“I think I am too softhearted,” the clerk said with a sigh. “Everyone says so.
It is my great weakness.”
“I could just tell,” Jessie said in a sugary tone.
“An American woman alone in this strange city—it must all be very bewildering.”
“If only there was somebody who could show me the sights. A real native. A real
Magyar man.”
“For me, helping others isn’t just a job.” His voice had a warm glow.
“It’s—well, it’s who I am.”
“I knew it as soon as I met you … ”
“Call me Istvan,” said the clerk. “Now, let’s see. What would be simplest? You
have a car, yes?”
“Sure do.”
“Parked where?”
“At the garage across the street from the Archives building,” Jessie lied. The
five-story garage complex was a massive structure of poured concrete, its
ugliness compounded by the contrast with the splendors of the Archives building.
“Which level?”
“Fourth.”
“Say I meet you there in an hour. I’ll have copies of these records in my
briefcase. If you like, we might even go for a drive afterward. Budapest is a
very special city. You’ll see how special.”
“You’re special,” said Jessie.
With a reluctant mechanical noise, the elevator door opened on a floor
two-thirds filled with cars. One of the cars was the yellow Fiat she had parked
there half an hour ago. It was shortly before the appointed time, and nobody
else was around.
Or was there somebody?
Where had she parked the car, anyway? She’d come up a different elevator this
time, on the opposite end of the lot. As she looked around, she noticed in her
peripheral vision a darting motion—someone’s head ducking down, she realized a
split second later. It was a hallmark of bad surveillance: being noticed by
trying too hard not to be. Or was she jumping to conclusions? Perhaps it was an
ordinary thief, someone trying to steal a hubcap, a radio; such thefts were
prevalent in Budapest.
But these alternate possibilities were irrelevant. To underestimate the risks
was to increase them. She had to get out of there, quickly. How? The odds were
too great that someone was watching the elevators. She needed to drive out—in a
different car from the one she had taken in.
She casually walked between an aisle of cars, and suddenly dropped to the
ground, cushioning her fall with her hands. She crawled, at tire level, arms and
legs moving together. Flattening herself toward the ground, she made her way
between two cars to the adjoining aisle and scurried rapidly toward where she
had seen the ducking man.
She was behind him now, and as she approached she could see his slender figure.
He was not the clerk; presumably, he was whomever the clerk’s controller had
arranged to send in his place. The man was standing upright now, looking around,
confusion and anxiety written on his middle-aged face. His eyes moved wildly,
from the exit ramps to the elevator doors. Now he was squinting, trying to see
through the windshield of the yellow Fiat.
He had been tricked, knew it, and knew, too, that if he did not reclaim the
advantage, he would have to face the consequences.
She sprang up and flung herself at him from behind, throwing the man down on the
concrete, vising his neck in a hammerlock. There was a crunch as his jaw hit the
floor.
“Who else you got waiting for me?” she demanded.
“Just me,” the man replied. Jessie felt a chill.
He was an American.
She flipped him over and dug the muzzle of her pistol into his right eye. “Who’s
out there?”
“Two guys on the street, right in front,” he said. “Stop! Please! You’re
blinding me!”
“Not yet I’m not,” she said. “When you’re blinded, you’ll know. Now tell me what
they look like.” The man said nothing, and she pressed the muzzle in harder.
“One’s got short blond hair. Big guy. The other … brown hair, crew cut, square
chin.”
She eased up on the pressure. An interception team outside. Jessie recognized
the basics of the stakeout. The thin man would have a car of his own on this
level: he was here to observe, and when Jessie drove to the exit ramp, he would
be in his car, a discreet distance behind her.
“Why?” Jessie asked. “Why are you doing this?”
A defiant look. “Janson knows why—he knows what he did,” he spat. “We remember
Mesa Grande.”
“Oh Christ. Something tells me we ain’t got time to get into this shit right
now,” Jessie said. “Now here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get into
your car and drive me out of here.”
“What car?”
“No wheels? If you won’t be driving, you won’t be needing to see.” She pressed
the pistol into his right eye socket again.
“The blue Renault,” he gasped. “Please stop!”
She got into the backseat of the sedan as he got into the driver’s seat. She
slumped low, out of sight, but kept her Beretta Tomcat pointed at him; he knew
that the slug would easily penetrate the seat, and followed her commands. They
sped down the spiraling ramp until they approached the glass booth and the
orange-painted wooden lever-gate blocking the way.
“Crash it!” she yelled. “Do just what I said!”
The car rammed through the insubstantial barrier and roared out onto the street.
She heard the footsteps of racing men.
Through the rearview mirror, Jessie was able to make out one of them—crew cut,
square-jawed, just as he’d described. He had been stationed at the other end of
the street. As the car hurtled in the opposite direction, he spoke rapidly into
some kind of communicator.
Suddenly the front windshield spiderwebbed, and the car started to careen out of
control. Jessie peered between the two front seats and saw a large blond-haired
man several yards off to the side in front of them, holding a long-barreled
revolver. He had just squeezed off two shots.
The American at the steering wheel was dead; she could see blood oozing from an
exit wound in the rear of his skull. They must have figured out that what had
happened was not according to plan—that the thin man had been taken hostage—and
resorted to drastic action.
Now the driverless car drifted through the busy intersection, cutting across
lines, rolling into traffic. There was a deafening cacophony of blaring horns,
squealing brakes.
A tractor-trailer, its powerful horn blasting like a ship’s, missed hitting the
car by a few feet.
If she kept down, out of range, she risked a serious collision with on-rushing
traffic. If she tried to clamber to the front seat and take control of the
vehicle, she would likely get shot in the attempt.
A few seconds later, the car, moving ever more slowly, rolled through the
intersection, across the four lanes of traffic, and crashed gently into a parked
car. Jessie was almost relieved when she felt herself slammed against the back
of the bucket seats, for it meant that the car had come to a stop. Now she
opened the door on the side nearer the street—and she ran, ran along the
sidewalk, weaving in and out of groups of pedestrians.
It was fifteen minutes before she was absolutely convinced that they had lost
her. At the same time, the requisites of survival had trumped the requisites of
investigation. Yes, they had lost her, but the converse was also true, she
realized with a pang: she had lost them.
They rejoined each other in the spartan accommodations of Griff Hotel, a
converted workers’ hostel on the street Bartok Bela.
Jessie had with her a volume she’d picked up somewhere along her wanderings. It
was apparently a sort of tribute to Peter Novak, and though the text was in
Hungarian, there wasn’t much of it: it was basically a picture book.
Janson picked it up and shrugged. “Looks like it’s for die-hard fans,” he said.
“A Peter Novak coffee-table book. So what’d you find out at the Archives?”
“A dead end,” she said.
He looked at her closely, saw her face mottled with apprehension. “Spill,” he
said.
Haltingly, she told him what had happened. It had become obvious that the clerk
was on the payroll of whoever was trying to stop them, that he’d sounded the
alarm and then set her up.
He listened with growing dismay, bordering on fury. “You shouldn’t have done it
alone,” Janson said, trying to maintain his equipoise. “A meeting like that—you
had to have known the risks. You can’t go freelancing like that, Jessie. It’s
damn reckless … ” He broke off, trying to control his breathing.
Jessie tugged on an ear. “Am I hearing an echo?”
Janson sighed. “Point taken.”
“So,” she said after a while, “what’s Mesa Grande?”
“Mesa Grande,” he repeated, and his mind became crowded with images that time
had never faded.
Mesa Grande: the high-security military prison installation in the eastern
foothills of California’s Inland Empire region. The white crags of the San