CHAPTER 19 Nadia
Nadia
Mackenzie runs things the way I imagine Liam runs things when he's at full capacity, which is to say efficiently and without unnecessary motion and with the specific quality of someone who knows what they want to happen and has already thought through three versions of what to do if it doesn't.
The difference is that Mackenzie does it while also making tea, which Liam does not do, and while maintaining a running commentary that is somewhere between briefing and conversation and which requires a particular kind of attention to track because the useful information and the casual information are delivered in the same tone and you have to be paying attention to know which is which.
I am, as it happens, very good at paying attention.
We've been working together for four days — formally, with a structure, me at the table in the compound's second floor office that Mackenzie has claimed as a working space and which has views of the gate and the car park and, if you angle yourself correctly, the main entrance.
She gave me access to the operational files that Liam approved, which is a specific subset of the full picture and which is nonetheless more than I expected to receive this quickly.
I've been reading them with the focused attention of someone building a map — not just of the Irish operation but of the gaps in it, the places where the structure is thinner than it looks, the places where Viktor has already been applying pressure and the places where he plans to.
It is, I tell myself, useful to know both sides of the map.
"The west distribution corridor," I say. "Who runs it day to day."
"Conor nominally. Practically, a man called Brennan who has been with the family for fifteen years and who Conor trusts because fifteen years and Declan trusts because Connolly told him to." Mackenzie doesn't look up from her own screen. "Which we now know means that trust needs to be reassessed."
"Has Liam spoken to Brennan."
"Liam is currently handling three other things simultaneously and has tasked me with flagging anything that comes through the west corridor while the Connolly situation resolves." She looks up. "Which I've done. Which is in the file under the Brennan tab."
I pull up the Brennan tab. The file is thorough — Mackenzie's work, clearly, built with the specific methodical quality she applies to everything, which is the quality of someone who learned early that incomplete information is more dangerous than no information.
She is not operationally trained but she thinks like someone who is, which is either natural aptitude or the result of growing up in a house where operational thinking was simply what thinking looked like.
"He's clean," I say, reading.
"As far as I can tell. Payments, communications, movement — nothing flags. But I'm not as good at this part as you are." She says it without self-deprecation and without false modesty, just as a factual assessment of relative skill. "So if you see something I've missed, tell me."
I read the file again. More carefully. "He's clean," I say again. "But he's been in Connolly's social orbit, which means Connolly has had access to his relationships without necessarily having turned him. We should assume he's been used without his knowledge."
"Used how."
"As a conduit for information Connolly extracted through social contact rather than formal reporting. Brennan mentions something at dinner, Connolly notes it, Connolly passes it." I look at the file. "It's common. The asset doesn't even know they're an asset."
Mackenzie is quiet for a moment, processing this. Then: "So we can't trust what Brennan knows but we can probably trust what Brennan does."
"With appropriate monitoring, yes."
She nods. Makes a note. Continues working.
This is what it's been like for four days, and I find — with a degree of surprise that I note and then accept — that I like it.
Not simply tolerate it. Actually like it, which is not a thing I say easily about working situations, having spent most of my life in working situations that required performing a version of myself rather than just being a version of myself.
With Mackenzie I can be — approximately — the version that knows things and says them directly and doesn't manage what she's thinking about what I'm saying.
She takes the information and she uses it and she doesn't look at me with the assessment quality that everyone else in this house does, which is probably because she did her assessment early and has moved past it into something more functional.
Roise comes at eleven.
She comes three mornings out of five, which I have noticed, and the mornings she comes she works at the far end of the table from me with the deliberate professional ease of someone who has decided on an approach and is executing it.
The approach is: competent, warm to Mackenzie, correct to me, entirely opaque about anything interior.
I match the approach. We work in the same room without incident. This is, I tell myself, a satisfactory arrangement.
The problem is that on the mornings she comes, Liam stops by more frequently.
I don't think he does this deliberately.
I think he comes by the office several times a day regardless, to check in with Mackenzie or to pull a file or to ask about the status of something he's tracking, and on the mornings Roise is here he simply — encounters her as part of those visits, and they interact with the specific efficiency of two people who know how to work together and have been doing it for long enough that the working together is easy.
It's the ease I can't be entirely neutral about.
Not the content of their interactions, which are professional and brief and contain nothing I could reasonably object to.
The ease. The particular quality of people who know each other's rhythms and fit into them without effort, who communicate in the shorthand of established familiarity, who don't have to think about how to be in the same space.
I have been in this operation for approximately two months. They have been in the same working relationship for years.
I know this. I apply the logic of it consistently and correctly.
And then Liam comes in at half past eleven and asks Roise about the Galway-7 follow-up, and she pulls it up in twelve seconds because she already knew he'd ask and she'd prepared it, and they talk about it for four minutes with the economy of people who are fluent in each other, and I look at the Brennan tab on my screen and I read the same paragraph three times without retaining it.
"You're doing the face," Mackenzie says, without looking up.
"I'm not making a face."
"The controlled one. The one where the control is too consistent. Most people's expressions shift every few seconds naturally. Yours gets very still when you're managing something."
I look at my screen. "I'm reading."
"You've been reading the same section since he came in."
Liam is still talking to Roise at the far end of the table. "I'm being thorough," I say.
"You're being thorough about something you told me was resolved forty minutes ago." She looks up. "Nadia."
I meet her eyes.
She says nothing. She doesn't have to. The expression on her face is the one that contains several things she's decided not to say, all of which she knows I know, and what she is doing is giving me the room to decide what to do with the knowledge rather than making the decision for me.
This is an advanced form of the thing she does and I appreciate it even when I find it inconvenient.
"I'm fine," I say.
"I know," she says. "That's not what I was going to say."
"What were you going to say."
She looks at her screen. "That the Brennan tab could use another pass on the 2022 communications. Something about the frequency feels off." She pulls up the tab in question and turns her screen slightly toward me. "Here. What do you see."
She's giving me something to do with my attention that isn't the other end of the table. I recognize this. I take it.
"The frequency drops in March," I say. "Consistently. Every year, March. Which means it's tied to something seasonal rather than something operational." I look at the pattern. "Does Brennan have family in Ireland? The Republic?"
"A sister in Cork," Mackenzie says.
"He goes home in March. He's out of the information network for two to three weeks annually, which means Connolly had a recurring gap in Brennan's data. He'd have to fill it from another source." I sit back. "What other sources was Connolly working?"
We follow the thread. By the time I look up, Roise has gone and Liam is at the door of the office looking at me with an expression that I've started to recognize — the one he gets when he's seen something he's decided to be amused about, which is a specific form of amusement that has the quality of being directed inward at himself as much as outward.
"How's it going," he says.
"Brennan's March gap," Mackenzie tells him. "Nadia found it."
"What does it tell us."
"That Connolly had at least one other source in the west corridor." I hold his gaze steadily. "I'm working through who."
He looks at me for a moment. "Good," he says, and then he looks at his sister and says something about the Friday timeline and she responds and they talk for approximately ninety seconds about logistics, and then he looks at me once more with that same expression, and then he goes.
I look at my screen.
"You know," Mackenzie says, "for someone trained to be invisible, you're quite visible about this particular thing."
"Mackenzie."
"I'm just saying."
"Could you say it less."
"Probably not." She taps something on her keyboard. "He's noticed, by the way."
I look up. "Noticed what."
"The face. The controlled one." She meets my eyes. "He mentioned it to me. In that way he has of mentioning things that he's actually asking about but won't ask about directly."
"What did you tell him."
"I told him to ask you." She turns back to her screen. "Which he won't do directly either. So you're both going to continue performing elaborate unawareness of something both of you are completely aware of until one of you stops."
I look at the Brennan file.
"He's going to say something," she says. "Probably soon. Probably in that way where it sounds like he's talking about something else." She pauses. "I'd prepare for that if I were you."
"I'm always prepared," I say.
"For operational things," she says. "This isn't operational."
He says something at three in the afternoon.
He comes back to the office ostensibly to collect the Connolly file, which he could have sent Conor for, and he collects it and then he leans against the doorframe while Mackenzie is on a call in the hallway and looks at me with the expression I've been cataloguing.
"Roise and I," he says. "You know that's not—"
"I know," I say. "You told me."
"I want to make sure you know."
"You've made it clear."
"Have I." There is something in his voice that is not quite amusement and not quite seriousness. "Because you've been reading the same paragraph since half ten and Brennan's March gap doesn't require three hours to process."
I look at him.
He looks at me.
"Say whatever you're going to say," I tell him.
"I'm not going to say anything." He pushes off the doorframe. "I'm just going to point out that you've been doing the face for four hours and Mackenzie has noticed and Roise has noticed and if Conor notices we'll never hear the end of it."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a very specific face." He crosses to my end of the table and picks up a file that is beside my screen, which is not the Connolly file but which gives him a reason to be at this end of the table.
He is very close. "It looks like this." He adopts an expression of elaborate, almost aggressive composure.
"Nothing to see here. I'm fine. Everything is fine.
The paragraph is extremely interesting."
I stare at him.
"That's not—"
"It's very accurate." He sets the file down. "I find it interesting," he says, quietly, in the register that isn't for the room but just for where we're standing. "For the record."
"What."
"That you make it." He meets my eyes. "Because you don't have to."
I look at him. At the tired eyes and the careful face and the man who is standing at my end of the table to tell me that I don't have to manage what I feel in this room, which is something his sister told me once in a smaller kitchen, and which apparently runs in the family.
"Liam," I say.
"Mm."
"Go deal with Declan."
Something moves through his expression. "Friday."
"I know it's Friday. I'm telling you that between now and Friday, if you're going to stand in doorways and make observations about my face, I'm going to have significantly less patience for it than I currently do."
"Your current patience is quite thin."
"Yes."
"Noted." He picks up the Connolly file — the actual one, which is at the other end of the table and which he has therefore moved the entire length of the room to collect when he could have taken it immediately.
He is almost at the door when he says, without turning around: "Tomorrow morning.
The west corridor. I want you in on the briefing. "
"All right."
"Bring the March gap analysis."
"Obviously."
He goes.
Mackenzie comes back from the hallway with her phone in hand and the expression of someone who heard the last thirty seconds of a conversation through a door and has opinions about it. "Well," she says.
"Don't," I say.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say several things."
"Only one thing." She sits. "He hasn't brought anyone into a west corridor briefing who wasn't inner circle in four years."
I look at the Brennan tab.
"That's all," she says. "That's the one thing."
I look at the Brennan tab for a while longer.
The cracks, I think, are showing. My father would say that's weakness. I'm beginning to think it might be something else — the beginning of a different kind of structure, one where the gaps aren't failures of the wall but places where something can actually get through.
Whether that's wisdom or sentiment, I haven't decided.
I go back to the March gap.
But I'm not reading the same paragraph anymore.