Chapter 18 Blackjack
BLACKJACK
Katarina was sound asleep beside me. She had been for hours. I’d lain awake the whole time.
My mobile lit on the nightstand. I picked it up and read the message from Dagger. Update. Urgent.
I moved her hand from my chest to the pillow and got out of bed. I waited when she made a sound. When she didn’t wake, I pulled the quilt up over her shoulder.
I dressed in the dark, picked up my boots, and eased the bedroom door shut behind me. I didn’t bother with coffee and headed straight to the boathouse.
Julian was on the dock when I came down the steps from the main camp. He was facing away from me, watching the lake.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“I have been.”
“Something wrong?”
“The loons are off.” He didn’t turn around. “They called at dusk, the way they always do. They haven’t since.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“They’re unsettled.”
I couldn’t explain why the birds’ behavior made me anxious, except it appeared to have the same effect on Julian.
Doc, Dagger, Givre, Kingston, Hornet, and Gunner were seated at a table on the second level when I walked in.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The network’s gone quiet,” said Hornet.
“How quiet?”
“Beacon put me on a layer of his operation. Every asset on it has stopped moving since yesterday morning.”
I took the chair across from Doc. “Dagger. Where are we on the freezes?”
“Every Hellmer-tied account is locked.”
“And nobody’s pushing back?”
“That’s right.”
Kingston leaned forward. “They go quiet when he tells them to.”
“Or when he’s moving,” said Hornet.
Doc pulled the overheads we received from his contact at the NRO up on the screen. They were from Dubai, timestamped two hours ago. A man who fit Vasiliev’s build was on a rooftop terrace with two others I didn’t recognize. The image wasn’t clear enough to confirm for certain.
“That’s our best read.” Doc turned to me. “It’s your call.”
“Send Kingston and Gunner in. We take him the first clean window we get.”
“Roger that. I’ll have Razor arrange transport.” He left the table and returned a few minutes later. “Wheels up at zero six hundred out of Johnstown. I’ve also reached out to our Gulf contacts. We’ll have the building covered before you land.”
My brother’s code name was Reaper because he was one of the best assassins in the business, and Gunner was just as lethal. When their eyes met mine, I nodded once. They stood and walked out together.
Katarina was still asleep when I returned an hour later. I’d left my boots by the door and slid into bed beside her.
“Bishop?” She rolled toward me and opened her eyes.
“Kitten.”
“You’re dressed.”
“Dagger pulled me in at zero four hundred. The network went quiet yesterday morning. Doc has overhead of Vasiliev in Dubai, two hours old.”
She pushed up on her elbow.
“Kingston and Gunner are on their way to the Gulf. Doc’s contacts have the Dubai location covered. They’ll link up when our team lands.”
“You made the call,” she murmured.
“I had to.”
“Good.”
I raised a brow. “Good?”
“I would have done the same thing.”
I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“We should get down there.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Bishop.”
“I’ll put your clothes on the chair.”
She was out of the bed and in the bathroom before I had the drawer open. I pulled a pair of jeans and a sweater out and laid them on the chair. She came out with her hair up, got dressed, and reached for her boots.
“Let me,” I said when she struggled to get them on.
She put her hand on my shoulder for balance and stepped into one at a time. It seemed like a little thing, but my every instinct said she needed more comfort than she’d allow anyone to give her.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I opened the door, and she went through ahead of me. The path was hard under our boots, and the lake was still dark off to our right. She didn’t say anything on the way down, and I didn’t either.
At the boathouse, she went up the stairs ahead of me. I watched her knee on the second flight, and she didn’t favor it.
Doc was at the table with Dagger and Hornet. The image of Vasiliev in Dubai was on the board.
“Beacon,” Doc said.
“Walk me through it.”
Hornet ran through the asset network, then Dagger gave her the frozen-account update.
Dagger looked up from his laptop. “I’m running two separate threads on Hellmer. The first is every outbound transfer Hellmer made in the forty-eight hours before the freeze. The second is every account Hellmer funded over the years that’s still sitting somewhere, untouched.”
“Start with the older accounts,” Katarina said. “Push me the account numbers as you resolve them.”
“Roger that.”
Dagger forwarded her the first account number twenty minutes later.
“Givre. Run this against the Cyprus registry.” She read the number across the table.
Two minutes later, Givre said, “Limassol Continental Holdings Ltd.”
Katarina got up from the table, went to the board, and stood in front of it with the marker in her hand. She wrote the name of the holding company and drew a line from Hellmer to it.
“Dagger?”
“Yes?”
“Pull the chain on this one first. If he’s in Dubai, that’s the account he is working out of.”
“Roger that.”
Hornet was monitoring the streets around the building where we’d identified the man we believed was Vasiliev. There were three ways out. Two of them fed into Deira Souk, which narrowed at midday. “If he moves in daylight, he moves through there,” he said.
“Can K19 put eyes on it?”
“I’m asking.”
Dagger raised his head. “That Limassol Continental chain you flagged is what I was afraid we’d find. Hellmer funded it years ago and hasn’t touched it since. The money is sitting outside the freeze entirely.”
Katarina raised her head. “Dormant?”
“Funded. Active. Ready to fire.”
She stared at it on his screen for a few seconds, then returned to what she was doing.
I stared at it longer.
Doc’s cell pinged, and he read the screen. “Two contract operators will be in Deira by the time our team is on the ground.”
“Copy,” I muttered before turning to Katarina, who was still staring at the screen. “How about a break?”
“That actually sounds really good.”
I hadn’t expected her to agree but was glad when she did.
“We’re about to have lunch,” Anna said when we stopped at the main camp to check in. “Will you join us?”
“That would be brilliant. I’m starving,” Katarina responded, surprising me for the second time.
Anna motioned to the kitchen table, where Lyra and Henry were both on their laptops. “Sit down. It will be ready in a few minutes.”
Lyra closed hers. “Where are we?”
“We believe we’ve located Vasiliev in Dubai,” Katarina said.
“Doc received overhead from his contact at the NRO early this morning. The image shows a man whose build matches Vasiliev, on a rooftop terrace in a building that fits his operational pattern. The quality isn’t good enough to confirm with certainty, but it’s the best read we’ve had on him. ”
“And his network?”
“Every asset Dagger has been tracking for him went quiet yesterday morning. Not a call, not a wire, no movement. Hellmer has been locked since yesterday afternoon. Every account tied to him is frozen. He has no money moving anywhere we can see,” I said.
“Which means he’s about to move.”
I nodded. “That’s what we think. Kingston and Gunner are en route to Dubai now. Doc has reached contract operators through his Gulf contacts, and they’ll be in position to support our team when they land.”
Lyra’s gaze moved between mine and Katarina’s. “You said the image isn’t certain.”
“The build fits. The location fits. But we can’t confirm it’s him,” I responded.
“And you’ve committed a team to that?”
“That’s right,” I said. “If we wait for certainty, he moves and we lose him.”
“What else do you have?” Lyra asked.
I brought her up to speed on Dagger’s trace work and on Givre’s resolution of Limassol Continental Holdings, explaining how the Cypriot shell Hellmer had funded years ago and left alone was sitting full and outside the reach of the freeze.
When Anna brought bowls of soup to the table, Henry closed his laptop. “Julian will be picking up Polina’s ashes today and bringing them to the main camp.”
“Thank you,” Katarina murmured.
We returned to the command center.
Doc’s contacts held the building’s exits in Dubai throughout the afternoon. No one in, no one out. The man we believed was Vasiliev had gone inside at zero six hundred Dubai time and hadn’t come back out since.
Hornet was on the perimeter feed at the other end of the table. I stayed on the Dubai feed with him.
Katarina worked at her end of the table with her laptop open and Horatio’s journal beside it. She didn’t come up for anything all afternoon.
Henry and Julian delivered baskets of food at eighteen hundred with orders from Anna that we all needed to eat.
Kingston and Gunner checked in wheels-down at nineteen hundred.
“Still no movement on the building,” Kingston said.
“Stay on it.”
“Copy.”
By twenty-one hundred, Doc was on his third call with the Gulf team, and Givre and Dagger had traced every chain out of Hellmer and still couldn’t say what Limassol was funding.
“Time for my perimeter-monitoring shift,” Dagger said. When he went up to the third floor, Katarina and I went up with him.
An hour later, I closed my laptop. “It’s late. Let’s call it a night.”
“I left my tablet on the second floor,” Katarina said. “I’ll go grab it.”
I was about to go with her when my cell rang with a call from my brother. I put it on speaker.
“He came out of the building,” Kingston said. “I closed for the shot. It’s not him. Wrong face, close enough to pass for a brother. We’ve been played.”
“Fuck.” I was already on my feet. “Lock this place down now.”
“Blackjack, we’re too late. There’s a watercraft on the sensor,” said Dagger. “This is what the Limassol money was staged for.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Vasiliev wasn’t in Dubai. He was here.