Chapter 15 Beacon
BEACON
“Should we have breakfast here before we head to the main camp?” Bishop asked.
“I guarantee you Anna has been cooking since dawn. Not that I don’t enjoy your cooking.”
He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kissed my temple. “No offense taken. Let’s go.”
As I’d anticipated, Anna and Polina were in the kitchen in their usual spots when we came in.
Anna looked over her shoulder from where she stood at the stove. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Is it? We never celebrated,” I said. “Not that I remember anyway.”
“We did, but it’s been many years.” She pointed her wooden spoon at the chairs. “Sit. Both of you and have breakfast.”
Bishop pulled one out, and I took the chair across from Polina. When I leaned over and kissed her cheek, she patted my hand.
“It was when you were very young,” Anna continued. She cracked two eggs into the bowl she’d been stirring.
“Why did we stop?”
“Many reasons.” She sighed. “When we moved to Switzerland, things were very hard. We had lost Amelia and her husband. And your parents.” She poured two cups of coffee and set them in front of Bishop and me.
“Then Mikhail. Then Horatio. There wasn’t much to celebrate.
And it isn’t celebrated there the way it is here. So we didn’t.”
Polina rotated her cup in her fingers but said nothing.
“And now?” I asked.
Anna brought her own plate to the chair across from Bishop. “Now, there are so many people here who should be home with their families and aren’t. Polina and I thought it might be nice.” She glanced at all of us. “So. Happy Thanksgiving.”
Bishop raised his mug. “Happy Thanksgiving, Anna.”
When we finished, Bishop pushed his chair out. “Anna, where’s the cellar? I’ll get those boxes for you.”
She wiped her hands on her apron and waved for us to follow.
The entrance to the cellar was near the kitchen door that Bishop and I used to come and go every day.
It was made of heavy wood with an iron latch.
Anna lifted it and reached inside. “The light switch is on the right. Be careful. The stairs are narrow.”
I gripped the railing and took the steps carefully. Bishop was already at the base and steadied me on the last one.
Shelves holding labeled boxes ran the length of the south wall. I worked one end while Bishop scanned for Anna’s Thanksgiving labels. I opened one marked Christmas near where I was standing and found glass ornaments in tissue paper and a string of lights coiled on a wooden spool.
“I think I might remember this.” I held up a small painted bird on a wire hook. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Bishop walked over to where I stood, and I handed it to him. “This is cool. They definitely don’t make decorations like this anymore.”
He gave it back, and I returned it to the box.
“Found them.” Bishop lifted the first container and set it on the floor. “I’ll need to make a couple of trips.”
I stepped aside to give him space and worked farther along the shelf and noticed something stuck behind the storage boxes.
“Oh my God.” I gasped when I pulled a journal out. “Bishop. Look at this.”
He set what he had in his hands down. “That’s identical to the one you salvaged from the safe.”
I nodded. “Let’s hope this has more of use in it than that one did.”
There was a wooden bench against the opposite wall. We settled on it, and I opened the journal. There was a date—14 October—written on the inside cover, but no year. Beneath it were several dates. Beside each one was a place and two names. The second name was in parentheses.
“This is a debrief,” I said.
“Looks like it.”
I turned to the next page, where he’d made connections. Vasiliev’s name sat at the head of the second, third, and the fourth chains.
“This looks like routing structures, all moving in the same direction.”
“The photo of the single page Dagger had must have been taken from this book.”
The fifth page showed all four lists converging on a single entity—Hellmer Privatbank. He’d underlined it twice, and beneath it, he’d added, Founded 1988. Vaduz.
Bishop pulled out his mobile and typed the name. “Vaduz is in Liechtenstein. It is where the small private banks live. The kind that operate behind real bank-secrecy law.”
“So anything parked there does not show up on a Russian service’s radar.”
“Not unless the Russian service already knows the bank exists and has a reason to look at it. For an FSB man, that means it may as well not exist.”
I put my finger on the underlined name. “Vasiliev is FSB. The FSB is his employer. Anything he moves through a bank, his own service watches, his own service sees. A bank his own service cannot see is a bank he is hiding from the people he works for.”
“That is the whole point of picking Vaduz,” said Bishop.
“The Kremlin won’t look the other way.” The ramifications of this were mind-blowing.
“They’ll forgive a lot from a man like Vasiliev, but not a private war chest sitting off their books since the late eighties.
If Moscow learns he has been running his own bank in Liechtenstein for almost four decades, they’ll put a round in him themselves. ”
“This is not exposure for him. It is a death sentence.” Bishop tapped the page with two fingers. “Walk me through the four chains again.”
“If he were only a customer of Hellmer, he would show up on one chain, which is the one that moves his money in. That is what a customer looks like on paper. One line in, one line out. There are four chains in this book. Four separate routing structures, built four different ways, all ending at the same bank. Hellmer isn’t a bank he uses. It’s a bank he built to use.”
“And the founding date was 1988?” he asked.
“Vasiliev had to have been in his thirties or right around there. There’s no way someone like him becomes a client of a brand-new Liechtenstein private bank in its first year of operation. He wouldn’t know the bank existed unless he started it himself.”
Bishop set his mobile down on the bench. “Dagger found the loop yesterday. He couldn’t find where it ends. This might be it, Katarina.”
I nodded once. “And Horatio and Mikhail found it all those years ago.”
“They were the only two who ever did.”
“And Vasiliev killed them for it.”
Bishop exhaled. “This goes to Doc tomorrow. Not today.”
“Agreed.”
I closed the journal, held it against my chest, and followed him up the stone steps. While he put the Thanksgiving boxes where Anna told him to, I set Horatio’s book on the side table, out of the way.
Anna was at the stove when we came up from the basement, and she didn’t turn around.
“What took so long?” she asked.
“We were in the basement—” Bishop began.
“Yes, I know where you were. I’m asking why it took so long.”
“We found something that took us a minute,” I explained.
“A minute. I’ve been up here with Henry and an onion for twenty of them.”
“I’m doing my best,” he called from the other side of the room.
“You are doing something,” Anna said. “I’m not yet ready to call it your best.”
Lyra was laughing as she tore bread into chunks, and my grandmother sat at the table, beside her, with a bowl of potatoes.
“Help peel,” she said, and put one in my hand. “Long strokes. Don’t fight it.”
“How do you fight a potato?” I glanced up at Bishop, who stood behind me with his hand on my neck.
“You’ll see,” Babushka muttered.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked Anna.
“Help your brother. He’s about to walk in here with wood, and I don’t want him idle in my kitchen for one second.”
“Idle,” Kingston said, coming in from outside with an armload of it. “I haven’t been idle since I was four.”
“You were idle when you were a teenager. I remember that,” Bishop muttered.
“You’re one to talk,” he said, carrying the cut pieces of log into the other room, where he set them in the rack near the fireplace.
Bishop sat beside me, reached for a potato, and took the peeler from my hand. “Let me do that.”
My grandmother raised a brow but didn’t say anything.
“Okay, what’s next, General Anna?” Kingston asked.
“I would think you’d be able to figure that out on your own.” She waved a hand around the kitchen.
“Come help me,” said Amaryllis, saving her husband from my aunt’s wrath.
“Is this what a normal family Thanksgiving is like?” I asked. “I’ve never had one.”
Kingston and Bishop made eye contact, and both laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know if ours could be defined as normal,” said Kingston.
“They were definitely eventful,” Bishop added.
“Our mother started prep before the sun came up.”
“And our father got nowhere near it. In fact, he avoided the kitchen as much as possible. At least after the year we almost burned the house down.”
All other conversation in the room came to a stop. Even Anna dropped what she was doing and turned around to listen.
“What happened?” I asked.
Bishop pointed at Kingston. “It was all his fault.”
Kingston smirked. “Sure it was, Sparky.”
“Dad isn’t here. We could let him take the rap.”
Anna put her hand on her hip. “Are either of you ever going to tell us what happened?”
Amaryllis turned the heat off the cranberries that were on the stove and set the wooden spoon down. “Is it the curtain story?” She nudged Anna and rolled her eyes. “This is a good one.”
“Our mother had the flu,” Bishop said. “She was upstairs with a hundred-and-two fever, and Dad told her we had dinner covered and she should stay in bed. I was ten. Kingston was twelve.”
“So it was just us. Dad, me, Bishop, a twenty-two-pound turkey, and a cookbook that had been printed in the twenties. Our father cranked the oven up to four-fifty because he thought higher meant it would be done faster, then he went to check on our mom.”
Bishop motioned with his hands. “Keep going.”
“Our dad told me to keep an eye on it.” I couldn’t tell if Kingston’s cheeks were red because it was warm in the camp or if he was embarrassed.
“How long did you last?” Amaryllis asked like she already knew the answer.
“About five minutes.”