Page 24 of The Dangerous Dance

I hang up and sit in the car and think about the Bayonne yard and the very specific way Marco said discuss and the pattern of targeting that reads as Irish — and the fact that I have been spending my Tuesday mornings walking the neighborhood of the person most likely responsible for all of it.

She told me in the warehouse that she knew about my history with women. She told her handler she was being managed. She walked out of a ballet studio and past a dry cleaner where I was standing and didn't know I was there, which means I still have that, at least — she doesn't know I've been coming to her neighborhood.

What I've been doing, if I'm honest, is building a file I keep on a private server that Conor doesn't have access to, and visiting her street on Tuesday mornings, and watching surveillance footage of a woman leaving a ballet studio at a frequency that does not have a clean operational justification.

And now one of Vito Rosso's shipments has been hit in a way that reads as Irish, which means she has moved on to the next phase of whatever she was sent here to do. Which means the thing I've been studiously not naming is going to require me to do something about it in both directions at once — keep my alliance with the Italians intact and not let them destroy the Russian operative I have been quietly and comprehensively refusing to hand over or neutralize.

I start the car.

Marco calls personally at two.

"Liam." Not Don Costello. First name, which from Marco is either familiarity or a deliberate leveling, and I'm not certain which.

"Marco." I match the register. "You spoke with Conor."

"I did. I appreciate the prompt confirmation." A pause, brief and calibrated. "I want to say, before tomorrow, that I'm coming to this conversation without a conclusion already drawn. What happened in Bayonne is significant. How we respond to it is more significant."

"I appreciate that."

"The pattern we've identified is consistent with Irish operational methodology," he says. "I want to be clear about what that means and doesn't mean. It means someone who knows Irish methodology, or who wants us to think they do." He lets that sit. "Vito asked me to make that distinction explicitly."

He's telling me they're open to the possibility that someone is manufacturing Irish attribution. He's telling me this before the meeting, which means either he already has a different suspect or he's extending me a professional courtesy that costs him very little and costs me considerably more — the obligation of reciprocity.

"I'll bring everything we have on the Bayonne yard," I say. "Our access logs, movement records, anyone we can place in or near that area in the relevant window."

"Good." Another pause. "How are things internally."

The question is casual and absolutely not casual. "Stable," I say, which is true in the way that most things I say to the Italians are true — accurate at a specific altitude and less accurate the closer you get.

"Good," he says again. "Tomorrow, then."

He hangs up.

I sit at my desk with the movement reports Conor has already assembled and think about what stable means.

It means I have a Russian operative moving against me and against my allies. It means I haven't told my allies about her. It means I haven't fully examined why.

Declan is in the east building when I get there, which means he went to the building rather than coming to me, which is a choice I note without comment. The south distribution plan is in a folder on the table between us, and it is, as I suspected when he mentioned it, actually good. Structurally sound, logistically feasible, and accounting for two variables I wouldn't have thought to weight the way he's weighted them — which tells me he's been thinking about this for longer than the confrontation between us would suggest.

"It's good," I tell him.

He looks at me like he's waiting for the qualifier.

"It's genuinely good, Declan. Run it."

He nods. Takes the folder back. There is a moment of something that could be the beginning of normal between us if we both left it alone, and we both have the sense to leave it alone.

"Mackenzie's been around," he says.

"I know."

"She's going to get involved in all of this whether we tell her to or not."

"I know that too."

He looks at the table. "She shouldn't be around if things get worse before they get better. With the Italians, with whoever's been hitting the supply routes." He pauses. "She's capable. I know she's capable. I just⁠—"

"I know," I say, and I mean it in the specific way that one person means it to another when the thing they're both circling is the same thing from different sides — the particular fear that comes with loving someone you can't fully protect.