Liam
Mackenzie arrives at half past ten the following morning with Roise, a bag of groceries, and the expression of someone who has rehearsed what she's going to say and is ready to deliver it regardless of reception.
I hear them on the stairs before they knock. Two sets of footsteps — one decisive, one carefully neutral. I open the door before the knock lands.
She knows about the safehouse because I told her.
One of the things I gave Mackenzie when I gave her the briefing two weeks ago was the list of family locations to use in an emergency, with the understanding that she'd never come to one unless something was wrong or she'd cleared it with me first. She has not cleared it with me.
She has decided, apparently, that my brother has spent four days off-grid with a Russian operative qualifies as something being wrong.
Roise is here because Roise was pre-cleared for safehouse routing two months ago, when I built the system.
They didn't drive themselves — Conor's people moved them, two vehicle changes, a circuit through Queens, a final approach on foot from the laundromat side.
The route is designed for this. The route is not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that Mackenzie has used it.
Mackenzie looks at me. I look at Mackenzie. Behind her, Roise stands with her tablet already out and her eyes moving over the hallway with the professional inventory of someone who has been told to behave normally and is trying.
"No," I say.
"You've been here four days," Mackenzie says, stepping past me.
She does not require invitation. She has never required invitation in her life.
"You postponed the Italian meeting, you're managing Conor remotely, and Declan is starting to notice you're not around, which means Connolly is starting to notice, which means we have about a week before your absence becomes a topic of conversation I can't redirect.
" She sets the groceries on the kitchen counter and turns around.
"So I'm here. And Roise is here because you need your actual work done and because she is professional enough to handle whatever—" She stops.
Nadia is in the doorway of the bedroom.
She has, as of this morning, changed into clothes that are hers rather than the spare things the safehouse keeps, which means she has what she needs in the bag she brought.
Which tells me she came to the warehouse that night prepared for something other than a quick plant-and-exit.
She is leaning against the doorframe with her coffee and looking at Mackenzie with the particular expression she uses when she's assessing something — the one that is almost neutral and not quite.
Mackenzie looks at her. Then at me. Then back at her.
"Hello," Mackenzie says.
"Hello," Nadia says.
"I'm Mackenzie."
"I know who you are."
Mackenzie turns to me with an expression that contains several questions she's decided to sequence rather than ask simultaneously.
I read them in order: Is she the Russian?
Have you lost your mind? How long has this been happening?
Are you all right? And underneath all of them, forming the actual foundation: I'm going to handle this, just give me a moment to assess the situation.
"Roise," I say, turning to where she has positioned herself near the door with the specific posture of someone who is professionally invisible and personally very much the opposite.
"Thank you for coming. The Cork correspondence needs a response by end of day — the files are on the secondary server under Galway-7, the encryption key is in the usual place. "
"Of course." Her voice is even. Her eyes have not gone to Nadia with any readable frequency, which is either genuine professional composure or a calibrated performance of it. Either way it's doing the necessary work. "I'll set up at the kitchen table."
She does. Mackenzie grabs my arm and steers me to the corner near the window with the practiced authority of someone who has been steering me since she was old enough to reach my arm.
"Is she the Russian," Mackenzie says, very quietly.
"Yes."
"The one from the warehouse."
"Yes."
"The one you have been—" She stops herself. Restarts. "The one the surveillance has been on."
"Yes."
She looks at me for a moment. Her expression does the thing it does when she's running through implications — fast, thorough. "Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"I'm not going to perform a reaction. There's no point.
" She glances toward the bedroom doorway, where Nadia has returned to her coffee and her phone with the apparent ease of someone who is completely comfortable and is actually completely aware of every word being said across the room.
"But Liam. I need you to be thinking clearly about this.
Not clearly as in—" She searches for the right framing.
"Not clearly as in she's dangerous so stay back.
Clearly as in — she might be exactly what she appears to be, which is an operative who has given you partial cooperation and might be doing so because it serves her current agenda, and you need to be accounting for that. "
"I am accounting for it."
"Are you."
I meet my sister's eyes and I give her the most honest version of my face. "I'm accounting for it alongside other things," I say. "Which I know isn't what you'd prefer to hear."
She exhales. "No. It isn't." She looks at the groceries on the counter.
"I brought food because I knew you wouldn't have any and because it gave me a reason to be here that wasn't just I've come to check on your judgment, even though that's exactly what this is.
" She looks back at me. "So. What do you know about her that isn't in the operational file. "
"What makes you think there's more than the operational file."
"Because you're here," she says simply. "If it were just operational, you'd have handled it operationally."
I look at my twenty-two-year-old sister, who is standing in a safehouse above a laundromat in Sunnyside telling me things I already know with a clarity I find both useful and quietly humbling. "Her father was Aleksei Volkov," I say.
"The assassin."
"You know the name."
"I've been doing my reading." She crosses her arms. "He's dead."
"Three years. Killed by his own handlers for declining an assignment."
Something shifts in her expression. "And she knows this."
"Yes."
"And she's still working for the organization that killed him."
"She was," I say. "The situation is—" I stop. "Complicated."
Mackenzie looks at me for a long moment. Then she uncrosses her arms, which is her version of standing down. "Bring me in," she says. "Not as an observer. Actually bring me in. I can be useful here if you let me."
I look at her. I think about what I said to Declan — you were supposed to be here — and what it costs when people who should be beside you aren't. "All right," I say.
Her expression does the brief thing that means she wasn't entirely certain I'd say that. "Good." She picks up a grocery bag. "I'm going to put the food away and introduce myself properly and then you're going to stop treating this flat like a bunker and let some air in."
She goes to the kitchen. I hear her say something to Roise, who responds in a tone that is professionally warm and personally careful, and then I hear her cross toward the bedroom doorway and I hear her say to Nadia: "I'm making eggs. Do you eat eggs?"
A pause. Then Nadia's voice: "Yes."
"Good." A beat. "I'm also going to tell you that if you're playing my brother, I will make your life extremely difficult in ways that don't require physical violence and are therefore much harder to anticipate. Just so we both know where we stand."
Another pause. Longer.
Then Nadia says: "I appreciate the directness."
"Good," Mackenzie says again. "Eggs, then."
I give Roise the Cork materials and the Bayonne supplementals and find that having her here, working at the kitchen table with the focused competence she always brings, is less uncomfortable than I anticipated.
She doesn't look at me with the weight she was carrying in the office.
She looks at her screen, asks two clarifying questions about the Galway-7 encryption, and proceeds.
Whatever she's feeling about the configuration of this flat and who is in it, she has placed it somewhere that isn't the surface of her work.
Mackenzie makes eggs for all four of us, which is a thing I wouldn't have predicted at seven this morning and which happens with a domestic ease that is either entirely genuine or is Mackenzie's most sophisticated social operation, and I honestly can't tell which.
We eat. Roise stays at the table. Mackenzie asks Nadia about the ballet studio, which produces the first real conversation I've heard Nadia have with someone other than me or Dara, and what I observe is this: she is different with Mackenzie than she is with me.
Not less guarded, but guarded in a different register — she's not performing, she's not calculating, she's doing the thing I saw her do in the footage when she was with Dara at the café, which is being approximately herself.
It's tentative. She hasn't decided yet whether Mackenzie is safe.
But she's not deciding against it either.
Mackenzie, for her part, is doing what Mackenzie does with everyone she's assessing — asking questions that seem conversational and are actually precise, listening to the answers with the part of her that remembers everything, filing.
After lunch, Roise goes back to the correspondence and Mackenzie corners me in the hallway.
"Trojan horse," she says, quietly.
"What."