The Secret Chord: The Virtuosic Spy - Book 2 (23 page)

None Kate dared to ask, and Dr. Burton correctly interpreted her silence.
 

"I know this sounds scary, but we've got a good plan. I'm hoping for results in the next few hours. Conor is awake and breathing more comfortably. I can take you back if you're ready to see him? He's certainly anxious to see you."

Kate had only been permitted brief glimpses at the inner sanctum of the emergency ward, but the automated doors swung wide for her now with a wizardly flourish. Stepping through them was like lifting the cover from a beekeeper's hive, revealing the industrious colony beneath. The atmosphere was heavy with purpose and the pervasive odor of disinfectant, but sporadically lifted by laughter and the conversation of colleagues. The sights and smells collected around her, slowing her steps as she followed Dr. Burton further into the ward. Kate was surprised it had taken so long to register. She had lain in a place just like this six years ago, and by morning had known how much she'd lost. More than the memory, the dread of enduring another loss sent a convulsive shiver down her back. The doctor's voice continued as a fuzzed background noise.

"I ordered pain medication but so far he's refused any. After you've had a chance to talk maybe you can persuade him. He needs to get some sleep." He pulled up at a doorway on his left and looked back, surprised to find her several yards behind him. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." She hurried forward, thanking Dr. Burton before scooting past him. Behind the exam room curtain Conor lay in a bed propped to an upright angle, an intravenous tube in his right arm, the clear plastic oxygen cannula still in place under his nose. A sheet covered him up to the waist, and from the available evidence he wore nothing beneath. A pale green hospital gown, wadded together with a blanket, lay at the bottom of the bed. He looked haggard and feverish, but he was alive. Seeing her, his face brightened.

"Finally. I was ready to crawl out of here and go find you myself."

"Not without coverage, I hope." Kate picked up the twisted hospital gown. "Aren't you supposed to be wearing this?"

"Too hot."

She let it drop back onto the bed and came closer, shyly examining the wide gauze bandage taped against his side. "Does it hurt?"

"Not too bad. Comes and goes."

"You told me you'd never lie to me."

"I don't think that's exactly what I said." Conor gave her a faint smile. "So, where do we stand? Did you speak to Abigail?"

"Sort of, but she didn't get to say much."

Kate shared the details of her brisk discussions with Reginald Effingham. Conor, relieved that Frank's FBI connections appeared to be as good as Sedgwick thought, speculated the promised visitors would likely be a protective detail. To Kate's question of who they might be he could only respond with a weary, apologetic shrug.

"Never mind. You should rest. The doctor prescribed something for the pain. I'll go find someone."

"No, not yet." Conor caught her arm and pulled her back. "Come here. Sit down."

He shifted on the bed, grimacing and losing a little more color in the process, and patted the empty space next to him. Kate gingerly climbed up and settled next to his hip, taking care not to interfere with any tubing. He remained quiet for a moment, tensed in pain, then his face relaxed and he took her hand.

"
We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows
." He ran a thumb over her fingers. "Robert Frost. That's the whole poem. Says all he needed it to."

Kate nodded, wondering what he expected from her. "You know all my secrets now," she offered uncertainly. He surprised her with a tender grin.

"Somehow, I doubt that. It wasn't yours I was thinking of, though." His smile faded. "He was such a little boy, probably no more than ten years old. Hindu," he said softly. "I don't know his name. We were in a hurry and I didn't take the time to ask. For a while I thought that's what made everything worse, but I was kidding myself. What made it worse was feeling I knew him entirely, in that one instant. As if his soul flew up out of him and showed me everything he was, everything about him. Except his name."

"Don't do this," Kate whispered. "Not now. It's too much."

"It’s not too much. More like not enough. You run as far as you can from the thing you're trying to escape. In the end you realize you've only been circling it." Conor looked up, sad and resigned. "I've nowhere else to go, except back to the middle. I have to get there while I can, and no matter what you might think of me later, I need to tell you."

Kate laced her fingers between his and felt the tremor running through him like a current of electricity, reaching for her, presenting no choice but to flinch and pull away or be frozen by its embrace. She raised Conor's hand to rest against her cheek, and held tight.

H
E
COULD
REMEMBER
the congestion in his chest as they climbed that morning, worsening with every step, but he didn't think it had ever reached the crackling pitch he was trying to ignore now. Conor gripped Kate's hand, his centering stake in the ground, and let his mind drift backward.

At the time, the state of his lungs was just one more thing to worry about as he followed Thomas, slogging up through the Kashmir woods to a doomed meeting with the lieutenants of Vasily Dragonov. Preoccupied and jittery, he'd fallen behind as they approached a small, dilapidated Hindu shrine. When the boy suddenly appeared, cupping a handful of marigolds, it startled him, as though a pint-sized spirit had risen from the snowy path. He couldn't resist the child's bright, engaging smile.

"Even now, I wonder about those marigolds—how he could have gotten them, with the ground still frozen."

Conor leaned back, allowing himself a short respite. Outside the room the business of emergency medicine continued along its course, moving to a tune of electronic tones and low-tech rattles, and the occasional unexpected crescendo. He listened, drawing strength from the compassion in Kate's eyes before continuing.

He'd obliged the boy by taking a few of the flowers, giving a handful of rupees in exchange, and after depositing his offering at the dancing feet of Shiva in the shrine's niche, he'd removed the long white scarf from his neck to wrap around the boy, and told him to run along home.

"It was freezing out, and he looked so cold." Conor worked his lips into a faltering smile. "I suppose something in saffron would have been better. He was an acolyte, after all, no matter how tiny. But white seemed to suit him as well."

What followed after was a dimly lit recollection—of moving forward and waiting and moving forward again, of rehearsed conversations in an antiseptic hotel room, of improvisation and, ultimately, of mayhem. When the mission exploded and his brother was shot, he and Sedgwick carried Thomas down the path, but after they'd laid him in the car two of Dragonov's men had arrived on the road, armed to the teeth. They managed to get between them and the car, and before Conor knew what was happening Sedgwick was dragging him back into the woods.

"Evasive maneuvers. We tried to lure them up the path, get them into a position so they weren't between us and the car. It almost worked."

Almost, but not quite. They were sprinting back down to the road when Dragonov's men pinned them down behind a boulder, opening fire from a point farther up the path, somewhere near the shrine.
 

Here, his memory was something more than just vivid. It was an endless present moment, always with him, never faded. He heard the relentless burst of automatic weapons, of bullets cracking against stone. He saw the trees around him, trunks torn apart, exposing the soft, shredded wood. He smelled the pine pitch.

And he could feel his jumpy, tingling nerves wrap themselves around the gun in his hand, felt his panic and desperation to move, to do something, to make it stop. Then, in the midst of chaos, a break— a breathless lacuna drawing Conor forward, away from his cover and onto the path, gun already raised, already firing.

And in this eternal sliver of time he saw it—the flash of white skating across the path, the wide, astonished brown eyes, and so much more. He saw everything, understood it, and knew what he'd done.

Why was he there, a small innocent running through the center of havoc? Why had he not gone home as he was told? Who could answer such questions? Who but the god Shiva, whose dancing idol had slipped from a small pair of hands, landing upright on the path where it had toppled, one bell-clad foot poised in the air, ready to ring down onto the icy earth. To destroy it all, and create it new.

The secret sits in the middle
. Now, so did he. Conor sat there with it and let everything else spin around him. He felt so far away, and so very tired. But still, there was a hand in his, cool and soft, that hadn't let go. And that was something.

In fact, that was everything.

22

H
E
DIDN
'
T
NEED
THE
PAIN
MEDICATION
,
AFTER
ALL
. His confession complete, Conor closed his eyes and Kate watched his body go slack, his hand heavy in her own as he slept.

Without taking her attention from his face she eased herself away from him, down into the chair at his bedside, and folded her arms on the mattress. At some point her head dropped on top of them, and there it remained until the pressure of a hand on her shoulder pulled her from sleep.

She sat up, muscles protesting as she unwound, and turned to face a muscular gray-suited stranger. He had a dark, precisely trimmed goatee, but not a follicle of hair on his perfectly formed head. It gleamed like rich polished mahogany, a warm contrast to the antiseptic light of the exam room.
 

"The spirit that was foretold?" Kate asked. The quizzical cast of his eyebrow indicated it wasn't the greeting he'd expected. He pulled a photo ID from his jacket.

"Agent Reynolds, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and my partner Agent Levine." He inclined his head at a second, far less imposing man who stood by the door. "We're with the Diplomatic Security Service, providing assistance at the request of the British Embassy. We arrived about three hours ago, and I apologize for waking you but I've been told we need to leave."

"Leave? Why? What's happening?" Kate turned back to Conor who lay with eyes closed, pale and motionless. His breath came and went in rapid puffs, a sluggish piston straining to keep up with its work.

"No further details, except that we should return to the waiting room," Agent Reynolds said.

"I'm not returning anywhere until I know what's going on."

"I'm afraid I don't have that information for you, ma'am."

"Well then, let's find someone who does."

"Yes, ma'am."

The two appeared to accept her remark as a mission-critical directive, but before they could act an unseen hand drew the privacy curtain back and three clinicians entered the room. Frightened and disoriented, Kate longed for a familiar face.

"Where's Dr. Burton?" she demanded. An attractive woman with purple-rimmed glasses stepped forward.

"His shift ended earlier and he didn't want to wake you. I'm Lucille Kim. I'm afraid we're not getting enough traction with the current line of meds and Conor's condition is becoming critical. We're going to transport him to the ICU and try a different therapy." The doctor gave her a sympathetic smile. "You've been here all night. Why not take a break and get something to eat? There's no immediate danger and we've got your cell number. Give us an hour or so to get him settled and then you can see him again."

The idea of eating generated only nausea, but for lack of a better plan Kate wandered over to the cafeteria, her impressive bodyguard trailing behind her while his partner remained with Conor. She bought a cup of coffee and offered to buy one for Agent Reynolds.

"No thank you, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. I'm good."

"Please call me Kate."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Yes,
Kate
," she said, exasperated.

"Yes, Kate." The agent allowed himself a fractional smile and touched a hand to his chest. "Gideon."

They made their way to a table by a bank of windows filled with the first wool-gray light of morning. Kate glanced at her watch—five o'clock. She wondered if Jeanette had brought Jigger back home by now, and whether Reg Effingham had been offered a guest room for the night or been shown the door. It was too early to call anyone. She swirled a spoon in her untouched coffee and watched the people filtering through the cafeteria. From the variety of uniforms—scrubs, hair nets, lab coats—she presumed most were hospital employees, but occasionally her attention locked on a few individuals who didn't laugh or talk with their companions but sat quietly pushing food around on their plates. They were like ghosts at the banquet, and she drew a guilty consolation from their tired faces. She was one of their number— another anonymous servant to the fear surrounding illness and loss.

B
REATHE
.

Not too deep. Just a little one.

Go again.

Life was simple for him on this level, where only a few rules mattered. The rest had all been incinerated into ash along with every hope or desire that fell subordinate to the one goal and its supporting objectives: To draw a breath. To keep the intake shallow and even—that minimized the pain. To coax his bloodstream into absorbing the wisp of air and its tiny cargo of oxygen. To draw another breath.

This was his universe, and it demanded singularity of purpose, but a pressure on his forehead kept disrupting his tempo, a stroke in counterpoint to the established rhythm. Conor's eyes fluttered open to squint at the distraction. He squeezed them shut and tried again. Still there. The vision might be a side effect of delirium, but it wasn't going away.

"Good morning, Conor. I seem to recall we've played this scene already."

Although its breeziness seemed forced Frank's mellifluous baritone rolled over him like a soothing melody. Conor's reply disappeared as it left his lips. Frank leaned in closer, and he tried to add a larger measure of sound on the next exhalation.