The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3

by Kathryn Guare

  “Oh my God, what happened to her?” Kate had come forward to stand next to Conor. “Is that …?” Her breath hitched in a shudder before she could finish.

  “Blood. Yes.” He stared, appalled at Petra’s appearance. Her hair hung around her face in wild, sweat-soaked ropes, and her face—drained of color—was twisted into a mask of anguished madness. From neck to waist, the front of her sleeveless gray dress was soaked in blood. More of it was smeared over her arms in varying degrees of thickness, creating a gruesome palette of color against her bone-white skin. He started forward but stopped again at the sound of her voice. Loud and guttural, it echoed through the high-ceilinged room.

  “Where is he?”

  At first, Conor thought she was looking for Martin, but then realized her eyes had already fastened on someone else.

  “Where is he, Karl?” Petra spat the question at the uniformed server at the buffet table, who was now backing away. “A superior race? You are nothing. You are ignorant savages. What have you done with him, you animal?” Her voice rising to a scream, she launched herself forward. “What have you done with my son?”

  The next three seconds seemed to advance slowly, like still images from a stop-motion video. Eckhard ran forward to sweep an arm around Petra’s waist while Conor made a running dive at Karl, who continued backing away as he drew a gun from the holster at his back. The shot exploded an instant before Conor connected with him, and as they went down he saw Eckhard drop to the floor and lie motionless. Flinching in horror, he mastered an instinct to rush across the room and forced his concentration back to the thrashing figure beneath him. Prying the gun from Karl’s hand he batted it aside, hoping Kate would pick it up, but the weapon skated across the floor and under the skirted banquet table. The move caused a shift in their relative positions, allowing his prisoner to escape.

  With pandemonium reigning inside the room and guests surging in a panic through the Concert Hall doorway, Karl headed for the side exit. Frank had been covering that door, but now, understandably, he was sprinting across the room to where Eckhard lay, still not moving. Scrambling to his feet, Conor saw Kate had already retrieved the gun from under the table. She stood poised but uncertain, ready to run in any direction.

  “Stay here,” he shouted, running after Karl. “Stay with Eckhard.”

  He pursued the retreating figure down the corridor of rooms—a hundred-yard dash over a terrain of bare parquet alternating with thick Oriental carpets—drawing frozen stares from the tourists throughout who’d clearly heard the gunshot. Conor hoped to chase him right around the square floor plan and into the arms of the officer at the main staircase, but at the end, instead of taking a right turn into the next series of rooms, Karl ran straight through the double doors ahead of him. These led to a private staircase, where Conor made up some ground by sliding down the banister—a skill he’d acquired long before anything he’d learned at Fort Monckton. Emerging from the stairwell he found himself in the palace cafe, where a tour group was filing through to the entrance hall, blocking the exit. Ahead of him Karl veered to the right, making straight for the open-air terrace. A few seconds later he swung himself over the stone balustrade and abruptly disappeared.

  “Ah, bollocks.”

  Praying that he remembered how to do it properly and that it wasn’t the stupidest—and possibly last—move he’d ever make, Conor accelerated to the balustrade. “Knees up,” he muttered as he vaulted over, bringing them to his chest while the forward movement carried him away from the wall. It was a twenty-five-foot drop to a grass verge at the edge of a long promenade next to the castle wall. He landed on the balls of his feet and rotated into a shoulder roll, then bounced back up and kept running, grateful to be alive, and to not have cracked any ribs on his right side. The burning ache on his left was beginning to take its toll.

  Karl was fifteen yards ahead and pulling away again in a sprint. The promenade was deserted, but at the end of it they would merge with the walkway leading to the main gates of the castle complex, where visitors would be collecting for the hourly changing of the guard ceremony. This was Conor’s only chance to end the footrace and make a capture. He pulled out the Walther and dropped to one knee. Aiming as carefully as his heaving chest would allow he pulled the trigger. Watching Karl go down in a heap he raced the remaining yards separating them and slammed him back to the ground as he was struggling to rise.

  Conor dug a knee into his spine, struggling to steady his breathing, and angled the gun’s muzzle for a snug fit against the base of the man’s skull.

  “Listen very carefully, Karl, because so help me God, I will only ask this question once. What have you done with the baby?”

  Since he’d incapacitated the man by firing a bullet through his leg, Conor had no choice but to drag his captive to a park bench and remain there until help arrived. He shoved Karl down and moved to the other end of the bench, unwilling to share more air space than necessary with a fascist murderer, and climbed up to sit on its vertical edge. Planting his feet on the narrow wooden slats, he took out his phone and rang Kate. By a fortunate coincidence, she was already downstairs with the anti-terrorist detail. She’d been chasing Petra, who’d run from the room in the confusion following the gunfire.

  “I couldn’t catch her,” Kate said. “She’s gone.”

  “What about Eckhard?” Conor asked, tightening his grip on the bench to prepare for the reply.

  “He’s alive. I know,” she added gently, when he released an explosive breath of relief. “I thought he was gone too, when I saw him go down. He’s unconscious but he’s breathing, and it doesn’t look as though he’s badly wounded, although it’s hard to tell how much blood is his own and how much had transferred from Petra. The ambulance is just getting here now. Should I go with them to the hospital?”

  “If Frank doesn’t mind, I’d rather have you with me. I’m going to need your help with something.” Conor shot a black look at Karl, who sat grimacing with his eyes averted, haughty and uncommunicative since giving up a secret in exchange for his life. “Ask the police to let you ride down here with them.”

  Almost as soon as he ended that call his phone rang. Seeing the number was one he didn’t recognize, he answered in silence, waiting for the caller to speak first.

  “Conor? Are you there?”

  He relaxed. “How did you get this number, Lukas?”

  “Frank gave it to me earlier today. What’s going on at your end? Are you clear yet?”

  “Not exactly. Things got fairly complicated. I’ve kept your witness intact for you, but he’ll be limping for a while.”

  “Yeah, good.” Lukas cleared his throat before continuing and Conor detected the strain in his voice. “I brought Sonia over to the Labuts so she could pack a bag to bring to the Embassy. I need you to get over here.”

  Conor stood up on the bench and hopped to the ground. “What is it?”

  “It’s … Christ. Just get over here. As soon as you can.”

  He continued holding the phone to his ear after the line went dead, sensing events beginning to clarify, moving through a curtain of mist to merge with his shapeless premonitions. He didn’t need any extra senses to spell it out for him, now.

  “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Yeats, at his most morbid.

  The winking blue light on the approaching Humvee pulled Conor from his moment of pensive kinship with the poet. The vehicle stopped in front of him, and the officers poured out in an overwhelming show of force that quickly wiped the arrogance from Karl’s face. Conor accepted a card from the officer-in-charge, promising to make an appointment to be interviewed about the incident, and then faced Kate, who’d exited the Humvee more slowly.

  “That all didn’t go the way I expected,” she said.

  “No. I had something else in mind as well.” He lifted his arm to scrub a hand through his hair, only at that moment realizing he’d torn the seam out of the right shoulder of his sui
t. “Lukas called from the Labuts’ flat. We need to get over there.”

  “What’s happened?” The look on her face told him her thoughts were similar to his own.

  “He didn’t say, Kate.” Conor put a hand against her back as they started up the promenade. “He didn’t need to.”

  Lukas and Sonia met them on the stairs outside the flat. Their reluctance to stay inside it gave Conor a warning of what lay in store for him, but he was still unprepared for the strength of his sensitivity. As soon as they walked through the door it was like piercing the membrane of a protective barrier. He felt as if somebody had begun screaming directly into his ear.

  From the beginning, he’d felt the waves of hostility and suppressed violence generated by Martin and Petra, but there had been something else lurking in the flat as well. It felt related but separate from them, a dark malevolence that absorbed everything while remaining hidden. Its presence now was so alive and overpowering it literally knocked him back a step.

  “Conor, are you all right?” Kate steadied the wall mirror he’d bumped into and grabbed his arm.

  “Sorry. Fine, yeah.” He calmed himself, slipping on his customary layer of ice. “Upstairs?” he asked Lukas.

  The powerful, ruddy-cheeked officer of the Castle Guard looked unnerved. He nodded. “Yes. Upstairs.” He turned to Sonia, who not only looked unnerved but ill. “Do you want to wait here?”

  “If you don’t mind, I would like to wait downstairs.” Sonia’s voice faltered. “I promise not to run away.”

  Conor touched Kate’s hand, still resting on his arm. “Maybe you should wait downstairs as well.”

  She gripped him more tightly. “Let’s go.”

  The smell reached them when they were only halfway up the stairs, a thick, iron tang that snagged at the back of Conor’s throat and remained there. It mingled with odors still less pleasant, the source of which he didn’t want to consider but soon enough could no longer avoid. Stepping ahead of both Lukas and Kate, he approached the closed door to the master suite, and after a slight hesitation swung it open to the width of his own body.

  “God help us,” he whispered. Behind him, he heard a strangled moan from Kate and she sagged against his back. Conor spun around, scooping her into his arms and away from the door. He braced his back against the wall, cupping her head with one hand while her face rested against him. “Don’t look at it, love. Don’t look at it anymore.” There seemed no way to describe what they’d seen as anything other than “it”, but he felt a stab of remorse for the dehumanizing reference.

  Butchered. There was no other word for that either, no other word that could capture the scene of carnage Petra had left behind. The master suite, with its silk curtains and sheets shaded the color of midnight, had become little more than a slaughterhouse, and lying on top of the bed, in a form rendered grotesque, Martin Labut had become something less than human.

  28

  For the next several hours, the flat was full of people—military police, crime scene investigators, and more than a few dark-suited intelligence officers from the Czech BIS. It was ironic to think the procedural commotion of a homicide could be soothing, but since they weren’t allowed to leave, Kate found it a relief to have the ghoulish atmosphere moderated by a buzz of purposeful activity.

  Throughout most of it, the four of them sat in the living room, answering questions posed by a revolving cast of professionals, and when the connecting pieces of the story began to emerge, the officer Conor had spoken with earlier arrived to interview them about the incident at the palace. Karl had already identified Sonia as an MI6 agent, but Conor’s cover had not been blown, and after a side conversation Lukas had with his superior, it was allowed to remain intact.

  All of them were eager to leave the place, but Sonia was especially wild with impatience, anxious to be out and on her way to Leo. The information Conor had “persuaded” Karl to share indicated Martin had instructed him to get the baby from the sitter’s house and take him to an orphanage in Klánovice, a municipal district on the eastern-most edge of Prague.

  Restless herself from the wait, Kate went to stand at the window, staring down at the plaza while conversations continued behind her. Two of the forensic analysts were discussing preliminary findings. Kate listened and began to form a picture of how Petra had taken her revenge with the eight-inch chef’s knife found in the bedroom.

  Martin had most likely delivered the news to her about Leo in the kitchen, because the analysts had determined the samples there represented the first blood shed. Judging from the battle she and Conor had heard on their first night in the flat, that seemed to be a pattern for them. The bedroom was for pleasure, if what the Labuts took from and gave to each other could be called that. The kitchen was for fighting. Small amounts of blood had been found there, but in the library, a much larger amount was discovered, smeared in a trail across the wall.

  Martin had fought with Petra and probably struggled to take the knife from her, but at some point he’d realized he was no match for her desperate, adrenalized strength. He’d fled from her, with Petra giving chase, and once she had him cornered, she’d hacked him to pieces.

  The jokes of God, and the cruelty of men.

  Kate remembered Petra’s comment after she’d recounted the legend of Wilgefortis, and how she seemed to identify with the martyred saint whose wishful prayers and passive resistance had hastened her death. How long might she have remained shackled to the sinister relationship corrupting her, covering for the sins of a monster in exchange for the love of a child? By arriving on the scene, Kate and Conor had innocently precipitated a chain of events, culminating in the grisly scene on the floor above them. She couldn’t condone the violence, the wild, mindless savagery of it, but searching deep in her heart, Kate discovered she had no appetite for condemnation. Petra might go to jail for the rest of her life, but she was finally free.

  “Kate? They’re saying we can leave now. Let’s pack up and get the hell out of here.”

  She turned from the window, sighing in relief, as much for Conor as for herself. If even she could feel the oppressive undercurrents of the flat, she could only imagine the job they were doing on all his susceptible sensors.

  “Do we need to go with Sonia to Klánovice?” Kate asked.

  “No,” he said. “Lukas will drive her and then drop both her and Leo back at the Embassy. He said he’d take the dog home with him.”

  “Oh, good. Poor little thing.” Tiny Algernon might have been easily overlooked if she hadn’t discovered him hiding in the bathroom on the main floor. “Have you been keeping Frank updated on all this?”

  Conor shook his head. “I figured he’s enough to worry about without getting the story in bits and pieces, but I just phoned him at the hospital. Eckhard is conscious. The bullet only grazed him, so it looks like he suffered no more than a concussion from the fall, but they’ll be running tests to be sure for the next few hours. I told Frank we’d be there in half an hour. If you’re up for it?” He looked at his watch. “It’s nearly eleven.”

  “I’m up for anything you are,” Kate said.

  He gave her a weary smile. “Of course you are. I should know that by now, shouldn’t I.”

  At the Military University Hospital, they found Frank in the crowded emergency room waiting area. With his tailored suit and handmade English dress shoes he stood out among the more modestly dressed population around him. He was thumbing through a Czech celebrity magazine, his posture expressing a languid boredom that Conor interpreted as a good sign Eckhard must be doing all right. His face lit up in relief when he saw them come through the door.

  “Can you read Czech?” Conor asked, dropping into one of the plastic chairs across from him.

  “No, of course not.” Frank tossed the magazine aside. “But in this instance I find it’s no impediment to comprehension.”

  Kate bent to give him a kiss on the cheek before taking the empty seat next to him. “How’s the maestro?”

&n
bsp; “Well enough to become cranky. Eckhard prefers to be in charge of fussing, and he grows impatient rather quickly when the roles are reversed.”

  “Aha. Another one,” Kate said.

  Conor ignored her ironic gaze and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I never got a chance to ask before now, but what have you done with Winnie? Is he a prisoner in the Embassy?”

  “Quite the contrary. I’ve given him a job. We’ve a small matter with a loan shark to tidy up, but assuming an otherwise clean background check, he’ll report to Vauxhall Cross for orientation in three weeks.” Frank smiled at Conor’s open-mouthed astonishment. “You didn’t tell me he was a waiter at Rules. They’re legendary for their discretion, and I’ve been looking for a personal assistant since Gavin retired three months ago. We had a chat early this morning and I concluded we’d get on well, although I refuse to call him ‘Winnie.’ It’s too ridiculous.”

  His expression changed as a young, harried-looking woman took a seat next to Conor. Pulling her toddler onto her lap she positioned a small plastic bucket under his chin. Frank regarded them with alarm.

  “Perhaps we might find a more suitable venue for your briefing, Conor. I could do with a bit of fresh air.”

  Although Conor thought he looked fit to collapse from exhaustion, Frank wanted to walk, so Kate agreed to remain behind and wait for further word about Eckhard. The two of them strolled out into the empty, darkened streets of a not particularly handsome suburb of Prague and wandered off in a random direction. Conor delivered a detailed briefing and Frank questioned him closely, but during the walk back they spoke little. Within a few blocks of the hospital they came to an elevated bluff with a staircase leading down a hundred feet to another street below. Frank went to stand at the railing and braced his hands against it.