Liam
Ailish comes to me, for once.
She lets herself into the compound at nine in the morning without calling ahead, which is her right — she has always had her right to walk into this house, which I gave her years ago and have never had reason to revisit — and she finds me in the study with the Maspeth reports and a coffee that has been cooling for longer than coffee should be allowed to cool, and she sits in the chair across from my desk with the air of someone who has been deciding what to say for several hours and has arrived at a version she can commit to.
"Tell me how bad it was," she says.
I tell her.
She listens the way she always listens — entirely, without interrupting, without performing reaction. She has a quality of attention that I've relied on for so long it's become structural, part of how I think things through. When I finish she is quiet for a moment, and then she says: "Connolly."
"Possibly." I turn the Maspeth report. "I'm having it looked into."
"By whom."
I look at her.
She holds my gaze. "By whom, Liam."
"By someone with the relevant expertise."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I have right now."
She looks at the desk between us with the specific expression she uses when she's deciding whether to push or to accept what she's been given and return to it later.
She accepts it. Not because she's satisfied but because she knows me well enough to know when pushing will produce less information rather than more, and she calculates that this is one of those moments.
"Declan," she says.
"Yes."
"You're going to confront him."
"I'm going to end it," I say. "One way or the other.
I should have done it weeks ago. I kept — managing around it, trying to find the approach that didn't require forcing a conclusion, and in the meantime three of my men are down and someone has been leaking routes and Connolly is still in his ear. " I set the report down. "It ends."
"How."
"Old way," I say.
She is quiet for a moment. "A fight."
"A fight. One on one. No weapons. Winner is the head of the Irish and the loser accepts it." I meet her eyes. "It's how our father settled it. It's the language Declan understands and I need him to understand the outcome."
"You could get hurt."
"I could." I look at the report. "He could too. Neither of us will do permanent damage. We know each other too well."
"You know each other well enough to know exactly where to cause maximum damage," Ailish says. "That's not the same thing."
"Ailish."
"I know." She exhales. "I know you've made the decision.
I'm just—" She stops. Looks at her hands.
"He's not himself right now. He's been in Connolly's ear for months and Connolly has been — I think Connolly has been working on him.
Specifically. Deliberately. Not just expressing disagreement but actively—" She stops again.
"Dismantling him," I say quietly.
She looks up. "Yes."
"Which means when we fight, I'm fighting what Connolly's built in him as much as I'm fighting Declan." I sit back. "I know that. I'm going in knowing that."
She nods. "When."
"End of the week. I want the Connolly question answered first. If what I think is there is there, it changes what I say to Declan after." I look at her. "You're going to be there."
"Obviously."
"And Finn."
Something in her expression shifts. "You're going to ask Finn."
"He's family. He deserves to be there." I pause. "And I need someone to pull Declan back if it goes longer than it should."
"What makes you think Finn could pull Declan back."
"Nothing," I say. "But he's the only one Declan won't read as taking my side, and that matters for what comes after."
She is quiet, considering this. Then she nods once.
"The Italians," I say. "Marco called yesterday. He's extending the patience but it has a shape now. He used the word timeline."
"Then you need to call him back."
"I know."
She stands. "I'll be here when you're ready to talk through Declan." She picks up her bag. "And Liam." She pauses at the door. "Whatever you're doing with the Russian. Be careful."
"I'm being careful."
"Be more careful than that."
She goes.
Marco picks up on the second ring.
"Liam." The first-name register again. Familiarity as information.
"Marco. I owe you an apology for the continued postponements."
"You owe me an explanation," he says. "The apology is implied."
"Fair." I sit forward. "There have been internal developments that required my attention before I could come to the table with the full picture. That's the honest version."
"And the full picture now."
"Is closer to full than it was a week ago." I pause. "The Bayonne hit and the supply route interference — I believe I know the source. I'm in the process of confirming it. When I can confirm it, I'll bring you everything."
A silence. Measured. "Are we talking about Russian interest."
"Yes."
"How established."
"More established than we'd like. I'm still mapping the edges of it."
He is quiet for a moment. "Vito is patient within reason, Liam. The reason has a limit."
"I know. A week. I'll have something concrete to bring you in a week."
"Three days," he says.
I sit with this. "Five."
"Four."
"Done." I pause. "Marco. The source — it's been operating against both our interests. When I confirm it, this becomes a shared problem rather than an Irish one."
He is quiet in the way of someone receiving information that reconfigures what they've been thinking. "Understood." Another pause. "Are you all right."
The question catches me slightly off guard, which tells me something about how Marco has changed since the early days of this alliance, when everything between us was formal and measured and without personal dimension. "I'll be better in a week," I say.
"Four days," he says, and I can hear the dry quality in it that is his version of wry, and I find I'm almost grateful for it.
He hangs up.
Nadia comes to the compound for the first time on a Thursday afternoon.
I didn't ask her to. She called and said she had something and I said come here, which was a decision made without significant deliberation because the deliberation has mostly been done by now.
She arrives in a cab and Conor meets her at the gate with the professional neutrality I asked him to maintain, and she comes through to the study and she sits across from my desk — where Ailish sat this morning — and she puts a file on the desk between us.
"Connolly," she says.
I open the file.
"He's been on Viktor's payroll for eight months," she says.
"Not directly — it goes through a shell in Antwerp that I recognized because my father used the same structure for a different network in 2018.
The payment pattern is consistent — small amounts, irregular timing, structured to look like consulting fees in a legitimate transport company that Connolly has a listed interest in.
" She watches me read. "Eight months is before I arrived.
Before the current operation. Which means Viktor was running Connolly before he sent me. "
I look up. "Connolly was the first operation."
"Connolly was the foundation. Get someone inside the Irish before you send someone to crack the Irish-Italian alliance from the outside.
Have eyes and ears at the decision level before you start applying pressure at the operational level.
" She holds my gaze. "Viktor is more patient than you've been giving him credit for. "
I sit with this. "Declan doesn't know."
"No. The payments go to an account Declan has no visibility into.
Connolly has been feeding Viktor information about Irish operations — routes, meeting locations, personnel decisions — while feeding Declan a version of events that makes the Italian alliance look like a slow invasion.
" She pauses. "He's been doing both simultaneously, very cleanly. "
"Playing both ends of the same fracture."
"Yes. Viktor gets the intelligence. Connolly gets paid. Declan gets—" She stops.
"Manipulated," I say. "Into the position Connolly wanted him in."
"Yes."
I close the file. I sit back. I think about Declan's face in the sitting room saying I'm afraid the alliance with the Italians will make us into something we weren't, and the specific way he said it — the conviction, the genuine fear — and the fact that Connolly put that fear there deliberately and tended it for eight months.
"How did you find it," I say.
"My father's contacts. One of them is adjacent to the Antwerp shell.
I called in something he owed my father — the debt transferred when my father died, which is standard in that world — and he gave me the account structure.
" She meets my eyes. "I'm telling you this because you asked me to tell you how. "
"I know you are."
"And because the contact now knows I was looking, which means if Viktor has eyes on that network he'll know something was pulled on the Antwerp shell within the next forty-eight hours.
" She is steady, direct, giving me the full picture including the cost of the picture.
"I didn't see another way to get you the confirmation in the timeframe you had. "
"You burned the contact."
"I used the contact. The contact stays intact. But there's a trail that points back to someone pulling on a specific thread, and Viktor will eventually trace that thread." She pauses. "You have a window."
I nod. "All right." I look at the file. "This is good work."
She receives this without performance. "It's what I said I could do."
"I know." I meet her eyes. "One chance," I say. "That's what I told you. That's still the condition."
"I know."
"This is the chance." I hold her gaze. "Not because you've earned unlimited trust. Because you've done what you said you'd do. The trust gets built from here."
She nods. "That's fair."
"When Viktor traces the thread, what do you tell him."