Page 7 of Dagger’s Shield

I sent a request, along with the photos, to the same agencies we’d queried for Vasiliev’s images, hoping that at least one of them would have an answer for us by morning.

“Ready to call it a night?” Dagger asked.

“There’s nothing more we can do now, so I suppose we should.”

He half smiled.

“What?”

“You’re a workaholic,” he said, rubbing my shoulder.

“I’m an intelligence operative searching for more information about the man who almost killed me,” I snapped in response.

“A tired one.”

The way he looked at me was too sweet for me to keep arguing with him, so I closed my laptop, put it into its case, and stood.

The wind off the lake was bitter on the walk up the path. He shortened his stride to match mine.

At the door of the main camp, he waited while I opened it.

“Good night, Maëlle.”

“Bonne nuit, Dagger.”

Somewhere, someone knew that man’s name. By morning, we might know it too.

Dagger was waiting in the kitchen of the main camp the next morning when I came in to get coffee.

“Any answers overnight?” I asked.

“I haven’t looked. Beacon called a morning briefing, so I stopped here first.”

Just as I took a cup from the cabinet, Dagger set a travel mug in front of me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I made you some of mine.”

Since it was too early in the morning for me to interrogate him about why, I took a sip.

“Wow, this is good,” I said before taking another one.

He held the door open for me. “You’re welcome.”

I wanted to stick my tongue out at him for passive-aggressively correcting my manners. Instead, I took another sip of the best coffee I’d had since we left Europe.

Blackjack, Beacon, Hornet, Delfino, Lyra, and Henry were already seated when we walked into the command center.

“Before we begin, if I may?” I opened my laptop and looked at Beacon, who nodded.

I loaded the photos onto the screen. “Last night, I found these in the surveillance batches.” As they studied the images, I told them about the number I’d found and how the dates of the first and the last were years apart. “I sent them out to our sources to see if anyone could identify him.”

“Any answers?” Blackjack asked.

Dagger looked up from his laptop. “DGSE has a hit.”

I opened my email. “His name is Aristide Géraud. He’s a financier based in Geneva.”