Anna was in the kitchen when I came inside.
“You’re up early,” she said, glancing up from the dough she was kneading on a bread board.
“Work called.”
She filled a cup with coffee and handed it to me.
“You’re a godsend. Thank you.”
“I’d ask if you slept well, but that would be a silly question, now, wouldn’t it?”
“Like a log, Anna.” I winked and leaned forward to kiss her cheek.
She chuckled and kept at it as I walked into the great room.
“Bishop, wait!” she called after me. “I was hoping you and Katarina could help bring the Thanksgiving dishes up from the basement later.”
I stopped and turned around. “Sure thing. How many are there?”
“Four boxes. Thank you, Bishop.”
Few enough that I could manage them myself.
“See you later, Anna,” I said, heading for the covered walkway that led to the boathouse.
The first light was breaking over the lake in a thin line at the horizon. I was used to being on the moveat this time of day, and the sunrise usually motivated me. Except today, I wished I were still in bed, with my kitten snuggled up beside me.
Dagger hadhis laptop open when I walked in. Givre was beside him on the phone.
When I approached, he turned the screen toward me and pushed two sheets of paper across the table. The first was a one-page summary. The other was a photograph of a hand-drawn diagram. It was done in pencil on graph paper, and the date in the upper right corner was written in Cyrillic—September 1989.
I read the summary. Dagger had been running the private banking institutions Horatio and Mikhail had identified against everything K19 had on Vasiliev’s current shell structure. The same routing appeared in three of the shells Vasiliev was using right now—a beneficial-ownership loop running through one of the old private banking institutions, then out the other side under a different name.
Givre ended her call. “Hamburg is confirming the same routing structure from their end.”
“It’s not noise,” I said.
“No,” Dagger said. “It’s not.”
Katarina walked in twenty minutes later, read the summary like I had, then looked at the photo Dagger set on the table in front of her.
“That’s Horatio’s handwriting.”
“Yes,” Dagger said.
She held it beside the routing chart. “He found this in 1989,” she said.
Dagger nodded. “It matches the current network exactly.”
She set both down. “Then, we know what we’re looking for.”
Mercury came through the door two minutes later. She picked the summary page up from the desk.
Nobody spoke while she read.
She set it down, lifted the photograph, held it for a moment, then set that down too.
“My father and Mikhail watched Romanov take shape in the last years of the Soviet Union,” she said. “They were the only two people in the West who understood what they were looking at while it was still coming together. The men behind it killed them for it before they could prove any of what they knew.”
