Page 30 of The Dangerous Dance

He is six feet away, hands at his sides, and he is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen from him before, which is the specific expression of a man who has been waiting for something to make sense and has just received information that almost does. "You stood in front of it on purpose."

"Yes."

"Why."

I look at him in the dark of his warehouse and I think about what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it, and what I decide is: honestly, because I've been doing the other thing for long enough that the weight of it has become impractical.

"Because I need you to take me somewhere that isn't here," I say. "And I need you to not call it in."

Silence.

"I'm not defecting," I say. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not switching sides. I'm—" I stop. Try again. "There are things I need to tell someone who isn't Viktor, and you're the only person in this city that qualifies."

He looks at me steadily for a long moment. The structural quality is there, mapping, assessing, but underneath it something else is also happening — I can see it, the faint shift of a man who has been making a private argument to himself for some time and has just been given unexpected external support for one side of it.

"The device," he says.

"Already placed."

"I'm going to need it."

"I know." I reach into my pocket and produce the receiver, the companion piece that makes the device operational, and hold it out to him. "Without this it's inert."

He looks at the receiver in my hand. He looks at me. He crosses the space between us and takes it, which requires him to be close enough that I can see the tiredness in his eyes that is always there and beneath it, tonight, something that is not tiredness.

"If this is a play," he says, low and even.

"It isn't." I hold his gaze. "I'm playing both sides. I want you to know that. I'm telling you that honestly so you can factor it in." I pause. "I'm also telling you that the side I'm playing less honestly is Viktor's."

The something that is not tiredness shifts slightly.

"Come on," he says.

He moves toward the loading bay door and I follow him out into the cold, and the city closes around us with its usual indifference, and I think about burner phones and light under doors and choices that my father made and choices I'm making now that are and aren't the same.

I think about Dara saying I want you to do what's best for you.

The safehouse is twenty-five minutes away, and he doesn't speak during the drive, and I don't either, and the silence between us has a quality that neither of us names because naming it would require the kind of honesty that even I, who have just done the most honest thing I've done in months, am not entirely prepared for yet.

But I am, I think, getting there.

CHAPTER 13

Liam

The safehouse is a two-bedroom flat above a laundromat in Sunnyside that smells permanently of warm fabric and has a view of a car park that I find, in a specific and difficult-to-articulate way, restful. It is not on any of the registered property lists. It is not known to Declan or to Roise or to anyone beyond me and Conor, and I told Conor last night only that I was using the Sunnyside location for a few days and not to flag it unless something critical emerged.

Conor's response was: Understood. And then, after a pause that carried a specific weight: Anything you need sent over?

I told him food and to charge it to the discretionary account. He asked no further questions, which is either professional discretion or the specific tact of a man who has been working alongside me long enough to recognize the particular situation without being told what it is.

I'm not entirely sure what it is myself. That's part of the problem.

She slept, the first night, in the way of someone who hasn't been sleeping enough and whose body has decided that the argument is over regardless of what the mind wants. She was on the couch at half past eleven with her coat still on and her shoes still on and the conversation we'd started about Viktor's timeline unfinished between us, and I looked at her for a moment and then I got a blanket from the bedroom cupboard and put it over her and went to the kitchen and made coffee and sat at the table with Viktor's name in my head and the receiver she'd given me on the table in front of me.

She handed me the receiver. Which means the device in the warehouse is inert. Which means she burned her own operation — not entirely, not permanently, the device can be reactivated with a secondary receiver that Viktor presumably has, but she handed me the control of it as a gesture and gestures in this life are not small things.

I sat with the coffee and the receiver and the sound of the city outside and the specific quiet of a woman sleeping in the next room, and I thought about what I was going to tell Conor tomorrow and what I was going to tell the Italians at the meeting that Marco was expecting and what I was going to tell myself about why I'd driven her here rather than making the call that every clear operational instinct I have was suggesting I make.