Page 12 of Blood in the Water

The silence in the room lengthened between them, his eyes never leaving hers in the moment before Seamus let loose a raspy laugh.

“Didn’t I tell you this one was a spitfire?” he asked Baren. “Smartest lass in the neighborhood.”

She had a feeling being “smartest” wasn’t high on the list of attributes Baren considered attractive in a lawyer — or a woman.

“I’ll be at C6 first thing.” She needed to get out of there, away from Baren Maguire’s piercing eyes and the feeling that the ground was shifting under her feet.

“Thank you, lass,” Seamus said.

Brendan looked quickly away when she glanced at him on her way to the door, leaving no doubt he’d been listening carefully to the conversation. She didn’t know him well — he was a few years younger than the group of kids she grewup with in the neighborhood — but he seemed perpetually terrified.

She parted the curtain, said a quick goodbye to Mick and Sean, and headed for the front door.

“Want me to walk you to your car?” Connor asked as she passed.

“No, thanks, I got a spot up front.”

“Take care,” he said.

“You too.”

They all needed to take care now.

5

“I thought you said this fecker got in late last night,” Will grumbled. He was slumped down in the passenger seat of Nolan’s Lexus, a hoodie pulled up around his face like a sullen teenager.

Nolan pulled next to the curb in front of Mike’s City Diner. “He did.”

“Then why are we meeting him for breakfast at this hour?” Will asked. “Doesn’t he ever sleep?”

“He’s a busy man,” Nolan said. “We meet when he says we meet.”

“Doesn’t sound that different from Seamus,” Will muttered.

Nolan leveled a glance at him. “We both know Christophe Marchand is miles away from Seamus.”

Will didn’t say anything as he got out of the car and Nolan knew he’d won the round. Involvement in organized crime was as far as the similarities between Seamus O’Brien and the Syndicate went.

Seamus’s outfit was small, dependent on neighborhood loyalties that sometimes went back decades. He’d onlymanaged to seize control of the city’s underground business because of the chaos in the Syndicate in the years before Nico, Farrell, Luca, and Christophe had taken over.

The Syndicate was a multi-national organization, a finely oiled machine with hundreds of shell companies that hid their financial holdings and reciprocal arrangements with every law enforcement organization in the world, including the CIA, Interpol, and BND.

There were no limits to the ways Seamus would make money — the indentured servitude of women, the selling of drugs to anyone who would buy them, the bludgeoning of the city’s business owners if they didn’t pay for protection regardless of whether they were young bar owners or elderly shopkeepers.

In Seamus’s mind, if you were in Boston, you were on his playground. You either played by his rules or you went to another park.

The Syndicate was remaking organized crime for the twenty-first century. Forced prostitution and trafficking were off the table, as was selling drugs to kids. To hear Christophe tell it, their cyber labs in New York and Paris rivaled the labs at the NSA, and they were increasingly moving into digital spaces like corporate espionage.

Nolan wasn’t naive: the Syndicate wasn’t the good guy. They wounded, stole, and killed. But there was a semblance of honor among their ranks, and when the dust settled from the Syndicate’s war with Seamus, one organization would rule Boston whether Nolan liked it or not. From where he was sitting, the city would be better off if it was the Syndicate, to say nothing of Bridget, whose debt to Seamus would disappear, the only reason Christophe had been able to talk Nolan into being their mole.

Mike’s City Diner was in a small brick building,unremarkable in every way, which Nolan assumed was the point. A red counter with a half wall of glass separated the kitchen and counter from the tables on the other side.

It wasn’t quite seven a.m. and the place was quiet, the scent of frying bacon, toasted bread, and fresh coffee pungent in the air. Nolan spotted Marchand at a table near the back, a cup of coffee in front of him, his custom suit making him look out of place even from a distance.

Nolan didn’t blame him for taking the booth against the wall: he felt the itch of paranoia as he took one of the chairs across from Christophe that left his back exposed to the diner’s entrance.

“Morning,” he said.