Page 97 of The Dangerous Dance

His expression doesn't change but something in it does, the fractional shift of confirmation.

"She's inside that building," I say. "And you're not going to reach her. So here's what happens now."

He looks at me.

"You go back to Viktor," I say, "and you tell him that the operation against Nadia Volkov is over. That she's under the protection of the Costello family and the Rosso alliance and that any further attempts will be treated as an act of war against both organizations." I hold his gaze. "And you tell him she's not compromised. She's defected. Which is different. And which means the rules of engagement for a compromised asset don't apply."

He says nothing.

"Go," I say.

He goes.

I stand on the corner until he's out of sight and then I take out my phone and I call Conor. "Get me everything on Viktor's non-lethal asset elimination protocols," I say. "I need to understand exactly what he sends and when and in what order."

"What happened," Conor says.

"He sent someone to the compound area. Not a watcher. Someone with a specific objective and a specific timeline." I look at the corner where the man was standing. "And Conor — the photos. The distribution. He didn't take them to expose Nadia publicly. He took them to give himself justification for eliminating her within his own network." I pause. "She's always been expendable to him. I don't think she knew that."

A silence. "You think this was always the plan."

"I think Viktor sent her on an operation she wasn't meant to survive," I say. "I think the plan was always to use her and then tie off the loose end before she became a liability." I look at the street. "I think her father declined an assignment and died for it, and Viktor decided his daughter was useful right up until the point she was a problem, and he's been running this both ways from the beginning."

"Does she know."

"Not yet," I say. "But she's going to."

She is at the kitchen table with her laptop and the distribution analysis when I come in, which is what Ailish said — working through the fear with her hands. She looks up when I come through the door and reads my face with the speed she reads everything.

"You found something," she says.

I sit across from her.

I tell her about the man on the corner. About the reconnaissance timeline. About what I've worked out about Viktor's plan — the full version, the one that starts with her father and ends with a man in a coat on a street corner a hundred yards from where she's sitting.

She listens.

She doesn't interrupt.

When I finish, the kitchen is very quiet.

She looks at her laptop screen. At the distribution analysis she's been running, the careful methodical work of someone who came to this operation prepared for most things and has just been told about the one thing they weren't prepared for.

"He always planned to kill me," she says.

"Yes."

"After the operation concluded."

"Yes."

"My father declined an assignment," she says. "And they killed him. And then they recruited me." She looks at the screen. "Because I was useful. And because using me was the cleanest possible way to make sure I never—" She stops. "Never became someone who could ask the right questions about how he died."

The silence has several things in it.

"Nadia," I say.

She looks up.