Page 23 of The Dangerous Dance

I drink my coffee and decide not to examine that.

CHAPTER 10

Liam

I tell myself the first time that it's reconnaissance.

This is not entirely false. The neighborhood where she lives is relevant operational information, and walking it in person gives me a quality of knowledge that surveillance footage doesn't — the feel of the block, the particular sightlines, which storefronts have angles on the apartment entrance and which don't, where the natural foot traffic pools and where it thins. These are things worth knowing about any active target's location. I have walked the perimeters of locations for less compelling operational reasons than this.

I tell myself this on the first morning, and it is approximately sixty percent true, and I accept that margin and keep walking.

She uses the coffee cart on the corner of her block at roughly eight-fifteen. I know this from the footage and I have not timed my walk to arrive at eight-fifteen. I arrive at eight-forty, which means I miss her by twenty-five minutes and can therefore confirm to myself that I wasn't trying to see her, which is the kind of confirmation that only needs to exist because the alternative is also true.

The coffee from the cart is better than I expected. I stand with it near the entrance of a dry goods store that has a clear angle on the apartment building entrance and I watch the street do its morning thing — a woman with a pram, two men in construction gear, a teenager on a bike moving with the specific confidence of someone who has decided traffic laws are for other people — and I think about operational timelines and what the next phase of the Russian problem looks like and whether Declan's south distribution plan has the structural weaknesses I think it has.

I do not think about whether she took the east-facing bedroom or the other one.

I finish the coffee and walk back to the car.

The second time is four days later, and this time I don't construct a justification because the first one was enough work and I'm running short on self-deception resources this week. I walk the block. I note the dry cleaner that's changed its window display. I note a new security camera above the building entrance that wasn't there on the footage from three days ago, which means either the building management installed it or someone else did, and both possibilities are worth flagging to Conor.

I am making a note of this in my phone when I look up and she is walking toward me from the direction of the ballet studio, forty feet away, coat open despite the cold, bag over one shoulder, not yet aware of me.

I have approximately three seconds to make a decision.

I turn into the dry cleaner.

It smells like chemicals and warm fabric and the specific interior air of small businesses that have been in the same location for a long time. A man behind the counter looks up. I tell him I'm dropping off a jacket. He tells me to bring the jacket in. I tell him I'll come back with it, which is the most useless exchange I've had in recent memory, and I leave.

She is past the building when I come back out. I watch her go inside without looking back, and I stand on the pavement and experience the particular quality of a man who has just hidden in a dry cleaner from a twenty-one-year-old Russian operative because he was not ready to see her on a Tuesday morning.

I walk back to the car.

In the car, I sit for a moment.

Then I call Conor.

"The Italian shipment," Conor says when he picks up, before I can speak. Which means it's already happened and he's been waiting to tell me. This is never a good sign — Conor does not wait to deliver good news.

"When."

"Last night. The container yard in Bayonne. Someone hit one of the Rosso shipments — took half the contents and left the rest in a condition that made it very clear the taking was deliberate and the leaving was a message." A pause. "The message reads as Irish."

I look at the steering wheel. "It reads as Irish or it is Irish."

"That's the question, isn't it." Another pause. "Vito's man called this morning. Marco. He was very polite. The kind of polite that means he has already decided something and is giving us the professional courtesy of informing us before he acts on it."

"What did he say."

"He said they've observed a pattern in the targeting of their supply routes that suggests coordination rather than opportunism, and that the pattern has characteristics they associate with Irish operational style, and that Don Rosso would like to discuss the matter at our earliest convenience." Conor lets the word sit. "He used discuss in a way that did not entirely mean discuss."

I close my eyes briefly. "When."

"He suggested tomorrow. I told him I'd confirm."

"Confirm it." I open my eyes. "And Conor — pull everything we have on the Bayonne yard for the last two weeks. Movement, access logs, any of our people who had reason to be in that area. I want it on my desk before the meeting."

"Already started," he says, which is why I keep him.