“Can somebody give me a knife?” Conor worked at the loops of electrical cord wound through the fins of the radiator. Without a word, Frank approached and offered him his pocket knife. Conor accepted it, glancing up at him. “Thanks.”
Once he’d freed her and guided Kate into a chair, Conor stripped the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her. He crouched down, watching her face while he rubbed her wrists. “You were magnificent, love. Just bloody brilliant on every level. How do you feel?”
Although she looked pale and ready to drop, Kate seemed peacefully satisfied. “I’m all right.” Her eyes widened a bit, seeing Frank, who’d moved several feet away and remained silent, not interfering. “Did you get all you needed?”
“All we needed and more,” Frank said. “You did something extraordinary here tonight, Kate. The Service owes you a great debt of gratitude.”
“And you, Frank?” Conor spoke without turning. “What would you say you owe her?”
As sometimes happened when overtired or deeply moved, the ironic British edge in Frank’s voice dropped into the musical cadence of another man entirely, from another place altogether. “What I owe to you both is not easily put into words.”
Conor pressed his lips together, refusing to let it soften him, but Kate rested a hand on his face. “Why should you be angry if I’m not? You know it was the right thing to do. Don’t hate him for it.”
He got to his feet, pulling her up with him. “I don’t, sweetheart. It isn’t about hate, or even anger, really. He knows that. It’s about me being scared to death that I get a little more like him every day.”
Leading her from the room he finally met Frank’s eyes and nodded, a gesture his boss returned. They understood each other.
They would have preferred to go almost anywhere else, but duty and the continuing question of Sonia’s safety demanded a return to the Labut home. Presumably the couple was only a few blocks away, in the hotel connected to the restaurant where Martin had met with Ghorbani, but the security detail was still guarding the door of their house. Since Conor had put in an appearance earlier, he talked the police into letting them in without waking Sonia. They tiptoed up the stairs and past her room into their own.
“What happened in here?” Kate, half asleep but still shaking like a leaf, became more alert at the sight of the clothes he’d scattered everywhere.
“Oh, right. I forgot about that.” Conor kicked aside his tuxedo trousers and stopped her from gathering another pile from the floor. “Never mind, love. I’ll get it later.”
She collapsed onto the bed. “Can I have a few of your para-whatever-you-call-them? Acetaminophen, isn’t it?”
“Shit. There aren’t any left.”
Kate sat up again, alarmed. “They’re all gone? Conor, how many have you taken over the past three days? You can get liver damage.”
“Can I? Christ. Well, anyway. I’ll go find you something. Do you want to get in the shower? It will help you get warm.”
Breaking his own promise to himself, he went into the Labuts’ decadent master suite. As expected, he found a well-stocked medicine cabinet. Returning to the guest room he heard the shower running, but Kate was still fully clothed, flat on the bed.
“What happened to the shower curtain?”
Staggering with weariness himself, Conor put a hand over his eyes and laughed. “Jaysus. All right. Hang on a minute.”
He did a makeshift repair job on the curtain he’d ripped then helped Kate off with her dress and put her under the hot spray. He stepped back and watched skeptically before shedding his own clothes and getting in the shower with her, afraid she’d tumble out of it.
After all that—dry, dosed with paracetamol, enveloped in sweatpants, a turtleneck, and a sweatshirt, and tucked into bed—Kate still couldn’t stop shivering. Conor was out of ideas.
“You’ve no fever now, but maybe I should take you to the hospital. You might need electrolytes or something.”
“I don’t need electrolytes. I need you.” Wriggling beneath the covers, Kate stripped off all the clothes she’d layered on, and after doing the same to Conor she shifted over. “Just hold me. I think that will work.”
He pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her, and she pressed herself to him with a deep sigh. A few minutes later, the relentless trembling had stopped, and Kate was sound asleep.
“Good as a gas-fired boiler, so I am.” He kissed the top of her head and closed his eyes.
25
They’d gone to bed at four in the morning and Conor wished he could sleep for a month, but at seven o’clock he came awake with a start, his brain tricking him into thinking he’d missed the morning milking.
“No cows here, ya feckin’ eejit.” He gazed at the ceiling, lingering over his self-pity before carefully sliding out from under Kate, who was lying in the same position she’d been in three hours earlier. While dressing he wondered what kind of scene might greet him on the floor below, but once downstairs Conor discovered only Sonia sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of black coffee in front of her. She rose when he entered the dining room, offering to bring him a koláče and some tea. He waved her back into her seat. He knew they had a lot to talk about and couldn’t face the discussion with only a jam-filled pastry in his stomach.
“Would it be all right to nose about the kitchen a bit?”
“Certainly, yes.” She sat down again. “Do you enjoy cooking?”
“In fairness, no, but I’ll give it a lash. I can at least be trusted with a pan of eggs and bacon.”
He explored the cupboards and the contents of the refrigerator, and got a cooked breakfast together without any need for the fire brigade. He carried his plate and another for Sonia into the dining room, along with a half-loaf’s worth of toast piled into a basket. Placing it all on the table, Conor nodded at the empty seats around it.
“Are they gone for good, do you suppose?” Her face froze at his casual wisecrack, and he belatedly realized the Labuts weren’t the only ones missing from the flat. “The baby. I’m sorry, Sonia. Have you any idea at all where the sitter lives? Maybe we can find Leo ourselves.”
She dismissed the suggestion with a tense shake of her head. “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look.”
Early the previous afternoon, Petra had packed a bag for Leo and taken him away, explaining he would be staying with a friend since they would all be out of the house for the next two evenings, first for the symposium’s opening concert, and then for Sonia’s recital the next evening.
“She always makes sure I can’t follow,” Sonia had remarked, watching from the library’s balcony window until Petra’s car had crossed the plaza and disappeared. “So crafty. A much better spy than I am.”
They’d been practicing at the time, which Conor had viewed as a futile exercise, even then. He doubted they’d ever perform the sonata they were so diligently rehearsing. The recital was scheduled to take place in less than eight hours—ironically, in the Concert Hall at Lobkowicz Palace, Lukas Hasek’s ancestral home. He considered calling Eckhard or Frank to suggest that something needed to be done about cancelling it, but then decided the two of them could sort the feckin’ logistics on their own. He had his own plateful of tricky tasks, and the first was to bring Sonia up to date.
Of all that had happened, he knew one development would horrify her even more than the fact that Ghorbani had been contracted to kill her. Conor dreaded telling her about the Iranian agent’s exposure of her Jewish ancestry and Martin’s reaction. He delayed that piece of news for as long as he could, explaining the events in the order they’d happened after Sonia had left the Old Town Hall. When he got to Ghorbani’s description of his conversation with Martin, she pushed her plate aside—barely touched—and rested her elbows on the table. Putting her hands over her face, she remained that way for the rest of his narration.
He finished with the obligatory delivery of a message he’d completely forgotten about until now. During their meeting at th
e Embassy, Frank had asked Conor to pass along instructions for Sonia to report to the Embassy, for her own safety. From there, she would fly to London and be processed into the UK as an asylum-seeker. With her hands still covering her face, Sonia began shaking her head, rejecting the orders before he’d even finished.
“Tell Frank I refuse to go. I won’t leave here without Leo.”
“No, of course not.” Conor pushed a piece of sausage gristle around on his plate. “Tell me how you want to play this, Sonia. Whatever you want to do, Kate and I will help you with it, but we have to start trusting each other.”
She dropped her hands, giving him a grateful smile. “We will be partners at last, yes? For now, I think we should carry on as we normally would.”
“Meaning what?” Conor asked, grabbing the last piece of toast as she stood up and began clearing the dishes from the table.
“Meaning it is time for us to practice. Have you forgotten we are performing a recital tonight?”
He stopped with the toast halfway to his mouth. “Are you joking me? We can’t play that recital. You can’t even go out of the house. It’s not safe.”
“No, Conor. As you would say, this is ‘rubbish.’” Sonia looked pleased with herself for successfully mimicking him. “Martin thinks he knows things I don’t. He doesn’t realize the killer he hired has been captured. I will be safer now at the recital than anywhere else, and we need Martin to relax and enjoy his anticipation. If I refuse to perform, he would grow suspicious and might even change tactics. We would lose our advantage.”
“Fair enough.” Conor thought Sonia was finally starting to sound like a spy. “It’s a good argument, but what’s the end game? This masquerade is on its last legs. We can’t go on with it much longer.”
“Yes,” Sonia agreed. “But we only need a little time. Petra said she would fetch Leo after the recital, and I believe she will, whether Martin wants him or not. She and I have been enemies—lovers and enemies at the same time, strangely enough—but we have also been mothers together. Leo’s ancestry will change nothing for her. She will bring him home, and if you help me get him away, I will go to the British Embassy.”
Instead of responding right away, Conor let his silence imply he was considering her argument, but actually, he was waiting for a warning to manifest. A sign of some kind—tingle, shiver, anything—any sort of whisper or signal that would point him in the right direction. Naturally, it didn’t work that way.
His connection to the numinous was strong. Conor could close his eyes and with little effort connect to a pulsing energy that filled him with an awareness he could never adequately describe. The predictive bit was different though, its communication as tenuous as a beam of sunlight. At times it shone straight down on him without warning, and at others the ray struck at a distance, but he could see enough to walk into it. It was a different sort of energy, and it didn’t obey a summons. He knew this, of course, but it didn’t stop him from trying occasionally. It would make his life so much easier.
At last, reasoning that Sonia deserved to set the strategy she preferred where her son was concerned, Conor agreed to go forward with the recital and her larger plan. The only barrier was that he didn’t have his violin.
“A member of the chamber group took the Pressenda back to his hotel after the concert last night,” he explained. “He was going to leave it in the manager’s safe for me, so I’ll walk over and collect it. If Kate wakes up before—ah, no. Never mind. She won’t wake up before I get back.” He thought it possible she might not wake up in time for the recital.
She woke up knowing she was alone even before opening her eyes. Without Conor’s ample metabolic heat, Kate couldn’t keep the bed warm and after fifteen minutes abandoned it for the shower. A thaw gradually took hold as she let the water scald her for the better part of forty-five minutes. She looked irradiated from head to toe by the time she was done, but Kate felt human again, and not quite as inclined to rail at Conor for deserting her.
Her remaining irritation turned to worry when she went downstairs at eleven o’clock and learned from Sonia that he’d come down hours ago and had gone to pick up his violin. Had he slept at all? And exactly how many pain relievers had he been taking for those bruised ribs? Although tenderly attentive to her smallest twinge, Conor resisted having the same kind of scrutiny focused on him. His aversion to being fussed over made him unusually laconic when it came to his own aches and pains. Kate tried not to, but she did occasionally fuss and realized that in this instance she hadn’t been paying enough attention.
The news that he and Sonia intended to go through with the recital further alarmed her, but she couldn’t deny the logic in the plan. There was no possibility of Ghorbani being a threat to her now, and trying to manufacture an excuse for not performing would likely raise suspicion just when they needed to lull Martin into a sense of false security.
While waiting for Conor’s return, they sat in the living room, wondering when the Labuts would turn up and discussing possible strategies for separating Leo from them—or more specifically, from Petra—with the least amount of trauma. In the back of her mind, Kate was also wondering what they’d do if the Labuts didn’t come back at all. How would they find Leo if the two of them disappeared? Not wanting to upset Sonia, she tried to think of some delicate way of asking the question, but a minute later there was no need for it. Hearing footsteps on the stairs and recognizing the voices accompanying them, they turned to look at each other.
Martin walked through the door of the flat with Petra’s hand under his arm, both of them still dressed like dissipated socialites who’d stayed out all night, moving from one after-party to the next.
“Well,” he said with forced jocularity. “Do you know the saying they use in America, Kate? ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ I never thought to use it in such a fitting circumstance. I hope you haven’t been terribly concerned over our absence. After an exhausting interview with the national security officers, we slipped away to a hotel to avoid this business of having the police around our home. They’ve been withdrawn at last upon my request.”
Forcing her weary mind into action, Kate produced a credible exclamation of relief. She got to her feet and hurried forward. “Of course, we’ve been concerned. What a frightening experience for you both. Everything happened at once, and the bodyguards took you away so fast I was afraid you’d been hurt.”
“Yes,” Sonia chimed in, joining Kate in the middle of the room. “It is such a relief to see you safe, Martin. I was terrified for you.”
“Were you? Ah, Sonia. I am deeply touched.” His smile was fixed and cold. “But there was really no cause for alarm, was there? As I insisted to the officers last night, I feel quite safe. Who would bother themselves to murder a lowly Minister of Culture? The assassin—some sort of terrorist, no doubt—was clearly intending to eliminate our dear president. How lucky we are this killer had such poor aim.” Martin’s eyes rested on Sonia for a long moment before shifting to Kate. “My dear Kate, I am sorry you’ve had to endure this horror. I would wish for you to have better memories of your visit.”
Kate found the next few minutes particularly arduous, trading questions all of them could have answered, pretending surprise and horror about an incident they’d known about well in advance. During this ordeal, Petra stood at Martin’s side not saying a word. Her hand hung limply on his arm and her eyes remained lowered. Kate thought she looked awful, haggard with exhaustion, and something else.
Finally, he brought the charade to a conclusion. “Well Sonia, I am anxious to spend some time with you. Perhaps you could wait for me in my study while I take Petra upstairs. As you can see, she is in great need of some peace and quiet.” He lifted his wife’s hand to his lips. “Isn’t that right, my dear?”
At the sound of her name, Petra raised her head. Her eyes looked unnaturally bright, and turning them on her husband they filled with a wild, desperate hatred. “Peace.” As though exhaling the word
on a stream of smoke, her gravelly voice drew the single syllable to an extended length. “Yes. I am in great need of peace.”
After accepting the Pressenda from the hotel manager, who treated it with as much reverence as he had on the day they’d arrived, Conor realized he should tell Eckhard about Sonia’s decision to perform, to preempt any plans underway to cancel the recital. He rang the conductor’s room from a hotel phone in the lobby and Eckhard answered in an irritated whisper before the first ring had finished.
“Sorry, Eckhard. Did I wake you?” Surprised, Conor looked at his watch. It was after ten o’clock.
“Not me, no,” Eckhard hissed. “Is it important? Are people dying? Because he got here only an hour ago. If people are not dying I am not waking him.”
“No, Jesus, don’t wake him.” Only an hour ago? Conor wondered what Frank had been doing with Ghorbani for the past six hours and decided he didn’t want to know. “I was calling for you anyway. I’m in the lobby if you want to come down.”
Eckhard arrived a few minutes later, crossing the lobby to where Conor sat on a window seat.
“You look exhausted,” the conductor announced immediately and Conor smiled.
“Same to you, Maestro. I suppose none of us got any sleep last night. I thought Frank was staying at the Embassy.”
“He was. More ‘discreet’ he said, but then here he comes to my room, and mein Gott he looked terrible.” Eckhard shrugged a dismissal. “What to do? I should lock the door? I require no discretion, and I’d told him to stay here in the first place. It’s nonsense, ja.”
Despite his dry wit, Eckhard was clearly concerned about his partner and relieved to have him under his own supervision. For the first time Conor allowed himself to feel a little sympathy for his boss. “I imagine he knew he’d get a warmer welcome here. The Embassy doesn’t lay on much hospitality, as far as I can tell. He’s had a rough week, I’d say.”
The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3 Page 90