Page 119 of The Dangerous Dance

"There's more," he says.

I stop with my jacket half on. "Tell me."

"The pattern of the attack. The entry points. The timing between the three locations." He pauses. "Someone knew our rotation schedules. Not general knowledge — the specific rotation I updated four days ago, the one that went to six people and nobody else."

Six people. I run them in my head in the specific rapid way of someone who has been building this list since the Connolly intelligence, since the Antwerp shell, since a woman in a coffee shop with a case in her hand told me Viktor had been more patient than I'd given him credit for. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I say again.

I hang up.

Nadia is in the doorway.

She heard the protocol. She's been awake — I can tell from the quality of her, the specific alertness that isn't sleep-woken but has been waiting. She looks at me with the expression she has when she's already running the analysis and is waiting for the data to catch up.

"How bad," she says.

"Three confirmed dead," I say. "Possibly more. Three simultaneous locations."

She closes her eyes for one second. Then she opens them. "They knew the rotation."

"Yes."

"Four days old," she says.

"Yes."

"That means the leak is current. Not historical. Not Connolly's residual network." She holds my gaze. "Someone active."

"I know." I button the jacket. "I'll call you from the compound."

"I'm coming with you."

"Nadia—"

"I know Viktor's methodology," she says. "I know how he runs simultaneous offensive operations. I know what the pattern of this attack looks like from the inside of his planning process." She meets my eyes. "You need that right now."

I look at her.

She is right. She is, with the specific clarity of someone who has been inside the operation I'm now trying to understand from outside, entirely right.

"Two minutes," I say.

She's ready in ninety seconds.

The compound at half past four in the morning has the specific quality of a place that has received bad news and is still in the process of absorbing it. Men move with the controlled urgency of people who have tasks and are doing them because doing them is what there is to do when the alternative is standing still with the shape of what's happened.

Declan is already there.

I see him from across the compound entrance, in conversation with two of the senior capos, and the quality of him is different from the last six months — not the defensive distance, not the manufactured fracture. He is present in the specific way of someone who has decided which side of the line he's standing on and is standing on it with both feet.

He sees me.

He crosses.

He looks at Nadia beside me and he nods at her — brief, professional, the acknowledgment of someone who has made his assessment and filed it — and then he looks at me.

"Red Hook is the worst," he says. "I've been there. Three of ours confirmed. Pearse, Gallagher, and—" He stops. "Donnelly."

Donnelly. Twenty-three years old, two years with the family, a kid from Cork who could fix anything with an engine and who had a way of making the older men laugh. I close my eyes briefly. "The families."