CHAPTER 20 Nadia
Nadia
The message from Viktor comes on a Thursday morning at seven forty-two, while I am at the coffee cart on the corner of my street, which means I read it in public, which means whatever my face does when I read it happens in front of the man working the cart who has learned my order and now has opinions about my mornings.
I read it twice.
Then I put my phone in my pocket and take my coffee and walk back to the apartment and stand in the kitchen and read it again on the inside of my eyelids because I have the specific kind of memory that retains things whether or not retaining them is comfortable.
The message is operational in format. Clinical.
Viktor's preferred mode. The operational content is as follows: an asset in the Italian shipping network has identified an opportunity in their lower Manhattan offices.
A one-time access window, forty-eight hours, requiring a physical presence inside the building.
The job is surveillance installation — the same category of work I did at the Irish secondary warehouse, scaled up.
The objective is to get eyes and ears inside the Italian operational center.
The asset assigned to the job is Dara.
I set my coffee down.
I pick it up again.
I think about Dara's knee, which ended her serious dance career at seventeen and which in cold weather gives her a gait that is slightly off her center — something any competent security professional would notice in a building where you're not supposed to be noticed.
I think about Dara's face when she performs composure, which is different from my face when I perform composure in the specific way that matters.
She does it with her mouth and I do it with my eyes, and hers reads, to someone paying attention, as effortful.
I think about the forty-eight-hour window, which means Dara has two days to execute a job inside an Italian facility where the security will be Rosso-standard.
I think about what happens when an asset is caught inside a target facility.
I sit down.
I stand up.
I call Viktor.
He answers on the third ring. "Nadia."
"The Italian job," I say. "Reassign it."
A pause. The particular pause of a man who was not expecting this specific form of response and is deciding how to handle it. "The assignment has been made."
"I know. I'm telling you to unmake it." I keep my voice even.
Factual. The clinical register he responds to.
"Dara is not the right asset for a physical infiltration of a Rosso-adjacent facility.
Her movement pattern under pressure is identifiable.
Her composure performance reads as effortful to trained observers.
She'll be made within the first twenty minutes and then we lose not only the operation but the asset and whatever goodwill the Italians extend to targets they catch rather than—" I stop. "Reassign it."
"And who would you suggest instead," Viktor says, in the tone of someone already several steps ahead of where they're pretending to be.
"I'll do it."
"You're already running the Irish operation."
"The Irish operation is in a phase that doesn't require my physical presence every day." This is half true and I say it with the confidence of the half that's true. "I can run both."
"This is not your assignment."
"I'm making it my assignment." I pause. "Viktor. I need Dara out of this one. I'm giving you a better asset in exchange. That's the offer."
Another pause. Longer. "Why," he says.
The question is simple and is the most dangerous question he could ask, because why is the one that requires an answer I can't give him.
"Because she's not ready for this level of exposure," I say. "And losing her is a cost we don't need to take on when there's an alternative."
He is quiet for a long moment. I let the silence exist without filling it.
"Fine," Viktor says. "You have the window. Starting tomorrow night."
"Understood."
He hangs up.
I stand in the kitchen.
The window starting tomorrow night means I have approximately thirty hours to plan an infiltration of a Rosso-adjacent facility based on whatever I can pull from Liam's operational files on Italian security protocols — files I have access to as a function of the west corridor briefing and subsequent access that Liam has extended, and which I am now going to use for an operation that Liam does not know about and which will directly affect the people he's trying to maintain an alliance with.
I sit with this.
This is the part where I am playing both sides, which I told him at the beginning, which he said he was accounting for.
This is the part where accounting for it meets what it actually looks like in practice, which is me in a kitchen in Astoria at eight in the morning planning to walk into an Italian building on Viktor's timeline using information Liam gave me in trust.
I should tell him.
I know I should tell him.
I pick up my phone. I put it down. I pick it up again.
I don't call him because if I call him he'll stop me, which is the correct operational decision from his perspective and which will also mean that Dara does the job instead, and the image of Dara's face going effortfully composed in a corridor with Rosso security coming around the corner is something I can't make myself choose.
I put the phone in my pocket.
I go to work.
I plan it in six hours, which is faster than I should be planning something like this and which produces a plan that is good in its fundamentals and has two weaknesses I can see clearly and one I suspect but can't confirm, which is the one that's going to matter.
The access window is through the loading dock on the building's west side.
The asset Viktor identified — someone inside the Italian operation who I'm given only as a reliable contact and whom I don't have time to independently verify — will leave the dock access unlocked between eleven and eleven forty-five.
I go in, I find the junction in the internal communications housing on the third floor that Viktor has identified as optimal placement, I install the device, I exit.
The two weaknesses I can see: the internal corridor between the dock and the third floor stairwell passes a security station that will have at minimum one person at it regardless of the hour, and the third floor housing junction is thirty feet from a secondary camera that has a seventy percent chance of covering the installation point depending on its precise mounting angle.
The one I suspect but can't confirm: the reliable contact who's leaving the dock open.
I don't know this person. Viktor gave me no verification protocol.
An unverified asset on the Italian side is either exactly what Viktor says or it's something else — a double, a compromised asset, someone who knows the window is being left open and has told the people on the other side of it.
I should not do this alone.
I do it alone anyway.
It goes wrong at the security station.
Not catastrophically. Not in the way that ends with me in a room with Rosso people asking me questions I can't answer.
But wrong enough that the timeline collapses and I'm in the building twelve minutes longer than the plan allows, which is twelve minutes of additional exposure in a building where I don't belong and where someone has been notified, based on the radio traffic I can hear from the station, that there's an anomaly in the dock access log.
The device is placed. I know it's placed because I placed it myself in forty-five seconds while the station guard was occupied with the radio call. The placement is clean and the signal is live — I tested it against the receiver in my pocket and it returned confirmation.
The exit is the problem.
The exit route I planned is now covered by a second guard who wasn't there when I came in and who is standing at the corridor junction between me and the dock with the specific posture of someone who has been told to watch a specific point and is doing exactly that.
I stand in the stairwell and I assess.
There is another exit. A fire stairwell on the building's east side that opens onto a service alley I didn't reconnaissance because it was outside the operational plan. I have forty percent information about it and sixty percent estimation, which is a worse ratio than I prefer to operate on.
I take it anyway.
The service alley is clear. The alley opens onto a side street that is clear.
I'm two blocks away in four minutes and three blocks away in seven and I stop in a doorway and lean against the wall and breathe with the focused deliberateness of someone who has trained their nervous system to accept adrenaline as information rather than crisis.
The device is in. The operation is technically complete.
I am also shaking slightly, which I note and which I attribute to the twelve extra minutes rather than to the larger picture of what I've just done.
My phone rings.
It's Liam.
I look at it for two rings.
I answer. "Yes."
"Where are you." Not a question. The specific flat register of someone who already knows.
"I'm—" I stop.
"The Italian building on Water Street." His voice is very controlled. "There was an anomaly flagged in their dock access. Marco called Conor. Conor called me. I had your location pulled from—" He stops. "I had your location pulled."
I close my eyes briefly. He had the location pulled, which means he had something on me that I didn't know about, which means I've been less invisible than I thought.
"The device is placed," I say. "The operation is complete. I'm clear."
"Come to the safehouse," he says. "Now."
"Liam—"
"Now, Nadia."
I go.
He is at the safehouse when I arrive, which means he got there before me. The flat smells like the laundromat and cold November and his coat, which is draped over the chair, and he is standing in the middle of the kitchen with the expression I haven't seen from him before.
Not anger. Something past anger, the thing that comes after anger burns through its fuel and leaves something rawer.