Page 21 of The Dangerous Dance

I go to bed.

I choose not to think about the transition between positions. About what it means when it isn't true.

I almost manage it.

CHAPTER 9

Liam

I get the call from Conor's man at half past ten on a Tuesday night, and the report takes approximately ninety seconds, which is about eighty seconds longer than the situation warrants.

"She went through a building," the man says.

"I know."

"The side entrance of a restaurant on⁠—"

"I know," I say again. "How long before you realized she was gone."

A pause that tells me more than the answer will. "Four minutes. Maybe five."

"And you called it in after."

"Yes."

"Thank you," I say, and hang up.

I sit at my desk and look at the wall for a moment. The tracker app is open on my secondary screen, the signal sitting exactly where it's been sitting all evening — the apartment building in Astoria, fifth floor, east-facing — and I look at it with the specific feeling of a man who has just confirmed something he already knew and doesn't particularly enjoy being right about.

She found the tracker within days. She's been running the signal as cover while she operates free and clear, which means everything my man has been watching for the last week has been footage of a coat in an apartment. She has been, for all practical purposes, invisible.

I should be angrier about this than I am.

What I am instead is something I don't immediately name, because naming it would require me to look at it more directly than I want to. I note it. I set it aside. I open the file I've been building on her and add to it.

The file on Nadia — I've been calling her that since the second day, which was a small and entirely predictable defeat — started as operational necessity. Target surveillance. Background check. The kind of documentation that any reasonable person running any kind of organization would compile on someone who'd broken into their property and placed incendiary devices with the ease of someone who'd done it before.

It has become, over the course of the last week, something more thorough than operational necessity strictly requires.

I know this. I continue anyway.

Her full name is Nadia Volkov. Twenty-one years old, born in Moscow, currently holding a valid American tourist visa issued six weeks ago. No criminal record in any database I have access to, which is its own kind of information — the absence of a record for someone with her skill set means either she's never been caught or she's been protected, and given what I know about who sent her, the answer is probably both.

Her father was Aleksei Volkov. This was is important.

Aleksei Volkov was, by the time of his death three years ago, one of the most successful contract operatives the Russian intelligence apparatus had produced in the post-Soviet era. He worked without organizational affiliation for most of his career — freelance in the way that people in that particular profession use the word, meaning loyal to whoever was paying and capable enough that there was always someone paying. He died at forty-four. The official report, which I obtained through a contact in Europol who owed me a favor I'd been sitting on for two years, lists the cause as a targeted hit by a rival operative.

The unofficial version, which I put together from three separate sources and a pattern analysis of the timing, suggests he was killed by his own handlers when he declined an assignment they'd decided was non-negotiable. He had a daughter, the file noted. The file did not elaborate.

I sit with that for a while.

A man who worked as a weapon for most of his adult life, who raised his daughter in proximity to that work, who at some point declined an assignment and died for it. I try to construct the version of that story where the daughter grows up uncomplicated and find that I can't. Every version ends with the same result: a twenty-one-year-old woman in a New York ballet studio who fights like she's been trained from childhood and lies with the ease of someone who never had the option of being entirely honest with anyone.

She knew my history with Rina, she told her handler. She factored it into her approach. She's been reading me as carefully as I've been reading her, and she's been doing it since before she arrived.

That level of preparation suggests either that she's particularly thorough — which she is, clearly — or that whoever sent her considered me a significant enough problem to warrant that level of investment. Both interpretations are either flattering or concerning, depending on how you hold them.

I close the Aleksei file and open the one on the woman who met Nadia at the café.