Chapter 7
VICTORIA
Echo Base, Montana
The briefing room smells like coffee and recycled air and the particular ozone tang of electronics that never shut down.
I walk in with my shoulders level, my chin up, and my hands clasped behind my back because my right knuckles are still swollen from the jaw of a man who is currently leaning against the far wall watching me with those ice-blue eyes like I'm an encrypted signal he hasn't finished decoding.
I don't look at him. I don't need to, because Roman Frost's attention has a physical quality I've never been able to train myself out of registering, and a decade of grief and fury hasn't dulled the sensation. That's information I refuse to process right now.
My collarbone scar pulls with each breath, the old knife wound tight against skin that hasn't adjusted to the dry mountain air. I ignore it the way I ignore most pain: by filing it in the category of things that don't require immediate action and moving on.
Kane stands at the head of a tactical table that dominates the center of the room.
Laminated maps, satellite imagery, and a tablet connected to the main display screen on the wall cover the surface.
He looks up when I enter, and his assessment is instant, a single sweep that catalogues threat level, capability, and usefulness in the time it takes me to cross the threshold.
I've been assessed by men like Kane before: military commanders, intelligence directors, men who run operations from bunkers and boardrooms and the backs of armored vehicles.
They all do the same thing: measure whether you'll be useful or whether you'll be a problem.
I intend to be both.
"Cross. Good. We're waiting on Tommy." Kane gestures to the table. "Take whatever seat you like."
No one is taking a seat, they’re all standing, which tells me this is a team that briefs on their feet and expects results before anyone gets comfortable. I approve.
The room is full, and I take the measure of each person the way I've taken the measure of intelligence assets and adversaries for the past two decades: quickly, thoroughly, and without letting any of them see me do it.
I’ve worked with and know some of these people and met some of them last night in the corridor and the common room and the medical bay, shook their hands while the mountain settled around us and my knuckles throbbed under Willa's bandage.
But introductions over coffee tell you one thing.
Watching people in a live briefing tells you everything else.
Stryker stands to Kane's left, arms crossed, solid and watchful.
I've coordinated intelligence with him for years through secure channels, traded information, heard his measured voice anchor operational briefings when things went sideways.
In person, he carries that same steady presence in the width of his shoulders and the way his eyes track movement without appearing to move at all.
Mercer is beside him, and the tightly wound stillness that always made his transmissions feel loaded with things unsaid is more pronounced in the flesh.
He reads as a coiled wire, all potential energy rather than composure.
A woman stands at Mercer's shoulder, close enough that the proximity reads as personal rather than professional.
She watches the room with the systematic gaze of someone trained to read people for a living, and my best guess puts her background in law enforcement.
Dylan Rourke occupies a position near the door, dark-eyed, carrying grief in the line of his jaw and the way he holds himself apart from the group. Present but guarded, as though proximity to warmth is something he hasn't earned.
I've worked with all of them. I've heard them discuss operations with the professional detachment of men who do dangerous work and don't waste time pretending otherwise.
And every one of them knew Roman was alive while I built a memorial in my mind.
Every call, every operational briefing, every intelligence exchange, they knew, and their voices never wavered.
Willa Hart stands beside Kane. She cleaned and wrapped my split knuckles last night with hands that were thorough and gentle and entirely without judgment, which is a talent when the knuckles in question clearly connected with the jaw of a man standing on the other side of the room.
Warmth radiates from her in a way that feels honest rather than performed, and the way she glances at Kane when he speaks carries the easy shorthand of a partnership that extends well beyond shared operational duties.
Near Stryker, a woman holds her position with the stillness of someone accustomed to being underestimated, her hands loose at her sides, chin level, eyes tracking my movements with the contained focus of a person cataloguing threats she hopes never materialize.
Another woman beside Dylan watches me with the assessing gaze of a journalist, or I'll eat my encryption key.
That sharpness belongs to someone who builds narratives from evidence.
Sarah Andrews occupies a workstation at the far end of the table, already pulling data onto her tablet.
I've worked with her before, during the leak investigation that started this entire cascade.
She's fast, precise, and she generates the kind of professional irritation among senior analysts who've spent decades building careers she outperforms on instinct.
She's young for the weight she carries, but the focus in her expression suggests age measured in experience rather than years.
Beside her stands Micah Hawthorne, the operative the intelligence community calls Ghost. Former CIA, deep cover specialist. His name surfaced in enough intelligence channels over the years that I knew his operational profile long before I met him.
He meets my eyes with the professional neutrality of someone untroubled by being assessed.
Roman hasn't moved from the far wall, and he hasn't needed to.
He occupies space the way he always has, not by demanding it but by creating a gravity that pulls the room's geometry around him, gaps forming where people shift to give him clearance without seeming to notice they've moved.
His arms are folded, one shoulder braced against concrete, and he watches the briefing take shape with the patient focus of someone whose silence is a weapon he's chosen not to deploy yet.
I hate that I cataloged his position before I cataloged Kane's.
Tommy arrives through the door behind me, brushing past with a laptop under one arm and a mug of coffee in the other hand.
"Sorry, sorry, had to reboot the encryption suite because someone decided to run a diagnostic at three in the morning.
" He drops into a chair at the comms station, catches sight of Roman's jaw still wearing the bruise from my right cross, and grins.
"That's looking worse today. Stryker, enjoy your winnings. "
"Already spent them," Stryker says.
"For the record," Tommy says, turning to me, "I had you pegged for a left hook. I feel betrayed."
"I'll keep that in mind for next time," I say.
Roman's mouth twitches at the corner into something that isn't a smile. It's darker, more private, aimed at me across the room like a frequency only I can receive. My pulse kicks once, and I kill the response before it reaches my face.
"Enough." Kane's voice carries the flat authority of a commander who doesn't waste words on repetition. "Cross, the floor is yours. You said you had intelligence to present."
I did say that. I said it last night when Kane outlined the briefing schedule, the weight of the mountain pressing down on the rock above our heads. I said it because intelligence is currency and I've arrived at Echo Base with nothing else to trade.
My network is gone. My finances are frozen. My contacts are dead or running. What I have is what I've always had: information, cataloged and cross-referenced and stored in a mind that MI6 spent years training to function as a living database.
I step to the tactical table and pull up the files I loaded onto Kane's tablet in the hours since last night, years of intelligence transferred from memory and phone to a format the room's display can read.
Moving to the table puts me directly across from Roman, and I feel the shift in his attention like a hand on the back of my neck.
Proprietary and focused, as though the operational map between us is a formality and the real territory he's surveying is me.
Don't.
"Webb's retaliation against my network wasn't random.
" My voice comes out the way I want it to: clipped, precise, British in the way that Americans associate with authority and Europeans associate with stubbornness.
"It was coordinated by a single operational director working under Webb's direct authority.
Every kill order, every frozen account, every raided safe house traces back to one man. "
I tap the screen, and a photograph fills the display.
The subject is heavy-set, mid-fifties, with the flat, assessing eyes of a career intelligence officer whose violence has long since become administrative.
He carries military bearing beneath civilian clothes.
The photograph was taken at a private airport outside Vienna, and the man in it is walking toward a charter aircraft with the confidence of someone who has never been followed successfully.
"Gregor Volkov. Former FSB, recruited by the Committee for his connections and his willingness to do the work that even Webb finds distasteful. He runs the Committee's European operations, and he personally oversaw the systematic destruction of my network."
Sarah leans forward at her workstation. "How long has he been in that role?"