Liam
I stand in the warehouse for four minutes after she leaves.
This is not like me. I make decisions and then I act on them and then I deal with what they produce. Hesitation is a luxury and I gave it up young.
But I stand in the warehouse for four minutes.
The devices she placed are already neutralized — I found them both before she left, which is the reason I was standing in that particular corner of that particular darkness when she came through the south wall.
The fire won't happen tonight. The smoke signal she planned to send to her superiors — proof of penetration, proof of Irish vulnerability — none of that will reach anyone, because when I called Conor two hours ago and told him I was handling the warehouse check personally, I meant it in both directions.
I handled the warehouse. And then I handled her.
Except I didn't, which is precisely what I'm standing here thinking about.
Twenty-one years old. Russian. Trained — genuinely trained, not the performance of training but the real thing, layered into muscle memory over years. Fast enough that I nearly lost her, and I'm not slow.
She knew my name. She knew enough to get into this building and find the two most useful places in it for what she was doing.
She knew to go for my weak side when she ran.
She knew, when I had her on the floor, to stop moving and wait rather than exhaust herself against a grip that wasn't going to break.
That last one is the least intuitive and the most telling.
Stopping when you're pinned by fear means you've given up. She stopped because she was thinking.
She was thinking the entire time.
She also said nothing that will hurt anyone with the intonation of someone who hadn't planned to say it.
I should have held her. Called it in. Had Conor here in eight minutes and her in a chair with proper lighting and the right kind of questions.
I let her go because she is twenty-one years old and small and the last time I took a woman like that and locked her in a room of mine, I told myself it was justified, and I was wrong, and I've spent years not adding another name to that list.
That's the truth and it doesn't make me feel better about it.
I crouch next to the south wall vent. She came through here.
Four feet wide, rust around the bolts, a visible gap on the lower left corner that someone should have flagged in the last security review but didn't, because my men have gotten comfortable and comfortable is what I've apparently been allowing.
There's a small thread of dark fabric caught on the lower bolt. From her jacket, when she came through. Or from when I put her on the floor.
I take it. I stand. I look at the thread for a moment and then I put it in my pocket with the other thing I took from her — or rather, placed on her — during the brief thirty seconds I had her on the ground and her attention was on not being held there.
The tracker is the size of a coat button.
I manufacture my own, because the commercial options are identifiable to anyone who's looking for them and the people I deal with usually are.
Seventy-two-hour battery, which I can extend remotely.
It transmits to a receiver I keep on my person and a secondary app that three people on the planet have access to, one of whom is me.
I pressed it to the inside hem of her jacket while she was focused on the grip around her wrist — the benefit of a physical altercation with someone who is very good. They spend their attention on the thing you're visibly doing and you do the other thing in the peripheral.
She is good. She didn't feel it.
I pull out my phone and check the receiver. The signal is clear. She's moving northeast at a walking pace, which means she left on foot and she's not running, which tells me she doesn't think she's being followed.
Good. I need her to keep thinking that.
I call Conor from the car on the way back.
"I need someone," I tell him. "Not family. Freelance, but vetted, and I mean actually vetted. Someone who can run a tail without being made." I pause. "And Conor. This one is between us. Just us. You understand what I mean."
"Aye," he says, without asking why. This is one of the things I rely on Conor for. "I know a man. Former Garda surveillance. He's been freelancing since he left the force. Good at quiet."
"Get him. I want the tail running by morning."
"What's the target?"
I watch the city go past the window — yellow light, a woman walking a dog too small for the weather, a cab cutting across two lanes without indication.
"I'll send you the tracker coordinates. Female, early twenties, Russian.
She'll go to ground in the outer boroughs — probably Queens or Astoria.
She's careful. Whoever you send needs to be better than careful. "
"Understood." A pause. "Do you want to know what she's doing, or do you want to know everything she's doing?"
"Everything," I say.
I hang up.
The footage starts arriving by noon the next day.
Conor's man — I never learn his name, which is the arrangement — is better than advertised.
The first clips are timestamped early morning, exterior of an apartment building in Astoria, and she is already different from the woman I had on the floor of the warehouse.
Her hair is down. She's wearing a pale coat that's wrong for the cold, the kind that marks her as someone who hasn't calibrated to a New York winter yet.
She is buying coffee from a cart on the corner with the ease of someone who does this every day, except she's been here a week at most and the ease is therefore performed and very well performed.
She stands at the cart and looks at her phone and takes her coffee and goes back into the building and the footage ends.
I watch it three times.
The second set comes in the early afternoon.
The ballet studio, four blocks north of the apartment.
She arrives with a bag over one shoulder and a coffee that's not from the corner cart, which means she took a different route.
She is inside for two and a half hours. There's no interior footage, for obvious reasons, but she exits looking exactly like someone who has spent two and a half hours in a ballet studio — flushed, looser in some places, more deliberate in others.
She is, I note with the detachment I'm applying to this entire exercise, extraordinarily graceful.
I note it once and then I close the clip.
There is a third set. She meets someone — a woman, similar age, red-haired, not a threat profile I recognize — at a café near the studio.
They sit for an hour and a half. The man I hired wasn't able to get audio, which I add to the list of things I'll address.
They seem easy with each other, comfortable with silence.
Twice the Russian girl — Nadia, I've started thinking of her as Nadia rather than 'the target,' which is a small and annoying development — says something that makes the red-haired woman laugh.
I sit at my desk at half past eleven at night watching footage of a woman I should have handed to Conor twelve hours ago laugh at something she said to her friend, and I think: I should close this and go to sleep.
I watch the clip again.
There is nothing operationally useful in a target's laugh. I catalogue it and move on.
Declan is at the compound the following morning and in a mood that is not improved by the fact that I come directly to him, which I can see he would have preferred to avoid.
He is eating breakfast at the kitchen table with the focused attention of a man who is hoping that if he concentrates hard enough on his eggs, the problem walking toward him will reconsider its approach.
I pull out the chair across from him and sit.
He cuts his food. Doesn't look up.
"Declan."
"I'm eating."
"You can eat and hear what I have to say at the same time. You've done it before." I set my hands on the table. "The meeting spot. Two nights ago."
His jaw tightens. Just slightly. "What about it."
"A shot was fired. One of our men was hit, not critically. The description of the shooter matches Russian contract work." I wait. "You were there that night. You were coming back from somewhere when I found you."
Now he looks up. "You're asking if I brought Russians to our own meeting spot."
"I'm asking what happened."
"I'm telling you those are different questions.
" He puts his fork down. "I didn't bring anyone.
I was meeting with Connolly and Brennan about reorganizing the south distribution — which, before you say it, yes, I know I'm supposed to clear that through you, and no, I'm not going to apologize for maintaining my own relationships with my own men.
" He holds my gaze. "The shot came after I'd left.
I heard it from the car. I didn't stop because I didn't know yet it was one of ours. "
"Why didn't you call it in."
"Because I knew you'd make it mean more than it means."
"A Russian shooter at a location one of my senior men was using for an unsanctioned meeting means quite a lot, Declan, regardless of what interpretation you'd prefer I assign to it."
He is very still for a moment, and I know this kind of still — it's the still before he decides whether to come at the argument or go around it.
Usually he comes at it. Tonight, something different happens.
He exhales through his nose and picks up his fork again.
"They're watching us. They know our patterns.
That's the part that should concern you. "
"It concerns me considerably. As does the fact that you're holding meetings I don't know about in locations I'm not securing."
"You can't secure everything."
"I can secure more than I'm currently securing, and that starts with knowing where my own people are.
" I lean forward. "I'm not your enemy, Declan.
I know it feels like I am. I know the last six months have felt like I've been dismantling everything without asking if you wanted it dismantled.
But I need you with me, and I need you where I can see you, and right now neither of those things are true. "
He stares at his plate. A long moment.
"Ailish won't talk to you about this one," he says. It isn't what I expected. "I told her not to."
"I know."
"And you came anyway."
"I always come anyway. You know that about me."
He doesn't answer. But the still has changed quality — less like a door held shut and more like one that isn't sure yet whether to open. I'll take it. With Declan, I take what I can get.
I stand. "The south distribution reorganization. Write it up and bring it to me. If it's a good plan, we'll run it."
He looks up at that.
I leave him to his eggs.
In the car on the way back, I check the tracker app.
She's at the ballet studio. She's been there since eight.
I close the app.
I open it again at the traffic light.
I close it again and put the phone face-down on the passenger seat and drive, and I do not open it again until I am home and there is no one to notice.
She's still at the studio.
I sit with that longer than I should. Then I go to bed.