"I don't believe in bad luck."
He nods. "What else?"
"Two weeks after that. Financial arrangement we were putting together with an external partner about guns. Early stages, nothing public, nothing on paper yet. Partner calls me to say he's been approached with a counter-offer from a third party he didn't recognize. Counter-offer that was suspiciously specific about what we'd discussed."
Tempest is quiet for a moment. "What did the partner do?"
"Came to me. He's been reliable for eight years, I believed him." I pick up my glass. "The third incident was last week. Security adjustment I made internally. Changed some of the movement patterns for one of our drug operations. The adjustment hadn't been communicated widely. Within four days, there was activity on the route I'd moved away from, like someone was checking whether we'd left it."
"Like they were told you'd be gone from it," Tempest says.
"Like they were told exactly that. And just this morning, I got a call from my realtor. The property I had her inquire about had been stolen out from under us. I hadn’t made it public knowledge that we were looking into a property for a new restaurant near the pier. Yet, I’ve been outbid, and the person who put in a higher bid was looking to build an Italian restaurant.” I down my bourbon. “My realtor managed to finalize our bid, but we paid higher than we had anticipated.”
He's quiet for a moment, glancing down at the beer bottle in his hands. "You've got a leak," he says after a minute of silence.
I don't deny it.
"How tight is the circle on these things?" he asks. "Who knew about all four?"
"That's what I'm working out. The overlap isn't as clean as I'd like. But it’s not just me, Tempest. Daithí and Prior have had the same issues."
“Fuck, you’ve definitely got a leak. But there's someone in the overlap for all three families. We need to figure out who had access to information from not only your business, but the Delaneys and the Kings.”
"Or there's one person with access to information from multiple sources, which is a different problem." I look at him. "It doesn't have to be someone in the room. It could be someone adjacent to someone in the room."
Tempest considers that. "Someone doing the talking without knowing what they're doing."
"Or knowing exactly what they're doing and letting someone else be the liability."
"You've got people watching?" Tempest asks.
"I've been watching for about two weeks now."
"And?"
"Nothing confirmed. A couple of things I'm not satisfied with, but nothing I can move on yet." I look at him. "I needed to say it out loud to someone outside the house."
He nods, understanding what that means. Saying it out loud to someone outside the house means I've been carrying this alone for weeks while living and working with the people who might be responsible for it. That requires a level of compartmentalization that gets heavy after a while, even for me.
"Could it be someone new?" Tempest asks. "Someone you brought in around the time the incidents started?"
"I've looked at that. There were some additions in the six months prior. I'm not ruling any of them out, but the specificity of the financial information in particular narrows it. That wasn't broadly held."
"What about the Delaney connection?" he asks.
I look at him.
"Not pointing fingers," he says. "I'm asking a question. You've got a new alliance forming, that creates access in both directions. Someone in the Delaney house could have gotten information through the arrangement discussions. That kind of thing gets talked about."
"The incidents started before the arrangement was formalized," I say. "The logistics route was two weeks after the Syndicate meeting, before the Delaney marriage discussion was even on the table in specific terms. The Delaney connection doesn't account for the timeline."
"Fair enough." He leans back. "What about the Morozov situation? What if it's not just a romantic problem? What if Rurik was looking to cause instability, and this is part of the same thing?"
I've thought about this. I've thought about all of it. I’ve gone through every scenario in my head, over and over again.
"Rurik's impulsive," I say. "I don't see him running a long-term intelligence operation. Getting a woman pregnant and hiding their relationship for a year is the limit of his patience for sustained effort." I pause. "That's not dismissing the Morozov angle entirely. But it's not Rurik doing the thinking."
"Could be someone using Rurik."
