hand beneath his left hand, stealing toward the handgrip of the bulky firearm.
He waited another moment for the other sound associated with celebration, at
least as much in Hungary as elsewhere: the pop of a champagne cork. It arrived a
moment later, the first of the four bottles that would be opened. At the sound
of the next popped cork, Janson squeezed the trigger of the silenced revolver.
A soft phut was lost among the clamorous festivities, but now a horrifed look
appeared on the gunman’s face. Janson was conscious of the tiny corona of woolen
threads puffing out from a barely visible hole in his jacket as the man
collapsed to the floor. An abdominal injury alone would not cause a professional
to plummet as he did. The immediate collapse could mean only one thing: the
bullet had plowed through his upper abdomen and lodged in his spine. The result
was the immediate cessation of neural impulses, and the resultant paralysis of
all muscles of the body’s lower regions. Janson was familiar with the telltale
signs of complete cataplexy and numbness, and he knew what the experience
uniquely did to combatants, even hardened ones: they mourned. They mourned what
they recognized to be the irreversible loss of their physicality, sometimes even
forgetting to take measures to prevent the loss of their very lives.
“Take your hand from your pocket, or you’re next,” he told the man’s partner in
a harsh whisper.
The authority of his voice, more than the gun in his grip, was his ultimate
weapon here, Janson knew. In theory, theirs was a Mexican standoff, two men with
their fingers on short triggers. There was no logical reason for the other man
to stand down. Yet Janson knew that he would. Janson’s actions were unexpected,
as was his confidence. Too many factors could underlie this confidence and they
could not be assessed with any certainty: Did Adam Kurzweil know that he would
be able to squeeze off a shot faster? Was he perhaps wearing concealable soft
body armor? Two seconds were not enough to make such an evaluation. And the
penalty of guessing wrong was starkly visible. Janson saw the man’s eyes dart
toward his ashen-faced, immobilized partner … and the spreading pool of urine
around him. The loss of urinary continence indicated the severing of the sacral
nerves caused by an injury to a mid- or lower-spinal vertebra.
The man held out his hands before him, looking sickened, humiliated, scared.
If your enemy has a good idea, steal it, Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest used
to say, referring to the wily snares of their Viet Cong adversaries; and it came
to Janson’s mind, along with a darker thought: When you gaze too long into an
abyss, the abyss will gaze back. What they had planned for him, he would use on
them, including even the burly guard’s silenced CZ-75.
“Don’t just stand there,” Janson said softly, leaning in close to the man’s ear.
“Our friend has just had a heart attack. Common in your country, as he was just
explaining. You’re going to lift this man, let him lean against you, and
together we’re going to walk out of the restaurant.” As he spoke, he buttoned
the fallen man’s jacket, ensuring that the splash of blood was concealed beneath
it. “And if I can’t see both your hands, you’ll find that the attack is
contagious. Perhaps the diagnosis will be changed to acute food poisoning. And
you two will be shopping for wheelchairs together—assuming either of you lives.”
What ensued was ungainly but effective: one man supporting his stricken
companion, moving him swiftly out of the restaurant. Sandor Lakatos, Janson saw
as they rounded the corner, was no longer at his table. Danger.
Janson suddenly reversed direction and dove through the double doors to the
restaurant’s kitchen. The din was surprisingly loud: there were the noises of
meat sizzling in oil, of fluids boiling, of knives rapidly chopping onions and
tomatoes, of veal cutlets being pounded, dishes being washed. He paid little
attention to the white-coated men and women at their stations as he raced
through the kitchen. He knew there had to be some sort of service entrance. It
was impossible that the supplies to this kitchen arrived through the exquisitely
carpeted lobby.
At the far end, he found the rusty metal stairs, cramped and steep. They led to
an unlocked steel panel, flush with the ground overhead. Janson barged through,
and the night air felt cool on his skin after the steamy warmth of the kitchen.
He closed the steel panel doors as quietly as he could and looked around him. He
was on the rear right side of the Palace Hotel, next to the parking lot. As his
eyes adjusted, he saw that twenty yards ahead of him were long-limbed trees and
grass: concealment, but not protection.
A sound—a scraping noise. Someone moving with his back to the wall, his feet
planted firmly on the ground. Someone who was moving toward him. The person knew
he was armed, and was taking all possible precautions.
He felt the stinging spray of brick and mortar against his face before he heard
the cough of the gun. His assailant had gained an angle on him! His assailant
was three hundred feet away; accuracy would be paramount. He had, he calculated,
four seconds to assume the rollover prone position. Four seconds.
Janson dropped to both knees and extended his left hand in front of him to break
his fall as he pitched forward; then he extended his firing arm downrange and
rested it upon the ground, rolling up on his right side as he did so. With his
left ankle braced against the back of his right knee, he stabilized his
position. Now he was able to put his supporting hand on the weapon, the heel of
his palm firmly and squarely on the packed-gravel ground: it would provide a
solid shooting rest as he placed his forefinger inside the trigger guard of the
CZ-75. What the Czech gun lacked in concealability, it made up for in stopping
power and accuracy. It would enable far more accurate cluster shooting than his
own palm-sized weapon.
He identified his target—it was the suited guard he had just left below—and
squeezed off two shots. They were silenced, but the recoil reminded him of just
how much force they conveyed. One missed his target; the other struck him in the
neck, and the man sprawled to the ground, spouting blood.
A muted explosion came from behind him: Janson tensed until he realized that it
was the tire of an SUV ten feet away, abruptly deflating as a bullet struck it.
There was another gunman stalking him, it appeared, and the direction of the
impact plus the geometry of the building told him approximately where he was
situated.
Still in the rollover prone firing position, Janson pivoted thirty degrees and
saw Sandor Lakatos himself, holding a gleaming, nickel-plated Clock 9mm. The
preening peacock, he thought to himself. The shiny surface reflected the light
of the parking lot halogens, making him an easier target. Janson aligned the
gun’s small sights along the man’s round torso and he felt his gun buck as he
squeezed off another two shots.
Lakatos returned fire spasmodically, the muzzle flash leaving a dark shadow in
Janson’s night vision, and he heard the thunk of one of the Hungarian’s bullets
hitting the hard-packed gravel a few inches from his right leg. He was proving a
deadly adversary after all. Had Janson missed? Was the man protected by body
armor?
Then he heard Lakatos breathing hard, heaving as he slowly sank to the ground.
Janson’s bullets had struck him in the lower chest and punctured his lungs,
which were slowly filling up with the resultant hemorrhage. The merchant of
death was too wise not to know precisely what was happening to him: he was
drowning in his own blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Goddamn you, Paul Janson,” said Jessie Kincaid. He was driving the rented car
at just under the speed limit while she kept an eye on the map. They were making
their way to Budapest, headed for the National Archives, but doing so via a
circuitous route, keeping off the main roads. “You should have let me come. I
should have been there.”
Having finally elicited the details of what had happened last night, she was
steamed and reproachful.
“You don’t know what sort of trip wires there might be at a rendezvous like
that,” Janson said patiently, his eyes regularly scanning the rearview mirror
for any signs of unwanted company. “Besides, the meeting was in an underground
restaurant, out of range of any perimeter stakeout. Would you have parked your
M40A1 on the bar, or checked it in the cloakroom?”
“Maybe I couldn’t have helped inside. Outside’s different. Plenty of trees
around, plenty of perches. It’s a game of odds, you know that better’n anyone.
Point is, it would have been a sensible precaution. You didn’t take it.”