3. Maëlle
MA?LLE
The following day, the doors of the command center opened, and Blackjack and Beacon walked in. Both looked rested and tanned after taking leave at Blackjack’s parents’ place in the Bahamas.
“Welcome home,” Dagger said when they approached our table.
“I’d say it’s good to be here, but I’d much rather our headquarters relocate to a warmer spot. One with a sandy beach and an ocean doesn’t sound too bad,” said Blackjack.
“You’re the boss now, right?”
He chuckled. “Co-boss, and somehow, I don’t think moving the entire team away from Onteora is practical.”
Within a few minutes of their arrival, the rest of the team joined them.
Kingston Black, code name Reaper, was Blackjack’s brother.
He and his wife, Charity “Amaryllis” Beaudoin, were both former US intelligence agents.
Devin “Hornet” Zak and his wife, Kima, code name Delfino, had risen through the ranks of MI6, eventually being recruited into Unit 23, SIS’ most elite and secretive team of operatives.
Rovena Basha, code name Magnolia, had a similar background. She’d originally been with Albanian intelligence, then did a stint with a UN coalition to fight human trafficking.
Lyra and Henry took seats in the rear.
Everyone in the room, including Dagger and myself, was considered among the best covert operatives in the world. It wasn’t a distinction any of us took lightly.
“I thought it would be a good idea to get caught up,” Beacon said, standing at the front of the room with Blackjack after the rest of us took our seats. “Shall we start with Briggs?” she asked.
Reaper and Amaryllis gave an update on Jason Briggs, the retired three-star general they’d been tracking since long before the bombing. What they’d learned amounted to very little. “He’s lying low and has been,” said Reaper.
For years, defense companies had paid Briggs, and he’d directed Pentagon contracts worth billions to them in return.
Eleanor Aldrich, Horatio’s daughter and Lyra’s sister, had uncovered it when she was at the CIA.
Her own director had ordered her to end the investigation, and when she refused, the agency shut it down.
She’d resigned, went dark, and she and her siblings had formed the Minerva Protocol.
She didn’t live to see it through. Briggs, meanwhile, hadn’t been so much as indicted. Now, he advised the Pentagon on Russian affairs and lived in a sixty-million-dollar mansion.
“Let’s see if we can rile him up with a visit,” Blackjack suggested. “Poke the bear, as it were.”
“Roger that,” Reaper responded.
“Add Bogdanov to your list if he isn’t already on it,” said Dagger.
Denis Bogdanov was the man Briggs had been photographed handing a manila envelope to. His records said he was connected to Russian foreign intelligence. His records also said he wasn’t Russian. Both could not be true.
Beacon had been looking at her mobile, but raised her head. “Good thinking, and take Magnolia with you. If Briggs so much as changes barbers, I want it photographed.”
“One more thing,” Blackjack said. “Connect with Sundance once you’re there. I made contact last week. He’s in.”
Zion Mills, code name Sundance, had spent his FBI career in the organized crime unit. I’d never worked with him, but Reaper had vouched for him weeks ago, and in our world, that carried more weight than any résumé.
After the three headed out with Blackjack’s okay, the briefing turned to us. Dagger and I filled them in on what little I’d discovered about the shell company accounts as well as the intel he’d gathered on Vasiliev’s activity with Russian intelligence.
“The surveillance images we requested have begun coming in. My plan is to start sifting through those,” I said.
“We can help,” Delfino offered, motioning to her husband, Hornet.
“As can we,” Beacon added.
“Appreciated,” I said, sharing the links we’d gotten from the CIA and MI6. We were still waiting for images from the DGSE, the NGA and the NRO, along with other lesser-known intelligence channels.
We spent the next couple of hours searching through hundreds of images while Dagger and Hornet picked up new threads on Vasiliev’s financial history. Most were of Vasiliev standing on street corners, hotel terraces, and the steps of buildings in dozens of cities around the world.
The facial recognition software had already gone through them, identifying as many people as it was able.
What was impossible to tell was who were actual associates.
The rest, the ones it couldn’t match, I had to sort through myself.
Most of them led nowhere—a driver, a waiter, a man who happened to cross the street behind him.
I marked a few to come take another look at later, then moved on.
The sun set early at this time of year, so the hours got away from me. When I last checked, it was twenty hundred. Blackjack, Beacon, Hornet, and Delfino had quit for the night. I was close to ready when Dagger asked if I wanted help with the photos.
“I can manage,” I said.
“I know you can.” He smiled. “I was looking for an excuse to sit closer. The photos were the best reason I could come up with.”
“You have your own computer. You can remain seated where you are,” I said without looking up at him.
“You wound me, woman.”
“I’m certain that no matter what I say to you, it goes in one ear and out the other, as they say.”
His brow furrowed, but only momentarily, as if I’d hurt his feelings. I doubted that was the case; however, I regretted my words anyway. “I was teasing, you know.”
“I know,” he said, returning to the table where he’d been seated before.
Two hours later, he got up again. “Time to call it a night. We’ll pick up in the morning.”
I was stunned when I looked at the clock. “How is it twenty-three hundred?”
“Time flies when you’re doing mundane, mindless work,” he deadpanned.
“I’m not finished with this batch. Go ahead. I will be fine on my own.”
Instead of leaving, he sat down beside me, with his already open laptop.
“I don’t need company, Dagger.”
“But I do.”
I rolled my eyes, then returned to the images, but stopped at a photograph of Vasiliev seated at a café table across from another man I thought I recognized from a previous batch.
“There he is again,” I mumbled after reopening some I’d marked.
Dagger looked up from his laptop. “There who is again?”
“This man is in a few photos I marked before.” I turned my screen toward him and loaded all the images on it. “Now, here are more.”
He dragged his chair closer. “Who is he?”
“Facial recognition didn’t come up with a match.”
“Run it again.”
I continued running each image I found as I went through the rest of the batch. By the end of it, there were more than twenty photographs of the two men together. The oldest and the newest were years apart.
“Every agency on the planet has a file on Vasiliev,” I muttered. “Someone has to be able to ID the person with him.”
“Agreed.”
I sent a request, along with the photos, to the same agencies we’d queried for Vasiliev’s images, hoping that at least one of them would have an answer for us by morning.
“Ready to call it a night?” Dagger asked.
“There’s nothing more we can do now, so I suppose we should.”
He half smiled.
“What?”
“You’re a workaholic,” he said, rubbing my shoulder.
“I’m an intelligence operative searching for more information about the man who almost killed me,” I snapped in response.
“A tired one.”
The way he looked at me was too sweet for me to keep arguing with him, so I closed my laptop, put it into its case, and stood.
The wind off the lake was bitter on the walk up the path. He shortened his stride to match mine.
At the door of the main camp, he waited while I opened it.
“Good night, Maelle.”
“Bonne nuit, Dagger.”
Somewhere, someone knew that man’s name. By morning, we might know it too.
Dagger was waiting in the kitchen of the main camp the next morning when I came in to get coffee.
“Any answers overnight?” I asked.
“I haven’t looked. Beacon called a morning briefing, so I stopped here first.”
Just as I took a cup from the cabinet, Dagger set a travel mug in front of me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“I made you some of mine.”
Since it was too early in the morning for me to interrogate him about why, I took a sip.
“Wow, this is good,” I said before taking another one.
He held the door open for me. “You’re welcome.”
I wanted to stick my tongue out at him for passive-aggressively correcting my manners. Instead, I took another sip of the best coffee I’d had since we left Europe.
Blackjack, Beacon, Hornet, Delfino, Lyra, and Henry were already seated when we walked into the command center.
“Before we begin, if I may?” I opened my laptop and looked at Beacon, who nodded.
I loaded the photos onto the screen. “Last night, I found these in the surveillance batches.” As they studied the images, I told them about the number I’d found and how the dates of the first and the last were years apart. “I sent them out to our sources to see if anyone could identify him.”
“Any answers?” Blackjack asked.
Dagger looked up from his laptop. “DGSE has a hit.”
I opened my email. “His name is Aristide Géraud. He’s a financier based in Geneva.”
“Geneva?” Lyra gasped. “This man is based an hour’s drive from the headquarters Vasiliev destroyed?”
No one spoke, but the ramifications hit all of us equally hard. Thirteen of our colleagues had died when three bombs leveled that building. Beacon, Blackjack, and I had almost joined them.
“What’s his background?” Beacon asked.
I read the rest of the brief aloud. “Everything they have is legitimate. There were no arrests, no lawsuits, no investigations, and no mention of him in any allied file.”
“That can’t be it,” Blackjack said.
“That’s all the DGSE has,” I added. “They’re the only agency we’ve received a response from thus far.”
When the briefing ended, we all returned to our work.
MI6 answered at ten hundred. The CIA replied two hours later. Both matched the DGSE’s brief.
By thirteen hundred, my irritation had turned into anger.