Liam #2
He hears me a half-second too late, which is the correct amount of too late — late enough to be caught, early enough to tell me he's trained.
He turns. He's younger than I expected, thirty maybe, with the specific quality of someone who is not the decision-maker but is very good at executing decisions.
"The photograph," I say. "Who took it."
He looks at me with the expression of someone deciding whether to run the cover or save the energy. He decides on the latter, which tells me he's been told not to bother with cover if he's caught. Which tells me being caught is something Viktor planned for.
This is an interceptable operation. Viktor sent this man expecting he might be stopped.
"You're not here to watch," I say. "You have a timeline."
His expression doesn't change but something in it does, the fractional shift of confirmation.
"She's inside that building," I say. "And you're not going to reach her. So here's what happens now."
He looks at me.
"You go back to Viktor," I say, "and you tell him that the operation against Nadia Volkov is over.
That she's under the protection of the Costello family and the Rosso alliance and that any further attempts will be treated as an act of war against both organizations.
" I hold his gaze. "And you tell him she's not compromised.
She's defected. Which is different. And which means the rules of engagement for a compromised asset don't apply. "
He says nothing.
"Go," I say.
He goes.
I stand on the corner until he's out of sight and then I take out my phone and I call Conor. "Get me everything on Viktor's non-lethal asset elimination protocols," I say. "I need to understand exactly what he sends and when and in what order."
"What happened," Conor says.
"He sent someone to the compound area. Not a watcher.
Someone with a specific objective and a specific timeline.
" I look at the corner where the man was standing.
"And Conor — the photos. The distribution.
He didn't take them to expose Nadia publicly.
He took them to give himself justification for eliminating her within his own network.
" I pause. "She's always been expendable to him. I don't think she knew that."
A silence. "You think this was always the plan."
"I think Viktor sent her on an operation she wasn't meant to survive," I say.
"I think the plan was always to use her and then tie off the loose end before she became a liability.
" I look at the street. "I think her father declined an assignment and died for it, and Viktor decided his daughter was useful right up until the point she was a problem, and he's been running this both ways from the beginning. "
"Does she know."
"Not yet," I say. "But she's going to."
She is at the kitchen table with her laptop and the distribution analysis when I come in, which is what Ailish said — working through the fear with her hands. She looks up when I come through the door and reads my face with the speed she reads everything.
"You found something," she says.
I sit across from her.
I tell her about the man on the corner. About the reconnaissance timeline. About what I've worked out about Viktor's plan — the full version, the one that starts with her father and ends with a man in a coat on a street corner a hundred yards from where she's sitting.
She listens.
She doesn't interrupt.
When I finish, the kitchen is very quiet.
She looks at her laptop screen. At the distribution analysis she's been running, the careful methodical work of someone who came to this operation prepared for most things and has just been told about the one thing they weren't prepared for.
"He always planned to kill me," she says.
"Yes."
"After the operation concluded."
"Yes."
"My father declined an assignment," she says.
"And they killed him. And then they recruited me.
" She looks at the screen. "Because I was useful.
And because using me was the cleanest possible way to make sure I never—" She stops.
"Never became someone who could ask the right questions about how he died. "
The silence has several things in it.
"Nadia," I say.
She looks up.
"You're under my protection," I say. "Not as an asset. Not as an operative. As—" I find the word. "As mine. Which in this world means something specific and I need you to understand what it means."
She looks at me.
"It means Viktor doesn't get to make decisions about your life anymore," I say.
"It means any move he makes against you is a move against this family and against the Italian alliance, and I will make sure he understands that cost before he calculates whether to pay it.
" I hold her gaze. "It means you're not alone in this. "
She looks at me for a long time.
"He killed my father," she says.
"I know."
"And he recruited me. And he sent me here to be useful and then to disappear."
"Yes."
Her jaw tightens. Not with the fear — through it, past it, into the thing that lives on the other side of fear when someone has been trained since childhood to find the thing on the other side of fear. "Then I want to be the one who ends it," she says. "Not you. Not the Italians. Me."
I look at her.
"That's my condition," she says. "For whatever comes next. I'm in the room when it ends."
I hold her gaze for a long moment.
"All right," I say.
She nods.
She looks back at the screen.
"Liam," she says.
"Yes."
"He never planned to let me live." She says it not as devastation — as the flat factual version, the way she says things when she's decided to look directly at them rather than around them.
"My father died because they decided he was done being useful, and they sent me because they thought they could use me the same way, and they were going to kill me the same way.
" She pauses. "That's what I've been working for.
That's what my father's network has been serving.
" She looks up. "I need you to know that I know that. "
"I know you know," I say.
"And I need you to know that it changes things."
"I know that too."
She nods again. She closes the laptop. She puts her hands flat on the table and she looks at them for a moment, and what's in her face is not one thing but several things at once — anger and grief and the specific clarity of someone who has just seen the full shape of something they've been seeing only in pieces.
And underneath all of it, moving through it like a current under still water — something else.
Something that looks, in the specific and difficult-to-name way of things that don't have clean labels, like the beginning of done.
Done being someone else's operation.
Done being the weapon pointed at a target.
Done.
"Okay," she says, to her hands on the table.
"Okay," I say.
And I mean: I've got you.
And she hears it.