Page 9 of Dagger’s Shield

He nodded once, and we walked down the pathway to the boathouse.

More surveillance images began arriving after we returned from lunch. MI6 sent theirs first, then the CIA, the NGA, and the NRO.

By fourteen hundred, we had more than three hundred photos of Aristide Géraud to pore through.

Most showed the ordinary movements of a wealthy man who traveled to various countries around the world.

An hour into the search, Dagger said my name.

I stood and looked at the image on his screen. It was of Géraud, sitting at a café table, with another man I recognized before I read the tag.

“That’s Nicholas Kerr,” I said.

Kerr had been the president of Interpol, and before that, the director of MI5. For more than twenty-five years, he’d used both positions to launder money, buy intelligence officials across half the world’s services, and order the murders of anyone who got close enough to expose his crimes. Three years ago, he was shot and killed when his network, Argead, was finally taken down.

I called Blackjack and Beacon over.

“Jesus,” Blackjack muttered, recognizing him as quickly as we had. There wasn’t an operative in the world who wouldn’t have.

Dagger kept paging. Kerr was in four more images.

“Stop,” said Beacon. “Let me see the last one again.”

Dagger stopped on a photo of Géraud at a restaurant table. The man seated across from him wasn’t Kerr or Vasiliev.

“That’s Briggs,” Blackjack said.

“Vasiliev. Kerr. Briggs.” Beacon straightened. “One so-called financier met with all three of them, and no agency in the world has a dossier on him.”

“We’ve spent two weeks asking who Vasiliev worked for,” Dagger said. “Maybe that was the wrong question. Kerr’s network was taken down, and no one ever found who protected him. Briggs should’ve been charged years ago, but the investigation was shut down first. Vasiliev ran a private bank for thirty-eight years, and his own service never found it. Three men who should’ve been caught, and one man who met with all three of them.”

“Photographs prove they met but not why,” said Blackjack. “See if you can find a connection between his businesses and theirs.”

Dagger searched for everything he could find on Géraud while I returned to the photographs. By nineteen hundred, he’d found all there was, and it wasn’t much. Along with running a private finance firm in Geneva called Géraud Capital, he held a few board seats at respectable institutions and had offices, as well as a residence, in the better part of the city and an estate on the outskirts. It was a public snapshot of the life of a wealthy man, and none of it tied him to Vasiliev, Kerr, or Briggs.

We took a break to join the others for dinner at the main camp, then Dagger and I returned to the command center.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said to him two hours later.

“We’ve had this conversation before. You said you didn’t need company.”

“I don’t.”

“And I told you I did.”

“I’m almost through this batch, then I’ll quit for the night,” I said.

It had come in from the DGSE, and all the images were taken in Geneva. After hours of looking at Géraud, every photo looked like the one before it.

I was near the end of the series when one made me stop. I leaned in and rubbed my eyes, convinced I must be seeing things.

Facial recognition hadn’t been able to identify him, but I could.

“Dagger?” My voice cracked.

When he stood and stepped closer, I pointed at the image.

“That’s my father.”