“Trust is honored with trust. Fairness with fairness. My clients can be
generous, but they are not profligate. They do expect to get what they pay for.
Value for money, as you put it. I should be clear, though. The assets they seek
are not simply material, or materiel. They are equally interested in the sort of
thing doesn’t come on pallets. They seek allies. Human capital, you might say.”
“I do not wish to mistake your meaning,” Lakatos said, his face a mask.
“Put it however you like: they know that there are people, forces on the ground,
who share their interests. They wish to enlist the support of such people.”
“Enlist their support … ” Lakatos echoed warily.
“Conversely, they wish to offer support to such people.”
A deep swallow. “Assuming such people are in need of additional support.”
“Everybody can use additional support.” Janson smiled smoothly. “There are few
certainties in this world. That is one.”
Lakatos reached over and tapped his wrist, smiling. “I think I like you,” he
said. “You’re a thinker and a gentleman, Mr. Kurzweil. Not like the Swabian
boors I so often have to deal with.”
The waiter presented them with fried goose liver, “compliments of the chef,” and
Lakatos speared his portion greedily with his fork.
“But I think you understand where I’m going, yes?” Janson pressed.
The American in the light blue jacket was back, with more on his mind. “You
don’t remember me?” the man demanded belligerently. This time he made it
impossible for Janson to pretend he did not know to whom he was speaking.
Janson turned to Lakatos. “How amusing. It would appear I owe you an apology,”
he said. Then he looked up at the surly American, keeping his face bland and
devoid of interest. “It would appear you have mistaken me for someone else,” he
said, his transatlantic vowels immaculate.
“The hell I have. Why the hell are you talking funny, anyway? You trying to hide
from me? That it? You trying to dodge me? Can’t say as I blame you.”
Janson turned to Lakatos and shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. He worked on
controlling his pounding pulse. “This happens to me on occasion—apparently I
have that kind of face. Last year, I was in Basel, and a woman in the hotel bar
was convinced that she’d run across me in Gstaad.” He grinned, then covered his
grin with a hand, as if embarrassed by the memory. “And not only that—we’d
apparently had an affair.”
Lakatos was unsmiling. “You and she?”
“Well, she and the man she took me for. Admittedly, it was quite dark. But I was
tempted to take her up to my room and, shall we say, carry on where her
gentleman friend left off. I regret that I did not—although I guess she would
have realized her mistake at some point.” He laughed, an easy and
unforced-sounding laugh, but when he glanced up, the American was still there, a
drunken sneer on his face.
“So you don’t have anything to say to me?” the American snarled. “Shit.”
The woman who had been at his table—almost certainly his wife—came over to him
and pulled on his arm. She was slightly overweight, and dressed in an
inappropriately summery frock. “Donny,” she said. “You’re bothering that nice
man. He’s probably on vacation, same as us.”
“Nice man? That shitheel’s the one got me fired.” His face was red, his
expression frankly choleric. “Yeah, that’s right. The CEO brought you in to be
his hatchet man, didn’t he, Paul? This fucker, Paul Janson, arrives at Amcon as
a security consultant. Next thing he’s handing in this report about
pre-employment screening and employee theft, and my boss is handing me my ass,
because how come I let all this happen on my watch? I gave that company twenty
years. Did anybody tell you that? I did a good job. I did a good job.” He
scrunched up his crimson face, his countenance radiating both self-pity and
hatred.
The woman gave Janson an unfriendly look; if she was embarrassed for her
husband, her narrow eyes made it clear that she had also heard plenty about the
outside security consultant who cost her poor Donny his job.
“When you sober up and wish to apologize,” Janson said, coldly, “please do not
concern yourself. I accept your apologies in advance. Such confusions happen.”
What else could he say? How would the victim of mistaken identity react? With
bafflement, amusement, and then ire.
Of course, it was not a case of mistaken identity, and Janson remembered exactly
who Donald Weldon was. A senior manager in charge of security at a
Delaware-based engineering firm, he was a complacent lifer who filled his
staffing positions with cousins, nephews, and friends, treating the security
division as a source of sinecures. As long as no major disaster occurred, who
would call his competence and probity into question? Meanwhile, employee theft
and the systematic filing of false workmen’s compensation claims had become an
invisible drag on the operating budget, while a company vice president was
doubling his executive compensation by reporting confidential information to a
competitor firm. It was Janson’s experience that errant executives, rather than
blaming themselves and their own dereliction for their dismissal, invariably
blamed whoever brought their misconduct to light. In truth, Donald Weldon should
have been grateful that he was only fired; Janson’s report made it clear that
some of the false-compensation claims were made with his complicity, and he
provided sufficient evidence for criminal prosecution, one that could easily
have resulted in jail time. Janson’s recommendation, however, was that Vice
President Weldon be relieved of his duties but not prosecuted, to spare the
company further embarrassment and prevent potentially damaging revelations at
the pretrial and discovery phases. You owe me your freedom, you corrupt son of a
bitch, Janson thought.
Now the American wagged a finger very near Janson’s nose. “You goddamn candy-ass
bastard—you’ll get yours some day.” As the woman led him back to their seats,
several tabletops away, his unsteady gait betrayed the alcohol that fueled his
fury.
Janson turned brightly to his companion, but a sense of dread filled him.
Lakatos had grown cold; he was not a fool, and the drunken American’s display
could not automatically be discounted. The Hungarian’s eyes were hard, like
small black marbles.
“You’re not drinking your wine,” Lakatos said, gesturing with his fork. He
smiled an icy executioner’s smile.
Janson knew how such people thought: probabilities were weighed, but caution
dictated that negative inferences were assumed true. Janson also knew that his
protestations could have provided little reassurance. He had been burned,
exposed, shown to be someone other than the person as whom he had presented
himself. Men like Sandor Lakatos feared nothing more than the possibility of
deception: Adam Kurzweil now represented not opportunity, but danger. And,
however obscure its motivations, such danger was to be eliminated.
Lakatos’s hand now disappeared into the inner breast pocket of his bulky woolen
jacket. Surely he was not handling a weapon—that would be too crude a gesture
for someone in his position. The hand lingered oddly, manipulating a device. He
was, it appeared, thumbing some sort of automatic pager or, more likely, a
text-messaging device.
And then the merchant looked across the room, toward the maître d’s station.
Janson followed his gaze: two dark-suited men, who had been inconspicuously
loitering around the long zinc bar, suddenly stood a little straighter. Why
hadn’t he picked them out earlier? Lakatos’s bodyguards—of course. The arms
dealer would never have met with a broker he did not personally know without
taking such an elementary precaution.
And now, as an exchange of glances suggested, the bodyguards had a new mission.
They were no longer simply protectors. They were executioners. Their unbuttoned
heavy jackets hung loosely around their torsos; a casual observer would assume
that the slight bulge near the right breast pocket was from a cigarette pack or
a cell phone. Janson knew better. His blood ran cold.
Adam Kurzweil would not be permitted to leave the Palace Hotel grounds alive.
Janson could envisage the scenario all too clearly. The meal would be hurriedly
completed, and the two would stroll together out of the lobby, accompanied by
the gunmen. At any convenient distance from the crowds, he would be dispatched
with a silenced shot to the back of the head, his body disposed of either in the
lake or in the trunk of a vehicle.
He had to do something. Now.
Reaching for his glass, he carefully elbowed his fork to the floor and, with an
apologetic shrug, bent down to retrieve it. As he reached down, he lifted the
cuff of his trousers, released the thumb-break of his ankle holster, and gained
a firing grip on the small Clock M26 he had acquired earlier in Eger. Beneath
the table, he could use the finger grooves to position his hand on the grip
frame. The weapon was now in his lap. The odds had shifted slightly.