Page 126 of The Dangerous Dance

I go to find Declan, who needs to know about the Italian partnership proposal before he hears it from someone else, which is the lesson I've been late to learn and am trying to apply consistently.

I find him in the main hall.

He listens.

He is quiet for a long moment after I finish.

Then he says: "Connolly told me this would happen."

"I know," I say.

"And it's happening. And it's not what he said it would be."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

He looks at the hall. At the family around him, moving through the compound with the focused quality of people who have had a bad night and have come through the other side of it into the specific determination of people who know what they're fighting and have decided to fight it. "All right," he says.

"All right," I say.

We stand in the main hall together.

Outside, the morning does what mornings do.

Inside, we are deciding what comes next.

That, I think, is the only thing we've ever had.

CHAPTER 33

Nadia

The idea comes to me at three in the morning on a Thursday, which is the hour when true things surface because the managed things have finally exhausted themselves.

I've been lying awake with the Vore intelligence summary open on my laptop and the specific quality of thought that happens when you've been turning a problem for long enough that you stop turning it and it starts turning you. The problem is this: Viktor is building toward something and we are responding to it, which is the correct response to the information we have and the wrong position to be in strategically. Responding means he sets the pace. He sets the pace because he has more information about his own operation than we do. We have what I can give them from the outside of his network, which is considerable, and what the TLC records and the Connolly residual analysis and the pharmaceutical intelligence have produced.

It is not enough.

What would be enough is someone inside.

I look at the ceiling.

I look at the Vore summary.

I think about Viktor's voice in the coffee shop saying you have the access, you have the opportunity, which was about me being inside Liam's operation, and I think about what it looks like from the other direction — what it would produce if I were inside Viktor's operation with the same access and the same analytical capacity I've been applying to the Irish files for the last two months.

I think about my father.

Not the version of my father that Viktor invokes — the asset, the legacy, the debt I supposedly owe to the memory of a man who was killed by the people I'm currently working for against his wishes. The actual version. The man who played chess with me in the evenings and taught me to read a room before I walked into it and who, at the end of his life, declined an assignment because he'd found the line he wasn't willing to cross.

My father's line.

I've been looking for mine.

I think I've found it, and finding it is pointing me somewhere specific.

I tell Liam at breakfast.

This is deliberate. Breakfast is the hour when he's most operational — the coffee is made and the day's information is organizing itself and he's at the table with the focused clarity of someone whose mind has already been working for an hour before his body caught up. He receives information better at breakfast than at any other time of day. I've catalogued this. I use it.