Page 125 of The Dangerous Dance

She absorbs this. "What's he like."

I look at the incident map. "Imagine the most controlled version of everything I am," I say. "And then imagine he's been doing it twenty years longer."

She looks at the window. "That's not reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be accurate." I pause. "But he listened. And he responded to what I said rather than to what he'd decided before I said it, which is — more than I expected."

"Rina," she says.

I look at her.

"You mentioned Rina," she says. "To him."

"Yes."

She is quiet for a moment. "That was a risk."

"Yes," I say. "It was."

"Did it work."

I look at the incident map. At the three names I've added to the specific internal list I keep, the list of people who died in operations I was running, the list I've been keeping since I was twenty-four and which I will keep for the rest of my life. "He said three days. So I think so."

She nods.

She turns back to the incident map.

I watch her for a moment — the focused quality of her, the way she moves through the analysis with the same economy she brings to everything.

"Nadia," I say.

She looks up.

"The meeting in three days. I need you to be — the full version."

She looks at me. "What does that mean."

"It means I need you to be everything you are. Not managed. Not careful about what you reveal. The actual version, the one with the full intelligence picture and the full analytical capacity and the —" I pause. "The full history. Including the parts that aren't flattering."

She holds my gaze. "You want me to tell Vito Rosso everything."

"I want you to tell him what's true. Because that's the only thing that's going to produce the outcome I need from that meeting."

She is quiet for a moment.

"All right," she says.

"It might be difficult."

"I know."

"He's going to ask things that⁠—"

"Liam." She says my name in the way she does when she's telling me she's heard enough. "I said all right."

I nod.

She goes back to the map.