Page 34 of The Dangerous Dance

She knows about the safehouse because I told her. One of the things I gave Mackenzie when I gave her the briefing two weeks ago was the list of family locations to use in an emergency, with the understanding that she'd never come to one unless something was wrong or she'd cleared it with me first. She has not cleared it with me. She has decided, apparently, that my brother has spent four days off-grid with a Russian operative qualifies as something being wrong.

Roise is here because Roise was pre-cleared for safehouse routing two months ago, when I built the system. They didn't drive themselves — Conor's people moved them, two vehicle changes, a circuit through Queens, a final approach on foot from the laundromat side. The route is designed for this. The route is not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Mackenzie has used it.

Mackenzie looks at me. I look at Mackenzie. Behind her, Roise stands with her tablet already out and her eyes moving over the hallway with the professional inventory of someone who has been told to behave normally and is trying.

"No," I say.

"You've been here four days," Mackenzie says, stepping past me. She does not require invitation. She has never required invitation in her life. "You postponed the Italian meeting, you're managing Conor remotely, and Declan is starting to notice you're not around, which means Connolly is starting to notice, which means we have about a week before your absence becomes a topic of conversation I can't redirect." She sets the groceries on the kitchen counter and turns around. "So I'm here. And Roise is here because you need your actual work done and because she is professional enough to handle whatever—" She stops.

Nadia is in the doorway of the bedroom.

She has, as of this morning, changed into clothes that are hers rather than the spare things the safehouse keeps, which means she has what she needs in the bag she brought. Which tells me she came to the warehouse that night prepared for something other than a quick plant-and-exit. She is leaning against the doorframe with her coffee and looking at Mackenzie with the particular expression she uses when she's assessing something — the one that is almost neutral and not quite.

Mackenzie looks at her. Then at me. Then back at her.

"Hello," Mackenzie says.

"Hello," Nadia says.

"I'm Mackenzie."

"I know who you are."

Mackenzie turns to me with an expression that contains several questions she's decided to sequence rather than ask simultaneously. I read them in order: Is she the Russian? Have you lost your mind? How long has this been happening? Are you all right? And underneath all of them, forming the actual foundation: I'm going to handle this, just give me a moment to assess the situation.

"Roise," I say, turning to where she has positioned herself near the door with the specific posture of someone who is professionally invisible and personally very much the opposite. "Thank you for coming. The Cork correspondence needs a response by end of day — the files are on the secondary server under Galway-7, the encryption key is in the usual place."

"Of course." Her voice is even. Her eyes have not gone to Nadia with any readable frequency, which is either genuine professional composure or a calibrated performance of it. Either way it's doing the necessary work. "I'll set up at the kitchen table."

She does. Mackenzie grabs my arm and steers me to the corner near the window with the practiced authority of someone who has been steering me since she was old enough to reach my arm.

"Is she the Russian," Mackenzie says, very quietly.

"Yes."

"The one from the warehouse."

"Yes."

"The one you have been—" She stops herself. Restarts. "The one the surveillance has been on."

"Yes."

She looks at me for a moment. Her expression does the thing it does when she's running through implications — fast, thorough. "Okay," she says.

"Okay?"

"I'm not going to perform a reaction. There's no point." She glances toward the bedroom doorway, where Nadia has returned to her coffee and her phone with the apparent ease of someone who is completely comfortable and is actually completely aware of every word being said across the room. "But Liam. I need you to be thinking clearly about this. Not clearly as in—" She searches for the right framing. "Not clearly as in she's dangerous so stay back. Clearly as in — she might be exactly what she appears to be, which is an operative who has given you partial cooperation and might be doing so because it serves her current agenda, and you need to be accounting for that."

"I am accounting for it."

"Are you."

I meet my sister's eyes and I give her the most honest version of my face. "I'm accounting for it alongside other things," I say. "Which I know isn't what you'd prefer to hear."

She exhales. "No. It isn't." She looks at the groceries on the counter. "I brought food because I knew you wouldn't have any and because it gave me a reason to be here that wasn't just I've come to check on your judgment, even though that's exactly what this is." She looks back at me. "So. What do you know about her that isn't in the operational file."

"What makes you think there's more than the operational file."