Page 11 of The Dangerous Dance

I let her go because she is twenty-one years old and small and the last time I took a woman like that and locked her in a room of mine, I told myself it was justified, and I was wrong, and I've spent years not adding another name to that list.

That's the truth and it doesn't make me feel better about it.

I crouch next to the south wall vent. She came through here. Four feet wide, rust around the bolts, a visible gap on the lower left corner that someone should have flagged in the last security review but didn't, because my men have gotten comfortable and comfortable is what I've apparently been allowing.

There's a small thread of dark fabric caught on the lower bolt. From her jacket, when she came through. Or from when I put her on the floor.

I take it. I stand. I look at the thread for a moment and then I put it in my pocket with the other thing I took from her — or rather, placed on her — during the brief thirty seconds I had her on the ground and her attention was on not being held there.

The tracker is the size of a coat button. I manufacture my own, because the commercial options are identifiable to anyone who's looking for them and the people I deal with usually are. Seventy-two-hour battery, which I can extend remotely. It transmits to a receiver I keep on my person and a secondary app that three people on the planet have access to, one of whom is me.

I pressed it to the inside hem of her jacket while she was focused on the grip around her wrist — the benefit of a physical altercation with someone who is very good. They spend their attention on the thing you're visibly doing and you do the other thing in the peripheral.

She is good. She didn't feel it.

I pull out my phone and check the receiver. The signal is clear. She's moving northeast at a walking pace, which means she left on foot and she's not running, which tells me she doesn't think she's being followed.

Good. I need her to keep thinking that.

I call Conor from the car on the way back.

"I need someone," I tell him. "Not family. Freelance, but vetted, and I mean actually vetted. Someone who can run a tail without being made." I pause. "And Conor. This one is between us. Just us. You understand what I mean."

"Aye," he says, without asking why. This is one of the things I rely on Conor for. "I know a man. Former Garda surveillance. He's been freelancing since he left the force. Good at quiet."

"Get him. I want the tail running by morning."

"What's the target?"

I watch the city go past the window — yellow light, a woman walking a dog too small for the weather, a cab cutting across two lanes without indication. "I'll send you the tracker coordinates. Female, early twenties, Russian. She'll go to ground in the outer boroughs — probably Queens or Astoria. She's careful. Whoever you send needs to be better than careful."

"Understood." A pause. "Do you want to know what she's doing, or do you want to know everything she's doing?"

"Everything," I say.

I hang up.

The footage starts arriving by noon the next day.

Conor's man — I never learn his name, which is the arrangement — is better than advertised. The first clips are timestamped early morning, exterior of an apartment building in Astoria, and she is already different from the woman I had on the floor of the warehouse. Her hair is down. She's wearing a pale coat that's wrong for the cold, the kind that marks her as someone who hasn't calibrated to a New York winter yet. She is buying coffee from a cart on the corner with the ease of someone who does this every day, except she's been here a week at most and the ease is therefore performed and very well performed.

She stands at the cart and looks at her phone and takes her coffee and goes back into the building and the footage ends.

I watch it three times.

The second set comes in the early afternoon. The ballet studio, four blocks north of the apartment. She arrives with a bag over one shoulder and a coffee that's not from the corner cart, which means she took a different route. She is inside for two and a half hours. There's no interior footage, for obvious reasons, but she exits looking exactly like someone who has spent two and a half hours in a ballet studio — flushed, looser in some places, more deliberate in others.

She is, I note with the detachment I'm applying to this entire exercise, extraordinarily graceful.

I note it once and then I close the clip.

There is a third set. She meets someone — a woman, similar age, red-haired, not a threat profile I recognize — at a café near the studio. They sit for an hour and a half. The man I hired wasn't able to get audio, which I add to the list of things I'll address. They seem easy with each other, comfortable with silence. Twice the Russian girl — Nadia, I've started thinking of her as Nadia rather than 'the target,' which is a small and annoying development — says something that makes the red-haired woman laugh.

I sit at my desk at half past eleven at night watching footage of a woman I should have handed to Conor twelve hours ago laugh at something she said to her friend, and I think: I should close this and go to sleep.

I watch the clip again.

There is nothing operationally useful in a target's laugh. I catalogue it and move on.