The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (34 page)

“The ghat. You walked down to the ghat. For the
aarti
.” Walker jammed his fists onto his hips. The small, dark eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses flashed even more dangerously.

Standing at attention with his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose a pair of hairy, muscular arms, Walker perfectly embodied a number of caricatures Conor could name—gym teacher, drill sergeant, or some kid’s particularly scary-looking dad. He had decided, however, after reflecting on it for three days, that he didn’t actively dislike Walker. The senior agent was tense and often irritable, but he was too candidly earnest to be despicable.

“Gentlemen, is there something unclear about the mission we’re engaged in, here? Something confusing about the significance of it? This is a deadly serious business. We’re not tourists on vacation.”

“Japers, are you serious?” Conor gaped with extravagant surprise. “Is this not the luxury package tour? It’s been such a fucking laugh-riot so far, you can see how I got confused.”

“Very funny. Very glib.” Walker scowled and aimed an accusing eye at Sedgwick, who gave a helpless shrug.

“What can I say? He’s Irish. They’re glib.” He bowed his head over the map, lips forcibly suppressing a telltale tremble. “Anyway, we’ve got the two of them back, so now where’s Costino?”

“I sent him to bed,” Walker said. “He’s got first shift driving tomorrow. He needs to be fresh.”

Thomas and Sedgwick shared a glance of withering irony. “Cute little hoor,” Thomas whispered. “Always works the angle to his advantage.”

“Okay, men.” Walker checked his watch, threw his leg over a chair, and dropped into it. “Let’s run through this plan from the top.”

The plan, insofar as they could control it, was kept as simple as possible. Having lost the home court advantage, Walker had attempted to regain the initiative by immediately flying to Srinagar with Costino, and from there they had driven to Gulmarg to execute a thorough site and perimeter inspection of the new venue before coming to Rishikesh.

The designated rendezvous was Gulmarg Alpine Cottage. Discreet inquiries confirmed a Russian investment company had indeed purchased the hotel within the past eighteen months, with an eye toward transforming it into a timeshare resort. The new owner was expected to be there with some associates on the following Thursday. He would take up residence in the presidential suite.

Their next stop had been the police headquarters in Srinagar. With no jurisdiction in India to make an arrest, the DEA needed to enlist local authorities for Dragonov’s apprehension. Walker had always known they would have to file an international arrest warrant with Interpol. He had just hoped to delay that move for as long as possible.

“Like I said earlier . . . ” He tossed a copy of the warrant onto the table. “If Dragonov has penetrated Interpol and developed contacts there, we’re screwed.”

“But your hand was forced,” Conor said, parroting back what they had all heard at least three times now. The senior agent seemed to believe repeating the story would have some positive impact on its outcome.

“My hand was forced.” Walker’s index finger poked the air for emphasis. “We needed authorities in place up there immediately. So the arrest warrant got filed early.”

“And the Criminal Investigation Department in Srinagar has booked a two-person team at the hotel posing as buddies on a skiing vacation,” Sedgwick chimed in mechanically. “They’re in the room next to the suite.”

“Hope they know how to ski,” Thomas said, with a small smile.

“Now, we keep this very clean and natural,” Walker continued. “Thomas will have the listening device. He’s got their trust, and they haven’t searched him for years. You both get inside the room, go through all the chitchat. We’ll run through the lines again in a minute—”

Conor groaned and slouched down into his chair.

“Which is one of the most important parts of this whole damned operation,” Walker enunciated imperiously. “If you don’t get him on tape saying what we need him to, the prosecution has no good case, and we’re wasting our time. Eventually, you get around to the payment. You log in to our bank account, you transfer the payment to the joint account, and when it’s done you give the verbal cue and we—”

“Whoa. Hang on a minute.” Conor sat upright. The latest recitation had uncovered a nuance he’d missed earlier. “You want the cue after the transfer? You want us to actually dump twenty million dollars into an account he can access? Not that it matters to me, but does that sound like a judicious risk with the US taxpayer’s money?”

Walker brushed the query aside with an impatient wave. “Legal analysis says it’s the only way. Anyway, it’s a joint account.”

“Yeah, but presumably he shifts it,” he persisted.

“He won’t have time,” Walker said, flatly. “You just give the verbal cue, and CID will come in from next door and make the arrest. Game over. Period.”

“But—”

“I believe I said ‘period,’ McBride.”

“Yeah, fine, ‘period.’” Conor abandoned further argument with a sigh.

The plan was about as good as it could be. There was nothing to be gained by parsing its components individually but as he tossed around in bed later, Conor mused on Walker’s emphatic ‘period.’ Applied as standard grammatical notation, the period was a reassuring anchor that signaled closure. Used verbally to hammer the lid on question and debate, it had rather the opposite effect.

Lifting his wristwatch from the night table, he angled it against a patch of moonlight, and dropped it back onto the table with a groan. Drowsily, he looked up at the ceiling and began tracing out a dimly visible network of cracks, but at the sound of a long, low creak in the hallway outside his door, he shot out of bed as though catapulted from it.

He paused in the middle of the room before creeping to the door and held his breath to listen. Something brushed softly back and forth against the wood. Taking the knob in his hand, Conor gave it a quick twist and yanked the door open, thrusting the Walther into the opening ahead of him.

Thomas leapt back from the door to the middle of the hall, stumbling and swearing in a guttural whisper.

“I’m getting fairly tired of watching you wave that feckin’ thing around, Conor.”

Conor lowered the gun with a terse obscenity of his own. “Sure, what do you expect, when you come rubbing up against my door in the middle of the night? What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“Listening. I wasn’t going to wake you if you were sleeping.”

“Obviously, I’m not.”

“Yeah, obviously. Put your goddamned gun in a drawer and come with me. I want your help with something.”

He followed Thomas down the hall and into Kavita’s apartment. Leaving the lights off, they walked through to the dining room where the laptop snoozed on the table, its revolving screen saver blitzing the room with erratic slivers of color.

“What are you up to?” Conor whispered. His brother pointed him to a chair in front of the computer and sat down next to him, leaning in to speak directly into his ear.

“I hadn’t thought about it until you said something,” he said. “In a couple of days, you and I are going to be sitting in a room with a Russian arms dealer, and we’re going to hoover twenty million dollars out of a US government bank account and put it into his. Then we’re going to sit back and pray to God somebody comes to arrest him before he bolts with it. It’s a dodgy bit of business, don’t you think?”

“I do, of course.” Conor frowned and picked at a piece of candle wax on the table. “Wasn’t I trying to say so earlier? You might have piped up then about it.”

Thomas shook his head impatiently. “Wouldn’t have made a difference. Walker wasn’t having it. Costino has him dead paranoid about the lawyers. He’s afraid they’ll somehow take it all away from him if he doesn’t do it the way they want. That’s fine if it goes according to plan, but what if it goes wrong? What if the DEA can’t get its money back? Who’s going to take the fall for losing twenty million dollars?”

Abruptly, Conor stopped fidgeting. He rested his hands on the table and sat motionless. “You think Walker would try to pin that on us.”

“I don’t think he’s planning to,” Thomas said. “But I can see him making the leap if he has to. We’re the ones going into the room and shifting the money, Conor, and who the hell are we? Two ‘joe soaps,’ right? A couple of nobodies—except one’s on the run for robbing a mafia don and the other’s a money launderer wanted for grant fraud. Walker can turn that into whatever he wants, especially if he needs to get himself off the hook.”

Conor’s initial skepticism died away in a low whistle. “Okay. Fair point, but what can we do about it now, short of bolting ourselves?”

“I’ve done it already. I thought you could make it better.” Thomas reached over and woke the laptop with a sharp tap on its keyboard. Squinting against the eruption of light, Conor saw a login page appear on the screen. There were no identifying characteristics, just plain black text against a stark white background. He stared at it, rubbing a finger over the stubble on his chin.

“What are we logging in to?”

“Vasily Dragonov’s new bank account.”
 

“Oh, shit. Thomas—”

“It’s a legitimate joint account,” Thomas interrupted. “I set it up by phone with a bank in South America about an hour ago.”

“You rang a bank in South America? How does
that
work?”

The exclamation was not loud, but it echoed like a shout in the otherwise silent apartment and Thomas flapped a hand in annoyance.
 

“
Whisht
, for the love of God, will you ever keep it down? We’ll be having the whole place awake. Yes, I rang up a bank in South America. I’ve opened and closed bank accounts all over the world for years now, Conor. What about the title ‘money launderer’ don’t you understand, for Jesus’ sake?”

“I understand more than I ever wanted to,” Conor fired back, acidly. Thomas sighed.

“Well, amen to that, brother. Listen to me now, though. Durgan’s got a fellow in South America who opens accounts. I’ve used him before. It’s another joint account, under the name of the same shell company Dragonov used for the other one. I had all the information from when we first opened it. No lawyer in the world could deny this account is identical to the others. The only difference is Dragonov doesn’t know about it.”

“So he can’t get it out, but we can,” Conor said. “Come through like heroes in a crisis.”

“Exactly.”

“Doesn’t this seem like the kind of thing the DEA should have thought of on their own?”

“Seems like it,” Thomas agreed. His deadpan stare indicated that no deeper comprehension—and certainly no comfort—would be gained from pursuing that line of discussion. He hit the keyboard again to refresh the login screen and Conor bowed to the inevitable.

“Right. You want me to assign a shatterproof password, I suppose.”

Thomas smiled. “You’re seeing out of all three eyes tonight, mate. Work away with your rare old tune. It’ll take up to thirty-six notes of it.”

“I should teach it to you as well,” Conor argued as he began entering the code. “You ought to know it, just in case something—”

Thomas clapped a hand on his shoulder, pulling him gently around to face him.

“Nothing is going to happen to you, Conor. “Do you understand me, now? Nothing. I’ll not let it.”

“Yeah. Same for you.” He banged a fist lightly against his brother’s arm. “Period.”

He assigned the password, and when it was done, they stared at the screen until the monitor blinked into sleep again, which coincided closely with the piercing blast of a whistle that made them jump. It came from the garden just outside. All over India, even on the peaceful east bank of Rishikesh, the night watchman was a ubiquitous presence during the early morning hours, traditionally armed with a whistle and a wooden staff. They watched the figure drift past the dining room window like an apparition. When the rhythmic tap along the walkway had faded, Thomas turned to Conor, his face wan and tired.

“I wonder, will it ever end,” he sighed. “Even if we get through this, Durgan is still out there somewhere, and that scares me more than all the rest. I’ve no idea where he is, and I’ve never understood how he knows so much about you.”

“Maybe someone is telling him about me.” Conor regarded his brother cautiously. “That’s Sedgwick’s theory, that someone bigger is calling the shots, someone who can access information about me whenever he wants. He thinks Durgan is just an errand boy. A sort of clown.”

“Horse shit,” Thomas said without visible emotion. “He’s one twisted son of a bitch, the farthest thing from a clown. How would Sedgwick know? He’s never met him.”

“Walker has. He had that meeting with him in—what?” Conor interrupted his own argument, seeing Thomas shake his head back and forth.

“Walker’s never seen him, either. It wasn’t Durgan who met him in Geneva.”

A sharp intake of air locked itself in Conor’s lungs for several seconds before exiting in a gust. “How do you know that?”

“I didn’t at first, but then Durgan told me himself, last September, when he called to tell me you’d be coming over here.” Thomas stared out the window. “He thought the Geneva meeting was a trap. Walker was going to make a deal on the spot if it had gone well. He’d give one criminal a free pass and a truckload of money in exchange for help catching another one. But Durgan got spooked. He sent Desi to the meeting instead, and Desi made a hames of it.”

“Who’s Desi?”

Thomas closed the laptop and stared down at it before answering. “Desmond Moore and his pal Ciaran. The two fellows from Armagh I hired, when this whole ball of shite first got rolling. Desi Moore. Poor, stupid bastard.”

“Why? What happened to him?” Conor asked.

Thomas rolled his head to look at him with an unblinking gaze. “He’s dead. That’s the real reason Durgan rang, I’m sure. Wanted to hear the fear in my voice. Said Desi had fucked up. Said he’d suspected for a long time that I had too, that it would be a lot better for me if I came clean with it before you got here. Said if he found out later I’d been cutting him out of something, we’d both be getting the Desi Moore treatment. I haven’t had any contact with him since then. Threw the mobile away, shut down the e-mail account, and came up here until Sedgwick called saying I’d better do something with you before Walker had you thrown in jail.”