Page 123 of The Dangerous Dance

"Vito is not asking for⁠—"

"I know what Vito is asking for," I say. "And I'm telling you the answer is no. Not because I'm not listening, not because I don't understand the operational reasoning, but because the answer is no." I pause. "Now let me tell you why, and I need you to take this back to Vito and I need him to actually hear it."

A pause. "All right."

"Nadia Volkov identified the Connolly asset. She handed us the pharmaceutical evidence. She has been providing intelligence on Viktor's methodology that has allowed us to stay ahead of his operational sequence rather than reacting to it." I keep my voice even. Clinical. The register he responds to. "Three men died last night. Not because of anything she did. Because Viktor has been running a social extraction operation through a chain we've now identified, which we identified because of her analysis." I pause. "If we had handed her over three months ago, or three weeks ago, or this morning, we would not have that analysis. We would not have the Connolly intelligence. We would have a debrief that told us what she knew then, not what she's continuing to learn, and we would have lost the operational relationship with someone who has chosen — repeatedly, at personal cost — to work with us rather than against us."

Silence.

"She's not an asset we're managing," I say. "She's someone who made a choice. And the way we respond to that choice is going to tell every person in our world who might consider making a similar choice exactly what that choice is worth." I pause. "Is that the message Vito wants to send?"

A longer silence.

"One moment," Marco says.

I wait.

I look at the incident map. Nadia has turned slightly. Not to look at me — she's looking at the window, at the cold morning, at the compound outside. Her hands are still flat on the table. She is very still.

Marco comes back. "Vito wants to speak with you directly."

"Put him on."

A brief pause. Then: "Liam." Vito Rosso's voice. I've spoken to him directly maybe a dozen times, and each time the specific weight of it is the same — the quality of a man who has been the most powerful person in most rooms for long enough that it's settled into something that doesn't require performance.

"Don Rosso," I say.

"Tell me why I should trust the judgment of a man who is personally involved with the asset in question," he says. Directly. Without preamble.

"Because the personal involvement is the result of the operational relationship, not the other way around," I say. "Because I saw what she chose, repeatedly, before any personal dimension existed, and the choices were consistent. Because a man who has been married to a woman who saved his life despite every reason not to understands what it looks like when someone's choices tell you more than their file does."

A silence.

"That's a bold reference," Vito says.

"It's an accurate one," I say.

Another silence. Longer. I wait it out.

"What do you propose," he says.

"A meeting. Nadia, Marco, you, me. She presents her intelligence directly. She answers your questions directly. You make your assessment based on the actual version rather than the secondhand version." I pause. "If after that meeting you still want to demand she be transferred to your operation, we'll have that conversation. But I don't think you will."

"Why."

"Because you're a man who responds to people who choose things at personal cost," I say. "And she's done nothing but."

The silence this time has a different quality — not deliberation exactly, but something more like the specific quiet of a man who has already decided and is determining whether to let you see it.

"Three days," Vito says. "Bring her in three days. My house."

"Done," I say.

"Liam." He pauses. "One more thing. This Russian network. The scope of it."

"Yes."

"We want to come in," he says. "Not to take over the Irish operation. To work alongside it. To bring what we have to the problem you're facing, because the problem you're facing is the problem we're all facing and we are stronger solving it together than separately." He pauses. "That's the other thing Vito wants. Not as a condition. As a proposal."