Page 52 of The Dangerous Dance

"Yes."

"How established."

"More established than we'd like. I'm still mapping the edges of it."

He is quiet for a moment. "Vito is patient within reason, Liam. The reason has a limit."

"I know. A week. I'll have something concrete to bring you in a week."

"Three days," he says.

I sit with this. "Five."

"Four."

"Done." I pause. "Marco. The source — it's been operating against both our interests. When I confirm it, this becomes a shared problem rather than an Irish one."

He is quiet in the way of someone receiving information that reconfigures what they've been thinking. "Understood." Another pause. "Are you all right."

The question catches me slightly off guard, which tells me something about how Marco has changed since the early days of this alliance, when everything between us was formal and measured and without personal dimension. "I'll be better in a week," I say.

"Four days," he says, and I can hear the dry quality in it that is his version of wry, and I find I'm almost grateful for it.

He hangs up.

Nadia comes to the compound for the first time on a Thursday afternoon.

I didn't ask her to. She called and said she had something and I said come here, which was a decision made without significant deliberation because the deliberation has mostly been done by now. She arrives in a cab and Conor meets her at the gate with the professional neutrality I asked him to maintain, and she comes through to the study and she sits across from my desk — where Ailish sat this morning — and she puts a file on the desk between us.

"Connolly," she says.

I open the file.

"He's been on Viktor's payroll for eight months," she says. "Not directly — it goes through a shell in Antwerp that I recognized because my father used the same structure for a different network in 2018. The payment pattern is consistent — small amounts, irregular timing, structured to look like consulting fees in a legitimate transport company that Connolly has a listed interest in." She watches me read. "Eight months is before I arrived. Before the current operation. Which means Viktor was running Connolly before he sent me."

I look up. "Connolly was the first operation."

"Connolly was the foundation. Get someone inside the Irish before you send someone to crack the Irish-Italian alliance from the outside. Have eyes and ears at the decision level before you start applying pressure at the operational level." She holds my gaze. "Viktor is more patient than you've been giving him credit for."

I sit with this. "Declan doesn't know."

"No. The payments go to an account Declan has no visibility into. Connolly has been feeding Viktor information about Irish operations — routes, meeting locations, personnel decisions — while feeding Declan a version of events that makes the Italian alliance look like a slow invasion." She pauses. "He's been doing both simultaneously, very cleanly."

"Playing both ends of the same fracture."

"Yes. Viktor gets the intelligence. Connolly gets paid. Declan gets—" She stops.

"Manipulated," I say. "Into the position Connolly wanted him in."

"Yes."

I close the file. I sit back. I think about Declan's face in the sitting room saying I'm afraid the alliance with the Italians will make us into something we weren't, and the specific way he said it — the conviction, the genuine fear — and the fact that Connolly put that fear there deliberately and tended it for eight months.

"How did you find it," I say.

"My father's contacts. One of them is adjacent to the Antwerp shell. I called in something he owed my father — the debt transferred when my father died, which is standard in that world — and he gave me the account structure." She meets my eyes. "I'm telling you this because you asked me to tell you how."

"I know you are."