16
BLACKJACK
I’d been up since zero four hundred, running the routing at the kitchen table. The chain out of Geneva in 1987 was the same chain Vasiliev was pushing money through last quarter. It was the same bank and payee tier, but there’d been decades between them. Dagger would confirm it at the briefing.
Katarina came out of the bedroom at zero five thirty in one of my flannel shirts, carrying the two journals. She set it on the table, rested her palm on the cover, and drank the coffee I got up and poured.
“You ready for today’s briefing?” I asked her.
“I feel like I’ve been ready for years.”
The pathto the boathouse was frozen hard and slick. We didn’t talk on the walk down, but she held on tight to my arm.
When we arrived at the second-floor command center, Doc was seated at the head of one of the tables.Gunner was beside him, but I didn’t see Razor. Dagger and Givre were at the far end, behind open laptops, and the rest of the teams were scattered at other tables.
Katarina walked past the empty chair beside mine and set the journal between Dagger and Givre.
“I found this yesterday in the basement at the main camp. The first was in a safe at Minerva’s headquarters. The only thing we’ve ever been able to find in it was the word Romanov. This one looks like more,” she said. “I want to know what we’re looking at.”
Dagger opened it, holding it so Givre could see it too. Katarina came around and sat beside me.
Partway through the first few pages, Dagger stopped, raised his head, and gave Katarina a single nod.
“I strongly believe that the routing Horatio documented here is the architecture Vasiliev is moving money through to this day.”
“And?” Doc asked.
“It isn’t going through a Romanov bank. At least not in the way Moscow understands it. That organization moves money through sanctioned channels that the Kremlin tracks. This bank, Hellmer, isn’t on thatlist. Vasiliev’s been running it outside their line of sight for years. Even his own people don’t know it exists.”
“Which means the bombing was paid for with money his bosses don’t know exists,” Givre added.
“Walk us through what this means for Vasiliev,” said Katarina.
“If Hellmer surfaces, he loses it both ways. Every jurisdiction that touches that bank freezes what’s in it within a week, so the independent funding’s gone. That’s the smaller loss. The larger is that Moscow finds out he’s been running a private operation outside their directive for close to four decades. They burn him.”
“He’d come hard at whoever exposed it,” said Doc.
Gunner rubbed his hands together. “And we’d be waiting for the fucker.”
“What’s our next move?” Katarina asked.
Dagger thought it over for several seconds. “We can’t seize it. Nothing we’ve got holds up in the jurisdictions Hellmer’s banking through. What we can do is expose it. Three packets, three inboxes, same hour. One to the US Treasury, one to the German financial regulator in Frankfurt, and the third to the Liechtenstein regulator in Vaduz. That one should be hand-deliveredthrough one of Beacon’s assets so it lands on the right desk instead of getting buried at the front counter. By the time Vasiliev hears about one, the other two will have arrived.”
“Nothing to Moscow?” I asked.
“Moscow’s the point, not the recipient. Send it to them, and they either bury it, use it to leverage him, or fold Hellmer into sanctioned channels. Send it to three regulators, and Moscow finds out the same way everyone else does: from the freeze notices hitting the wires. That’s the version Vasiliev can’t survive.”
Dagger looked between Doc and Katarina.
“Your call,” said Doc.
“Send them today,” she said, then pointed to the journal. “What Horatio and Mikhail began all those years ago ends now.”
Doc picked up his mobile. Dagger had the journal open to the respective pages, and Givre started drafting.
Under the table,Katarina put her hand on top of mine on my thigh and left it there. I turned mine over and closed my fingers around hers.
Lyra’s mobile buzzed against the wood. She read the screen, stepped toward the window, and said into it, “We’re on our way.” She waited for Doc to finish his call before she spoke again.
