Page 4 of Dagger’s Shield

The building had three floors above the docks. At the bottom, the boats hung on their lifts above the water, out of the ice for the winter.

The first floor stored off-season gear: canoes and kayaks on their racks, lawn chairs, and folding tables. I thought I remembered seeing a net rolled up, probably for volleyball or badminton.

I climbed to the second floor, which served as our team’s center of operations. Long tables were set up for work surfaces, with smaller private meeting rooms flanking one of the interior walls.

The third level housed comms and imagery equipment and the server arrays.

I took my usual chair, and Dagger dropped into the one beside me, so close his arm brushed mine.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

“Touch you or carry you?”

“Any of it.”

He clasped his hands and stretched his arms over his head like he was preparing for a workout. “Shall we continue our quest to find out who the Russian sonuvabitch who tried to end us works for?”

His shirt rode up, revealing the cut of muscle of his stomach and the dark line of hair below his navel that ran down and disappeared into his jeans.

He smirked when he followed my line of sight. “Givre?”

“Oui. I mean, yes. Let’s get busy. I mean—get to work.”

“What’s next?” Dagger muttered.

“Good question.” I loaded my notes and reviewed where we were.

A month ago, Vasiliev—the Russian sonuvabitch, as Dagger had called him—had bombed the Lausanne headquarters of Minerva Protocol, the private intelligence service founded by Katarina “Beacon” Stepanova’s family.

I’d been working for France’s foreign intelligence service—Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure or DGSE—for three years when the woman who then ran Minerva, Lyra Hyde-Carrington, code name Mercury, recruited me to join them. Even though I almost lost my life when their headquarters were leveled, it was still the best decision I’d ever made.

In the days that followed the bombing, two significant things happened, neither of which I was present for since I remained in hospital.

One, Beacon, a survivor of the blast, like me, had proposed that Minerva rebuild. Bishop Black, aka Blackjack, teamed up with her, and within a couple of days, we had a proposed structure.

The second thing was that we received intelligence suggesting that Vasiliev had no intention of stopping with taking down the headquarters. His next step would be to target the family’s estate in Lausanne.

Twenty-four hours later, after I was released from medical care, I, along with the rest of our remaining team, boarded a plane headed to a remote area in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where the family owned a compound called Onteora. There was one road in and a lake in front, making it the most defensible ground we could reach.

That was when K19 Security Solutions, another powerful private intelligence firm, proposed a merger, and we decided on the name K19 Genesis Consortium.

We were operational within days, and for the first time since Lausanne, I let myself believe we’d outrun him.

We hadn’t. Two weeks ago, Vasiliev had come for us here too, up the lake, by water, with enough explosives to do to this place what he’d done to Minerva’s headquarters. Before he could set the first charge, Blackjack took him out. However, the last thing he said before he died was that he “hadn’t had a choice” and that this “wouldn’t end” with him. Those two statements made it clear he wasn’t acting alone and he wasn’t the man in charge.

At the hot-wash briefing the next afternoon, follow-up assignments were given out. Dagger and I were tasked with figuring out who Vasiliev might have been working with or, more importantly, for.

“Where in the bloody hell do we start?” Dagger asked that first morning. “We can’t chase him forward,” he said, turning the screen so I could read it with him. “He’s dead, so there’s no following him anywhere. We exposed his accounts at Hellmer Privatbank before he came here, and every one tied to him is frozen.”

“So we go in the opposite direction instead,” I said. “He founded the bank in 1988. He was in his thirties then, off Moscow’s books, and he ran it for thirty-eight years without his own service ever finding it.”

“Someone had to be covering him,” Dagger said. “A man doesn’t fund a bank like that without partners.”

“Then, we must figure out where it began.” Whoever opened that bank with him signed for it and put up the money. Those records still existed somewhere.

“The charter.” Dagger was already had it on the screen. “I can trace it to the first year. What I can’t do is get into the sealed registry in Liechtenstein and find out who signed it.”

Since that first morning, Dagger and I had worked from early morning until well past midnight.