Page 104 of The Dangerous Dance

A silence. Then: "Liam."

"Yes."

"Come back quickly. Ailish made stew and there's a lot of it and I am being aggressively offered seconds."

I almost laugh. It's the first time something has been funny today and it lands with the specific relief of things that land after a long day of things that weren't.

"Twenty minutes."

"I'll hold them off."

"Heroic," I say.

She hangs up.

I stand in the car park for a moment longer, and I think about a vote and a room full of men and a name said out loud in front of all of them with the specific weight of a thing that can't be taken back.

Not taking it back.

Just going forward.

I get in the car.

CHAPTER 29

Nadia

The security detail arrives on a Wednesday.

Not one person. Not two. Four, rotated in pairs, with a fifth who manages the rotation and reports to Conor and who has the specific quality of someone who has been told to be present without being obtrusive and has interpreted present as very present and obtrusive as a relative term.

The house in Carroll Gardens has, over the course of thirty-six hours, acquired the quality of a location under management. There is a man outside the front who I have named, internally, the Statue, because he stands with the specific stillness of someone who has decided that movement itself is a professional failing. There is a man who does the perimeter of the garden at intervals that are variable enough to be non-predictable but frequent enough to be constant. The other two rotate through the front hall and the adjacent street in a pattern that I decoded on the first morning and which I have not mentioned to anyone because decoding the pattern is a reflex and mentioning that I decoded it would produce a new pattern, which is the kind of operational loop that is more trouble than it's worth.

I am, in practical terms, inside a protective structure.

Protective structures are prisons with better intentions, and I have been in enough of both to know the difference is less significant than people who haven't been in them tend to think.

By day three I have reorganized everything in the kitchen that can be reorganized, completed the secondary analysis on the distribution network that I started the night the photographs arrived, run through every piece of intelligence I can access without flagging to Viktor that I've accessed it, and done three hours of floor work in the sitting room because there is no barre in the house and floor work is what you do when there is no barre and you need to do something with your body before your body does something with you.

On the morning of day four, the fifth man — the one who manages the rotation, whose name is Ciarán and who has the thankless quality of someone responsible for something that is professionally necessary and personally annoying — knocks on the kitchen door to ask if I need anything from the outside, meaning he will go get it, meaning I should not go get it myself, meaning the outside is not currently available to me on a voluntary basis.

I look at him.

He looks at me with the neutral expression of someone who has been briefed extensively and has decided that maintaining the neutral expression is his primary professional contribution.

"No," I say. "Thank you, Ciarán."

He nods. He retreats.

I look at the kitchen.

I look at the garden through the glass, where the fig tree that never produces figs is doing its late November thing, which is mostly being bare and vaguely reproachful.

I start making coffee and I think about what I'm going to say when Liam gets back.

He comes back at half past six.

I hear the front door. I hear him say something to the Statue, who responds in what I've identified as Statue's professional voice, which is two registers lower than his actual voice and which he uses specifically when reporting to Liam. I hear the brief exchange that means the day has been accounted for without incident. I hear his footsteps on the floor of the front hall and then the kitchen.