Page 120 of The Dangerous Dance

"Conor's on it," Declan says. "He'll go personally."

I nod. "The other two locations."

"Greenpoint lost product and a vehicle. No casualties. Red Hook lost three men and everything we had there. The west side warehouse—" He pauses. "They hit the storage and left. Clean extraction. Professional."

"They knew what was there," Nadia says. She says it to the air, not to Declan, working through it. "The west side warehouse — what was the rotation there four days ago."

Declan looks at her. "Changed," he says, carefully. "Same update as the others."

"Who received the update."

"The six people it went to," I say.

"Then the breach is in that six," she says. "Or in someone those six spoke to without realizing they shouldn't." She meets my eyes. "Viktor uses social extraction as often as direct asset management. He doesn't always need someone on payroll. He needs someone who talks to someone who talks."

"Connolly's network is cleaned," Declan says.

"Not Connolly," she says. "Something newer. Someone who received updated operational information four days ago through a legitimate channel and passed it, possibly without understanding what they were passing, to someone Viktor has access to." She looks at Declan. "Walk me through who received the rotation update. All six. And who those six might have spoken to in the last four days about anything adjacent to operational scheduling."

Declan looks at her for a moment.

Then he looks at me.

"She's right," I say. "Walk her through it."

He nods, once, and turns to Nadia, and the three of us go into the compound building.

The briefing room at five in the morning is not its best version of itself, which is true of most things at five in the morning, but it works. Conor has the incident maps. Nadia has her laptop and the specific focused quality of someone running multiple analyses simultaneously and appearing to be doing one thing while doing several.

Declan presents the six names.

He does it with the specific discomfort of someone naming people he knows, which is the part of this life that doesn't get easier regardless of how long you've been in it. Five men and one woman — the woman being Roise, who received the rotation update because she manages scheduling logistics, and who I note and move past because Roise has been accounted for in ways I'm not going to explain in this room.

"The fifth name," Nadia says. "Brennan."

Declan looks at her. "What about him."

"He's been cleared of active Connolly involvement," she says. "But I flagged in the secondary analysis that Connolly used him as a passive conduit — social extraction, exactly the methodology I'm describing now." She looks at the map. "If Viktor has identified Brennan as a passive conduit, he doesn't need to turn him. He just needs to maintain proximity to someone Brennan talks to."

"Who does Brennan talk to," I say.

Declan is quiet for a moment. "He has a brother," he says slowly. "Not in the family. Civilian. They have dinner every Sunday."

"Does the brother have any connection to⁠—"

"No," Declan says. "He's—" He stops. Something changes in his expression. "He drives a cab. Night shifts, mostly. He told Brennan three weeks ago he got a regular fare. Someone who tips well, talks a lot."

The briefing room is very quiet.

"What does the regular fare look like," I say.

Declan looks at the table. "I don't know. I heard it in passing. Brennan mentioned it at dinner — it was casual, it wasn't—" He stops. "I didn't flag it because it sounded like a man talking about a generous passenger."

"It is a man talking about a generous passenger," Nadia says, without judgment. "Viktor's contact talks to the cab driver. The cab driver talks to Brennan. Brennan, completely without knowing it, mentions something adjacent to operational scheduling to someone Viktor has access to." She looks at me. "There's no malice in it. There's no betrayal. There's just information moving through a chain and someone at the end of the chain who knows what to do with it."

"Can we confirm it," Conor says.

"The cab driver will have records of pickups," Nadia says. "If we can identify the regular fare⁠—"