Chapter 10 Blackjack
BLACKJACK
Iwas up at zero five hundred and cursed myself for not lighting a fire the night before.
On my way to the bathroom, with the blanket wrapped around me, I noticed the thermostat set at fifty degrees and chuckled.
I cranked it up to seventy but still lit the logs that had been laid in the hearth.
God knew what kind of insulation these camps had, and I doubted if it got much above forty.
Once it was warm enough to make a shower bearable, I took a quick one, dressed, put on my boots and heavy jacket, then went to see if there were any signs of life in the main camp.
Lights were on in the kitchen, and the pathway I was on led to a door.
Henry’s vehicle was still in the clearing when I crossed from Ohkwari. He stood with Mrs. Eggers, whom he was taking to Syracuse this morning.
The front door of the main camp was open. Anna stood with both of the woman’s hands in hers. Polina was beside her. Mercury had her arm around Mrs. Eggers’ shoulders. Beacon stood behind them.
Mrs. Eggers, Anna, Polina, and Mercury were choked up as they said their goodbyes. Beacon’s face showed almost no emotion at all.
When Henry announced it was time to go, Anna and Polina returned inside, and Mrs. Eggers turned to Beacon.
I was too far away to hear whatever was said between them.
Mrs. Eggers put both hands on Beacon’s face the way Anna had, and Beacon covered them with her good hand and held them there.
When Henry announced it was time, Mrs. Eggers went to the vehicle, and Beacon watched her go.
Anna and Polina were still wiping their eyes when the doors closed.
Beacon’s face was dry. I’d seen her in a collapsing building, on the grass outside it, with thirteen bodies coming out around her, and in a room full of people she’d just asked to walk into a war.
She hadn’t cried at any of it. I didn’t read it as cold.
I read it as someone who’d learned to bury what she felt deep enough that it wouldn’t show.
I stayed on the path and waited until the engine sound faded before I went into the main camp.
“You’re busy this morning,” I said to Anna, looking at the dough she was kneading on the counter.
“We started rising with the loons on this lake before you were born, Bishop.” She smiled over her shoulder at Polina, who was seated at a long wooden table on the far side of the kitchen.
“There’s coffee on the stove. Cups are in the cabinet to the left of the sink.
Most everyone is up and gathered in the great room. ”
“Good morning,” I said to Polina as I poured my coffee. “Mind if I hang out with you for a bit?”
She reached over and patted my hand. “Stay as long as you’d like, but know that Katarina is in the other room with Lyra. You may enjoy her company a bit more.”
“Nah. The two of you are the prettiest girls here. The smartest too.”
Both women chuckled.
“Your mother taught you well, young man.”
“What’s this about our mom?” Kingston asked, walking in with two mugs.
“Anna was saying she did a good job raising two well-mannered young men,” Polina told him.
I glanced at the doorway where Beacon stood, resting against the jamb.
“Mornin’,” I said when her eyes met mine.
“Bon matin,” she responded.
I got up and checked the cup she held. “More coffee?” I asked when I saw it was empty.
“I can manage.”
“And what would happen if I let you? Your aunt and grandmother would retract every nice thing they said about me.”
“Maybe not everything.” Anna winked. “Even with poor manners, you’d still be a handsome devil. Isn’t that right, Katarina?”
She smirked in my direction. “No comment.”
“Go see if the loons are here yet,” said Anna, looking from Beacon to me.
“Yes, ma’am.” As I followed Beacon into the main room, I noticed she wasn’t using her crutch. “Leg feeling better?”
“It’s stiff, so I thought it would help if I moved it more.”
There was an enclosed porch off the left of the great room, and I followed her when that’s where she went.
“Have a seat, and I’ll see if I can loosen you up.”
“Me or my leg?”
I rubbed my hands together and blew on them, more for effect since it was warm on the porch. “How about both?” I asked when she sank into an oversized chair and rested her foot on a stool.
“Maybe later. For now, just the leg.”
Before taking a seat on the stool, I put a hand on both chair arms and leaned closer. “Is that a date later?”
Beacon’s eyes met mine, and in them, I saw the same heat I did every time I looked at her.
She shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe.”
I got to work on her leg, and she rested her head against the chair. Five minutes later, she raised it.
“We have things to talk about.” Her tone suggested whatever it was had nothing to do with a “date.”
“Shoot.”
“We should talk about setting up a command center—”
“I was about to tell you that K19 Sentinel Cyber’s team…” I let my words trail off when she drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair and her nostrils flared. “Sorry, uh, go ahead with whatever you were going to say.”
Her glare held for a few more seconds, then she huffed. “I’d like to finish my own thoughts before you tell me you’ve already had them.”
I leaned away and stopped rubbing her leg. “Go ahead.”
“The great hall will do for today. For the long term, we should set up somewhere else.”
“Like?”
“The boathouse has three floors above the indoor docks.”
I waited for her to go on, but it seemed like she was waiting for me to respond. “Uh…”
She huffed again. “You were saying something about K19?”
“Right. Their cyber team is headquartered at Kane Mountain Camp. I’m sure they could have a functional build-out in place by tomorrow afternoon if we give them the go-ahead.” I refrained from mentioning that everything I’d said had been Doc’s suggestion.
“We’ll need electronic boards, secure comms, and multiple workstations, but with separate areas for teams to meet on their own.”
“Understood.”
She drummed her fingers and cocked her head.
“What?”
“What are you waiting for? Call them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I saluted and winked at the same time, which earned me a smile.
The Sentinel Cyber unit arrived from Kane Mountain within the hour and immediately got started on the boathouse reconfiguration.
While they did that, our team set up a space to work in the main camp.
The first order of business was for Beacon to remotely brief Agatha and establish her as our London liaison. The rest of the recruiting list was on hold until we were fully operational.
Beacon made the Agatha call from the far side of the room. She kept her voice low and the conversation short. When she pulled the earbud, she nodded once.
“Agatha’s in. I didn’t tell her where we are. She has what she needs to keep the London doors open, and she’ll feed us anything Unit 23 surfaces.”
Henry came in from the hall. “I spoke with Preacher this morning. He’s locked into an op for ninety days. We’ll reengage when he’s clear.”
“Understood,” I said.
I’d just shut my laptop when my mobile buzzed with a call from Pershing Kane, aka Admiral. He and his wife, Alice, were managing partners of Sentinel Cyber.
“We made good progress today,” he reported. “Everything you need to be fully operational will be online no later than tomorrow at seventeen hundred. What’s up now is secure and ready to use.”
“That’s faster than I expected.”
“We’ll add to it as we go. Anything you think of that we missed, say the word.”
Razor approached when the conversation ended.
“Perimeter walk?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing my jacket.
We took the path behind the main camp first. He stopped at the east edge where the tree cover dropped off, and crouched down.
“A guy with a rifle in those birches has a clean shot at the front porch.”
“How clean?”
“Two hundred meters. Maybe one-eighty.”
“Do we clear it?”
“No. You cut it, and he uses the next stand of trees. We need to run a sensor line through here and put a camera on the roof.”
He was on his feet and moving before I caught up.
The lake side was better. The boathouse sat low on the water, and the dock lights Admiral’s team had wired yesterday were up.
“We should sweep the island again tomorrow. Sentinel Cyber runs checks on a periodic schedule, but with your arrival, we need to do another one now.”
“Agreed,” I said.
He stopped two more times: one at the break in the stone fence that marked the property entrance, then again at a lower stretch where a deer path crossed the boundary.
“Who else has vehicle access?” he asked.
“Outside of the team, the caretaker.”
“Change the gate code tonight. Every forty-eight hours from here on.”
“Roger that. Anything else?”
“That’ll do it for tonight. See ya, Blackjack.”
After he got in his SUV and drove away, I returned to the command center and walked the two floors Admiral’s team had built out.
The top one ran the length of the building. Signals intercept stations lined the north wall, facing a bank of monitors that displayed communications feeds across multiple frequencies and encrypted channels.
The SIGINT—Signals Intelligence—processing suite sat adjacent to them, separated by a half wall of acoustic paneling.
On the opposite side was Magnolia’s territory—satellite imagery analysis stations ran beneath a row of large-format displays.
The perimeter security station anchored the east end with live feeds from every camera on the property and a continuous sweep of the lake. A server room occupied the northwest corner behind a climate-controlled door and a keypad.
A financial intelligence platform sat on its own isolated network at a standalone station near the center of the floor. The whole space hummed with equipment that hadn’t existed here four days ago.
Dagger had already claimed it. He’d pulled a chair to the station and was loading the Vasiliev files K19 had on hand into the new platform.
The floor below was where they’d meet. Long tables filled the main room, arranged in a loose horseshoe with enough chairs for the full team. Natural light came off the water through the windows on the dock side.
On the opposite wall, four smaller meeting rooms sat side by side. Each had a door, a glass window, a table, and four chairs. It was enough space for a team to work through something without the whole floor hearing it.
Two larger conference rooms flanked them at either end for larger team meetings, each with a display screen and a whiteboard.
At the front of the main room, electronic boards on a motorized track hung from the ceiling rafters.
I stood at the center of the upper floor and looked at what Admiral’s team had built in under twenty-four hours.
Yesterday, this had been a boathouse. Now, it was the operational core of an intelligence organization that hadn’t existed a week ago.
I’d helped build things before—infrastructure, teams, operational frameworks—but always inside something that already existed. This was different.
The sun had gone down by the time I made my way from the boathouse to Ohkwari.
I pushed the latch and stepped inside, got a fire going in the hearth, and unpacked the gear bag I’d left on the floor last night. Shirts, kit roll, the hard case for the sidearm, the field razor I had carried since my first deployment, and a change of boots. I put it all where it belonged.
I’d had three deployments in the last two years, and I’d lived out of that bag for most of them. I knew the weight of it packed, and the weight of it empty, and I’d never once put anything in a drawer and thought of it as a place it lived.
I’d just stored my bag when I heard a sound in the other room. I stepped out of the bedroom to find Beacon standing on the front door’s threshold.