Page 82 of The Dangerous Dance

"Three days," I say. "I'm giving them three days to make their decision. With us or not with us, and not with us means out."

He nods. "I'll be there when you tell them."

"That's what I was hoping."

He looks at the ice at his ribs. "Liam."

I look at him.

"Rina," he says. Carefully. "The things you did. The way this — the alliance, all of it — started."

"Yes," I say.

"You've been trying to lead differently since." He says it not as a question and not quite as a statement. As an observation, extended carefully.

"Yes."

"Is it—" He stops again. "Does it work. Trying to be different than what you were."

I think about everything I could say to that question. I think about Nadia in the study with the case on the desk between us, and the warehouse floor, and the farmers market, and a safehouse above a laundromat, and you matter said in the register of a fact rather than a consolation.

"I don't know yet," I say honestly. "I think so. Some days I'm more certain than others." I hold his gaze. "But I know that trying is the only option I have that I can live with."

He nods. He drinks.

We sit in the bad lighting for a while longer.

Then he says: "The girl. Nadia."

"Yes."

"Does she make you better at this." He gestures with the glass, meaning everything — the operation, the leadership, the whole unwieldy thing. "Or worse."

I think about the Connolly file. About the March gap in the Brennan data. About the Italian pharmaceutical case and the receiver handed over in a warehouse and a woman who had two capsules in her coat pocket for three days and came to tell me instead.

"Better," I say.

He looks at me for a long moment.

"Then handle it carefully," he says. "And handle her carefully."

"I intend to."

He nods. It isn't approval exactly. It's the acknowledgment of someone who has decided to trust a decision he can't fully see yet, which from Declan is the closest thing to a blessing I'm going to receive and which is enough.

The men come at two in the afternoon.

Twelve of them, the core of Connolly's network within the compound, the ones who've been operating in the particular grey zone of following a man who was following someone else. They come into the main hall and they stand with the specific quality of people who know they're being assessed and are waiting to find out what the assessment means for them.

Declan stands to my right.

Finn is at the wall. Mackenzie beside him. Conor at the door.

I look at the twelve men and I tell them what they are — not in accusation, just in the flat factual register of a man laying out what he knows. I tell them about Connolly and the Antwerp shell and eight months of compromised operational intelligence. I tell them that the men who actively facilitated it have already been dealt with, and that what I'm looking at now is the question of who's in this room by active choice and who's in this room by passive default.

"You have three days," I say. "To tell me which. Three days to decide if you're here because you believe in what we're building — the alliance, the direction, all of it — or if you're here because Connolly told you the story you wanted to hear and you believed it without asking who was writing it." I look at each of them in turn. "Three days. After that the question is answered whether you've spoken or not."

I look at Declan.