Page 28 of The Dangerous Dance

It is not, I think, enough for today. But it will have to do.

CHAPTER 12

Nadia

Viktor calls on a Tuesday, a Thursday, and twice on a Saturday — the Saturday I'm at the farmers market. My phone vibrates four times in my coat pocket while I'm talking to Liam Costello at the edge of a park, and I let it. The alternative is answering it in front of him, which I'm not going to do. And because — in the moment — I am more interested in what's in front of me than in what Viktor wants.

He leaves a voicemail on the fourth call. I listen to it that evening, standing at the kitchen window with the city going grey-blue outside and Dara making tea behind me.

The voicemail is three minutes and twenty-two seconds long. The first ninety seconds are about the timeline and the gap between what was projected and what has been delivered and the specific language Viktor uses when he is performing patience rather than exercising it, which I can identify precisely because my father taught me to identify it, because performing patience and exercising it produce different results and it matters which one you're dealing with.

The last ninety seconds are about my father.

Not directly. Viktor never does anything directly. It's one of the qualities that has kept him alive this long. I've studied it the way you study a thing that is trying to manage you. But he talks about legacy and about what is owed to the people who built what I'm currently benefiting from and about the particular kind of failure that happens when someone is given an exceptional opportunity and treats it as ordinary, and underneath all of that, moving through it like a current under still water, is my father's name. Not spoken. Present.

I delete the voicemail.

"How bad," Dara says, without turning from the stove.

"Bad enough."

She brings two cups and sets one beside me and stands at the window next to me in the particular way she has of being present without being demanding, which is the thing I value most about her and which I am aware I do not say often enough. "He mentioned your father."

"Not explicitly."

"He never does." She drinks her tea. Outside, a light comes on in the building across the street, a yellow square in the blue dark. "What does he want."

"Faster. More direct. He used the phrase demonstrable impact." I look at the yellow square. Someone moving behind it, a silhouette of ordinary evening life. "He wants the Irish and the Italians fully fractured before the end of the month. Not just strained. Fractured."

Dara is quiet for a moment. "That's not the original timeline."

"No."

"The original timeline gave us another six weeks."

"The original timeline has been revised." I drink my tea. It's too hot and I drink it anyway because doing something with my hands is useful. "He's getting pressure from above him. Someone wants this moved forward."

"Or something changed," Dara says carefully. "That he hasn't told you about."

I look at her. She meets my eyes and does the thing she does where she tells me something without saying it, which is a skill that requires both intelligence and restraint and which she applies consistently and which I find useful and occasionally infuriating. She is telling me that Viktor's acceleration might not be about my performance. It might be about a development in the Russian operation that changes what's needed and when, and that development may not be something Viktor is going to share with me.

Which means I may be working toward a goal that has shifted without anyone informing me it shifted.

"I need a burner," I say.

She doesn't ask why. She finishes her tea. "I'll get one tomorrow."

"Tonight."

She looks at me. "Tonight."

"Please," I add, which I don't always remember and which she accepts as the gesture it is.

She puts on her coat.

The burner is a basic prepaid, purchased by Dara at a pharmacy four neighborhoods away, paid for in cash. She brings it back wrapped in the pharmacy bag and sets it on the table without ceremony, and I take it out and hold it in my hand and think about what having it means and what I'm going to do with it.

The answer to the second question is: I don't know yet. The answer to the first is: it means I'm preparing for the possibility that what is best for me is not the same thing as what Viktor wants from me, which is a thought that would have been almost unthinkable six months ago and which now sits in my hand along with a prepaid phone in a pharmacy bag and feels almost manageable.