The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3 Read online

  Only one item disturbed the anonymous uniformity. It lay at the foot of the bed, its antique leather shining with incongruous brilliance in the colorless room. At Valencia Mathers’s slight nod of permission, he released the clasps of the violin case and lifted up the instrument inside. Sweeping his fingers over the cinnamon-hued varnish, he peered through the f-holes at the label inside.

  “My God—a del Gesù?” Conor pulled his head back in surprise.

  “Correct,” she replied crisply. “Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, made in Cremona, 1726. Mr. Murdoch secured it on loan from a private collector. He thought you might enjoy playing it during your stay at Fort Monckton.”

  He studied her with a curious frown. “How long have you had it here?”

  “Mr. Murdoch had it delivered by special courier a week ago.”

  “Did he, now?”

  He turned his attention back to the violin with a private smile. Frank had evidently held a high degree of confidence for the success of his recruitment mission. It was a magnificent instrument, but he wasn’t tempted. The Pressenda demanded his loyalty. He placed the del Gesù back in the case, snapped it shut, and passed it to his aloof hostess with a look of apology. “I’m sorry for the trouble that was taken, and I appreciate the gesture, but please tell Mr. Murdoch it’s one I can’t accept. I won’t be playing the del Gesù or anything else until I’m finished with all this.”

  Valencia Mathers mastered her surprise and accepted the case with a curt nod. “As you wish.”

  She directed him to an informational binder on the desk to obtain an orientation to the grounds and services and informed him that dinner was served at eight each evening. “I expect someone will be in contact shortly to arrange your schedule. I do hope you will find your experience at the Fort useful, Mr. McBride. Good day.”

  He tested the door after she left, dispelling a vague paranoia that she might have locked him in, before making a cursory inspection of his quarters. He paged through the informational binder disconsolately and flipped it back onto the desk with a sigh.

  Nothing so melodramatic as a prisoner, Frank had assured him. Why, then, did he feel so much like one?

  5

  At the end of his third week of indoctrination, close to midnight on a Friday evening, Conor rapped on the frosted glass door of his lead instructor, Hamilton Bestor. “Sorry I’m late,” he apologized, sticking his head into the office to assess the mood before committing to anything further.

  Bestor was a middle-aged, translucently pale oddity, with a shining helmet of hair combed into furrows suggestive of black licorice. The two of them met twice a week to assess progress, and their relationship to date had been uneven, primarily due to Conor’s glib attitude about the entire enterprise.

  He was finding the experience far from dull—some of the exercises were downright entertaining—but the sheen of adolescent escapade overlaying all of it inspired a dismissive contempt. It was hard to take any of it seriously or imagine putting any of the tactics he was learning to practical use.

  He’d been trained on surveillance, countersurveillance, and antisurveillance. He’d received direction on the establishment of “dead letter boxes” for exchanging clandestine information and had been turned loose on the unsuspecting populace of Gosport with hidden camera technology. He’d even been given a class in secret writing. He went through the motions, obeying the rules and performing as required, but the remote superficiality of his engagement was a constant irritant for Bestor.

  “Right, come in.” The agent motioned him inside and indicated a folding chair next to his desk, against the wall.

  Conor pulled it forward before sitting on it. Bestor’s office was in the subterranean nether regions of the fort’s main building, and its walls sweated with a malodorous moisture that made his skin crawl.

  “I’m told you made a good fist of it with tonight’s exercise,” Bestor remarked. “Fill me in. How did you manage it?”

  He held out a hand for the file, and Conor dutifully slid it across the desk. The evening’s activity had been an exercise in the gathering of personal information from strangers. He had just finished writing up the notes.

  “The assignment wasn’t entirely unfamiliar,” he said, mildly. “I’ve had some prior experience chatting up women in pubs. I told her I was the hiring manager for the Cunard Cruise Line.”

  “Full curriculum vitae. Impressive.” Bestor traced a long, tube-like finger down the page. “How did you get a copy of her passport?”

  “That was her idea. She popped back up the street to her office and made the photocopy while I waited.”

  “Excellent. Let’s have a look.” Bestor swiveled toward his computer, and Conor stiffened.

  “What are you doing?”

  Bestor pulled the file forward for easier viewing and replied while still focused on the computer screen. “Putting her into the database, obviously. Let’s see what she’s been getting up to, if anything.”

  Conor stood and plucked the file from the desk. “Nobody said that was part of the exercise. She was out with her friends for a bit of fun, and I just spent two hours telling lies to her. I got an entire life story out of her, and you’ve run your eyes over it; that should be enough. Why should she be filed in your database just because she had the bad luck to run into a student taking one of his spy exams?”

  Bestor swung back to face him with a flat, disinterested gaze but then lurched forward and snatched the file from his hands. “Who are you to tell me what’s enough, you poncey little shit?” he snarled. “You think it isn’t fair you had to talk rubbish to a pretty girl? This is how it’s done. We gather intelligence, we analyze it, and we act on it. You need to get your head round that, and stop smirking your way through this training as though it were a Boy’s Own adventure story. The men and women dedicating their lives to this service deserve your respect, not your snide condescension.”

  “I have plenty of respect for the men and women in this service,” Conor said. “I just have no desire to join them. This isn’t a career choice for me.”

  “A point you’ve clarified more than once,” Bestor growled, “to the perverse distress of your trainers, who appear to consider it a bloody shame.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Never mind.” Bestor let the file drop onto his desk. His anger dissipated with a sigh. “At any rate, the field techniques section is finished. We realize, of course, that many of them are archaic. The main objective was to instill a sense of discipline and a respect for cautious, methodical process. Whatever you might have thought of them, you performed well.”

  He paused, staring pointedly down at the desk, and Conor realized he was expected to acknowledge the compliment. He dipped his head apologetically.

  “Thanks. Listen, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make anyone’s job harder. I’ll work on my attitude. What comes next?”

  “Intensive language lessons, weapons and martial arts training, and computer labs,” Bestor responded promptly. “Tomorrow you’ll be briefed on the methods of international money laundering. Britain boasts the preeminent expert on the subject, and he’s coming down from London to spend the day with you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lawrence Shelton.”

  “Ah. Brilliant.”

  Shelton appeared bright and early the following morning as promised and proved every bit as surly in his new role as faculty member. Despite his attempts to stupefy him with the arcane details of tax shelters and fraudulent invoicing, Conor found the basic concepts of money laundering easy enough to understand.

  “It’s pretty clear Thomas is taking in the money from the source,” Shelton said, jabbing a stubby thumb at the puzzling hieroglyph he’d circled in the center of a whiteboard.

  They were conducting the session in one of the Fort’s smaller seminar rooms, and Conor had patiently watched him draw a bewildering series of figures and arrows to illustrate the methods by which funds could elude the finance mechanisms m
eant to track them.

  “Somebody has a shitload of cash they want to use to arm this pack of lunatics up in the mountains. Well, nobody deals in cash anymore. They can’t just throw it into sacks and head off for their meeting in Bahrain, Vladivostok, or wherever the hell. They need to put it somewhere, and Thomas is taking care of it. He’s managing to get it deposited without tripping any alarms. How’s that, then? Couple of possibilities. Either he’s got a high-level partner in a bank somewhere that’s binning the transaction reports, or he’s cutting out the banks as the entry point altogether. Personally, I’m plumping for the latter theory.”

  Shelton pulled up a chair and leaned forward across the table. Conor saw a gleam of sharp intelligence in his muddy brown eyes and found he could afford a greater measure of respect for a man who brought such a keen sense of curiosity and analysis to a subject that seemed impossibly dry.

  “They don’t need a bank, you see. As far as they’re concerned, he is the bank.”

  Conor exhaled a small sigh of exasperation. “Thomas has become a banker, now. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Not in the regular sense. I think some schemer a good bit smarter than your brother took all that money that got filched out of the EU and incorporated a shell company to look like it had some legitimate business taking in all that money.”

  “A shell company. What the hell is that?”

  Shelton’s face darkened in its familiar scowl. “Jesus, McBride, it’s not an act, is it? You really are a cretin. Do you ever read a newspaper? Have you ever been to the movies, even? Every mafia film ever made has this shit in it.”

  Conor’s expression of blank ignorance did not flicker. Shelton took a deep breath and made a conspicuous attempt to gather his patience. He got to his feet again and paced a few times in front of the whiteboard before resuming the lesson.

  “Here’s how it works. For the money to come out looking clean, it’s got to get itself into a bank account and slosh around with a lot of money from a legitimate business. That means Thomas has either latched onto an existing business and started mixing the dirty deposits in with the clean ones, or he’s working with a sort of purpose-built company—a shell company that produces nothing, sells nothing, and basically does nothing but sit there as a front for deposits into a bank account. Once the money is in there, Thomas can whip out the laptop and start transferring it around to other accounts.”

  Another slap at the whiteboard.

  “Now, for your average criminal, the money comes out smelling fresh and new and goes back into the legitimate economy to buy holiday homes and diamond necklaces. But our boys are using it to buy boxes of M-16s and rocket launchers, aren’t they? Thomas just bounces the money around a bit and eventually wires it into the account of Fecky-the-arms-dealer, who’s no doubt got his own shell company all set up and ready.”

  Shelton plopped once again into his seat. “So. Right.”

  The room fell quiet as Conor absorbed the implications of such an operation. It was point less to mention the sophisticated skills required were incompatible with what he remembered of his brother’s capabilities. At this point, he had to admit his opinions about those capabilities might be naïve or at least out of date. In a fairly short time, he’d gained some surprising skills of his own.

  Shelton shifted in his chair and abruptly broke the silence. “I suppose you’ve got questions, no doubt most of them

  brainless. Go on, then.”

  He shot the officer a jaded look. “Who’s supplying the money in the first place?”

  “We don’t know, and for the purpose of our current mission, we don’t much care.”

  “You don’t care?” Conor’s eyes widened. “How do you expect you’re going to stop all this if—”

  “No, no, no! Jesus!” Shelton pounded a fist against the table. “You’re not focusing on the mission. Once again, as I said at the beginning, as I’ve been saying all bloody day: the mission is not to shut down international terrorism. It’s to shut down this left-behind IRA crowd and stop them from making a living as money managers for international terrorism.”

  “Well, then, shut it down, why don’t you?” Conor shouted. “You’ve just told me you know how the whole plan works, and you know my brother is running it. You call me brainless. What more do you need, for Jesus’ sake? Go find him. Get the names of the people who taught him how to do it, and then throw the lot of them in jail. What are you laughing at, you pompous shite?”

  The final insult made Shelton laugh harder. When he had collected himself and wiped his eyes, he looked at Conor in derisive pity. “It’s what we hired you for, you silly prat. Go and find him yourself.”

  Shelton’s tutorial marked a turning point in Conor’s career at Fort Monckton. As Hamilton Bestor had inferred, he had been merely tolerating the experience, behaving not unlike a sullen but acquiescent teenager forced to endure a family holiday, but once the architecture of his brother’s new vocation was spelled out in all its insidious, finely calibrated detail, something changed.

  That night, tossing restlessly in bed, he experienced an unwelcome epiphany. As implausible—ludicrous even—as the scenario might appear, these “Crown servants” were intent on turning him into a passably competent intelligence operative. They were about to send him overseas and actually expected him to wrestle his brother away from a horde of terrorists and the high-rolling fanatics who loved them.

  Given the enormity of his situation, he realized his detached manner was childishly counterproductive, and more important, a self-indulgence he couldn’t afford.

  “They’re actually going to go through with this. I need to stop feckin’ about and get to work.”

  The Glock semiautomatic pistol was in a pouch inside his backpack, stripped down to its component parts. There wasn’t much light in the alley, but he couldn’t wait any longer to assemble it.

  Ahead of him, he saw strings of lights hanging in a festive, haphazard pattern that connected the stalls of the village’s night market, but their bright glow only made the surrounding darkness more complete. He heard fragments of animated conversations in English and Hindi as well as other South Asian dialects he couldn’t identify. They were growing louder, which meant he had very little time to get ready.

  Quickly moving along the wall, he felt for the small alcove he knew lay somewhere along its length. He found it after a few steps and released a quick breath of relief. Scrambling into a kneeling position inside the confined space, he swung the backpack from his shoulders.

  He made a mental note of its location along the wall and conducted a cursory exploration of its dimensions. Pulling the backpack forward, he removed the pouch and shook its contents into his hands. He closed his eyes as his fingers traced over the components and nimbly locked each into place. With the Glock assembled, he tucked it into his waistband and pulled his shirt down over it. Then he stepped back into the alley.

  Less than a minute later, Conor was in the center of the market, his eyes sweeping back and forth over the crowd in anticipation of two encounters: one with the agent he’d been instructed to meet there and the other with an individual who had been hired to kill him.

  He didn’t know what either of them looked like. Was the assassin a merchant at the market or a customer? Old or young? What was the strategy, and what kind of weapon would be used? What about the agent—was it a man or woman? Was he supposed to make contact first or wait for a signal? The brief had been too vague to be of much use. He was operating on instinct and adrenalin.

  Sweat beaded above his brow and coursed down between his shoulder blades. A thick, sticky humidity hung in the atmosphere, and he wondered why he hadn’t noticed it earlier.

  He continued to scan the faces and figures as they proceeded through the aisles between the stalls and observed those in his immediate vicinity: a well-dressed, heavyset man whose wife trailed along behind him; three children with ice cream dripping over their hands; a young mother with a baby swaddled agains
t her breast; and a small group of Maryknoll nuns. The voices around him were more distinct now, and as he warily marked the passing throng, he allowed part of his mind to follow some of the conversations, translating snatches of Hindi as they floated forward.

  “Finest Kashmiri wool, three hundred knots per square inch . . . ”

  “Sweet, made from cardamom and pistachio . . . ”

  “Gauri’s mother-in-law will not let her . . . ”

  “Conor, over here . . . ”

  “Chai, chai, chai . . . ”

  “Two days until salwar is finished . . . ”

  His head snapped around in the direction of the voice that had spoken his name, and his hand went to the gun at his waist. In the same instant, he realized it was a mistake. Such a reaction could give him away. To his left, a tall, rugged man with a deeply tanned face was signaling him with a surreptitious movement of his head, but just behind him, the young Indian mother who had passed him earlier was observing the exchange. She could not have identified him until that moment.

  Her hand disappeared into the bundle she held gathered against her chest. He still had time to get off a shot, but instead he turned and launched himself back at the alcove, diving for cover. It was too late. The shot hit him before he landed, and an explosion of pain immediately followed.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” He sprawled in the doorway with a hand pressed to his side, emphasizing each exclamation with a vicious kick at the wall.

  The lights snapped on, and the images of the village night market faded from the screens around him. He was once again surrounded by the sterile, fluorescent glare of the Fort’s simulation facility. With a small hum, the air conditioning powered on, and his mouth twisted in annoyance as a door at the end of the corridor opened, revealing the compact, muscular figure of his weapons training instructor, Joanna Patch.

  She strolled forward and squatted down next to him. From the hint of laughter in her light brown eyes, he could tell she was in a playful mood. Ordinarily, he would have jumped at the opportunity to widen this crack in her professional demeanor, but now it increased his irritation.