She stared at it on his screen for a few seconds, then returned to what she was doing.
I stared at it longer.
Doc’s cell pinged, and he read the screen. “Two contract operators will be in Deira by the time our team is on the ground.”
“Copy,” I muttered before turning to Katarina, who was still staring at the screen. “How about a break?”
“That actually sounds really good.”
I hadn’t expected her to agree but was glad when she did.
“We’re about to have lunch,”Anna said when we stopped at the main camp to check in. “Will you join us?”
“That would be brilliant. I’m starving,” Katarina responded, surprising me for the second time.
Anna motioned to the kitchen table, where Lyra and Henry were both on their laptops. “Sit down. It will be ready in a few minutes.”
Lyra closed hers. “Where are we?”
“We believe we’ve located Vasiliev in Dubai,” Katarina said. “Doc received overhead from his contact at the NRO early this morning. The image shows a man whose build matches Vasiliev, on a rooftop terrace in a building that fits his operational pattern. The quality isn’t good enough to confirm with certainty, but it’s the best read we’ve had on him.”
“And his network?”
“Every asset Dagger has been tracking for him went quiet yesterday morning. Not a call, not a wire, no movement. Hellmer has been locked since yesterday afternoon. Every account tied to him is frozen. He has no money moving anywhere we can see,” I said.
“Which means he’s about to move.”
I nodded. “That’s what we think. Kingston and Gunner are en route to Dubai now. Doc has reached contract operators through his Gulf contacts, and they’ll be in position to support our team when they land.”
Lyra’s gaze moved between mine and Katarina’s. “You said the image isn’t certain.”
“The build fits. The location fits. But we can’t confirm it’s him,” I responded.
“And you’ve committed a team to that?”
“That’s right,” I said. “If we wait for certainty, he moves and we lose him.”
“What else do you have?” Lyra asked.
I brought her up to speed on Dagger’s trace work and on Givre’s resolution of Limassol Continental Holdings, explaining how the Cypriot shell Hellmer had funded years ago and left alone was sitting full and outside the reach of the freeze.
When Anna brought bowls of soup to the table, Henry closed his laptop. “Julian will be picking up Polina’s ashes today and bringing them to the main camp.”
“Thank you,” Katarina murmured.
We returnedto the command center.
Doc’s contacts held the building’s exits in Dubai throughout the afternoon. No one in, no one out. The man we believed was Vasiliev had gone inside at zero six hundred Dubai time and hadn’t come back out since.
Hornet was on the perimeter feed at the other end of the table. I stayed on the Dubai feed with him.
Katarina worked at her end of the table with her laptop open and Horatio’s journal beside it. She didn’t come up for anything all afternoon.
Henry and Julian delivered baskets of food at eighteen hundred with orders from Anna that we all needed to eat.
Kingston and Gunner checked in wheels-down at nineteen hundred.
“Still no movement on the building,” Kingston said.
