Page 29 of The Dangerous Dance

"If you go rogue," Dara says, sitting across from me, "I can't come with you."

I look at her. "I know."

"I want you to know that I know that you know." She says it with precision, which is how Dara says things that matter. "Not because you'd ask. You wouldn't. But because I want to say it clearly — I know what the constraints are for me, and I'm not pretending they're otherwise, and I'm not pretending that if you decide to do something I can't follow you into, that it doesn't—" She stops. Takes a breath. "I want you to do what's best for you. I want you to know that I mean that without reservation."

I look at the phone in my hand.

"I'm not going rogue," I say. "I'm being careful."

"That's the same thing," she says gently. "When you're in this operation."

She's right. I know she's right. Being careful in this context means building exits that Viktor doesn't know about, which means not being entirely what Viktor thinks I am, which means that the performance I've been maintaining — the loyal operative, the father's daughter, the weapon that does what it's pointed toward — has a crack in it now that I put there myself by getting a burner phone and standing at farmers markets on Saturday mornings and telling a man with dark tired eyes that I'd prefer he stayed alive.

"Dara," I say.

"Mm."

"When this is done — whatever done looks like — I'm going to find a way to make sure you're clear of it." I meet her eyes. "I don't know how yet. But I'm going to."

She looks at me for a long moment. "Okay," she says. Like I've told her something she already knew and is glad to have confirmed.

We finish our tea.

The secondary warehouse is on a block I've been watching for eleven days.

It is, in several respects, a better target than the first one. Better location, more foot traffic to provide cover for approach, a loading bay that faces the building rather than the street and therefore offers a natural blind angle for anything happening along the east wall. The listening device is small — military grade, the kind that requires specific knowledge to acquire and which Viktor provided without telling me where it came from, which is typical — and it will transmit on a frequency that requires the right receiver to collect, which means even if the Irish find it, finding it tells them very little without the receiver.

This is a clean operation. Technical. Unambiguous.

I tell myself this while I'm crossing the street. While I'm moving along the east wall in the shadow of the loading bay. While I'm identifying the placement point I scouted two days ago — a junction in the exterior ventilation housing, covered enough to survive casual inspection and close enough to the main interior space to collect any conversation within forty feet.

I tell myself this right up until the moment I think: I could let myself get caught.

The thought arrives with the clarity of something that has been forming for a while beneath the surface of other thoughts, and I stop moving for a moment and crouch in the shadow of the loading bay and look at it directly.

If I let him catch me. If I tell him I did it deliberately. If I give him the device and the information about Viktor's timeline and let him make of it what he will — then I have moved the burner phone from preparation to action. Then I have made the choice I've been circling since a Saturday morning at a farmers market.

The device is in my hand.

I think about Dara saying that's the same thing, when you're in this operation.

I think about Viktor's voicemail and my father's name moving through it like a current and the thing my father did at the end of his life — declining an assignment, choosing something other than what he'd been told to choose — and dying for it at forty-four.

My father made his choice at forty-four. I am twenty-one.

I place the device. Or I start to.

And then I stop. And I stand up. And I step out of the shadow of the loading bay and into the lit section of the east wall and I look up at the security camera I know is covering this angle and I stand there for four seconds, which is enough.

Then I move back to the device and I finish placing it.

Then I wait.

He comes himself, which I didn't know for certain but suspected. Eight minutes. He comes through the loading bay door rather than the external approach, which means he was already inside or already nearby, and he moves through the dark with the same quality as the first warehouse — that altered silence, presence that changes the air.

"The camera," he says, from somewhere behind me.

"Yes," I say. I straighten from the placement and turn around.