Razor approached when the conversation ended.
“Perimeter walk?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing my jacket.
We took the path behind the main camp first. He stopped at the east edge where the tree cover dropped off, and crouched down.
“A guy with a rifle in those birches has a clean shot at the front porch.”
“How clean?”
“Two hundred meters. Maybe one-eighty.”
“Do we clear it?”
“No. You cut it, and he uses the next stand of trees. We need to run a sensor line through here and put a camera on the roof.”
He was on his feet and moving before I caught up.
The lake side was better. The boathouse sat low on the water, and the dock lights Admiral’s team had wired yesterday were up.
“We should sweep the island again tomorrow. Sentinel Cyber runs checks on a periodic schedule, but with your arrival, we need to do another one now.”
“Agreed,” I said.
He stopped two more times: one at the break in the stone fence that marked the property entrance, then again at a lower stretch where a deer path crossed the boundary.
“Who else has vehicle access?” he asked.
“Outside of the team, the caretaker.”
“Change the gate code tonight. Every forty-eight hours from here on.”
“Roger that. Anything else?”
“That’ll do it for tonight. See ya, Blackjack.”
After he got in his SUV and drove away, I returned to the command center and walked the two floors Admiral’s team had built out.
The top one ran the length of the building. Signals intercept stations lined the north wall, facing a bank of monitors that displayed communications feeds across multiple frequencies and encrypted channels.
The SIGINT—Signals Intelligence—processing suite sat adjacent to them, separated by a half wall of acoustic paneling.
On the opposite side was Magnolia’s territory—satellite imagery analysis stations ran beneath a row of large-format displays.
The perimeter security station anchored the east end with live feeds from every camera on the property and a continuous sweep of the lake. A server room occupied the northwest corner behind a climate-controlled door and a keypad.
A financial intelligence platform sat on its own isolated network at a standalone station near the center of the floor. The whole space hummed with equipment that hadn’t existed here four days ago.
Dagger had already claimed it. He’d pulled a chair to the station and was loading the Vasiliev files K19 had on hand into the new platform.
The floor below was where they’d meet. Long tables filled the main room, arranged in a loose horseshoe with enough chairs for the full team. Natural light came off the water through the windows on the dock side.
On the opposite wall, four smaller meeting rooms sat side by side. Each had a door, a glass window, a table, and four chairs. It was enough space for a teamto work through something without the whole floor hearing it.
Two larger conference rooms flanked them at either end for larger team meetings, each with a display screen and a whiteboard.
At the front of the main room, electronic boards on a motorized track hung from the ceiling rafters.
