Page 8 of The Dangerous Dance

They just won't know it's me.

CHAPTER 4

Nadia

The warehouse on the west side is, as I noted the first time I walked past it on a Thursday afternoon with a coffee and my best impression of someone who simply lives in the neighborhood, operated by people who have gotten comfortable.

Comfortable is a vulnerability. My father taught me that before I was old enough to understand why, and I understood why before I was old enough to be grateful for it. Comfort makes people predictable. It puts them on the same schedule, in the same positions, watching the same corners. It makes the gaps between them consistent, which means the gaps are mappable, which means the gaps are mine.

I've spent four nights mapping them.

The rotation runs two men on the east entrance, one on the west, and a fourth who moves between the loading dock and the south wall on a pattern that is so regular I could set a watch to it. There's a camera on the northeast corner that covers the approach from the street and another above the loading dock, but the angle on the dock camera creates a blind spot approximately four feet wide along the south wall that the fourth guard walks past every eleven minutes without ever looking at directly.

In that blind spot, on my third night of observation, I found an exhaust vent low on the wall that is, based on the rust pattern around the bolts and the slight give when I pressed it with my foot, no longer properly secured.

Tonight is the fourth night. Tonight the observation ends.

I dress for this the way I dress for everything — practically, specifically, with the understanding that every item I wear is a decision that will either help or complicate me in the next two hours. Dark clothing is obvious but correct. Flat shoes with grip. Hair up and covered. Nothing around my neck, nothing on my wrists that catches light or makes sound. My jacket has deep interior pockets, and in the left one I have a small incendiary device that is exactly what it sounds like and not quite as dramatic as that sounds — enough to start a fire in a confined space, enough smoke to trigger a response, enough time before it catches properly for me to be somewhere else.

I am not here to burn the warehouse down. I am here to let the Irish know the warehouse is not as safe as they think it is.

There is a difference. My superiors did not specify that I needed to preserve the distinction, but I preserve it anyway, partly because wholesale destruction attracts the kind of attention that makes subsequent operations difficult, and partly because I find gratuitous damage intellectually unsatisfying.

My father, I think, would call that a character flaw.

The street is quiet by the time I move. It is a Wednesday, past midnight, and the particular cold of the night has driven most people inside. I cross from the far side of the block using the shadows along the building fronts the way I've practiced in more cities than this one, and I reach the south wall of the warehouse in the window between the fourth guard's passes without incident.

The vent gives on the second pressure. I'm inside in under a minute.

The interior is dark, which I expected, and smells of machine oil and cardboard and the specific dusty cold of a building that's kept locked more than it's opened. I wait inside the wall cavity for thirty seconds to let my eyes adjust and my heartbeat settle, and then I move.

It's easy, the way things are easy when you've prepared for them. I know the approximate layout from the external dimensions and from what I could see through the loading dock on the nights when it was briefly open. The devices I've brought don't need precision placement — they need proximity to anything that will help the smoke travel — and I find what I need in a stack of palletized material near the interior wall.

I'm placing the second device when I hear it.

Not footsteps. Something quieter than footsteps. A shift in the ambient sound of the space, a presence that changes the way silence sits in a room.

I go still.

Listen before you look. Looking announces you. Listening just keeps you informed.

I listen for three full seconds and then I move, not toward the vent I came in through — too obvious, the direction any sensible person would retreat — but along the interior wall toward the northeast corner where the shadows are deepest and the structural columns give me something to put my back against.

I almost make it.

"Don't."

The voice comes from approximately six feet ahead of me in the dark. Low, unhurried, carrying the particular quality of someone who is not surprised. Not a guard's voice. Guards, when they discover an intruder, produce a specific flavor of alarm regardless of how well-trained they are. This voice produces nothing of the kind. It is calm the way a locked door is calm — not passive, just waiting.

I stop.

"Hands where I can see them." Still calm. "Both of them."

I raise my hands. I keep my breathing even. I am running rapid calculations — distance, angles, whether the darkness works more in my favor or his right now, what he does and doesn't know about how many of me there are in this building — when he steps close enough that I can see him.

He is taller than I expected. This is inconvenient but not insurmountable. He has dark hair and the kind of face that has been through enough to organize itself into watchful lines, and he is looking at me the way I have been looking at this warehouse all week — cataloguing, mapping, identifying the gaps.

And then he sees my face.