“Stay on it.”
“Copy.”
By twenty-one hundred, Doc was on his third call with the Gulf team, and Givre and Dagger had traced every chain out of Hellmer and still couldn’t say what Limassol was funding.
“Time for my perimeter-monitoring shift,” Dagger said. When he went up to the third floor, Katarina and I went up with him.
An hour later,I closed my laptop. “It’s late. Let’s call it a night.”
“I left my tablet on the second floor,” Katarina said. “I’ll go grab it.”
I was about to go with her when my cell rang with a call from my brother. I put it on speaker.
“He came out of the building,” Kingston said. “I closed for the shot. It’s not him. Wrong face, close enough to pass for a brother. We’ve been played.”
“Fuck.” I was already on my feet. “Lock this place down now.”
“Blackjack, we’re too late. There’s a watercraft on the sensor,” said Dagger. “This is what the Limassol money was staged for.”
Jesus fucking Christ.Vasiliev wasn’t in Dubai. He was here.
19
BEACON
“Come on, let’s call it a night,” said Bishop. “Dagger will alert us if there are any updates.” We’d been on the third floor of the command center for hours, waiting for word on whether Reaper and Hornet had found Vasiliev. It could be hours more before they did.
“Right.” I pushed back from the monitors, stood up, and rolled my shoulders. “I left my tablet downstairs. I’ll go grab it.”
“Hang on, I’ll go with you,” he said at the same time his mobile buzzed with a call.
“I’ve got it. I’ll only be a sec,” I said when he held up a finger as if to say I should wait.
I took the stairs down to the second floor in the dark.
The command center was on standby. The screens were dark, and the only sound in the room was the steady hum of servers.
My tablet was on the table by the window, where I’d left it earlier when we’d gone upstairs to watch the overhead images as they came in.
I picked it up, tucked it under my arm, and turned for the stairs.
A movement past the window stopped me before my foot reached the first tread.
A figure wearing a dark coat was moving fast on the lower path. It was a woman.My God, it was Anna.
I opened my mouth to call Bishop when I looked beyond her to the water. A small boat without running lights was nosing up onto the shore. Its bow was already on the sand, and its stern was still in the shallow ice at the edge. A man was standing up inside, one hand on the gunwale, and he was swinging one leg over the side to step out.
One man. Alone.
I dropped the tablet and was out the door before it hit the floor. I raced down the stairs to the lowest level of the boathouse, then took off in a full run.
“ANNA!”I screamed her name, but she was already too far ahead of me to hear it.“ANNA!”I screamed again.
The pines thinned ahead of her, and she broke out of the trees onto the shore before I was through the birch, and by the time I cleared the last of the pines at the treeline, I was still ten yards behind her.
My knee gave out.
“Putain,”I muttered when it went sideways under me on the next stride, and I came down hard on the frozen ground. My good arm hit first. The cast on the other one hit second, and pain shot up into my shoulder.
