The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3

by Kathryn Guare

  "It was on the list, mate," he murmured. "Door of the fridge, red carton."

  "Something I need to know?" Abigail pivoted to confront them. Ghedi's face, which had been subsiding into relief, froze again.

  "Only that his baby girl was running a fever yesterday, so I collected the shopping while he went to the doctor's." Conor tossed the sports section aside—American papers never covered sports he actually cared about—and smiled to see Abigail's face predictably crumpling in sympathy.

  "Poor little Ayanna. Is she all right, Ghedi?"

  "Yes ma'am, thank you. It is an ear infection, but she is much better."

  "Well, why on earth didn't you say something when I—"

  "Abigail," Conor said mildly. "Are those my pancakes you're waving about? Could I ever have them before they're cooled entirely?"

  As Abigail was putting the plate in front of him, Kate swung through the door with a tray of dirty dishes. "Oatmeal-with-soy-milk is here. Please, tell me we can do that."

  Ghedi offered a bright smile. "Of course, ma'am. Straightaway."

  Conor swung around on his stool to face Kate, bursting with the knowledge of a secret shared and curious to see what she'd do with it. She saw him and stopped short, flicking a nervous glance at Abigail.

  "I didn't know you were back," she said in a neutral tone.

  "Just got here," he replied, equally bland.

  She set the tray on the counter next to him, and as Conor prepared another banal remark she suddenly stopped him with a long, demonstrative kiss. His muffled laugh escaped around her lips, and over her shoulder he watched Abigail's rounded amazement crinkle into delight.

  "Thank God that's finally settled," she muttered, heading back to the stove. "Took them long enough."

  Kate reached into her pocket and reluctantly presented him with a folded piece of paper. "Arrived early this morning. And I was hoping for a quiet, normal day."

  Conor accepted the paper without looking at it. A quick glance confirmed Ghedi was busy with his soy-spiked oatmeal, well out of hearing range.

  "Is this going to put me off my breakfast?"

  "I don't think so. It's pretty short."

  Dubious, he peeled back the corners of the paper as though defusing a bomb, and read the email message.

  Have him call me this morning ASAP. On his cell. My number is the same.

  "Is he still in India?" Kate asked.

  "Last I knew. Frank was supposedly coordinating strategy with him."

  "I didn't think you had a cell phone."

  Conor looked up from the note, grinning. "I don't, actually. The MI6 lads took it off me when they debriefed me in the hospital last March. They were glad to have something back. I'd lost or broken everything else they gave me. I suppose I can get one cheap at the WalMart?"

  "Wow. WalMart. Where the discerning spy shops?" Kate gave him an arch look. "You're a regular James Bond, aren't you?"

  "Seems like you thought so last night."

  His impertinence earned him a vicious poke in the shoulder, but the laughter in her wide blue eyes was worth the punishment.

  The smoke-gray sky was unloading a style of precipitation he'd never seen before. It wasn't snow, nor was it exactly hail or freezing rain. Sitting inside the truck, Conor was transfixed by the perfectly round dots bouncing off the hood, obsessed with the challenge of putting a name to them. He noted the sudden squall had not cast the same spell over his fellow shoppers. They continued across the parking lot, their stolid gait signaling this was not a weather event of any interest to them. Maybe because Vermonters knew what to call it. Maybe—like the Inuit—they had a rich vocabulary for types of snow. Conor tried to think of how many words the Irish had for rain, but decided their talent lay more in describing what the rain was actually doing—lashing, teeming, pissing, bucketing . . .

  He was stalling. On the plastic bag next to him, WalMart's iconic smiley face beamed its idiocy at him, looking jaundiced against the filmy blue background. The phone was inside the bag, activated, charged and ready to go, but having a premonition of what was coming, Conor was not.

  He delayed the inevitable for a few more minutes before finally plucking the phone from the bag. After connecting to the international bridge Conor dialed from memory and slumped back, waiting for something to happen. He'd only called the number once before, and briefly thought he might be as unsuccessful as he'd been the first time, but on the fifth ring he heard a click, an obscenity and a muffled cough, and then Sedgwick's flat mid-Western twang.

  "You do know what time it is over here, right?"

  "Night-time. You did say ASAP."

  "I said ASAP hours ago. Christ, this could have been a disaster; I fell asleep waiting for you. What took you so long?"

  "Had to run an errand," Conor said.

  "Oh, right. God forbid we alter the flow of happy village life." The sizzling snap of a lighter cracked over the line. "I've got eyes on Costino."

  "Right now, like? Does that mean he's in bed with you?"

  He heard Sedgwick take a long drag from his cigarette and release his breath slowly. "Okay, Conor. 'Uncle'. I yield. I haven't slept in three days, so can you cut me a break?"

  "Yeah, of course. Sorry." Conor wrapped his fingers over the steering wheel, watching whatever the heavens were still unloading onto the asphalt. "Been a busy month here as well."

  "So I'm told, buddy," Sedgwick said, without sarcasm. "The whole thing is pretty fucking unbelievable. Anyway, I'm in a hotel in Bangalore. Costino's in another one up the road and I need you over here. How are you doing, by the way? Are you healthy?"

  "Sure. Fighting fit. What's the plan?"

  "I'll tell you when you get here. You leave this afternoon. Frank's got you booked from Burlington to Newark under your own name, but the guy in the seat next to you will have alias info for the flight to Mumbai—passport, credit cards, cash, and whatever crap they throw in to pad the legend. The Brits love pocket litter. He'll leave an envelope in the seat-back pocket, so just pull it out when he goes to the john. From Mumbai you fly to Bangalore, and I'll meet you outside the arrivals hall. Don't stand me up like the last time."

  Conor detected the smile in his voice and grinned as well, remembering his first chaotic arrival in India almost a year ago. "Promise. When is the flight from Burlington?"

  "1:30 on United, so you don't have much time. You'd better pack and get on the road now."

  "Bloody hell, I can't make that," Conor sputtered. "I'm not even at home. I'm at a mall in Berlin. It's forty miles at least, and on secondary roads. I can't get back in time to pack and get to Burlington."

  "What the fuck are you doing at a mall in . . . shit. Wait, Berlin, Vermont. That's right off I-89. Sedgwick hurried on without waiting for confirmation. "Look. You need to make this, so get your ass on the interstate and head for the airport right now. From where you are, you're less than an hour away."

  "No, hang on a minute, I can't—"

  "You have to," Sedgwick said flatly. "Your documents are all on that flight, McBride. You can't miss it. Do you hear me?"

  "Yeah. I hear you." Conor slumped back, defeated. "I won't miss it."

  28

  Even at ten o’clock at night, the soupy tropical heat was strong enough to make Conor's bones feel like softening wax. A masala of odors he dared not identify swam in his nose, and an uproar—like the tipping point in a boxing match—jarred him from the stupor produced by nineteen hours of recycled air. The noise came from the convergence of two piles of humanity—one tumbling from the plane into the airport, and the other milling around the airport itself in anticipation of the first. Travelers, greeters and the ubiquitous touts of the tourist industry all fell about in a spirited tangle. By the time he'd wriggled through to the arrivals hall exit, his brand new WalMart t-shirt had acquired a puzzling brown stain and was plastered against his back. Had he been drugged and blindfolded, Conor still would have known he was in India.

  A cluster of service providers waved h
im through the door as though escorting an arriving dignitary, but their ranks soon dwindled and the few remaining grew plaintive in their appeals for his business. He ignored them, positioning himself near the doorway and scanning the area, determined not to miss the rendezvous.

  "City of Bangalore is welcoming you, sir. You are wanting taxi? Excellent hotel? First-class womens?"

  He turned in the direction of this more familiar voice and saw Sedgwick maneuvering toward him, twisting around the crowd in a series of athletic bounces. The agent had gained a few badly needed pounds since their last meeting and seemed to have caught up on his sleep.

  This was more than Conor could say for himself, but he managed a smile as they shook hands. "They say memory always exaggerates—not really possible with this place, is it?"

  "Not that I've noticed." Sedgwick pushed away one of the touts arguing his case with too much persistence and proximity. "Arrey, back off dude. This one's mine." He grinned at Conor. "You look all right for someone who's almost died twice in one year. Flights okay? Make any new friends this time?"

  "A family of touring Australians. Becky, Sam and baby Jake, visiting their mates in Pune. The baby honked his dinner all over me, but otherwise no drama."

  "Lunatics. Only Australians would bring a baby on vacation to India." Sedgwick started down the sidewalk. "Come on. Our ride's down here and we've got about a three-hour drive. You can sleep in the back."

  Sweaty, tired and petulant, Conor swore under his breath and picked up his duffel bag—another artifact from his lightning round at WalMart. "A three-hour drive to where, please, and more importantly will we find any food at all when we get there?"

  Without stopping, Sedgwick merely twirled a finger in the air, signaling Conor to follow, but when they reached a battered toy-sized cargo van he slid open the side door and indicated a backpack on the floor inside.

  "Food for the road. Knowing you and your hollow leg, I brought plenty. I put in a futon too, and it's mostly highway driving. Should be pretty smooth. Climb aboard."

  Conor didn't move. "A Maruti van? What happened to the SUV?"

  "Wasn't right for the job," Sedgwick said cryptically.

  "Hmm." Conor frowned at the dented exterior. They were big dents, and there were a lot of them.

  "How are the brakes?"

  "Good horn, good brakes, good luck. That's all you need in this country. Get in the fucking van, McBride. I want to check out how it rides with you in the back."

  Once inside, Conor settled against the steel-cage partition separating the driver's cab from the cargo area and opened the backpack. Along with two-litre bottles of water, he found a package of sheekh kebabs, a larger one of chapatis to wrap around them, and an enormous tin of chicken biryani.

  "Careful with the biryani." Sedgwick lit a cigarette and started the van. "They throw in more chilis down here." After merging with the traffic exiting the airport, he glanced in the rearview mirror. "Did you tell Kate where you were going?"

  "I did, of course." Conor took several long swallows of water.

  "How did that go?"

  "Pretty feckin' rocky. Let's leave it at that."

  Neither of them spoke again for a while. Sedgwick smoked and concentrated on the road, threading the van through openings only he could see, while Conor polished off a large share of the provisions. He tried not to think about Kate's face or voice, or the taste of her skin, or anything else that would only remind him how far he was from her.

  He'd called her during his high-speed drive to Burlington, and the conversation had been as difficult as he'd dreaded—full of confusion, anger and awkward silences. By the end he'd heard her tired acceptance, and a catch in her voice suggesting she thought herself foolish not to have expected something like this, which troubled him most of all. Conor knew he didn't have a lot of wiggle room with Kate, nor did he expect much. The last man in her life had left her in dramatic fashion, inflicting a psychological violence she'd already been brave enough to survive once. While picking her way through the minefield a second time, she'd reasonably hoped for some small zone of stability and he'd failed to provide it. His only comfort came when she rang him back right before he boarded the flight to Mumbai. The call had been short.

  "That Irish thing you say when people are leaving."

  "Slan abhaile. Safe home." Hunched over in a hard plastic chair, Conor had pressed the heel of one hand to his forehead, aching for her.

  "Yes." After a short silence, she'd added, in a whisper, "Slan abhaile, Conor."

  The back of the van—dark, claustrophobic, smelling of biryani and diesel—had no side windows. Conor could only assess their surroundings by peering beyond the cage barrier and through the front windshield. Not that he would have recognized anything. He'd covered a lot of ground in India, but he'd never been this far south. Directly ahead of them he faced the terrifying spectacle of a young woman sitting sidesaddle on the back of a motorcycle, holding on to nothing except the infant in her arms. He averted his eyes, but had nowhere else to turn them other than on a sea of cars and auto rickshaws and the occasional ox cart. Conor stretched out on the futon with his head on the backpack.

  "Are you going to tell me where we're off to, or is it a secret?"

  "No secret," Sedgwick said. "Just waiting for you to stop sulking. We're going to Mysore. I've discovered Costino is splitting his time between two hotels—one in Bangalore and the other in Mysore. He's managing them."

  "Managing hotels? What's that about?"

  Sedgwick grunted a laugh. "Seems Tony has a few more brain cells than we gave him credit for—he's got your brother's old job, working for our friend Pawan Kotwal."

  Conor shot upright, connecting the dots instantly. "He's laundering Pawan-bhai's money through the hotels?"

  "Big time. After he found out Dragonov's twenty million was missing, he thought you and Thomas had teamed up with Kotwal and pulled a rope-a-dope with the money. Where do you suppose he'd go first for information?"

  "The pub in Mumbai."

  Sedgwick nodded. "But by the time he got there, Frank had debriefed you in London and knew about it, and he'd already rained a world of shit down on that pub. He had MI6 and the Mumbai police crawling all over, looking for something to lead them to Durgan. For his next brilliant move, Costino went directly to Kotwal, which didn't go as planned. Hang on, here's the expressway."

  Conor narrowly avoided being thrown against the opposite wall as the van executed a series of sharp left turns. A less congested road rolled out in front of them, and Sedgwick relaxed.

  "Of course, Pawan-bhai had nothing to do with the missing money, and he was bullshit about the pub. He had the Mumbai authorities breathing down his neck, his local money launderer—Thomas—had deserted him, and Robert Durgan, the mastermind of the whole pub operation, wouldn't return messages. Plus, his DEA buddies who'd been so eager for his help on the Dragonov sting had disappeared. So, when Costino showed up he found himself in the cross hairs of one highly pissed off mafia boss. To save his own skin, he struck a deal with Kotwal. He agreed to fill in for Thomas and relocate the money-laundering to this area, and in return Kotwal agreed to provide protection from Dragonov and keep an eye out for you and Thomas. All right, I've got a free hand now—any food left?"

  Conor wrapped up a few kebabs and slid them through one of the narrow squares in the partition. "And you figured this out, how? I'm guessing it didn't come to you in a dream."

  "Almost that good. Pawan-bhai dropped a dime on him."

  "No shit." Conor whistled. "Why would he grass on his own man?"

  Sedgwick laughed. "Sick of him. Just like us. I questioned Kotwal back in the spring. By then he’d already made his deal with Costino and wanted nothing to do with me, but when I tried him again a few weeks ago he spilled the whole story. He'd warned Costino I was alive and looking for him, then in August he had to warn him Dragonov's people had come sniffing around. That's when Tony contacted Durgan, desperate for some angle to track you down and
get the target off his back. He also started demanding more protection from Kotwal—fancy surveillance equipment, extra bodyguards. Pawan-bhai had an inkling he'd put himself on the wrong side of a Russian arms dealer and Costino was a problem he couldn't afford. Now, he wants us to handle the little weasel before he has to."

  "This is going to somehow lead us to Robert Durgan?" Conor asked.

  "Not quite. It will lead Durgan to us. Make yourself comfortable and I'll tell you how."

  Apart from a few clarifying questions, Conor allowed Sedgwick to divulge the plan without interruption, and let the details settle in over a distance of several miles before voicing an opinion. "Sounds overly complicated."

  Sedgwick gave a derisive snort. "Life is complicated."

  "Exactly. Life is extremely bloody complicated, which is why plans should be simple. That was the take-away wisdom from our last fiasco together."

  "It wasn't our fault we got set up. That plan was good and so is this one, and it's not up for discussion."

  "I figured as much. I just want to go on the record. 'Overly complicated'." Massaging a cramp in his calf, Conor put a finger through the partition and rattled the wire cage. "Look, I've had enough of the 'prisoner in transport' game. Will you ever pull over and let me come sit in the good boy's seat, now?"

  They reached the royal city of Mysore a little after one in the morning. Even in the darkness, Conor could sense a charming old-world appeal in the quiet tree-lined boulevards, but as with most urban centers in India the sporadic street lights revealed more than a few figures sleeping on the sidewalks and in doorways. Motionless in the shadows, they bore an uncomfortable resemblance to shrouded corpses.

  From his many months in Mumbai, Conor had grown adept with Hindi, but here most of the storefront signs displayed the rounded decorative script of the Kannada language. It served as another reminder that he'd come to unchartered territory—a southern region where Hindi, and its more recognizable linear script, was not dominant.

  They turned at a traffic circle where the statue of a maharajah stood under a golden-domed pavilion, draped with a necklace of fresh marigolds. Beyond the roundabout, a carved stone gate with large, scalloped archways led to a palace that was nothing short of a Moghul emperor's fantasy come to life. The elaborate structure glowed under the moonlight, studded everywhere with domes of rose-colored marble, looking like evenly spaced pomegranates.