“Isn't it obvious, Tom? Something that connects Voekl to 30 April.”
Six
Budapest, 10:30 a.m.
Anatoly Rubikov was a man of few words, which is why he was still alive.
He crushed out the remains of his cigarette in the twist-off cap of his bottled beer, and immediately lit another. He smoked filtered cigarettes because Marya worried about his lungs and wanted him to quit. The filter was a bone he threw her, although filters meant nothing when a man smoked as much as he did.
Cigarettes were Anatoly's solace — an addiction, yes; a weakness, of course; but so much a part of his biological imperative that to abandon them now would be to poison himself with fresh air.
And the air of Budapest, when he thought about it, was scarcely clean anyway.
He smoked absentmindedly, the way other people breathed, his eyes fixed on the snowy television screen mounted behind the bar. Everything was murk — the air of the place, the yellow lights, the expression in the eyes of the waitress with bright orange hair and laddered stockings. The murk comforted him, and so he delayed the inevitable accounting, the walk out into the raw cold of the streets, the phone call he would have to make. It was ten-thirty in the morning. The television broadcast was in Hungarian, a language he had never understood.
He continued to stare at the screen, his beer drained to the faint tracings of foam, waiting for the face.
Could it be possible that no one had found him?
Anatoly closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the rim of the empty beer bottle. How could no one have found him?
The Hungarian National Bank occupied a building on the green swath of Szabadsag Ter, next to the embassy of the United States and across the way from Magyar TV headquarters. At this hour it should have been swarming with bankers and secretaries and clerks and factotums, all going about their legitimate business, and the man with the hole in his temple and the pool of blood under his neck should have been found by now. His picture should have flashed up on the television screen — not the man as he looked dead, but sleek and repellent in the full flush of power.
Perhaps they were keeping the mess under wraps, Anatoly thought. Assessing the damage. Deciding what could be told. If they waited much longer, Krucevic would take matters into his own hands.
And if I wait much longer, Krucevic will think too much about what I saw. He'll decide that a bullet keeps the best secrets.
The short, curling hairs at the back of his neck began to rise of themselves.
He crushed out the second cigarette and tossed a hundred-forint note on the counter. The orange-haired waitress followed him with her eyes as he left.
He placed the call in the Keleti train station, barely seven minutes before the Berlin train.
“Aronson,” he said thickly when the receptionist answered.
“Mr. Aronson is not in. Would you like to leave — ”
He hung up.
Aronson would want him to stay in Budapest. He would want him to shadow Krucevic, find out where he kept the woman, turn informer, and thus seal his death warrant. Aronson would want him — Anatoly Petrovich — to risk his life for someone he knew was as good as dead. He turned, trailing smoke from his splayed fingers, and sought the protective cover of the train.
He cased it from front to back and took a seat at the very end of the last car — a smoking one, of course — folding himself into a corner near the half-open window in the six-person compartment. Otherwise, it was empty. He read his paper and pretended to ignore what he was actually studying frantically, the passage of other travelers along the corridor. Travelers who might be sent to kill him.
The train gave a lurch, compartment doors hissed shut. In a moment, the conductor would ask for his ticket. He closed his eyes again and saw the dead man's face.
Anatoly had never liked killing. He had done it when necessary — in the army, during his first tour in Afghanistan — but the mujahideen were wolves, rabid with violence. Killing them was a matter of survival. He had never watched a man consider his own death before — had never watched the knowledge come with all the inevitability of rain after a stifling day. When the pistol grazed his temple, Lajta's eyes had widened slightly, like a dog's when you pull hard on its ears.
It was the only sign of fear the banker had shown.
The compartment door slid open, and a youngish woman — tired face, raincoat smelling dankly of the streets — shoved a bulky suitcase inside. Its zipper was broken, and she had been forced to tie the lid shut with string. Everything about her suggested a weary struggle against respectable poverty — her dark stockings, her thick-soled shoes. Hair as dry and tousled as an old bird's nest.
She gave Anatoly a furtive glance and took the seat farthest away.
Did he look menacing? Or like a man in terror for his life?
The woman drew a paperback from her purse and opened it. Idly, Anatoly glanced at the cover: something in German. She was going home, then, as he was. Her head drooped, absorbed in words; suddenly, the platform began to slide backward.
Anatoly did not trust himself to gaze out the window.
He was an expert at cracking security systems. The KGB had trained him, and he had worked all over the world, lifting the locks on office doors in Khartoum and Valletta and Santiago and Manhattan. He had defected fifteen years ago during his last tour, in Rome, when he'd been sent to bug the building directly next door to the U.S. embassy — a simple affair of attaching a remote fiber — optic device to one of the ancient pipes running between the walls of the two buildings.
Anatoly had never been a man of politics. He was not much of a man for morality, either, or for debating the finer points of loyalty. The KGB had been good to him. He had been good to the KGB. But it was time for their paths to part.
He had fallen in love with a translator at the Rome embassy, and the last few weeks of her tour were up. Anatoly was moving on to Kabul; Marya was returning to Moscow. He tried to buy time, a transfer, a change in Marya's assignment. The system proved inflexible.
And so, on that night nearly fifteen years ago, he discarded his cigarette, told his partner to take a hike, ignored the placement plan for the listening device, and instead disarmed the American embassy. Then he broke the glass in a ground-floor window at the back of the building, a window that should have been barred. He thrust himself through, grunting as his leather jacket snagged on the ledge — it was a coolish night in February, even the ubiquitous Roman cats gone to ground — until his sneakered feet touched something springy and soft. A tumbledown couch in a minor bureaucrat's office.
Anatoly stretched himself out on the cushions and went instantly to sleep.
In the morning, an extensive debriefing, the Soviet listening device like a peace offering on the table.
Forty-eight hours later, he and Marya were on a plane for Washington.
He spent eighteen months telling the CIA everything he knew about security installations throughout the Soviet empire, and about the hostile listening devices and fiber optics planted in the walls of a hundred U.S. installations.
Then the Soviet empire began to crumble and the KGB heads themselves fled to Washington, and Anatoly decided to look for other work. Two years later he was a freelancer in Hamburg, Marya was thriving, their baby was on its way. He had four employees and a reputation for discretion. The difficult jobs — the problems of access or of imaginative design, the jobs that still made his blood race — he took on himself. That was when he met Krucevic.
The man came to Anatoly with a bunker in mind. Something entirely controlled by computer, with infrared detection zones, motion sensors, video surveillance inside and out. Krucevic wanted his own phone lines monitored, he wanted cellular communications routinely tapped, he wanted the hard drives of his computer systems armed to
