the family’s estate in Lausanne.
Twenty-four hours later, after I was released from medical care, I, along with the rest of our remaining team, boarded a plane headed to a remote area in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where the family owned a compound called Onteora.
There was one road in and a lake in front, making it the most defensible ground we could reach.
That was when K19 Security Solutions, another powerful private intelligence firm, proposed a merger, and we decided on the name K19 Genesis Consortium.
We were operational within days, and for the first time since Lausanne, I let myself believe we’d outrun him.
We hadn’t. Two weeks ago, Vasiliev had come for us here too, up the lake, by water, with enough explosives to do to this place what he’d done to Minerva’s headquarters.
Before he could set the first charge, Blackjack took him out.
However, the last thing he said before he died was that he “hadn’t had a choice” and that this “wouldn’t end” with him.
Those two statements made it clear he wasn’t acting alone and he wasn’t the man in charge.
At the hot-wash briefing the next afternoon, follow-up assignments were given out. Dagger and I were tasked with figuring out who Vasiliev might have been working with or, more importantly, for.
“Where in the bloody hell do we start?” Dagger asked that first morning.
“We can’t chase him forward,” he said, turning the screen so I could read it with him.
“He’s dead, so there’s no following him anywhere.
We exposed his accounts at Hellmer Privatbank before he came here, and every one tied to him is frozen. ”
“So we go in the opposite direction instead,” I said. “He founded the bank in 1988. He was in his thirties then, off Moscow’s books, and he ran it for thirty-eight years without his own service ever finding it.”
“Someone had to be covering him,” Dagger said. “A man doesn’t fund a bank like that without partners.”
“Then, we must figure out where it began.” Whoever opened that bank with him signed for it and put up the money. Those records still existed somewhere.
“The charter.” Dagger was already had it on the screen. “I can trace it to the first year. What I can’t do is get into the sealed registry in Liechtenstein and find out who signed it.”
Since that first morning, Dagger and I had worked from early morning until well past midnight.
I had spent my days tracing Hellmer Privatbank’s dollar and euro transfers through the larger banks that had cleared them. Every transfer I traced ended in an account that belonged to a shell company.
Dagger read every file the allied agencies held on Vasiliev’s years in Russian intelligence.
The files gave him the man’s postings, his ranks, the officers he had served beside, and the men who had given him orders.
He read the debriefs of every defector who had ever mentioned him.
He compared photographs across thirty years.
All of it stopped in 1991. The bank was founded in 1988, while allied services still watched him, and not one file mentioned it.
His money ended in shell companies, and his files ended in 1991. Both trails were dead.
That left the surveillance. Allied services had watched Vasiliev for thirty years, and somewhere in their photographs had to be the people he worked for.
Before we quit for the night, I sent a request to every agency, asking them to send all the footage they had on him.