Page 31 of The Dangerous Dance

I didn't arrive at clean answers to any of those questions.

I made more coffee.

By the second day I've constructed something that resembles a reason to be here rather than at the compound. It is a working reason — there are things I can do from the safehouse that I cannot do as efficiently from anywhere more visible, primarily the secondary analysis of the Bayonne yard records and a set of correspondence with a contact in Cork who has information about Russian financing routes that he'll only transmit through channels that require my personal encryption key. These are real tasks. They take real time.

They also take approximately four hours, which leaves the remainder of the day less accounted for.

I work at the kitchen table. She works at the other end of it, which is an arrangement that happened without discussion on the second morning when she got up and made coffee — she makes better coffee than I do, which I've decided not to mention — and sat down at the far end with her phone and the particular focused stillness of someone running their own internal calculations. We work in parallel. We speak when something requires speaking and otherwise we don't, and I find, with the kind of surprise that tells you something about what you've gotten used to, that the silence is not uncomfortable.

My phone rings at intervals. Mackenzie is the most persistent.

She calls at nine, which I let go to voicemail. At eleven, which I answer briefly and tell her I'm working from an alternate location and everything is fine. At two, which I answer and which produces the following exchange:

"Where are you."

"Working."

"You said that at eleven."

"It's still true."

"Liam." Her voice has the specific quality it gets when she's decided that being patient has served its purpose and she's ready to be direct. "Declan's been talking to Connolly again. I saw them together this morning at the east building and Connolly had that face he gets when he thinks he's winning something."

I set down my pen. Across the table, Nadia does not look up from her phone, but I see the slight shift in her posture that means she's listening. "What time."

"Half nine. I was on my way in and they were coming out. Declan saw me and said something to Connolly and Connolly left. But Liam — he looked—" She stops. "He didn't look like himself."

"How did he look."

A pause. "Like he was trying to decide something."

I sit with that. Declan deciding something with Connolly in proximity is either Declan doing what I asked — keeping his own counsel, working the south distribution plan, maintaining his relationships — or it's Declan doing what Connolly wants, which is the version I've been trying to prevent by giving Declan the specific purpose of keeping Mackenzie safe and occupied.

The irony of Mackenzie reporting on Declan while I'm supposed to be keeping her out of it is not lost on me.

"Go home," I tell her.

"I'm not⁠—"

"Kenzie." I use the same tone I used when she was sixteen and about to do something inadvisable, which is a tone I hoped I'd retired by now. "Go home. I'll deal with Connolly."

"You're not here to deal with anything."

"I'll be back tomorrow."

"You said that yesterday."

"Tomorrow," I say with more certainty than I have, and she makes a sound that means she knows I don't have it but is going to let me keep it for now, and hangs up.

I set the phone on the table.

Nadia says, without looking up: "Your sister."

"Yes."

"She sounds competent."

"She's twenty-two."