Page 38 of The Dangerous Dance

Mackenzie, at the counter, has stopped pretending to be busy.

Roise sets her tablet down. "Go on."

"The Cork contact has flagged a series of payment fragmentations he can't account for. He thinks it's a laundering operation. He's wrong. It's a financing structure being used to move operational funds through what looks like commercial activity. The fragmentation is the point — not concealment, signaling. Each fragment is a confirmation message to a counterparty that the next phase is funded." I keep my voice flat. "And the methodology is structurally identical to the cash flow we used to fund the Bayonne hit."

Silence.

Then Mackenzie says, mildly: "We."

"The Russian operation," I say. "The one I was attached to. Which is the same answer to the question Roise is about to ask, which is how I know any of this." I look at Roise. "It's a financing pattern designed by people I came up around. The two-day lag in the clearing sequence is a tell. If your Cork contact knows his business, that one detail will mean something to him."

Roise looks at me for a long moment. I can see the calculation happening — the professional version of it, separate from the personal version that I can also see running underneath. She is deciding whether the information I'm offering is useful enough to accept from a source she has extensive personal reasons not to trust.

She looks at Mackenzie.

Mackenzie says, "I think we hear her out and verify it."

Roise looks back at her screen. Her fingers move. "I'll verify every detail independently before any of it touches the response."

"I'd do the same," I say.

"And Mackenzie sits with us."

"Yes," Mackenzie says, without being asked twice. "I do."

We work.

It takes forty minutes and produces a response that is, I can see from Roise's expression when she reads it back, considerably more useful than what she'd been drafting. She sends it without commenting on this. I don't comment on it either. Mackenzie watches the whole thing from the other chair with the focused attention of someone who is taking mental notes she will deliver to her brother in their entirety later.

We are not friends. We are three people who have found the specific angle at which cooperation is more useful than the alternative, which is a different thing and which suits us.

"She likes you," Mackenzie says.

We are in the sitting room while Roise takes a call from the Cork contact, who has responded faster than expected, which Roise seems to consider a personal victory and which I think is because the response we drafted was specific enough to signal knowledge that demanded attention.

"She doesn't like me," I say.

"Not the way she likes—" Mackenzie stops herself with the specific self-editing of someone who has decided that particular sentence doesn't need to be finished. "She respects you. Which from Roise is something. She respects competence above everything."

"She loves him," I say.

Mackenzie is quiet for a moment. She is sitting on the arm of the couch in the way that people who grew up without being told not to sit on furniture arms sit on furniture arms, and she is looking at me with the direct assessment I've been on the receiving end of since she arrived and which I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I don't mind. Mackenzie's attention doesn't have the quality of being evaluated for threat potential. It has the quality of being actually seen.

"Yes," she says. "She does."

"And he's not⁠—"

"No," she says. "He isn't." She tilts her head. "Does that matter to you."

I look at the window. The car park. The yellow security light that is on even in the daytime because someone didn't wire it to a sensor. "I'm asking for operational reasons," I say.

Mackenzie looks at the ceiling briefly.

"You keep doing that," I say.

"You keep saying that," she says.

We sit for a moment.