Nadia
Viktor calls on a Tuesday, a Thursday, and twice on a Saturday — the Saturday I'm at the farmers market.
My phone vibrates four times in my coat pocket while I'm talking to Liam Costello at the edge of a park, and I let it.
The alternative is answering it in front of him, which I'm not going to do.
And because — in the moment — I am more interested in what's in front of me than in what Viktor wants.
He leaves a voicemail on the fourth call. I listen to it that evening, standing at the kitchen window with the city going grey-blue outside and Dara making tea behind me.
The voicemail is three minutes and twenty-two seconds long.
The first ninety seconds are about the timeline and the gap between what was projected and what has been delivered and the specific language Viktor uses when he is performing patience rather than exercising it, which I can identify precisely because my father taught me to identify it, because performing patience and exercising it produce different results and it matters which one you're dealing with.
The last ninety seconds are about my father.
Not directly. Viktor never does anything directly.
It's one of the qualities that has kept him alive this long.
I've studied it the way you study a thing that is trying to manage you.
But he talks about legacy and about what is owed to the people who built what I'm currently benefiting from and about the particular kind of failure that happens when someone is given an exceptional opportunity and treats it as ordinary, and underneath all of that, moving through it like a current under still water, is my father's name. Not spoken. Present.
I delete the voicemail.
"How bad," Dara says, without turning from the stove.
"Bad enough."
She brings two cups and sets one beside me and stands at the window next to me in the particular way she has of being present without being demanding, which is the thing I value most about her and which I am aware I do not say often enough. "He mentioned your father."
"Not explicitly."
"He never does." She drinks her tea. Outside, a light comes on in the building across the street, a yellow square in the blue dark. "What does he want."
"Faster. More direct. He used the phrase demonstrable impact." I look at the yellow square. Someone moving behind it, a silhouette of ordinary evening life. "He wants the Irish and the Italians fully fractured before the end of the month. Not just strained. Fractured."
Dara is quiet for a moment. "That's not the original timeline."
"No."
"The original timeline gave us another six weeks."
"The original timeline has been revised." I drink my tea. It's too hot and I drink it anyway because doing something with my hands is useful. "He's getting pressure from above him. Someone wants this moved forward."
"Or something changed," Dara says carefully. "That he hasn't told you about."
I look at her. She meets my eyes and does the thing she does where she tells me something without saying it, which is a skill that requires both intelligence and restraint and which she applies consistently and which I find useful and occasionally infuriating.
She is telling me that Viktor's acceleration might not be about my performance.
It might be about a development in the Russian operation that changes what's needed and when, and that development may not be something Viktor is going to share with me.
Which means I may be working toward a goal that has shifted without anyone informing me it shifted.
"I need a burner," I say.
She doesn't ask why. She finishes her tea. "I'll get one tomorrow."
"Tonight."
She looks at me. "Tonight."
"Please," I add, which I don't always remember and which she accepts as the gesture it is.
She puts on her coat.
The burner is a basic prepaid, purchased by Dara at a pharmacy four neighborhoods away, paid for in cash.
She brings it back wrapped in the pharmacy bag and sets it on the table without ceremony, and I take it out and hold it in my hand and think about what having it means and what I'm going to do with it.
The answer to the second question is: I don't know yet.
The answer to the first is: it means I'm preparing for the possibility that what is best for me is not the same thing as what Viktor wants from me, which is a thought that would have been almost unthinkable six months ago and which now sits in my hand along with a prepaid phone in a pharmacy bag and feels almost manageable.
"If you go rogue," Dara says, sitting across from me, "I can't come with you."
I look at her. "I know."
"I want you to know that I know that you know.
" She says it with precision, which is how Dara says things that matter.
"Not because you'd ask. You wouldn't. But because I want to say it clearly — I know what the constraints are for me, and I'm not pretending they're otherwise, and I'm not pretending that if you decide to do something I can't follow you into, that it doesn't—" She stops.
Takes a breath. "I want you to do what's best for you.
I want you to know that I mean that without reservation. "
I look at the phone in my hand.
"I'm not going rogue," I say. "I'm being careful."
"That's the same thing," she says gently. "When you're in this operation."
She's right. I know she's right. Being careful in this context means building exits that Viktor doesn't know about, which means not being entirely what Viktor thinks I am, which means that the performance I've been maintaining — the loyal operative, the father's daughter, the weapon that does what it's pointed toward — has a crack in it now that I put there myself by getting a burner phone and standing at farmers markets on Saturday mornings and telling a man with dark tired eyes that I'd prefer he stayed alive.
"Dara," I say.
"Mm."
"When this is done — whatever done looks like — I'm going to find a way to make sure you're clear of it." I meet her eyes. "I don't know how yet. But I'm going to."
She looks at me for a long moment. "Okay," she says. Like I've told her something she already knew and is glad to have confirmed.
We finish our tea.
The secondary warehouse is on a block I've been watching for eleven days.
It is, in several respects, a better target than the first one.
Better location, more foot traffic to provide cover for approach, a loading bay that faces the building rather than the street and therefore offers a natural blind angle for anything happening along the east wall.
The listening device is small — military grade, the kind that requires specific knowledge to acquire and which Viktor provided without telling me where it came from, which is typical — and it will transmit on a frequency that requires the right receiver to collect, which means even if the Irish find it, finding it tells them very little without the receiver.
This is a clean operation. Technical. Unambiguous.
I tell myself this while I'm crossing the street.
While I'm moving along the east wall in the shadow of the loading bay.
While I'm identifying the placement point I scouted two days ago — a junction in the exterior ventilation housing, covered enough to survive casual inspection and close enough to the main interior space to collect any conversation within forty feet.
I tell myself this right up until the moment I think: I could let myself get caught.
The thought arrives with the clarity of something that has been forming for a while beneath the surface of other thoughts, and I stop moving for a moment and crouch in the shadow of the loading bay and look at it directly.
If I let him catch me. If I tell him I did it deliberately.
If I give him the device and the information about Viktor's timeline and let him make of it what he will — then I have moved the burner phone from preparation to action.
Then I have made the choice I've been circling since a Saturday morning at a farmers market.
The device is in my hand.
I think about Dara saying that's the same thing, when you're in this operation.
I think about Viktor's voicemail and my father's name moving through it like a current and the thing my father did at the end of his life — declining an assignment, choosing something other than what he'd been told to choose — and dying for it at forty-four.
My father made his choice at forty-four. I am twenty-one.
I place the device. Or I start to.
And then I stop. And I stand up. And I step out of the shadow of the loading bay and into the lit section of the east wall and I look up at the security camera I know is covering this angle and I stand there for four seconds, which is enough.
Then I move back to the device and I finish placing it.
Then I wait.
He comes himself, which I didn't know for certain but suspected.
Eight minutes. He comes through the loading bay door rather than the external approach, which means he was already inside or already nearby, and he moves through the dark with the same quality as the first warehouse — that altered silence, presence that changes the air.
"The camera," he says, from somewhere behind me.
"Yes," I say. I straighten from the placement and turn around.
He is six feet away, hands at his sides, and he is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen from him before, which is the specific expression of a man who has been waiting for something to make sense and has just received information that almost does. "You stood in front of it on purpose."
"Yes."
"Why."
I look at him in the dark of his warehouse and I think about what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it, and what I decide is: honestly, because I've been doing the other thing for long enough that the weight of it has become impractical.
"Because I need you to take me somewhere that isn't here," I say. "And I need you to not call it in."
Silence.
"I'm not defecting," I say. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not switching sides. I'm—" I stop. Try again. "There are things I need to tell someone who isn't Viktor, and you're the only person in this city that qualifies."
He looks at me steadily for a long moment.
The structural quality is there, mapping, assessing, but underneath it something else is also happening — I can see it, the faint shift of a man who has been making a private argument to himself for some time and has just been given unexpected external support for one side of it.
"The device," he says.
"Already placed."
"I'm going to need it."
"I know." I reach into my pocket and produce the receiver, the companion piece that makes the device operational, and hold it out to him. "Without this it's inert."
He looks at the receiver in my hand. He looks at me. He crosses the space between us and takes it, which requires him to be close enough that I can see the tiredness in his eyes that is always there and beneath it, tonight, something that is not tiredness.
"If this is a play," he says, low and even.
"It isn't." I hold his gaze. "I'm playing both sides. I want you to know that. I'm telling you that honestly so you can factor it in." I pause. "I'm also telling you that the side I'm playing less honestly is Viktor's."
The something that is not tiredness shifts slightly.
"Come on," he says.
He moves toward the loading bay door and I follow him out into the cold, and the city closes around us with its usual indifference, and I think about burner phones and light under doors and choices that my father made and choices I'm making now that are and aren't the same.
I think about Dara saying I want you to do what's best for you.
The safehouse is twenty-five minutes away, and he doesn't speak during the drive, and I don't either, and the silence between us has a quality that neither of us names because naming it would require the kind of honesty that even I, who have just done the most honest thing I've done in months, am not entirely prepared for yet.
But I am, I think, getting there.