Suarez kept his hood up to conceal his tattoos. He had strolled along L Street for a half hour, passing the modest house on the corner twice. There were two cars out front. One was a tiny, beat-up Honda—the sort that a nineteen-year-old girl might drive. The other, though, was a newer Mustang with tinted windows and a spoiler on the rear. This was the kind of car that a younger man would drive. Suarez knew that Buddy Cavanaugh didn’t have the means to drive a car like that, and O’Connell drove an older sedan, which meant only one thing: O’Connell had left a man—maybe more than one—to guard his daughter.

Suarez wasn’t surprised. O’Connell was smart enough to know that his daughter was still a target in the war. It was the reason Soh had sent Suarez here now. She represented a pressure point for O’Connell like none other. The fact that Suarez would have to get through those protecting Diamond O’Connell would make his task more complicated, but not impossible. Few of O’Connell’s men had real experience with war and killing the way that Suarez did.

And Suarez had the element of surprise on his side.

The Conley Terminal Facility was the largest cargo holding facility in Boston. It was directly across the Reserve Channel from the union office, and spread out for nearly a mile from South Boston toward Fort Independence. Vast cargo containers were stacked in endless rows, like some giant child’s building blocks.

Cormack O’Connell steered his Buick up L Street from his house and turned right onto East First Street. The entrance to the terminal was at the corner of East First and Farragut. It was a secure facility, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fences. At the terminal entrance, Cormack was required to show a series of passes and identifications to get through, but his position as head of the union permitted him full access.

Once through the gate, he drove down a series of pathways between the cargo containers stacked thirty feet high. Off to his left he could see the giant cranes that were used to load and unload the containers from cargo ships.

It took a few minutes for him to make it all the way to the far end of the facility, but eventually the stacks of cargo containers grew smaller and sparser, until there was a clear space a few hundred feet from the water. Cormack pulled his car to the side of the last container and parked it. He sat there for a moment, wondering what would happen next. It was just a few minutes before eleven.

He got out of his car and walked into the middle of the small clearing. He kept his hand on a gun he had hidden in his pocket, and he looked furtively for any spot from which someone might hide to take a shot at him.