The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (35 page)

“Why didn’t you tell them Durgan suspects something?”
 

Thomas shrugged. “Too scared. They need me at this point, but they don’t need you. What if they tried protecting me by getting him after you instead? Do you understand now, why I wanted you kept out of it? Why I wanted you sent home without knowing what was really going on over here?”

“Yeah.” Conor ran a hand over his face before asking the question he didn’t want answered. “How can you be certain Durgan killed Desi?”

“Because he sent me a picture, Conor,” his brother whispered. “E-mailed it to me. And Desi’s face was the only part of him left I could recognize.”

Back in bed a half-hour later, Conor’s sleepless mind returned again to the symbolic relevance of the ‘period,’ and to the wistful question Thomas had posed.

Will it ever end
?

In a musical composition, a set of chords known as a closed cadence forms the punctuative counterpart to the written word’s period. Marking the end of a section within the piece—or more dramatically indicating its conclusion—the closed cadence and its definitive tonic chord signals closure. In doing so, it supplies a fulfillment the pricked ear hardly knew it yearned for: a release of tension, an accession to completion and rest.

He had always reveled in compositions that toyed with that nebulous desire, that withheld gratification until the next measure, and then the next, letting the tension build inexorably as the listener’s heart fills, waiting for the instant when the music will crest and resolve.

But then it doesn’t come.

Instead of the anticipated closed cadence, the music slides to a “deceptive cadence.” It goes up, back, sideways, across— somewhere new. Somewhere unexpected. The musician works the strings, and the process begins again. The ear quivers in exquisite torture, still waiting for release, still aching for a tonic chord.

33

T
HEY
DEPARTED
R
ISHIKESH
BEFORE
DAWN
THE
FOLLOWING
morning, while the east bank still lay hushed and frosty under a twinkling film of rime. Conor was waiting for the others in the ashram’s courtyard when Kavita came out to him carrying a white Pashmina scarf.

For the past several days, she’d been supplementing his tropical wardrobe with cold-weather clothes. An endless assortment of long-sleeved woolen kurtas and thick sweaters had been finding their way into his bedroom until he’d felt obliged to stop the madness.

“It’s more clothes than I left London with, Kavita,” he protested, and she’d responded with unusual severity.

“Again I am telling you, Conor. You are feeling quite well now, but you must take care. Kashmir is very cold just now. It is not good to you. Cold Kashmiri air going down inside your chest is not good to you. It is a very dangerous thing.”

Abashed, he’d resisted any further objections and stood patiently motionless as she coiled the scarf around his neck.

He caught a glimpse at her eyes as she finished. They were dark and somber, too much like the eyes he had left thousands of miles behind on a late summer day that felt like a hundred years ago. When her hands moved from the scarf to hover— one on top of the other—over his chest, the gooseflesh surged over his skin in waves.

“You will need all of your strength,” she breathed, as though speaking to herself.

“Whatever I’ve got,
ji
, it’s what you’ve given me.” He took her hands and pressed them gently. “We should be back in a few days. I’ll see you again soon, please God.”

“Yes. You will be seeing me here again,
beta
, but I think it will not be soon.”

She tried to smile for him, realizing she had frightened him. Before she could say any more, the others arrived, and Walker was anxious to be going. Conor bent to touch her feet, and she kissed the top of his head. Without another word, they parted.

The furriness of sleep was quickly blown out of them as they crossed the wind-swept Ram Jhula pedestrian bridge to the waiting Range Rover on the opposite bank. The seven- passenger vehicle had been stocked the night before with bottled water and a picnic hamper supplied by the ashram’s cooking staff.

Apart from Tony Costino, who was well rested and aggravatingly buoyant, none of them felt inclined for conversation during the first few hours of the ride. The tense quiet inside the SUV gave Conor plenty of time to brood on the troubling emotions Kavita’s parting words aroused.

After several hours of useless worry, he put it aside. He couldn’t hope to interpret the obstacles Kavita—or, for that matter, his mother—had sensed were ahead of him. Obsessing over it only added to the strain on his overstretched nerves.

Driving helped. They all took a turn in the rotation after Costino’s initial stint, and he discovered Indian roads required a level of concentration that erased any inclination to daydream. He volunteered for a second shift when the first was finished. Altogether, he spent a good six hours navigating around various obstacles and marveling at the ever-changing panorama as they rode deeper into Jammu and Kashmir.

Sedgwick was at the wheel now. After fourteen hours on the road, the journey was concluding as it began—in darkness—and the mood inside the Range Rover was one of tedium. Conor stared out the window while his brain whispered nonsense.

Porter cake. velvet on the tongue. easy going down. a dense, sweet fantasy, with a perfect blend of nuts, dried peel, and sultanas delivered in every bite.

It was an old television advert from home. Now that the announcer’s honey-soaked voice had taken root in his head, complete with the image of a succulent porter cake rotating on a plate, he found it hard to think about anything else. It was an absurd but welcome respite from what had been rubbing against his mind for the rest of the day.

He turned away from the window. The scenery had been spectacular throughout the day, but it was too dark to see anything now, and since they had been steadily corkscrewing up a narrow track against the side of a mountain for the past several minutes, he didn’t much mind the obscurity. He twisted around, inadvertently—or perhaps not—kicking the foot of the sleeping Costino, whose puppy-like energy had finally expired a few hours earlier.

“Porter cake,” he recited to Thomas, who was in the seat behind him. “Velvet on the tongue.”

His brother indicated recognition with a low, animal moan. “Easy going down. Wouldn’t I like to tackle a slab or two,” Thomas sighed. “That’s hitting below the belt. I’d eat the beard of Moses, I’m that hungry.”

“Nothing left in the hamper?”

“Raked hollow.” Thomas rolled a meaningful glance at the yawning Costino.

“What’s porter cake?” their younger colleague asked. He was blinking in confusion at being jarred awake by a shot to the anklebone.

Conor blinked back in light ridicule. “Never had a slice of porter cake in all your sad life? Poor bastard. I could never make you understand what you’ve missed.”

Unlike his verdict regarding Walker, after careful consideration, Conor had determined that he did dislike Costino. Heartily. The baby-faced agent he had taken for a recruit fresh from college was actually the same age as he was, which made his pretensions of doe-eyed innocence even more grating.

His pose as an eager-to-please subordinate was a better act than his attempt as a Crimean mobster, but having played a role himself recently, Conor knew how far it needed to settle in for the charade to be convincing. Costino’s natural self was not buried deep enough. It needed a sharp eye, but when he paid attention, Conor could detect the shrewd glances and flashes of naked ambition.

Instead of looking annoyed, Costino laughed. “I love listening to you guys, especially in that patois you sometimes use.”

“Patois?” Thomas, who did look annoyed, huffed in disgust. Conor merely shrugged.

“It’s called
Gaeilge
, and it’s actually classified as a standard language, but never mind. Happy to provide the evening’s entertainment.”

A squeal of brakes sounded as the Range Rover violently swerved to the right.

“Sorry, boys,” Sedgwick said from the driver’s seat. “Hard to see the turns in the dark.”

Walker, riding shotgun and sleeping soundly until that moment, lurched up, instantly wide-awake. “Are we here?” he asked.

“Wherever the hell ‘here’ is,” Sedgwick said. “I’m following your directions. Feels like we’re climbing Everest.”

“We’re through Tangmarg?”

“Five or six kilometers back,” Sedgwick confirmed, “and about a thousand feet down.”

“Then we’re on the Gulmarg access road.” Walker put his face to the window, peering into the darkness. “We should be hitting an army checkpoint soon. The safe house is somewhere at the top.”

While sounding imminent, the top of the hill proved to be an additional fifteen minutes away, and before they reached it, they encountered the expected checkpoint. The entrance to Gulmarg had closed at sundown, but Walker produced an impressive document festooned with official stamps for the inspecting officers. The gate was raised, and they were given directions for following a restricted military road to their destination.

Hidden among the trees on Gulmarg’s western outskirts, the property was owned by the Indian Army, and the Criminal Investigations Division in Srinagar had secured its use for them that night. Walker had called it a safe house, but as Conor climbed from the SUV, weary and stiff, he thought “sheep barn” more accurately described it.

It was perched on the hillside and constructed from rough-hewn pine. A set of stairs and a wide deck had been added—perhaps in an effort to disguise its original purpose. The interior was a single large room divided evenly into areas that emphasized its two main functions: sleeping and eating. Precisely spaced army cots lined the wall on the right-hand side; a dining table and kitchen area dominated on the left.

The CID had also arranged for someone to provide supper. The young man who greeted them at the door with flour-covered hands was clearly taking his duties seriously, but judging from his muscular physique—along with the AK-47 strapped to his back—he was a cook who came with supplemental skills.

The place was rustic but adequate. It was made more inviting by its cozy warmth and by the aroma of Mulligatawny soup simmering on the wood-fired kitchen stove, which also served as the building’s main source of heat.

After serving up an enormous amount of food, their cook returned to his barracks, and the rest of the evening yawned before them as a torpid descent into limbo. Having forcefully persuaded Walker to forego another rehearsal, there was little to do except search for innocuous topics of conversation and wait until it was late enough to go to bed. When Walker called lights out at ten o’clock, the announcement met with audible sighs of relief.

After so little sleep the previous night, Conor had no trouble nodding off, but at three in the morning, an acrid odor, combined with a noticeable constriction in his chest, brought him fully awake. The kitchen stove did a fine job of keeping the large room heated but its vents were in less than perfect working order, and it smelled like someone might have banked the fire with something other than wood.

He fumbled in the darkness for his coat and slipped outside. Standing on the front deck he took cautious gulps of the freezing air, mindful of Kavita’s warning. The tightness loosened, but he lingered outside, listening to the disembodied night sounds of the forest.

In the surrounding pines, boughs creaked and sporadically shifted to unload parcels of snow, each of them hitting the ground with a noise like a muffled punch. After eavesdropping for a few minutes, he straightened and caught a whiff of cigarette smoke on the breeze. He leaned over the deck railing and saw Sedgwick sitting on a bench in the yard below, looking up at him. Offering a silent wave, Conor descended the steps.

“Stove bothering you?” The agent asked, with a note of apology. “I threw in a few bricks of sheep dung by mistake. I thought I’d cleared out most of the smoke. Did it wake everyone?”

“No, just me,” Conor replied, sliding onto the bench. “Lower tolerance, I suppose. How long have you been up?”

“About an hour. Walker’s fault. He’s invented so many worst-case scenarios I can’t sleep wondering which one will happen. It’ll be something we never thought of, probably.”

“That would make Costino happy,” Conor said sourly. “He’s panting to see some action.”

Sedgwick flicked the cigarette onto the snow with a grumble of agreement. “Costino’s lucky he’s seeing anything at all. I’d have left him back in Mumbai. He feels like bad luck, exactly the kind of dumbass analyst that field operatives get killed trying to rescue. Makes me nervous.”

“In that case, I’m glad he’s supposed to stay with the car.” Conor grinned, but then added more seriously, “You were supposed to be in the room with Thomas tomorrow if I hadn’t come along and nicked your job. Does that make you nervous, too?”

“A little. Not because I don’t trust you. It’s because I’m a control freak. To be honest though, it would have been riskier with me in the room. I would have—” He stopped. After staring straight ahead for several seconds he gave a slight nod, as if acknowledging an internal dialogue. Without turning, he finished the thought. “I would have needed some kind of disguise. Someone in the room might have recognized me. It’s not my first trip to the rodeo with Dragonov and his gang.”

Conor stiffened. He hadn’t seen that one coming. He almost felt foolish for being surprised by it. “Right. That got my attention. How do you know him? And why didn’t you tell me before?”

Sedgwick’s chin burrowed down into his jacket. “I hoped I wouldn’t need to get into it, unless it became relevant.”

“Unless it became relevant.” Conor languorously exhaled a plume of breath. It was hardly worth the effort of getting angry anymore. “Fine. Whatever. You all think it’s better having me drip-fed little squirts of information as it suits you, so who am I to argue?”

“I’ll tell you about it.”

“Don’t put yourself out; I mean if it’s not relevant—”