A laptop sits open on the table, screen casting a cold blue light across the sheaf of printed documents scattered between the whiskey glasses and bloodied napkins.
Killian's tablet is synced to the satellite feed that cross-checks Liam's every claim with the live data pulled from the shell company registries we've been scraping for weeks.
We push him harder than necessary.
Not out of cruelty, but because time is finally short, and pain still works when pride won't.
What spills from him is equal parts smugness and panic—a list of shell corporations and offshore accounts, financial front doors that lead nowhere, until Killian traces the names backward and starts hitting on a pattern.
Padraig didn't just launder money for Moretti.
He structured the entire network himself.
Four fake businesses operating out of Brussels, all tied to a property manager whose passport expired in 2019.
A film production company in Berlin that's never released a single reel, currently holding five million euro in phantom expenses.
A logistics firm registered in Cork, running empty hauls to Oslo and back, signed off with customs stamps from a dockmaster who died two years ago.
An export license under the name of Padraig's dead cousin, renewed twice using a Garda login that traces back to Liam's own IP.
Then there's the flight manifest—a Bombardier Challenger scheduled to land at Shannon Airport under a clean alias, set to arrive in forty-two hours.
The passenger list is redacted, but the tail number has been used twice before.
Once to land in Palermo, once in Tangier, both times matching dates when high-profile assassinations occurred within a day.
Killian cross-checks the airstrip handlers.
One of them made a deposit three days ago to an unlisted account that shares a routing path with the Brussels firms.
It's not circumstantial.
It's designed.
Ruairí reviews the spread in silence, then nods.
That's enough.
We call Padraig.
Ruairí dials the number from the landline.
No encryption.
No burner.
No intermediary.
He doesn't mask the number because he wants Padraig to know who it is.
He doesn't bother with preamble either.
When the call connects, he speaks with the kind of restraint that draws blood all on its own.
"Liam's here," he says, tone flat, clipped only by choice.
"He's not dead. Yet. But he's talking. And we didn't need much to start matching your money to Moretti's books."
