"Every skeleton accounted for."
He thumbs through it, uninterested in the details, then sets it aside.
"Good. Let's talk ports."
I pull out a chair, tilt it back, and fix my eyes on the maps.
The city's docklands are lit in colored highlighter, each block coded for risk, loyalty, and opportunity.
Red for contested, green for ours, yellow for the ones not worth holding.
The Donnellys control the east, but only on paper.
The O'Duinns are bleeding them in Docklands proper, and the Kellys are circling the customs office like carrion.
"First order of business," I say, tracing a finger along the Ringsend perimeter.
"We consolidate here. Any Donnelly loyalists who don't switch allegiance by Friday are out, permanently. No exceptions. You see this stretch?"
I draw a line through the old rail yard.
"That's where the O'Duinns are going to move. They'll throw bodies at it, but I want them on the defensive. Move the Albanian crew in tonight, but keep them dry until I call."
Fiachra leans in, squinting at the map.
"That's a lot of bodies for a dead yard."
"It's not the yard I want," I say.
"It's the access tunnel. The Donnellys were sitting on it for years but never bothered to fortify it. It leads straight into the south docks. Customs won't have eyes on it, not for weeks."
He nods, lips pursed.
"Fine. What about the Italians? They're using the east dock as a pipeline. We squeeze too soon, we lose their heroin channel."
I almost smile.
"We won't squeeze. We'll absorb. Start buying debt at a discount, but only the small creditors. Let the big ones sweat. When the time's right, we own the pipeline, and the Italians don't know we've done it until the next shipment goes missing."
Fiachra watches me, a flicker of something like pride in his eyes.
"You've thought this through."
"I don't have the luxury of not thinking," I say.
We go through the rest of the city in the same manner—north to south, block by block, every inch of territory a miniature war.
The only real threat is the O'Duinns, and even they are a dying brand—more noise than action, but enough that they could slow us down if we get careless.
Fiachra taps at a separate map, this one marked in blue.
"What about this?" he asks.
It's a run through the Wicklow Mountains, a corridor that doesn't appear in any official record.
Only a handful of men in the world know about it, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.
"That stays off the books," I say.
