Page 22 of The Dangerous Dance

Her name is Dara Morozova. Twenty-three, also Russian, also on a tourist visa issued around the same time as Nadia's. No operational record in any database, which is either because she's clean or because she's better covered. The café footage — which I pulled from a security camera on the adjacent building through a contact who works for the city — showed them together for ninety minutes. Easy body language. The specific ease of people who don't have to perform for each other.

Dara is not, I don't think, primarily operational. She's present for reasons I haven't fully mapped yet — support structure, possibly. A secondary operative kept in reserve. Potentially just a friend, in the specific and complicated sense that anyone in this world ever has a friend who knows what they do.

I add her to the file. I note the apartment building, the floor, the proximity to the ballet studio. I note the coffee cart on the corner that Nadia uses three mornings a week and the dry cleaner two doors down that she passed twice last week and looked at once, which could mean nothing and could mean she's identified it as a useful landmark.

I note the way she walks when she thinks no one is watching versus the way she walks when she knows she's being observed. They are meaningfully different. And I note which one I like better, and then I delete that note because it doesn't belong in an operational file.

I reopen it thirty seconds later because the information is relevant and I am trying to be honest with myself about what relevant means in this context.

She moves differently when she's not performing. Looser through the shoulders. More direct in her line of travel. There's a quality to it that's hard to describe without sounding like something other than a man running a security operation, so I write: subject demonstrates reduced situational performance when unobserved — more direct movement pattern, less ambient awareness behavior. Which is accurate and is also the most clinical possible way of saying something that is not entirely clinical.

I keep the note.

What I know, by the time I close the file at one in the morning, is this:

She is not a blunt instrument. Whoever sent her — and I have a name forming in my mind that I'm not ready to commit to paper yet, a name with Russian organizational ties and a specific interest in destabilizing the Irish-Italian alliance — didn't send her because she's disposable. They sent her because she's good. Good enough that they believed she could run a sustained operation in a foreign city against a target who has been doing this for twenty years, and good enough that they were probably right.

She's also twenty-one, and she is the daughter of a man who was killed for declining an assignment, and she is operating in a city where she knows nobody except the woman with red hair who keeps her light on when Nadia comes home late.

I know this last part because I've started checking the apartment windows in the surveillance footage. The light under the door on the fifth floor, east-facing. It's on when she leaves in the evening and it's still on when the tracker signal — the false one, the coat in the apartment — goes still in the early morning hours.

Someone keeping a light on for you is a small and specific thing. It is also, in a life like the one I've been able to piece together for her, not a small thing at all.

I close the file.

I open it again and add one more note, in a separate section I've created and labeled with the kind of vague heading that will mean nothing to anyone who isn't me: Keep Dara Morozova in reserve. If needed — leverage, protection, extraction option. Not to be used unless necessary. Do not flag to Conor yet.

I look at that last line.

Do not flag to Conor yet is the line where operational practice ends and something else begins, and I know it when I write it, and I write it anyway. Conor is my most trusted man. There is no strategic reason not to flag Dara to Conor. The reason I'm not flagging her is that flagging her would make her part of a chain of information that I can't fully control, and I find, in this particular moment, that there is something about Nadia Volkov's one friend keeping a light on in an Astoria apartment that I don't want to put into a chain of information I can't fully control.

This is not a rational operational decision. I know this.

I close the file. I go to bed.

I lie in the dark and think about what she said in the warehouse — nothing that will hurt anyone — and the way it came out. The kind of honesty you don't choose to give. The kind that escapes.

Then I think about her in the ballet studio, working through a transition with her weight on the wrong hip, and the way she went completely still when I mentioned Rina. Not the stillness of someone caught out. The stillness of someone filing something away and deciding what to do with it.

She is reading me as carefully as I'm reading her.

In the morning, I tell Conor to replace the freelancer with someone better.

"Better how," Conor says.

"Better at not being made by a twenty-one-year-old dancer in under ten minutes." I pour coffee. "Someone with actual surveillance training. Ex-military, if you have one. And tell him the target is specifically trained to detect standard patterns, so he needs to be non-standard."

"Anything else?"

"Tell him to watch the friend too. The redhead." I pause. "Passively. Nothing that could be read as threat."

Conor looks at me for a moment with the expression he uses when he has a question he's decided isn't his to ask. "Understood," he says.

He goes.

I drink my coffee and think about what passively means in this context and whether it means what I want it to mean, which is that Dara Morozova stays comfortable and unaware and keeps leaving the light on.

It's an unusual operational concern for a man running an intelligence file.