he recalled Fielding’s words: It’s in Hungary, still, that you’ll find his
greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. And Lang’s observation: For
better or worse, Hungary made him who he is. And Peter is not one to forget his
debts.
It made him who he is.
And who was that?
It made him who he was: Hungary. That had to be Janson’s destination.
It was his best chance at flushing out Peter Novak’s blood enemies—the ones who
had known him longest and, perhaps, best.
“You look like a man who’s just made up his mind,” Jessie said, almost shyly.
Janson nodded. “What about you?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I’m thinking about my next move. What about yours? You going to go back to Cons
Ops now?”
“What do you think?”
“Tell me.”
“Let me break it down for you. I report in to my operations director, I’d be
taken out of the field for at least a year, maybe forever. And I’d be the
subject of a very lengthy ‘interview.’ I know how the system works. That’s what
would be in store for me, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. But that’s not
even the bigger problem. The bigger problem is, how I am supposed to rejoin this
world where I don’t know what can be trusted and what can’t be. It’s like, I
know too much and I don’t know enough, and for both reasons, I can’t go back. I
can only go forward. Only way I can live with myself.”
“Live with yourself? You don’t increase your odds of living by hanging around
me. You know that. I’ve told you that.”
“Lookit, everything’s got a price,” she said quietly. “If you let me, I’m a tag
along with you. If you don’t, I’ma do my darndest to tail you.”
“You don’t even know where I’m off to.”
“Sugar bear, it don’t really matter.” Jessie stretched her lean, loosely jointed
body. “Where you off to?”
He hesitated but a moment. “Hungary. Where it all began.”
“Where it all began,” she repeated softly.
Janson stood up. “You want to come along, you can. But remember, try to make
contact with Cons Ops, and you’re as good as deactivated—and not by me. If
you’re along for the ride, you follow the rules of the road. And I set those
rules. Otherwise—”
“Done,” she said, cutting him off. “Quit drilling, you struck oil.”
He looked at her coolly, appraising her as a soldier and an operative. The truth
was, he needed the backup. What would await them was beyond knowing. If she was
half as deadly working with him as she had been working against him, she’d prove
a formidable weapon indeed.
He had many phone calls to make before he slept, many legends to resurrect. The
path had to be prepared.
Where it would lead, of course, was impossible to say. Yet what choice was
there? Whatever the risks, it was the only way they could ever penetrate the
mystery that was Peter Novak.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He was baiting a trap.
The thought did little to calm Janson’s nerves, for he knew how often traps
caught those who set them. In this phase, his principal weapon would be his own
composure. He thus had to steer clear of the pitfalls of anxiety and
overconfidence. One could lead to paralysis, the other to stupidity.
Still, if a trap had to be set, he could think of no setting more appropriate.
Thirty-five seventeen Miskolc-Lillafiired, Erzsébet sétány 1, was a couple of
miles west of Miskolc proper, and the only notable building in the resort area
of Lillafüred. The Palace Hotel, as it was now called, stood near the wooded
banks of Lake Hámori, surrounded by a sylvan glade that suggested a long-past
feudal Europe of parks and palaces. If the place evoked nostalgia, it was in
fact a tribute to it. The completion of the faux hunting castle, in the 1920s,
was an imperial project of Admiral Horthy’s regime, designed as a monument to
the nation’s historical glories. The restaurant, fittingly, was named for King
Matthias, the fifteenth-century Hungarian warrior-sovereign who led his people
to greatness, a greatness that gleamed with the blood of their enemies. In the
post-Communist era, the place was swiftly restored to its former opulence. Now
it drew vacationers and businessmen from all over the country. A project borne
of imperial vainglory had been co-opted by a still more powerful dominion, that
of commerce itself.
Paul Janson strode through the lavishly appointed lobby and down to the
cellar-style restaurant on the level below. His stomach was tight with tension;
food was the last thing on his mind. And yet any sign that he was on edge would
only betray him.
“I’m Adam Kurzweil,” Janson told the maitre d’hotel, in a well-modulated
transatlantic accent. It was the sort of language-school English that was common
both to educated citizens of the British Commonwealth—Zimbabwe, Kenya, South
Africa, India—and to affluent Europeans who had received early instruction in
the tongue. “Kurzweil” wore a chalk-striped suit and a scarlet tie, and bore
himself with the erect hauteur of a businessman used to being deferred to.
The maître d’, dressed in a swallowtail dinner jacket, his black hair oiled and
combed into obsidian waves, gave Janson a sharp, appraising look before his face
creased into a professional smile. “Your guest is already here,” he said. He
turned to a younger woman beside him. “She will show you to your table.”
Janson nodded blandly. “Thank you,” he said.
The table was, as his guest had obviously requested, a discreet corner
banquette. The man he was meeting was a resourceful and careful man, or he would
not have survived in his particular line of business for as long as he had.
As Janson walked toward the banquette, he concentrated on entering into a
character he would have to make wholly his own. First impressions did indeed
matter. The man he was meeting, Sandor Lakatos, would be suspicious. As
Kurzweil, therefore, he would be more so. It was, he knew, the most effective
countermeasure.
Lakatos turned out to be a small, hunched man; the curvature of his upper spine
set his head oddly forward on his neck, as if he were tucking in his chin. His
cheeks were round, his nose bulbous, and his wattled neck was continuous with
his jawline, giving his head a pearlike shape. He was a study in dissipation.
He was also among the biggest arms dealers in Central Europe. His fortunes had
risen markedly during the arms embargo of Serbia, when that republic had to seek
irregular sources for what was no longer available to it legally. Lakatos had
begun his career in long-haul trucking, specializing in produce and then dry
goods; his business model, and his infrastructure, required little modification
to expand into the armaments trade. That he had agreed to meet with Adam
Kurzweil at all was a testament to another factor behind his success: his sheer,
unappeasable greed.
Employing a long-disused legend, that of a Canadian principal in a
security-services—that is, private militia—company, Janson left calls with a
number of businessmen long since retired from the trade. In each instance, the
message was the same. A certain Adam Kurzweil, representing a client who could
not be named, sought a supplier for an extremely large and lucrative
transaction. The Canadian—a legend Janson had created for himself, without
notifying Cons Ops—was remembered fondly, his low profile and long periods of
invisibility respected. Still, the men he contacted demurred, albeit
reluctantly; all were cautious men, had made their fortunes and now had moved
on. No matter. In the small world of such merchants, Janson knew, word of a
serious buyer would spread; the one who arranged a successful contact could
expect a commission on the transaction. Janson would not get in touch with
Lakatos; he would contact those around him. When one of the businessmen he spoke
to, a resident of Bratislava whose close ties with government officials had kept
him safe from investigation, asked him why this Adam Kurzweil did not try
Lakatos, he was told that Kurzweil was not a trusting soul and would not use
anyone who had not been personally vouched for. Lakatos, as far as Kurzweil was
concerned, was simply not trustworthy. He and his clients would not expose
themselves to the risk of such an unknown. Besides, wasn’t Lakatos too
small-time for such a transaction?
As Janson anticipated, the haughty reproach filtered down to the porcine
Hungarian, who bristled at being dismissed in those terms. Untrustworthy?
Unknown? Lakatos was not good enough for this Adam Kurzweil, this mysterious
middleman? Outrage was joined with pragmatic calculation. To allow his
reputation to be thus impugned was simply bad business. And there was no more
effective way to expunge any lingering aspersions than by landing the elusive
account.
Yet who was this Kurzweil? The Canadian investor was cagey, obviously unwilling
to say what he knew. “All I can say is that he has been a very good client of