Page 55 of The Dangerous Dance

He is quiet for a moment. Then: "I'll be there Friday."

"Thank you, Finn."

"Don't thank me," he says. "Just finish this so we can both do something else."

He hangs up.

I sit in the study in the quiet of a house that is about to get significantly less quiet, and I look at the Connolly file, and I think about what it means to tell your brother that the man he trusted most has been selling him to his enemies for eight months.

I think about the right words for it.

I don't find them.

But I'll find them by Friday. I'll find them because I have to, and because Declan deserves the true version delivered with the care that the true version requires.

That's the only kind of leader I know how to try to be anymore.

Whether it's enough is what the rest of the week will tell me.

CHAPTER 19

Nadia

Mackenzie runs things the way I imagine Liam runs things when he's at full capacity, which is to say efficiently and without unnecessary motion and with the specific quality of someone who knows what they want to happen and has already thought through three versions of what to do if it doesn't.

The difference is that Mackenzie does it while also making tea, which Liam does not do, and while maintaining a running commentary that is somewhere between briefing and conversation and which requires a particular kind of attention to track because the useful information and the casual information are delivered in the same tone and you have to be paying attention to know which is which.

I am, as it happens, very good at paying attention.

We've been working together for four days — formally, with a structure, me at the table in the compound's second floor office that Mackenzie has claimed as a working space and which has views of the gate and the car park and, if you angle yourself correctly, the main entrance. She gave me access to the operational files that Liam approved, which is a specific subset of the full picture and which is nonetheless more than I expected to receive this quickly. I've been reading them with the focused attention of someone building a map — not just of the Irish operation but of the gaps in it, the places where the structure is thinner than it looks, the places where Viktor has already been applying pressure and the places where he plans to.

It is, I tell myself, useful to know both sides of the map.

"The west distribution corridor," I say. "Who runs it day to day."

"Conor nominally. Practically, a man called Brennan who has been with the family for fifteen years and who Conor trusts because fifteen years and Declan trusts because Connolly told him to." Mackenzie doesn't look up from her own screen. "Which we now know means that trust needs to be reassessed."

"Has Liam spoken to Brennan."

"Liam is currently handling three other things simultaneously and has tasked me with flagging anything that comes through the west corridor while the Connolly situation resolves." She looks up. "Which I've done. Which is in the file under the Brennan tab."

I pull up the Brennan tab. The file is thorough — Mackenzie's work, clearly, built with the specific methodical quality she applies to everything, which is the quality of someone who learned early that incomplete information is more dangerous than no information. She is not operationally trained but she thinks like someone who is, which is either natural aptitude or the result of growing up in a house where operational thinking was simply what thinking looked like.

"He's clean," I say, reading.

"As far as I can tell. Payments, communications, movement — nothing flags. But I'm not as good at this part as you are." She says it without self-deprecation and without false modesty, just as a factual assessment of relative skill. "So if you see something I've missed, tell me."

I read the file again. More carefully. "He's clean," I say again. "But he's been in Connolly's social orbit, which means Connolly has had access to his relationships without necessarily having turned him. We should assume he's been used without his knowledge."

"Used how."

"As a conduit for information Connolly extracted through social contact rather than formal reporting. Brennan mentions something at dinner, Connolly notes it, Connolly passes it." I look at the file. "It's common. The asset doesn't even know they're an asset."

Mackenzie is quiet for a moment, processing this. Then: "So we can't trust what Brennan knows but we can probably trust what Brennan does."

"With appropriate monitoring, yes."

She nods. Makes a note. Continues working.