The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (6 page)

Conor placed his head back against the plush upholstery of the chair. He opened his mouth and this time consciously sought the tender spot where his lip was swollen and split. When he found it, he pressed against it until his eyes smarted and he tasted a warm trickle of blood running over his tongue. “What’s in Gosport?” he asked, staring up at the ceiling.

“Everything you need to know.”

He briefly lowered his gaze to glare at Frank but let the cryptic remark pass without challenge. “How long will I be there?”

“Ten weeks.”

He allowed the news to sink in, his fingers tightening on the arm of the chair. “After that, I go to India?”

“Correct,” Frank said, and then continued in a softer tone. “I know that personal circumstances make this difficult for you, Conor, and I regret it. Of course, you’ll want to let your mother know you’ll be away, and . . . out of contact, for some time. We can’t allow you to share specifics, however. It’s for the best—for her safety as well as yours.”

Lifting his head from the chair, Conor nodded and retrieved the towel from the ice bucket. He would make the call, naturally, but the information would be redundant.

I’m afraid it will be a long journey for you, my little love.

She’d known it already on the day he left, and even after all he’d learned in the past two days, he expected that on some level, she still knew more than he did.

W
HEN
S
HELTON
APPEARED
at two thirty, Conor was encouraged to see the officer had apparently taken Frank’s advice. It would be a stretch to say his attitude was friendly, but he looked rested and refreshed and less inclined to violence.

With more than two hours of driving before them, he thought it was worth another try with the Special Branch officer.

“Can you tell me at all what I’ll be doing in Gosport, Lawr . . . er, Officer—”

“Shelton. Just call me Shelton.”

“Right. Shelton. And you can call me—”

“Whatever the hell I please,” Shelton snapped. “Look, it’s not a little trip to get to know each other, is it? We’re not going to be chatting all the way down to the seaside. I’ll sit here and drive, and you sit there and shut up, right?”

“Yeah, right. Whatever.” He turned to watch the outskirts of London passing by, adding in an audible murmur, “Wanker.”

He heard a low grunt of amusement, and after a moment, Shelton spoke again in a more temperate tone. “They’re having you down there for training at Fort Monckton. It’s where MI6 sends its recruits to prepare for field operations.”

“Does Frank do any training?” Conor asked.
 

“No.”

“He’s just a recruiter?”
 

“No.”

“Well, what’s he do, then?”

Shelton’s eyes continued to focus on the road in front of them. His large, square face remained neutral. “Frank’s got his finger in a bit of everything.”

“Meaning what?” Conor asked.

“Meaning exactly what I just said, smartass,” Shelton snarled. He pulled into the passing lane, and the police car shot down the motorway. Flipping on the flashing lights, he scowled a warning at him. “Chat’s over, Paddy. Shut it now, right?”

“Right.” He sighed, and settled back into his seat for the long ride to Fort Monckton.

T
HEY
HAD
TO
cross a golf course to get to it. It was a small detail, but it accentuated Conor’s sense that he had stepped onto the stage set of some absurdist theatre piece. Sitting at the tip of a peninsula overlooking Portsmouth Harbor—mere yards away from the scene where pensioners duffed their way around the sand traps—Britain’s most secretive installation was taking in recruits and training them up to be players in the deadliest game of all.

They rolled to a stop in the courtyard, and as he stepped from the car, a tall, angular woman with graying blond hair greeted him. She introduced herself with a brisk, utilitarian manner that belied her exotic name—Valencia Mathers— but offered nothing to identify her position within the Fort’s hierarchy. From her smooth blend of deference and authority, he thought she could be anything from the housekeeper to the senior agent in charge.

She escorted him to his room, which proved a stark contrast to the plush coziness of his suite at the Lanesborough. It was spacious enough but almost devoid of decoration or character. Its austere atmosphere seemed perfectly designed for the nameless recruit whose purpose was to become expert at being nondescript.

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

A
T
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.”

S
HELTON
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 meant 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.”