"Not without coverage, I hope." Kate picked up the twisted hospital gown. "Aren't you supposed to be wearing this?"
"Too hot."
She let it drop back onto the bed and came closer, shyly examining the wide gauze bandage taped against his side. "Does it hurt?"
"Not too bad. Comes and goes."
"You told me you'd never lie to me."
"I don't think that's exactly what I said." Conor gave her a faint smile. "So, where do we stand? Did you speak to Abigail?"
"Sort of, but she didn't get to say much."
Kate shared the details of her brisk discussions with Reginald Effingham. Conor, relieved that Frank's FBI connections appeared to be as good as Sedgwick thought, speculated the promised visitors would likely be a protective detail. To Kate's question of who they might be he could only respond with a weary, apologetic shrug.
"Never mind. You should rest. The doctor prescribed something for the pain. I'll go find someone."
"No, not yet." Conor caught her arm and pulled her back. "Come here. Sit down."
He shifted on the bed, grimacing and losing a little more color in the process, and patted the empty space next to him. Kate gingerly climbed up and settled next to his hip, taking care not to interfere with any tubing. He remained quiet for a moment, tensed in pain, then his face relaxed and he took her hand.
"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." He ran a thumb over her fingers. "Robert Frost. That's the whole poem. Says all he needed it to."
Kate nodded, wondering what he expected from her. "You know all my secrets now," she offered uncertainly. He surprised her with a tender grin.
"Somehow, I doubt that. It wasn't yours I was thinking of, though." His smile faded. "He was such a little boy, probably no more than ten years old. Hindu," he said softly. "I don't know his name. We were in a hurry and I didn't take the time to ask. For a while I thought that's what made everything worse, but I was kidding myself. What made it worse was feeling I knew him entirely, in that one instant. As if his soul flew up out of him and showed me everything he was, everything about him. Except his name."
"Don't do this," Kate whispered. "Not now. It's too much."
"It’s not too much. More like not enough. You run as far as you can from the thing you're trying to escape. In the end you realize you've only been circling it." Conor looked up, sad and resigned. "I've nowhere else to go, except back to the middle. I have to get there while I can, and no matter what you might think of me later, I need to tell you."
Kate laced her fingers between his and felt the tremor running through him like a current of electricity, reaching for her, presenting no choice but to flinch and pull away or be frozen by its embrace. She raised Conor's hand to rest against her cheek, and held tight.
He could remember the congestion in his chest as they climbed that morning, worsening with every step, but he didn't think it had ever reached the crackling pitch he was trying to ignore now. Conor gripped Kate's hand, his centering stake in the ground, and let his mind drift backward.
At the time, the state of his lungs was just one more thing to worry about as he followed Thomas, slogging up through the Kashmir woods to a doomed meeting with the lieutenants of Vasily Dragonov. Preoccupied and jittery, he'd fallen behind as they approached a small, dilapidated Hindu shrine. When the boy suddenly appeared, cupping a handful of marigolds, it startled him, as though a pint-sized spirit had risen from the snowy path. He couldn't resist the child's bright, engaging smile.
"Even now, I wonder about those marigolds—how he could have gotten them, with the ground still frozen."
Conor leaned back, allowing himself a short respite. Outside the room the business of emergency medicine continued along its course, moving to a tune of electronic tones and low-tech rattles, and the occasional unexpected crescendo. He listened, drawing strength from the compassion in Kate's eyes before continuing.
He'd obliged the boy by taking a few of the flowers, giving a handful of rupees in exchange, and after depositing his offering at the dancing feet of Shiva in the shrine's niche, he'd removed the long white scarf from his neck to wrap around the boy, and told him to run along home.
"It was freezing out, and he looked so cold." Conor worked his lips into a faltering smile. "I suppose something in saffron would have been better. He was an acolyte, after all, no matter how tiny. But white seemed to suit him as well."
What followed after was a dimly lit recollection—of moving forward and waiting and moving forward again, of rehearsed conversations in an antiseptic hotel room, of improvisation and, ultimately, of mayhem. When the mission exploded and his brother was shot, he and Sedgwick carried Thomas down the path, but after they'd laid him in the car two of Dragonov's men had arrived on the road, armed to the teeth. They managed to get between them and the car, and before Conor knew what was happening Sedgwick was dragging him back into the woods.
"Evasive maneuvers. We tried to lure them up the path, get them into a position so they weren't between us and the car. It almost worked."
Almost, but not quite. They were sprinting back down to the road when Dragonov's men pinned them down behind a boulder, opening fire from a point farther up the path, somewhere near the shrine.
Here, his memory was something more than just vivid. It was an endless present moment, always with him, never faded. He heard the relentless burst of automatic weapons, of bullets cracking against stone. He saw the trees around him, trunks torn apart, exposing the soft, shredded wood. He smelled the pine pitch.
And he could feel his jumpy, tingling nerves wrap themselves around the gun in his hand, felt his panic and desperation to move, to do something, to make it stop. Then, in the midst of chaos, a break— a breathless lacuna drawing Conor forward, away from his cover and onto the path, gun already raised, already firing.
And in this eternal sliver of time he saw it—the flash of white skating across the path, the wide, astonished brown eyes, and so much more. He saw everything, understood it, and knew what he'd done.
Why was he there, a small innocent running through the center of havoc? Why had he not gone home as he was told? Who could answer such questions? Who but the god Shiva, whose dancing idol had slipped from a small pair of hands, landing upright on the path where it had toppled, one bell-clad foot poised in the air, ready to ring down onto the icy earth. To destroy it all, and create it new.
The secret sits in the middle. Now, so did he. Conor sat there with it and let everything else spin around him. He felt so far away, and so very tired. But still, there was a hand in his, cool and soft, that hadn't let go. And that was something.
In fact, that was everything.
22
He didn’t need the pain medication after all. His confession complete, Conor closed his eyes and Kate watched his body go slack, his hand heavy in her own as he slept.
Without taking her attention from his face she eased herself away from him, down into the chair at his bedside, and folded her arms on the mattress. At some point her head dropped on top of them, and there it remained until the pressure of a hand on her shoulder pulled her from sleep.
She sat up, muscles protesting as she unwound, and turned to face a muscular gray-suited stranger. He had a dark, precisely trimmed goatee, but not a follicle of hair on his perfectly formed head. It gleamed like rich polished mahogany, a warm contrast to the antiseptic light of the exam room.
"The spirit that was foretold?" Kate asked. The quizzical cast of his eyebrow indicated it wasn't the greeting he'd expected. He pulled a photo ID from his jacket.
"Agent Reynolds, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and my partner Agent Levine." He inclined his head at a second, far less imposing man who stood by the door. "We're with the Diplomatic Security Service, providing assistance at the request of the British Embassy. We arrived about three hours ago, and I apologize for waking you but I've been told we need to leave."
"Leave? Why? What's happening?" Kate turned back to
Conor who lay with eyes closed, pale and motionless. His breath came and went in rapid puffs, a sluggish piston straining to keep up with its work.
"No further details, except that we should return to the waiting room," Agent Reynolds said.
"I'm not returning anywhere until I know what's going on."
"I'm afraid I don't have that information for you, ma'am."
"Well then, let's find someone who does."
"Yes, ma'am."
The two appeared to accept her remark as a mission-critical directive, but before they could act an unseen hand drew the privacy curtain back and three clinicians entered the room. Frightened and disoriented, Kate longed for a familiar face.
"Where's Dr. Burton?" she demanded. An attractive woman with purple-rimmed glasses stepped forward.
"His shift ended earlier and he didn't want to wake you. I'm Lucille Kim. I'm afraid we're not getting enough traction with the current line of meds and Conor's condition is becoming critical. We're going to transport him to the ICU and try a different therapy." The doctor gave her a sympathetic smile. "You've been here all night. Why not take a break and get something to eat? There's no immediate danger and we've got your cell number. Give us an hour or so to get him settled and then you can see him again."
The idea of eating generated only nausea, but for lack of a better plan Kate wandered over to the cafeteria, her impressive bodyguard trailing behind her while his partner remained with Conor. She bought a cup of coffee and offered to buy one for Agent Reynolds.
"No thank you, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. I'm good."
"Please call me Kate."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Yes, Kate," she said, exasperated.
"Yes, Kate." The agent allowed himself a fractional smile and touched a hand to his chest. "Gideon."
They made their way to a table by a bank of windows filled with the first wool-gray light of morning. Kate glanced at her watch—five o'clock. She wondered if Jeanette had brought Jigger back home by now, and whether Reg Effingham had been offered a guest room for the night or been shown the door. It was too early to call anyone. She swirled a spoon in her untouched coffee and watched the people filtering through the cafeteria. From the variety of uniforms—scrubs, hair nets, lab coats—she presumed most were hospital employees, but occasionally her attention locked on a few individuals who didn't laugh or talk with their companions but sat quietly pushing food around on their plates. They were like ghosts at the banquet, and she drew a guilty consolation from their tired faces. She was one of their number— another anonymous servant to the fear surrounding illness and loss.
Breathe.
Not too deep. Just a little one.
Go again.
Life was simple for him on this level, where only a few rules mattered. The rest had all been incinerated into ash along with every hope or desire that fell subordinate to the one goal and its supporting objectives: To draw a breath. To keep the intake shallow and even—that minimized the pain. To coax his bloodstream into absorbing the wisp of air and its tiny cargo of oxygen. To draw another breath.
This was his universe, and it demanded singularity of purpose, but a pressure on his forehead kept disrupting his tempo, a stroke in counterpoint to the established rhythm. Conor's eyes fluttered open to squint at the distraction. He squeezed them shut and tried again. Still there. The vision might be a side effect of delirium, but it wasn't going away.
"Good morning, Conor. I seem to recall we've played this scene already."
Although its breeziness seemed forced Frank's mellifluous baritone rolled over him like a soothing melody. Conor's reply disappeared as it left his lips. Frank leaned in closer, and he tried to add a larger measure of sound on the next exhalation.
"Sorry to bore you."
"Ah, you are never a bore, my friend. Many things, but never that." Frank's face quickly sobered. "Do you know who did this?"
Conor's brow creased with the effort of patching together an oral brief. “Fella . . . from Armagh. Heard the accent. Big fucker. Crew cut. Shot . . . shot him twice. Right leg . . .”
"Yes, all right. Well done." Frank ran a hand over his forehead again, the cool touch an instant of luxury, too quickly consumed by the furnace burning through his skin. "We're coming very close now, Conor. Our elusive wizard has bungled his position. He's lost the initiative, and we'll not let that advantage slip away."
Conor managed a small nod and closed his eyes. He had no more strength to spare, but as he slipped back to focus on his goal of sustained respiration he realized he'd neglected something—the most critical piece of information in his whole report. The thought provided a short-lived jolt of adrenalin. His eyes shot open and fixed on the agent.
"He wasn't after me. He wanted Kate. She just inherited a fortune. Durgan found out, somehow. Don't let anything—swear to me, Frank. Swear you won't let anything happen to her."
He struggled to hold onto consciousness for a few more seconds, but he'd exhausted all his reserves. Conor fell into darkness, still waiting for Frank's promise.
From the corner of her eye Kate noticed Gideon removing a phone from his pocket. As he spoke to the caller, his eyes met hers and glanced away. Something was wrong. Her shoulders trembled as she tried to read some message in the agent's flat expression. He clapped the phone shut and turned to her.
"What's happened? Is something wrong?"
"No ma'am." He spoke in the same emotionless tone, either oblivious or impervious to her state of mind. "The gentleman you've been expecting just arrived."
"Who? What gentleman?"
"Unknown."
Kate scowled. "Gideon, can we please talk like normal human beings for a minute? What does 'unknown' mean?"
This time the agent offered her a wide, apologetic smile. "It means I don't know the guy's name, Kate, but he's on his way down so we'll both find out soon."
When he did appear she had an immediate hunch as to his identity, but doubted her instinct. The handsome, silver-haired figure didn't look like someone who'd just flown through the night across the Atlantic. He carried a leather briefcase shined to a glossy finish, and the suit draping his lean frame fit with tailored perfection. A regimentally folded handkerchief peeked from its breast pocket and his shirt—snowy-white shot through with pin-striped burgundy—was equally precise. Not a single crease appeared where it should not. He stopped to confer with Agent Reynolds and Kate came forward to greet him.
"Frank Murdoch?" she asked doubtfully.
Offering a slight bow, the older man smiled and took her hand. He regarded her in silence for a few seconds, his hazel eyes meeting hers with a mixture of irony and warmth. "Ginger-haired, indeed. Eckhard mentioned as much, but I'd no notion it would be so beautiful. Your blouse sets the color off to marvelous effect."
"I . . . thank you." Kate ran her hands over the shirt, attempting to smooth its wrinkles. "Can I offer you something?" She indicated the various stations of the cafeteria.
"Please allow me to offer you something." Frank took her elbow and led her back to the table. "I believe you could do with a bit of breakfast."
"No, I'm not hungry, and I have this coffee I haven't even touched."
"Nonsense." He gave the cup a frown of distaste and turned on his heel. "Agent Reynolds, would you be so kind? Bring whatever appears least gruesome. Buttered toast perhaps, and a quantity of hot tea, preferably in a pot of some sort." Having handily dispatched the federal agent Frank turned his attention back to Kate. "Now, shall we have a chat? I've just come from Conor, who offered brief comments before inconveniently falling asleep."
"You saw him? How is he?"
Frank paused before offering a reassuring smile. "Well he's looked worse, my dear. Tell me what the doctors are saying."
She attempted a dispassionate narration, but exhaustion and fear finally caught up with her. The words tumbled from Kate in a monologue fractured by sobs, and once begun they seemed unstoppable. Frank offered the pristine handkerchief from his pocket and put
an arm around her, murmuring encouragements that gradually succeeded in calming her. When she was quiet he guided her into a chair and poured out cups of tea. With dull surprise, Kate realized Gideon had managed to find a stainless steel teapot.
She sipped the tea and nibbled at the toast Frank insisted she eat, and at his gentle prodding began describing the events of the past twelve hours. By the time she'd finished, the cafeteria had filled. Outside over the mountains a pale autumn sun burned through the mist, and although it was still quite early the breakfast aromas of eggs and toasting bread began subsiding under a pervasive smell of stewing tomatoes.
Frank removed an envelope from his briefcase and placed it on the table between them. "Kate, I realize this is all extremely frightening, but the window of opportunity for action is shrinking and I must ask for your assistance." He slid the envelope across the table, his hand still pressed on top. "These photographs represent classified documents, but I need you to tell me if the man who tried to kidnap you last night is in any of them. You mustn't ask about the subject or content of the photographs, and you must tell no one you've seen them. Do you understand all this?"
Kate nodded, and Frank removed his hand. He sat back in his chair and crossed a leg over his knee. She unfastened the clasp and slipped a dozen photographs out on the table. All featured men in groups of two or three, taken in a variety of settings, at different times of day. A few were interior shots in what looked like a bar.
The first six photos contained faces she'd never seen before, but when she flipped to the seventh Kate immediately shuddered. A group of three men stood under the Guinness sign of an Irish pub, and she recognized her kidnapper as the one in the middle. The man on his left was a stranger, but as she focused on the third figure in the photograph a deeper chill shook through her. Even turned slightly in profile the face was unmistakable.
"My God," she whispered. "It's Phillip Ryan."
"What? Phillip Ryan?" Frank sat forward, startled.
"Yes." Kate turned the photo to give the agent a better view. "This man in the middle is the one who tried to kidnap me last night, but this man on his right is Phillip Ryan. He's Irish. He was my late husband's cousin and he lived over here for a while, but later he became the manager of Conor's farm in Dingle. He's the one who first wrote to me about Conor."
The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3 Page 52