asset to Budapest to find the offending Serb in a dockside bar, fill him with drink, then slip a knife into his spine and let his lifeless form slip silently into the black waters of the Danube.
Gentry also knew Budapest from before, back in his time with the agency. He’d been in and out of the city once every couple of years for nearly a decade, tailing diplomats, running sneak-and-peeks against shady Russian businessmen in the mansions of Buda or the hotels in Pest. He’d once chased off a Tajik assassin targeting the local CIA chief of station because there was no one else handy to deal with the matter.
In Court’s work in the city he’d had multiple run-ins with a local fraudster named Laszlo Szabo. Szabo was an amoral, devious scumbag; he’d do anything for anyone waving a big enough wad of crumpled Hungarian forints in his face. His specialty was forgery, buying and selling identity papers and modifying them for whoever needed their identity changed on the fly. He’d helped a dozen wanted Serb war criminals flee Central Europe just ahead of the International Court of Justice and had made a shitload of money cleaning up the dirty loose ends of that war and others. Then in 2004 he ran afoul of Gentry himself when he agreed to create papers for a Chechen terrorist who’d slipped out of Grozny and the Russians’ grasp and into Budapest on his way farther west. Court and his Goon Squad caught up with the Chechen in a warehouse Laszlo owned in the suburbs. It had gone loud, and in the melee a tub of Szabo’s photographic chemicals had blown up, killing the terrorist. Court and his team had to disappear before the fire trucks arrived, leaving Laszlo to slip away. Immediately thereafter, Court was sent after bigger fish, but he remembered Szabo, kept tabs on the forger, just in case someday he needed his services. Court normally used documentation assets from Sir Donald Fitzroy’s Network, but it was nice to know there was also a man in Budapest who could, for the right price, turn him into anyone he wanted to be, at least on paper.
Laszlo Szabo was an irredeemable piece of shit. Court knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Court also knew Szabo
It was three thirty by the time Court had filled his gas tank, bought a gyro and lemonade at a little Turkish stand on Andrassy Street, and parked his bike a block away from Laszlo’s lair in Pest, just a kilometer or so from the shores of the Danube. Icy sheets of cold rain poured down, but Gentry did nothing to shield himself from the weather. His muscles were tiring from the already long day; the rain soaked his hair and his beard and his clothes, but it also kept him alert.
The door to Laszlo’s building was a deception. A rusty iron plate on hinges sunken in a stone building on Eotvos Utka Street, it was covered with yellowed and torn handbills and stood no more than five feet high. It looked like no one had passed through since the Second World War, but Court had just finished his soggy meal of lamb chunks and cucumber sauce folded into a pita when the door creaked open and disgorged two thin black men. Somalis, Court guessed. In Europe illegally, obviously, since no one who had access to legitimate papers would have need to come see Laszlo. Court knew how easy it was for Africans and Middle Easterners to immigrate legally to the Continent these days. The two knuckleheads walking past him in the rain somehow didn’t qualify for the near- universal rubber stamp entry, which indicated to Gentry that these were some seriously shady fuckers.
In a moment of perspective, the Gray Man realized there were few people on earth more wanted than he, so Court allowed he was, by definition, likely a shadier fucker than either of these two Somalis.
Gentry banged on the little iron door with an open left hand. His right hovered above the Walther pistol in his waistband and hidden under his wet jacket. There was no answer after a minute and a further knock. Finally Court found a little plastic intercom button tucked into the upper left corner of the doorway, “Szabo? I need your help. I can pay.”
A tinny response through the intercom. “References?” His accent was unmistakably Hungarian, but his English was good. The tone of his voice was sheer boredom. A clerk in a paint store. Court was just the next of a long line of customers reaching the counter to inquire about goods.
“I’m one of Donald Fitzroy’s men.” Though Szabo was not a Network asset, he would certainly know of Sir Donald.
A pause just long enough for Court to worry ended with a buzz and the sound of remote-controlled door locks clicking open. Court pushed in the iron door warily, knelt, and entered a dark hall behind it, followed a pinprick of light fifty feet on. The light was another doorway, and through it Court found a large workshop, part science lab, part library, and part photo studio. Laszlo was there, sitting at a desk against the wall. He turned to face his visitor.
Szabo wore his gray hair long over his shoulders. His clothes were Hungarian drab, black jeans and a polyester shirt open halfway down to expose his rail-thin chest. He was sixty, but an East bloc sixty, which looked eighty in the face but thirty in the physique. A life of physicality, a life of hardship. He appeared to Court something like an aging rock star who still fancied himself a catch.
He stared at Court for a long time. “A familiar face,” he said. “Without the beard and the rainwater, perhaps I would know you?”
Court knew Szabo had never seen his face. He’d worn a balaclava mask when he took down Szabo’s lair with the Goon Squad in 2004, plus it had been dark and the action quick and confusing.
“Don’t believe so,” said Gentry, looking around the room for security threats. Wires hung off the walls like ivy, tables and shelves of equipment and boxes and books, locked file cabinets along the wall, a full-sized photography studio in the corner with a camera on a tripod facing a chair on a riser.
“An American. Thirty-five years old. Height five eleven, weight one seventy. You don’t carry yourself like a soldier or a cop, which is good.” Court remembered fragments from the man’s dossier. Szabo had been trained by the Soviets in electronic surveillance and forgery and other nonlethal black arts, he’d been used to spy on his own people by the Russians, but he had played for both teams, giving Moscow information on his countrymen while providing well-off Hungarians with escapes to get them through the Iron Curtain.
His marginal and conditional and halfhearted help of his own people had proven to be just enough to keep a knife out of his chest after the fall of the Soviet Union, though Gentry remembered reading that Laszlo had been no stranger to getting his ass kicked in retaliation for his association with Moscow.
“I’m just a man who needs some of your product. In a hurry,” Court said.
Laszlo stood up and reached for a cane leaning against the desk. He leaned heavily on it as he crossed the room to his visitor. Court noted the Hungarian’s slumped body and severe limp. This injury had developed since he last saw him five years ago.
After an eternity, Szabo arrived in front of Court, leaned well into his personal space. Put a hand up to the American’s chin and turned his head left and right.
“What sort of product?”
“A passport. Clean, not fake. I need it now. I’ll pay for the extra trouble.”
Laszlo nodded. “How is Norris?”
“Norris?”
“Sir Donald Fitzroy’s son, of course.”
“You mean Phillip.”
“Yes. Does Sir Donald still have the summer place in Brighton?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Neither would I, to be honest,” Szabo allowed with a sheepish shrug.
Court said, “I understand your need to establish my bona fides, but I am in a rush.”
Szabo nodded, hobbled to a little bench, one of a dozen in the room and each in front of a different table or desk covered with computers, microscopes, papers, cameras, and other gear. “Fitzroy has his own network. His own facilitators of documentation. Why would you be slumming with Laszlo?”
“I need someone good. And someone quick. Everyone knows you’re the best.”
The Hungarian nodded. “Maybe that’s just flattery, but you are exactly right. Laszlo
Court knew to loathe men who referred to themselves in the third person. But he also knew to be polite when in need. “You get me out of here with clean papers in under an hour, and I will do just that.”
Szabo seemed pleased. He nodded. “I recently came into possession of a consignment of Belgian passports. New serial numbers, not reported stolen. Perfectly legitimate.”
Court shook his head emphatically. “No. Two-thirds of the stolen passports on the market are Belgian. They are guaranteed extra scrutiny. I need something less obvious.”
“An informed customer. I respect that.” Laszlo stood, leaned on his cane, and made his way to another desk.
