“Have you walked around the lake?” Sandor Lakatos asked. “So beautiful this time
of year.” Another display of his porcelain teeth.
“It’s very beautiful,” Janson agreed.
“I would like to take you on a walk, afterward.”
“Isn’t it rather dark for that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lakatos said. “We’ll be able to be alone. That’s really the
best way to get to know each other, I find.” His eyes had an anthracite gleam.
“I’d like that,” Janson said. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a minute?”
“Be my guest.” His gaze drifted toward the two suited guards in the bar area.
Janson tucked his Clock into his front trouser waistband before he stood up and
wandered to the rest rooms, which were off a short hallway extending from the
far corner of the main dining room. As he approached, he felt a sharp pang of
adrenaline: before him was another dark-suited man, his posture identical to
those at the bar. This man was clearly neither a diner nor an employee of the
restaurant. He was another guard of Lakatos’s, stationed there for such an
eventuality. Janson walked into the marble-floored bathroom, and the
man—broad-chested, tall, his face a mask of bored professionalism—followed him
in. As Janson turned toward the sinks, he heard the man lock the door. That
meant that they were alone. Yet an unsilenced gunshot would only summon the
others in Lakatos’s employ, who were also armed. Janson’s pistol was not the
advantage he had hoped. The imperative of visual concealment ruled out the
possibility of aural concealment: the bulk of a silenced gun could not have been
secreted undetectably in an ankle holster. Now Janson walked to the urinals; in
the stainless steel of the knob, he could make out a distorted reflection of the
burly guard. He could also make out the long cylindrical shape of the man’s
weapon. His weapon was silenced.
There would be no need to wait for Janson to leave the Palace Hotel; Janson
could be dispatched where he was.
“What’s he paying you?” Janson asked, without turning around to look at the man.
“I’ll double it.”
The guard said nothing.
“You don’t speak English? I bet you speak dollars?”
The guard’s expression did not change, but he put away the gun. Janson’s very
defenselessness suggested a better approach: now the man removed a two-foot loop
of cord with small plastic disks on either end serving as handles.
Janson had to concentrate to hear the whisper-quiet sound of the man’s jacket
stretching as he extended his arms, preparing to loop the garrote precisely
around Janson’s throat. He could only applaud his would-be executioner’s
professional judgment. The garrote would ensure not only a soundless death but a
bloodless one. In a restaurant like this, particularly given the alcohol
consumption patterns in Central Europe, it would take little creativity to
escort him out. The guard might well drag him out more or less upright, propping
him up with a powerful arm around his shoulder: a sheepish grin, and everyone
would assume that the guest had simply imbibed too much Zwack Unicum, the spirit
of choice at the Palace Hotel.
Janson bowed deeply, placing his forehead against the marble tiled wall. Then he
turned, his stooped body signaling boozy exhaustion. Suddenly, explosively, he
surged upward and to the right, and as the guard reeled back from the impact, he
smashed his knee into his groin. The man grunted and reared up, throwing his
looped cord against Janson’s shoulders, and frantically trying to slide it
upward, around his vulnerable neck. Janson felt the cord digging into his flesh,
searing like a band of heat. There was no way but forward: instead of
retreating, Janson pressed closer to his assailant, and dug his chin into his
opponent’s chest. He thrust a hand into the man’s shoulder holster and removed
the long, silenced handgun: his assailant could not free up his own hands and
maintain the pressure on the cord. He had to choose. Now the man dropped the
garrote and struck Janson’s hand with an underhand blow, sending the gun
skidding along the marble floor.
Suddenly, Janson thrust the top of his head against the man’s lower jaw. He
heard the clicking sound of the man’s teeth banging together as the impact of
the head butt traveled from jaw to cranium. Simultaneously, he wrapped his right
leg around the man’s facing leg and drove forward with all his might until the
burly man toppled backward to the marble floor. The guard was well trained,
though, and swept his leg toward Janson’s feet, knocking him to the floor as
well. His spine jangling from the impact, Janson scrambled to his feet again and
stepped forward, delivering a powerful kick to the man’s groin and keeping his
leg planted between his thighs. With his right hand, he pulled out the guard’s
left leg as, with his left hand, he bent the man’s other leg at the knee,
folding it so that the ankle went over his other knee. There was a look of fury
and fear on the man’s face as he thrashed violently against Janson’s grip,
battering him with his hands: he knew what Janson was attempting, and would do
anything to prevent it. Yet Janson would not be deterred. Coldly following
method when every instinct called for the simplicities of collision or retreat,
he lifted the man’s straightened leg up and over his own knee for leverage, and
wrenched it with all his strength until he heard the joint break. From beneath
the wet sheaths of muscle, the sound was not like a piece of wood snapping; it
was a quiet popping sound, accompanied by the tactile sense, the sudden give as
the ligament of a complicated joint tore irremediably.
The man opened his mouth as if to scream, the excruciating pain reinforced by
his awareness that he had just been maimed for life. The knee was broken and
would never work quite properly again. Combat injuries usually produced their
greatest pain afterward; endorphins and stress hormones dampened much of the
acute agony at the time the injuries were inflicted. But the figure-four leg
lock had its intended consequence, and the agony of the break was, Janson knew,
often sufficient to induce unconsciousness by itself. The guard was no ordinary
specimen, however, and his powerful arms were forming grapple hooks even as the
pain convulsed him. Janson dropped abruptly, pitching forward so that his knees
hit the man’s face with the weight of his body. It was an anvil blow. Janson
heard the man’s quick expulsion of breath as unconsciousness overtook him.
He picked up the silenced revolver—it was, he now saw, a CZ-75, a highly
effective handgun of Czech manufacture—and shoved it awkwardly into his deep
breast pocket.
There was a knock on the door—dimly, he realized there had been such knocks
earlier, which the focus of his mind had not permitted to register—and there
were urgent Magyar mutterings as well: guests in need of relief. Janson lifted
the burly guard and carefully positioned him on one of the toilets, pulling his
trousers down around his ankles. The upper body lolled against the wall, but
only his lower extremities would be visible to the guests. He latched the door
from the inside, slid underneath the partition, and retracted the dead bolt of
the rest room. He walked out to the baleful glares of four florid-faced diners
and shrugged apologetically.
The bulky revolver was pressed uncomfortably against his chest; Janson buttoned
the lowermost button of his jacket, and that one only. At the end of the
hallway, he saw the two bodyguards who had been at the bar. From their
expressions—dismay turning to congealed hatred—he saw that they had expected to
assist their colleague in escorting a “drunk” from the restaurant. As he turned
the corner to the dining room, one of them, the taller of the two, stepped
directly in front of him.
The man’s hatchet face was perfectly expressionless as he spoke to Janson in
quiet, accented English. “You’ll want to be extremely careful. My partner has a
gun trained on you. Very powerful, very silent. The rate of heart attacks is
very high in this country. Nonetheless, if you are stricken, it will attract
some attention. I should not prefer it. There are more graceful ways. But we
will not think twice about dealing with you right here.”
Drifting in from the main dining room were the sounds of merriment and the
festive tune that had become universal in the past century, “Happy Birthday to
You.” Boldog szuletesnapot! he heard. The song lost nothing in the Hungarian,
Janson was sure, recalling the large table filled with a couple of dozen
revelers, a table on which four frosty bottles of champagne had been assembled.
Now with a look of stark terror on his face, Janson placed both his hands on his
chest, in a theatrical gesture of fright. At the same time, he slipped his right