I finished my coffee and took the mug to the sink.
“I should start my day,” I said, leaning down to kiss each woman’s cheek.
“You know, Anna, I believe our Katarina is falling in love.”
I studied her, unsure what to say. I hardly knew Bishop. Love? Impossible.
Her eyes stayed riveted to mine. “He seems like a good man, like your grandfather was.”
Anna squeezed my hand once and stood. “I told Julian I’d walk down to the boathouse with him this morning. He wants to show me something on the shore.” She set her cup in the sink and pulled her coat off the hook by the door. “I won’t be long.”
“That reminds me, Katarina. I want you to see the spot your grandfather and I used to visit. Bishop should come too.”
“Whenever you’re ready, Babushka.”
“Not yet,” she said. “But soon.”
I was about to leave for the second time when Amaryllis came face-to-face with me in the doorway. I stepped aside, and she sat at the table.
“Aunt Polina, can I ask you something?”
“You may ask me anything, Charity.”
“Is there something romantic between Grandmama and Julian? The way the two ofthem?—”
“Romantic?” Polina’s eyebrows went up, and she made a sound that was half scoff, half laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s—” She stopped.
“He’s what?” I asked.
Her lips pursed. “He’s not her type.”
I let it go. But I thought about it on my walk to the boathouse. Julian was Anna’s age, or near it, and fit considering he had to be in his seventies, and he was quite good-looking. My aunt also seemed to enjoy his company. So how was that not her type? On the other hand, perhaps my grandmother couldn’t envision Anna with anyone other than her brother, regardless of how long he’d been dead.
The command centerwas buzzing when I walked in.
Dagger had Vasiliev’s known operational network on the main screen. It wasn’t new intelligence, but everything they already had was organized into a map of nodes and connection lines. It showed them less than any of us wanted and more than we’d had before we started. I took a seat and set my tablet in front of me. Bishop was already at the head of the table. We didn’t make eye contact.
“This is the baseline,” Dagger said. “Known associates, confirmed locations going back five years, financial movements we can attribute to him directly. The gaps are as useful as what’s there. He doesn’t leave much, and what he does leave is deliberate.”
“He wants to be seen where he wants to be seen,” Delfino said. “His FSB support means he operates with a confidence most targets don’t have. He’s not hiding. He’s controlling the picture.”
“Then, we work the edges of the picture,” Bishop said. “What falls outside the frame is where he actually lives.”
Bishop’s questions landed exactly where my analysis left gaps, not because we planned it, but because his mind moved through a problem the way mine did, but from a different angle. I’d worked alongside a lot of people. It had never felt like this.
His knee pressed against mine under the table. I’d been lost in thought, and he’d noticed.
“Start with the people around him,” I said. “Not his known associates. Go deeper, to the ones adjacent to those. Two degrees out. That’s where the real picture starts.”
“Roger that,” Dagger responded.
“Got a minute?” Bishop asked when the others had returned to their work.
“Of course.”
We walked out of the main room and into the corridor.
“How did it go with Anna and Polina?” he asked.
