The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3

by Kathryn Guare

  “Frank said she’d make contact with us,” Conor said mildly.

  “Like she did last night? Given her track record of making things harder for us, how’s that likely to turn out?”

  “Banjaxed, no doubt. Or ‘pear-shaped’ as Frank would say.” He put a hand over hers and spoke more seriously. “It’s no secret nothing in the field ever resembles what’s drawn up by clever pricks in conference rooms. It turns to a pile of cack as soon as it hits the open air, and we deal with whatever’s left to make it work.”

  Kate turned her hand over to let her palm rest against his. Warm, solid, and reassuring. “How are we getting back to Prague?”

  “We’re going by train as well. We leave in an hour.” Conor reached over to the chair next to him and picked up a plastic bag. “I actually got you something to wear, too, at an open-air market around the corner. A sweater and some kind of … leggings, I guess the woman called them.”

  Grateful and annoyed, Kate snatched the bag from him. “You might have brought it up to me instead of letting me waltz down here and put on a show for everyone.”

  Conor grinned. “I didn’t know you were going to, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  14

  The train from Hřensko arrived back in Prague with enough time to change and collect the Pressenda from the hotel safe, but—to his enormous relief—not to join Kate for the welcome lunch at the home of Martin and Petra Labut. Conor decided it would be unwise to tease her about it.

  He arrived at the rehearsal alone and a half-hour early, wanting to get a feel for the acoustics of the performance space. He also wanted privacy for determining what impact the bruised ribs would have on his range of movement.

  It could have been worse. He might have broken a shoulder, or his wrist, or one of his fingers. Any of those injuries would have been catastrophic and impossible to hide from Eckhard, who would be understandably alarmed if he knew his soloist was in less than perfect condition. He wouldn’t know it, though. Although Conor was black-and-blue from armpit to hip, as long as he could keep the pain under control there was no danger of discovery, or of recriminations from his conductor.

  The symposium’s opening concert was scheduled to take place in three days at five o’clock, and the rehearsal was at the venue itself—the Mirror Chapel, a resplendent vaulted hall in a sprawling complex called the Klementinum. Named for the oval mirrors embedded in the ceiling among elaborate frescoes, the chapel was like a lovely jewel box. Both the walls and ceiling were embellished with delicate patterns of gilded stucco, and the color scheme featured complementary shades of light rose and red ochre, right down to the geometric patterns in the marble-tiled floor. The space was glorious, the acoustics were perfect, and he was playing well. Conor felt the balance of his emotions shifting as nervousness gave way to confidence.

  Eckhard and the members of the group arrived exactly on time. No one seemed surprised to see him already practicing, and he got through the rehearsal without incident, having front-loaded it with a generous dose of pain relievers. They weren’t completely effective, but he could ignore the residual discomfort. Whether alone, with an orchestra, or in front of an audience, he could usually ignore everything that wasn’t central to the immediate, precise execution of whatever piece he was playing.

  Once the two-hour session had finished, he’d begun to register the throbbing pain shooting up his side and into his head when the mobile phone in his pocket began ringing. Conor removed it with a sinking feeling and looked at the screen, but saw the call was not coming from Kate’s phone. They’d left it for Winnie to use if something went desperately wrong with his babysitting assignment. The message on the screen read “Unknown Caller.” That could mean only one thing, and it did little to ease his nerves. Moving to a quiet corner of the chapel, Conor punched at the phone and observed the standard response protocol, even though he knew who it would be.

  “Yes?”

  “Who the bloody hell is Winnie?”

  Shit. Conor closed his eyes and silently cursed the private eye he’d deputized. There were only two numbers coded into the feckin’ phone and the twitchy little git had called the wrong one.

  “What did he say?” he asked.

  “He was asked for the password and he said, ‘It’s Winnie,’” Frank snapped. In an office somewhere at the other end of Europe, his anger was burning hot enough for Conor to feel it sizzle down the line. “During the course of our acquaintance, I have given you secure numbers on three occasions, Conor, and not once has it been you on the line when we answer it. We get USAID doctors in Kashmir, your bellowing cook, and now some wretched creature called Winnie. Who is he, and what the hell is going on?”

  “Frank, you’ve every right to be annoyed, but it’s more important at the minute for me to know what else Winnie said instead of explaining who he is, which will take a bit of time.”

  “He said nothing else. The line is set to disengage at password failure, which as you most assuredly know, is not ‘Winnie’.”

  “No, I realize that, but—hang on.” Conor heard a beep on the line and quickly took the phone from his ear to look at the screen. “That’s him. I’ll ring you back.” Without ceremony, he ended the discussion with Frank to take the second incoming call. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s Winnie.”

  “I know who you are, for fuck’s sake.” The other musicians were waiting for him to go for a drink and Conor signaled them to go on without him. “Why are you calling?”

  “He’s done a runner, our Farid,” Winnie said. “I only stepped away to take a leak, and when I come out of the gents he was gone.”

  “Did you search for him?”

  “Did I search for him? Course I searched for him. It’s my job, isn’t it? Private detective? I hunted for an hour, but it’s a small town, right? And it’s just bloody forest everywhere you look. Then, I thought—”

  “The car,” Conor interrupted. “Did you look to see if the BMW was gone?”

  “That’s it,” Winnie said, with greater energy. “That’s what I thought, so I went to see, or rather not to see, because it wasn’t there.”

  “Right.” Having heard enough, Conor kneaded his eyelids with a thumb and forefinger. “You’re drunk as well, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” Winnie said in an injured tone. After a short silence he added, “But I wouldn’t say I’m sober. He’s a lot bigger than me. It was hard keeping up.”

  Conor instructed Winnie to sleep it off and take the morning train to Prague as planned, and reconfirmed the location for meeting him the following afternoon. After that, Conor thought it would be best to leave the chapel before ringing Frank. He packed up his violin and walked to Old Town Square, parking himself on a bench near the base of the Jan Hus Memorial. He sat with the phone in his hand, hoping some of the fortitude of Hussite warriors might flake off and settle on him; then he placed the call. The computerized voice was on the line before the phone had even rung.

  “Welcome. Please speak or enter your password.”

  “Chaconne.”

  “Thank you.”

  After listening to the white noise of trans-continental static, Conor heard the line pop to life again.

  “Is that you? What a surprise,” Frank purred, oozing sarcasm.

  The conversation remained chilly for a while, but when Conor finished his debrief Frank was forced to admit he was behaving better than the other wayward agents MI6 had in Prague. Ghorbani had been shockingly indiscreet and irresponsible, and Greta—equally indiscreet—had sold him out for her own benefit.

  “What do you want me to do?” Conor asked, without great enthusiasm.

  “Nothing for now, apart from your continuing assignment,” Frank said. “I’ll inform the Dresden station. If he’s gone off the idea of defecting he’s taking a hell of a risk, but he might simply be attending to unfinished business with Greta. Our best scenario is for him to surface again in Prague, seeking vengeance.”


  “That’s our best scenario?”

  “Preferable to the one that sees him surfacing from the bottom of a river, yes. As I’ve indicated, he’s a valuable asset.”

  “Maybe you should pull her out now,” Conor said, embarrassed that the idea of vengeance hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d been so concerned about the Iranian doing himself an injury he’d given no thought to his more likely desire to confront the woman who’d exposed him.

  “No,” Frank replied, after a brief silence. “She lobbied me to do this job, and she can look after herself. That’s apparently what she wants.”

  Following this icy remark, he rang off. Conor returned the phone to his pocket, thinking about the two enemies—Ghorbani, and now Frank—the woman had acquired over the past twenty-four hours. One might already be back in the city looking for her, but the one who remained a continent away was probably more dangerous.

  Across the square, he saw tourists congregating under the Town Hall tower’s astronomical clock. From his previous visit to Prague, he recalled that every hour, a procession of carved wooden apostles emerged from a door and revolved around a semi-circular track before disappearing again. As he stopped to watch, the minute hand advanced, and to the right of the clock a ghoulish mannequin was set in motion. The skeletal figure of Death pulled the bell and turned his hourglass, heralding that the new hour had begun, and that time was running out.

  Conor returned to the Little Quarter via the Charles Bridge and arrived at the home of Martin and Petra Labut as dusk was falling. Their townhouse, only a short distance from where he and Kate had been staying, overlooked a plaza dominated by the curving, statue-studded facade of St. Nicholas Church.

  Before heading over to their new quarters, Conor went to stand on the church steps. It offered a good vantage point for looking at all the entrance and exit points of the plaza, and for seeing if the people hanging around it looked like any kind of threat to the Minister of Culture.

  They were mostly tourists, of course: strolling couples and roaming packs of college students. A few yards away from him a German tour group had gathered on the steps and were listening to their guide’s final history lesson of the day. The city’s residents were sprinkled throughout the plaza like sultanas in a seed cake, easily identified by their business attire and quick strides. They knew where they were going and had no interest in dawdling.

  Turning his attention to the townhouse, he spent a few more minutes watching the bustling cafe on the ground floor and the small, quiet market next to it. Like so many other buildings in Prague, the townhouse was ornamented with pediments carved in elaborately decorative relief above each window. It looked warm and inviting, bathed in the soft violet hues of the setting sun, with a golden glow in all the lit windows of the upper floors.

  Conor regarded it all with grim suspicion. He didn’t like it—the Labuts, their home, the whole situation. His internal circuits were fizzing—a prescience forecasting trouble the way the scent of ozone heralds a storm. He’d been susceptible to auras like this his entire life. They were often impossible to interpret or immediately act on, but he’d learned not to ignore them.

  After going through a central stone passageway and circling an interior courtyard, Conor had no further excuse for delay. At the gated staircase back in the passageway he tapped the intercom button. From the response he got, he assumed the unit must have some hidden camera technology.

  “Ah, the delicious virtuoso. We have been waiting for you.” Petra’s throaty chuckle faded, but during the unusually long pause before the buzzer sounded, he got the impression she was still looking at him.

  Delicious?

  “Jaysus,” he said under his breath.

  The entire household—including an impossibly small black and tan dog—had assembled in the foyer by the time he reached the second floor. The Labuts greeted him with cries of welcome, and Kate with the silent, exhausted gratitude of a drowning woman. The only one missing from the group was Martin’s protégé, Sonia Kovac, the gifted pianist Conor was to rehearse with for their recital together. When he inquired about her he saw Petra squint and pucker as though tasting something sour. He wondered if her irritation was because the young woman was absent or because he had asked about her.

  “She’s out for the evening,” Martin explained. He was in jeans and a snug v-necked shirt and wore a thin gold chain around his neck. Ushering Kate ahead of him, he moved a hand down over her back—an overly familiar gesture, in Conor’s opinion. “There is an elderly couple from her native town in Bosnia living somewhere near the botanical gardens. They are quite infirm, so she visits a few times each week to do cooking and cleaning and such. Sonia has a very tender heart.”

  “Tender. So tender,” Petra echoed, a guttural Greek chorus.

  “I didn’t realize she was Bosnian,” Conor said.

  “Yes, she was orphaned in the war. Tragic.”

  He could hear the emphatic period at the end of Petra’s one-word sentence. She was finished with the topic. She looped an arm around his and escorted him from the foyer.

  They entered the first of three connecting rooms, all of them separated by white double-hung doors that were thrown open, allowing for a view from one end of the flat to the other. Each featured tall windows facing the square. There was parquet flooring throughout, laid in a herringbone pattern with alternating shades of mahogany. The polished surface was gorgeous, but with no sound-dampening fabric, the high-ceilinged rooms felt like an art gallery—spare, hollow, and somehow unfinished despite the collection of beautiful artifacts in every corner.

  They stopped in the first room; apparently the Labuts considered it their living area, but it was the size of a ballroom and hardly cozy. Martin finally took his hand from Kate’s back to sweep it through his feathery long hair, revealing a loose gold chain on his wrist to match the one around his neck.

  “Now. What can I fix you both to drink?”

  Kate replied immediately. “I’d love a martini. Extra dry.”

  “Sounds good,” Conor said. “Make it two.”

  He discreetly untangled himself from Petra. As though needing something else to fasten onto, she drifted over to her husband at the bar. With the two of them distracted, Conor crossed the room to Kate, concerned at her wan appearance. He circled an arm around her, pointedly running his palm down the length of her back, and felt her relax as he kissed her.

  “You’ve gone a bit white. Are they sucking the life out of you?”

  Smiling, she swatted his arm. “Quit it. How was your rehearsal?”

  “Oh, the rehearsal. Yeah, it was good. I’ll tell you about it later.” He pulled away to look at her. “Honestly, though, you do look pale. Are you all right?”

  “I’m just tired,” Kate said. “They’ve actually been fine. It’s just—excuse the pun, but they really are sort of draining, and there’s a vibe in this place that’s making me uncomfortable.”

  “What sort of vibe?” Conor was interested to hear he wasn’t alone in his misgivings.

  “You tell me. You’re the one who gets them. If I can feel something it’ll probably hit you even harder. “

  “What about Sonia? Did you meet her?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve heard a few things. I’ll tell you about it later.” She turned him around to face Martin, advancing across the void with their drinks.

  Conor nursed the martini—little more than a glass of cold gin, really—while perched on the edge of an uncomfortable leather couch, and then later on the edge of an uncomfortable dining room chair. Their eccentricity aside, the Labuts did know how to entertain. The conversation meandered pleasantly over a number of topics, including the symposium, the upcoming concerts, and the cultural treasures of Prague. The meal was also excellent, right in the middle of his comfort zone: braised lamb with two kinds of potato, peas, and sweet red cabbage.

  There was nothing the slightest bit tense or troubling about the evening. Their hosts were a relaxed, amiable couple, affectionat
e and solicitous with each other, and there was obviously a potent sexual chemistry between them. This overall impression made Conor’s epiphany even more jarring when it came.

  Kate’s prediction was accurate. Although it took a while to reach him, it hit him hard—a toxic energy washing over him like a breaking wave. He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t known how to describe the thing she’d felt. It was incompatible with the surface atmospherics, but to Conor it could not have been more obvious if its name had been written on the tablecloth. Hatred. A noxious, virulent strain of it. These people despised each other with a malignant strength that frightened him, not least because the insatiable hunger pulling them together seemed just as strong. In the light of this awareness, he saw the Labuts as an appalling perversion of the yin and yang concept—fused together, but for all the wrong reasons.

  Bone-weary and rattled by recent events, the prospect of bearing witness to a corrosive marriage for the next week made Conor feel like he was long overdue for a lucky break, but it wasn’t coming quickly. After coffee and dessert, Kate’s transparent exhaustion was her ticket to an early night, but Conor had the additional duty of visiting Martin’s study, ostensibly to review his collection of musical instruments. This turned out to be a cover story for an indirect conversation about partner swapping. Martin proposed it in coded language while Conor threw down shots of a fiery herbal liquor called Becherovka and pretended not to understand. Eventually he was allowed to leave with his stubborn naiveté intact, and pulled himself up the stairs—alone, thanks be to God—to the guest bedroom.

  It was actually more like a one-room studio flat, with a fully equipped kitchenette lining the wall to the left of the door, and a bathroom in the corner to the right of it. Like every other room, it was enormous, had a bare parquet floor, and lacked any homely touches that might have given it warmth and character. The bed looked more like a piece of modern art than a place to sleep—he doubted they would even leave a dent in the severe rectangular mattress.