The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (23 page)

The only thing that seemed unchanged was his face. It had always been lined and weather-beaten, and those remarkable eyes—colored like the horizon where sea meets sky on a cloudy day—had always held a hint of jaded resignation. The difference now was just a matter of degree, and it tugged at something inside Conor.

“Anyway,” he said, attempting to lighten the mood, “no matter how she was feeling, if she could see what you look like, she’d be having a run at you with the razor.”

Thomas grunted a quiet laugh, but when he raised his head to Conor, his face was solemn. “And if she could see what you look like, she’d be cutting my throat with it.”

Conor dismissed the statement with a sniff, but gave himself a surreptitious self-examination. He didn’t look as bad as that, did he?

“And what about the farm, then?” Thomas asked. “The cows and all?”

“All right, I suppose,” he replied absently. “I haven’t seen them in a while either, you know.”

He was looking at several large, fading bruises along his upper arm and wondering what the hell had happened there before remembering Raj had landed a few vigorous kicks in that region . . . how many nights ago? He shook his head and gave his brother a sly glance.

“We had to give up on your sheep, though, Thomas. It was too hard keeping track of them.”

He thought it a gentle enough jab to open a dicey subject but saw the remark had stung more deeply than he’d intended and again felt his face redden with irritable impatience. What did the fecker expect, after all? That they would go on nattering about the cows, their silage, and what the weather had been doing on the Dingle peninsula? What right did he have to sit looking so wounded and put upon, when he was responsible for everything that had brought them to this point? Now that he’d finally turned up, he could bloody well face it.

Thomas had apparently reached the same conclusion. The small school chair creaked as he shifted and sat up straighter. Placing the palms of his large hands flat against his knees, he nodded an invitation at Conor.

“Go on and tell me about it now.”

“Tell you about what?” Conor demanded snappishly.
 

“About what happened after I left,” Thomas replied. “About how you’ve been getting on for the past six years and about how you managed to get roped into playing Paddy the Secret Agent for a pack of British eejits.”

Conor gave him a narrow look of suspicion. “Have Curtis Sedgwick and his crowd really not briefed you on all that? Have they not told you the whole story by now?”

“Sure, they’re always telling stories, Conor.” His brother’s tone was flat. “They’re good at that. I’d like to get the tale from your side of it.”

“Well, I’d like to hear a new one altogether. Why can’t we start with yours?”

“We’ll get around to that.”
 

“When?”

“When I say so.”

He briefly considered fighting about it. For as long as he could remember—at least since their father had died—this was the pattern in their relationship. Thomas made the rules, and because he presented them with such self-assurance and absolute authority, Conor had never found sufficient cause to question or disobey.

Things had changed since then, however. Now, he had both cause and opportunity, supported by a few new talents his brother would no doubt find surprising. He had his own brand of authority, and if he chose to reveal it, a new capacity for ruthlessness in drawing on it.

He didn’t reveal it, though. Thomas didn’t yet know how much his little brother had changed, and Conor wanted to keep it that way for as long as he could. He wanted to lie in the long grass and play the naïve younger sibling. It wouldn’t be difficult; he’d grown accustomed to pretending, and that was part of the problem. He had been an artist of a different sort once, but now it seemed his only virtuosity was in the art of deception.

He pulled a face at Thomas. “Have it your way. As if that was a change.”

In the process of considering how to begin and how much to include, Conor discovered something even more surprising. He had been telling himself that this odyssey was about rescue and redemption, that he was bound by familial duty to an age- old command to seek and retrieve the prodigal son. It was noble and selfless . . . and it wasn’t true.

The truth was that until Frank had shown up the previous September, he had no idea where his brother was, no means of finding out, and no expectation of ever seeing him again. The truth was that he had started down this road—had learned to shoot, lie, steal, and smother his humanity under layers of “tradecraft”—because it had been the only route offered for getting something he only now realized that he craved: freedom from an internalized bitterness he had never fully acknowledged or expressed.

Someone—someone he loved and trusted—had taken something irreplaceable from him. He had carried the burden of that betrayal within his heart for years and had traveled a long way for the chance to lay both his grievance and his uncomprehending sorrow at the feet of the one responsible.

So he told his story—a memoir of fragmented identity— for the first time to the one person he most wanted to hear it. He spoke without much outward emotion, but the details were powerfully suggestive of the feelings he’d endured: the shame of encountering a neighbor on the stoop as he was led from his Dublin flat in handcuffs; the humiliation of submitting the resignation of his position with the National Symphony to a stone-faced personal assistant when the conductor refused to see him; the emptiness he’d felt in reading Maggie Fallon’s formal, carefully worded letter to break off their engagement; the hopeless rage in adjusting to a new daily routine and of trying to remember everything he’d once assumed it had been safe to forget; and then shame again, and guilt, for the death of both a cow and her calf because he had been too proud to ask his snickering neighbors for help with a breached birth.

With these details, he was more honest and expansive, but when he launched into the description of his latest incarnation as an amateur operative, he began to equivocate. He didn’t lie, exactly, but he was careful to shape the few details he did provide so as to cast himself in the most humbling light. He made much of the insults suffered at the hands of Lawrence Shelton and of his chaotic arrival in Mumbai. He made very little of what had followed after, doing his best to cement the image of Paddy the Secret Agent in his brother’s mind and leaving the darker aspects of his recent history unspoken.

When he finished, Conor felt unexpectedly refreshed, and with a ripple of smug satisfaction, he noted the tale had taken its intended toll.

Thomas was slumped low in the chair again, his face pale, one hand shielding eyes that had disappeared into slits of squinting pain. Conor knew the look. Thomas had always been prone to sudden, blinding headaches that came without warning and disappeared just as quickly. Their mother believed the
chuisle Dé
was exceptionally strong in him and that he resisted it too fiercely. Conor’s righteous satisfaction faded as he watched his brother’s face grow even whiter.

“Listen,” he began, but got no further as Thomas lurched up and stumbled to the door. A few seconds later, he heard the bathroom door slam, followed by sounds of violent sickness. Thomas stepped back into the room some fifteen minutes later and looked at him with a sheepish shrug.

“Are you all right?” Conor asked, watching him cautiously.

“Yeah. It’s gone, now.”

“You did say you wanted to hear it.”

“I needed to hear it,” Thomas corrected. He sank back into the chair with a tired sigh and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “And you needed to tell it.”

“I did,” he agreed, and then he added, “Sorry.”

“Are you?” Thomas’s bloodshot eyes regarded him ironically. “Sure, you were always one for pulling on the hair shirt. What have you got to be sorry for, in all this?”

“For wanting it to hurt.”

“Ah, well, no crime in that,” Thomas said mildly. “You can’t say I don’t deserve it, but I don’t deserve to be treated like a fool, either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Thomas’s face twisted into a scolding grimace. “It’s a load of shite, trying to make me believe you’re the worst bogtrotter ever recruited by MI6 and that you’ve been nothing more than a fool on holiday for the past six months.”

“How do you know I haven’t been?”

Thomas leaned forward, reached under the bed, and drew out the Walther semiautomatic. Conor stiffened. His eyes shifted involuntarily to the pillow on his bed.

“Yeah, it used to be there,” Thomas said with a faint smile. “The doctor found it a few days ago. He was trying to get a tube down into you for his sputum sample, and you were thrashing around in a fever. He pulled this out, much to his surprise, and you latched onto his throat like a trained killer. He’d nearly browned his pants by the time I pulled you off him.”

“I don’t remember it,” Conor said, feebly.

“Clearly. But I don’t think I would have believed you, even without this.” Thomas tossed the gun to him. “It wouldn’t fit the pattern. I’ve never known you to be a bungler at anything you ever tried.”

“Ah, for . . . go away outta that, Thomas.” He caught the gun cleanly, and after a slight hesitation, he tucked it back under the pillow.

“I won’t, though,” Thomas insisted. “It’s the truth, and you know it. A lot of things come naturally to you. It’s a gift. I don’t know—maybe in this case it’s a curse. But you can’t deny it. You’ve only to set your mind to be good at something, and before long it’s almost second nature. You’ve mastered it. Take farming for instance.” Thomas gave Conor a furtive, half-wistful glance. “You’ve mastered that as well by now, I’m guessing. It was a great relief to me, you know, when you came and said you’d rather go play the violin in Dublin than stay and work the farm with me. I remember it like yesterday. You were scared—thought I’d be disappointed—but do you know, if you’d stayed, you’d have turned yourself into the best bleedin’ farmer in the west of Ireland, and then what would I do? I actually thought it would be easier without you. That was my first soft-headed mistake but not the biggest.”

Conor reflected on this for a moment and then lifted his head with a smile. “Sounds like the beginning of your story, now.”

Thomas choked out a mirthless laugh. “I suppose it is.”
 

“Well, don’t tell it yet.” He eased himself gingerly up from the bed. “I’m tired of sitting around here in my underwear. Push that bag over here. I want to go out for a while.”

Thomas frowned anxiously. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be getting out of bed.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He pulled a clean shirt and a pair of jeans from his luggage. “I’ve been in bed for four days, and anyway, fever is episodic in TB. I’ll feel like shit again soon enough, but I don’t feel too bad right now.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Thomas asked.

“There’s no shortage of tuberculosis in the slums of Dharavi,” Conor remarked, drily. “I’ve been working with Kavita in the clinics there. The doctor thinks I caught it from her, but I might have picked it up there as well. Doesn’t much matter. The real question will be whether the tests show a straightforward infection or an MDR strain.”

“And what’s that, then? MDR?”

“Multidrug resistant. Much harder to treat. Harder to cure.”

Thomas rubbed a hand over his mouth, absorbing the information in silence. “Could do with a stiff drink,” he said finally.
 

Conor nodded. “This was my point.”

“Fancy a little Jameson’s Limited Reserve?” Thomas asked.
 

“Hell, yes, but I’ve whistled for it in every five-star hotel bar in Mumbai. I haven’t found it yet.”

“You’re whistling in the wrong bars,” his brother said with a crooked grin. “I know a place.”

22

C
ONOR
GAPED
AROUND
THE
ROOM
,
HARDLY
ABLE
TO
CREDIT
THE
evidence of his eyes. One minute he had been in the cacophonous center of a Bandra shopping district, the street teeming with homeward-bound workers, begging children, and a continuous flow of honking, fuming traffic. The next minute, he had stepped through a door and was transported home.

The interior of Durgan’s Irish Pub was so authentic, so uncannily evocative of bars he’d known from Dingle to Dublin, that the overall effect was one of momentary dizziness. It was as if the needle of an internal compass had been twisted to a familiar but unexpected setting.

“It’s unbelievable. It even smells like Ireland.” He closed his eyes and breathed in an aroma both sweet and acrid.

“That’ll be the peat fire.” Thomas cocked his head at the massive fieldstone fireplace anchored at one end of the room. “It’s mad altogether, really. It’ll be thirty-three centigrade and the air-con cranked full blast, but there’s always the peat fire going.”

“How did you find this?” Conor asked.

His brother’s eyes slid from him evasively. He turned away toward the bar—a long, handsome specimen of dark, polished wood featuring an array of long-handled taps advertising Guinness, Smithwick’s, and Murphy’s. He pointed Conor to an empty area of the room.

“Let’s have a drink first. Get yourself a seat in the corner there, and I’ll bring it over.”

Conor made his way to the table Thomas had indicated, taking time to browse among the photos lining the walls. They were a stock collection of the most famous, most frequently photographed Irish landscapes, but he lingered over them affectionately, as if absorbing images from a family album.

He paused at the fireplace and had to agree the great expanse of fieldstone was a bit overdone, a bit too “Bunratty Folk Park,” but the homely little bricks of peat in their various misshapen sizes still produced a twinge of nostalgia. He wondered what logistical hurdles were involved in importing genuine Irish turf into India.

When he reached the corner table, he pulled one of the chairs back, throwing a casual glance at the photo centered over it . . . and froze. It was another landscape, a very familiar one, but not famous. It was a particular view of Ventry Harbor off the coast of the Dingle peninsula. He would have known the harbor anyway, but this angle he particularly recognized because it was a vista that could only be seen from the upper pasture of the McBride family farm.