The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (12 page)

“I’m not interested in getting good at it,” Conor replied. “I’m interested in getting it over with and getting out.”

Sedgwick nodded. “Sure. Point taken, but I’m sure you’ll understand that after being bombarded with tales of your prowess, I’m eager to see some evidence of it.”

He reached down and lifted up a small black bag that had been sitting on the seat next to him. The mysterious young man who had been hunched over his glass of beer moved even farther against the wall. Sedgwick tossed the bag onto the table, its contents jangling as it landed.

He didn’t need to open the bag to know what it was and what Sedgwick wanted. Conor felt a rush of intense irritation. The wisecracks and cheap theatrics were wearing thin. He was beginning to wonder if managing a spiteful recovering heroin addict might be a greater strain on his patience than dealing with an active one.

“Here? In the middle of the restaurant?” he hissed. “Is there something about the word ‘covert’ you don’t understand? We might as well slap signs on our backs. And what about yer man, there?” he added, jerking a thumb at the huddled figure. “What’s he going to think?”

“Like I told you, he doesn’t speak any English.”

“Sure, he doesn’t need to,” Conor argued. “He’ll bloody well know a gun when he sees one, won’t he?”

“Just get on with it.” Sedgwick nudged the bag forward. “Trust me, in a place like this, no one will take much notice.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” With a frown of annoyance, Conor pulled the bag forward and unzipped it. “A Walther,” he said, poking a finger among the parts in the bag. “Why not a Colt 1911? Give me a real challenge.”

“I only wish I could turn out the lights,” Sedgwick said in a soft undertone. “Shall I time you?”

“I assume that’s the point, isn’t it? And if it’s a show you want, let’s have the full treatment.
Arrey
. . . ” Conor rapped a knuckle on the table in front of the young man and pointed to the scarf around his neck. “Let me have that for a minute.”

He wrapped the scarf twice around his head, covering his eyes, and knotted it in the back. Then, he carefully tipped the parts of the stripped down Walther semiautomatic out of the bag and onto the table. He assembled it quickly by touch, and when he had hammered the loaded magazine into place and placed the gun on the table, he removed the scarf and threw it back across to the young man, who fumbled with it clumsily.

“Nine seconds. I’m impressed,” Sedgwick purred with a mocking grin.

An instant later, the blond agent’s face was pressed against the table, and a small trickle of blood was seeping over his lip where the point of impact had forced it against his teeth. With lightning speed, Conor had seized his hair and snapped his head down, and then, still holding him, he had snatched up the gun and come around to the other side of the booth. He slammed in against him, pressing him up against the nameless companion, who in turn was pinned against the wall.

“And how about this?” he asked with icy calm, thrusting the barrel of the gun against his controlling officer’s ear. “Pretty good trick, too, right? How many points do I score for this one, boss?”

“Perfect ten,” Sedgwick said, his voice muffled by the table.
 

“Then, if you’re satisfied, maybe we can knock off the caustic commentary and horseshit games from now on, right? I haven’t known you more than a day, and you’re already on my last nerve.”

Sedgwick made a strangled, inaudible comment, and his shoulders began shaking with silent laughter. Conor gave him another irritated shove, and the young man against the wall yelped in alarm.

“Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” He released his hold on the back of Sedgwick’s neck and dropped the gun back onto the table. The agent sat up slowly, putting his fingers to his lip. “Don’t shoot him. I brought him here to meet you, after all.

His name is Raj. He works for your brother.”

Conor swiveled around the table, taking his seat again, and looked at the long, thin face with greater interest. Raj watched him nervously and shifted away from the wall. Conor opened his mouth, mentally formulating the words to the question in Hindi, but then remembered himself and stopped, even before he saw Sedgwick’s hand flash across the table in a gesture of warning. He was supposed to be a tour operator investigating new trekking tours. He wasn’t supposed to know anyone named Thomas McBride.

“Does he know where my brother is?” He addressed the question in English instead to Sedgwick, who shook his head.

“Nobody does. I think your brother got spooked. Frank told you about the agent MI6 sent over last year to flush him out?”

Conor nodded.

“The guy was supposed to find him—with my help—and offer him an immunity deal in exchange for cooperation. London is after the ringleader—the ‘wizard.’ Well, their agent managed to find me at the airport, but in every other respect, he was a train wreck. Half the time he was drunk, and the rest of the time he was careening around town interviewing the club owners and bartenders and making no secret about who he was looking for. He blew his own cover and nearly blew mine as well. And they called me a security risk.”

Grimacing in disgust, Sedgwick drained his glass and signaled for another round. “Thomas and I used to cross paths occasionally, but he went to ground once that fathead showed up, and I haven’t seen him in Mumbai since the beginning of July. I’m not sure Raj here has ever even met him.”

“If he’s never met him, how can he be—”

“I’ll tell you how he can, if you’ll shut up and let me finish,” Sedgwick said affably. He took a deep breath and arched his back in a long stretch. When he sat forward again, his face had smoothed into a more sober expression. “The money your brother has been laundering belongs to Ahmed Khalil. He’s a businessman and a gangster—big in the Bollywood racket and the mobile communications business, but he’s got a sideline trade in drugs and prostitution that brings in more cash than anything else he’s got going on. The way it used to work is that Thomas would go around to all the collection points in Mumbai and pick up the cash. Nobody knows what he does with it, but eventually it shows up as a deposit in a series of Swiss accounts that he and Khalil control. Then, when Khalil’s crazy friends up north need some firepower, Thomas goes to the meetings with the arms dealer and sets up the payment transfers. That’s how it used to work.”

The waiter appeared with three fresh bottles and placed them on the table, removing the empties. For the sake of appearances, Conor filled his glass again but didn’t drink any more. It was hard enough to absorb yet another confirmation that Thomas had become enmeshed in a world as alien as the far side of Mars. He didn’t need the fog of alcohol amplifying his distress.

“How does it work now?” He maintained an appearance of unemotional interest, but Sedgwick appeared to sense his discomfort and regarded him with an almost sympathetic smile.

“A few months ago, he introduced a few new layers of security between him and the daily grind, and one of those layers, however skinny, is Raj. He’s making the cash pickups now and delivers them to a drop point. Somehow it gets moved on to Thomas, and he does whatever it is he’s been doing with it.”

“But Raj doesn’t know what happens after he makes the drop?” Conor asked. He looked over at the younger man, who perked up slightly at the sound of his name. He now looked simply sleepy rather than nervous.

“Nope.”

“Brilliant.” He sighed. “So what are we doing here? You brought him to meet me. Who does he think I am?”

“His new body man,” Sedgwick said, with matter-of-fact promptness. “Mine too, as a matter of fact. You get to take the gun home with you tonight. And that little acrobatic move you pulled on me was helpful. Scared the piss out of him. You’ve got him thinking you’re a real badass.”

Conor stared at him. “I’m not following you.”
 

“Look, McBride—”

“Will you ever please stop using—”

“Oh, fine, whatever.” Sedgwick tossed his head. “Listen, I’m sorry if you spent a lot of time memorizing it, but this tour guide cover they assigned you is crap, and as soon as Frank Murdoch heard they were putting you with me, he must have known it was dead. He just didn’t have the guts to tell you how it was going to be.”

“He gave me a pretty good idea. He offered to let me back out of the whole thing.”

“But, you didn’t. So, here you are in Mumbai, and this half- assed alias that has you going off on environmental treks is not going to wash. If you want to get anywhere with this mission, if you want to find your brother, then you’ve got to work from inside the Khalil organization, and I’m your ticket to get there because I’m already inside it. I’m assigning your cover. You’ll have to take what I give you and like it.”

“So you say,” Conor muttered. He didn’t like any of it. As much as he had tried to strip away any sense of naiveté regarding the character of the business he had committed himself to, he still found himself seriously shaken by the plan being suggested.

The most obvious argument against getting mixed up in Sedgwick’s insider activities was that he would put himself beyond protection or support from his employers if something went wrong. He had been briefed on conditions that would set their “plausible deniability” process in motion, and although playing bodyguard for the bagman of a drug and prostitution ring wasn’t specifically mentioned, he was pretty sure it was somewhere on the list.

Of more immediate concern was not the question of what might happen if it went badly but how to cope if he were good at it. Infiltrating an Indian mafia organization required a far deeper level of reinvention than passing himself off as an earnest environmental tour guide, but he knew he had the required skills to pull it off, and it made him uncomfortable.

Already, he felt as though the past ten weeks had turned him into someone that he didn’t seem to know anymore. Who would he be when this performance was done? Assuming a criminal alias and living inside it had consequences, and he thought the acerbic, scarred man across the table could tell him more about that than he cared to know.

He slouched against the back of the booth, considering his options. He didn’t have many, but he eyed Sedgwick with cautious calculation and exercised one of them.

“You know, the ink on those briefing books was barely dry when I read them two days ago. If they’re obsolete already, I’d appreciate having that confirmed by Frank.”

“Forget about Frank.” Sedgwick swatted the suggestion away without even changing expression. “Frank is off the grid. He appears out of the mist when he’s called and sinks back into it when they’re done with him. You’re not likely to ever see him again.” He gave a wolfish smile. “You’re in my wheelhouse now, McBride. They threw you to me, and they knew exactly what they were doing. I write the music; you play the tune. The sooner you get used to it, the easier it will be. Welcome to my world.”

The cheerful menace and clichéd constructions were too corny to sound threatening, and Conor didn’t feel provoked. The more time he spent in his company, the easier it was to see the loneliness and self-doubt lurking beneath the agent’s veneer of irascibility.
 

He swallowed the anxiety that had convulsed the muscles in his throat and gave Sedgwick a weary smile of acceptance. “Okay, then. Go on and tell me who I’m supposed to be in your world.”

11

H
E
DIDN
’
T
MUCH
CARE
FOR
WHO
HE
TURNED
OUT
TO
BE
IN
Curtis Sedgwick’s world, but as he’d expected, he accommodated himself to the role without much difficulty—or at least without much that was visible to anyone else.

His responsibilities, as they were outlined that first night, were not complicated. He would function as an armed guard, and on the evenings when collections were scheduled, he would accompany Raj on his rounds to ensure the smooth transport of funds to a designated drop point. On certain other evenings, he would be safeguarding the supply side of Khalil’s drug operation, tagging along with Sedgwick to take delivery of fresh product arriving from the Kabul and Peshawar regions and conveying it to the numerous retail distribution points scattered around Mumbai.

The first step in cementing his latest identity was to settle on what others would call him. A single, easily pronounceable word was all that was required, Sedgwick had insisted, and he found it unnecessarily complicated to create something new. With a perverse instinct to irritate, he selected the half of the official alias that Conor despised most and introduced him to the skittish, skeletal Raj simply as Con.

During the week that followed, he understood that he would soon be introduced to an assortment of leading characters in Ahmed Khalil’s underworld army but not before Sedgwick had taken ample opportunity to school him in the details of his new persona.

“Let’s get this clear. Your job is not to blend in,” he instructed during one of the frequent educational sessions he had convened following the Chole House initiation.

They were on Chowpatty Beach, steering around the lovers and families who had come out to stroll in the evening air and watch the sunset. Conor’s attention was divided between the lesson and the large plate of
bhel puri
he was devouring as they walked. He’d become addicted to the famous Mumbai salad of puffed rice dressed with combinations of potato, fruit, dry noodles, and piquant spices. It was offered in countless varieties at the street stalls lining the beach, and he was making a point of trying them all.

“Not to blend in,” he repeated dutifully, wiping a smear of tamarind chutney from his chin. Sedgwick shot him an impatient glance before continuing.

“Your job is to provide contrast, primarily just by being white. That’s why Khalil hired me—he wants a few
goras
on the payroll to show around. He thinks it makes him look more international. You also need to have an attitude that contrasts with his regulars. They’re a band of
goondas
—thieves, pimps, black marketeers, and smugglers. They’re colorful and uninhibited—big personalities. You, on the other hand, will be colorless and self-contained. This is your chance to show off that splendid ‘talent for repose’ your teachers were so proud of. You need to convey the threat of violence while looking tranquil at the same time. Think of yourself as a monk—a dark, brooding, ass-kicking monk with a sketchy paramilitary past that you don’t discuss. That’s what I’ve led them to expect.”