It wasn’t that she was unable to cope. She had to cope on a daily basis with worse tribulations than this one. Nor was she concerned that Jack might be getting a little on the side while he was away. She’d often enough wondered that about her father on his trips—her parents’ marriage had occasionally been a rocky one—and didn’t know what her mother (now deceased) had wondered about. But with Jack, no, that ought not to be a problem. But she loved him, and she knew that he loved her, and people in love were supposed to be together. Had they met while he was still an officer in the Marine Corps, it would have been a problem with which she would have had to deal—and worse, she might someday have had to deal with a husband who’d gone in harm’s way, and that, she was sure, was the purest form of hell to live with. But no, she’d not met him until after all that. Her own father had taken her to dinner, bringing Jack along as an afterthought, a bright young broker with keen instincts, ready to move from the Baltimore office up to New York, only to be surprised—pleasantly at first—by the interest they’d instantly found in each other, and then had come the revelation that Jack wanted to take his money and go back to teaching history, of all things. It was something she had to deal with more than Jack, who barely tolerated Joseph Muller, Senior Vice President of Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, plus whatever acquisitions they’d made in the past five years. Joe was still “Daddy” to her and “him” (which translated to “that pain in the ass”) to Jack.
What the hell is he working on? she wondered. Bonn? Germany? NATO stuff? The goddamned intelligence business, looking at secret stuff and making equally secret observations on it that went to other people who might or might not read it and think about it. She, at least, was in an honest line of work, making sick people well, or at least helping them to see better. But not Jack.
It wasn’t that he did useless things. He’d explained it to her earlier in the year. There were bad people out there, and somebody had to fight against them. Fortunately, he didn’t do that with a loaded gun—Cathy hated guns, even the ones that had prevented her kidnapping and murder at their home in Maryland on the night that had ended blessedly with Little Jack’s birth. She’d treated her share of gunshot wounds in the emergency room during her internship, enough to see the harm they inflicted, though not the harm they might have prevented in other places. Her world was somewhat circumscribed in that respect, a fact she appreciated, which was why she allowed Jack to keep a few of the damned things close by, where the kids could not reach them, even standing on a chair. He’d once tried to teach her how to use them, but she’d refused even to touch the things. Part of her thought that she was overreacting, but she was a woman, and that was that… And Jack didn’t seem to mind that very much.
But why isn’t he here? Cathy asked herself in the darkness. What could be so damned important as to take her husband away from his wife and children?
He couldn’t tell her. And that really made her angry. But there was no fighting it, and it wasn’t as if she were dealing with a terminal cancer patient. And it wasn’t as if he were boffing some German chippie on the side. But… damn. She just wanted her husband back.
EIGHT HUNDRED MILES AWAY, Ryan was already awake, out of the shower, shaved, brushed, and ready to face the day. Something about travel made it easy for him to wake up in the morning. But now he had nothing to do until the embassy canteen opened. He looked at the phone by his bed and thought about calling home, but he didn’t know how to dial out on this phone system, and he probably needed Hudson’s permission—and assistance—to accomplish the mission. Damn. He’d awakened at three in the morning, thinking to roll over and give Cathy a kiss on the cheek—it was something Jack liked to do, even though she never had any memory of it. The good news was that she always kissed back. She really did love him. Otherwise, the return kiss would not have come. People can’t dissimulate while asleep. It was an important fact in Ryan’s personal universe.
There was no use turning on the bedside radio. Hungarian—actually Magyar—was a language probably found on the planet Mars. For damned sure, it didn’t belong on Planet Earth. He’d not heard one, not even one, word that he recognized from English, German, or Latin, the three languages he’d studied at one time or another in his life. The locals also spoke as quickly as a machine gun, adding to the difficulty on his part. Had Hudson dropped him off anywhere in this city, he would have been unable to find his way back to the British Embassy, and that was a feeling of vulnerability he hadn’t had since he was four years old. He might as well have been on an alien planet, and having a diplomatic passport wouldn’t help, since he was accredited by the wrong country to this alien world. Somehow he’d not fully considered that on the way in. Like most Americans, he figured that with a passport and an American Express card he could safely travel the entire world in his shorts, but that world was only the capitalist world, where somebody would speak enough English to point him to a building with the American flag on the roof and U.S. Marines in the lobby. Not in this alien city. He didn’t know enough to find the men’s room—well, he’d found one in a bar the previous day, Ryan admitted to himself. The feeling of helplessness was hovering at the border of his consciousness like the proverbial monster under the bed, but he was a grown-up American male citizen, over thirty, formerly a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. It wasn’t the way he usually felt about things. And so he watched the numbers change on his digital clock radio, bringing him closer to his personal date with destiny, whatever the hell that was going to be, one red-lit number at a time.
ANDY HUDSON WAS already up and about. Istvan Kovacs was preparing for one of his normal smuggling runs, this time bringing Reebok running shoes into Budapest from Yugoslavia. His hard cash was in a steel box under his bed, and he was drinking his morning coffee and listening to music on the radio when a knock on the door made him look up. He walked to answer it in his underwear.
“Andy!” he said in surprise.
“Did I wake you, Istvan?”
Kovacs waved him inside. “No, I’ve been up for half an hour. What brings you here?”
“We need to move our package tonight,” Hudson replied.
“When, exactly?”
“Oh, about two in the morning.”
Hudson reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of banknotes. “Here is half of the agreed sum.” There was no point in paying this Hungarian what they were really worth. It would alter the whole equation.
“Excellent. Can I get you some coffee, Andy?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Kovacs waved him to the kitchen table and poured a cup. “How do you want to go about it?”
“I will drive our package to near the border, and you will take them across. I presume you know the border guards at the crossing point.”
“Yes, it will be Captain Budai Laszlo. I’ve done business with him for years. And Sergeant Kerekes Mihaly, good lad, wants to go to university and be an engineer. They do twelve-hour shifts at the crossing point, midnight to noon. They will already be bored, Andy, and open to negotiation.” He held up his hand and rubbed a thumb over his forefinger.
“What is the usual rate?”
“For four people?”
“Do they need to know our package is people?” Hudson asked in return.
Kovacs shrugged. “No, I suppose not. Then some pairs of shoes. The Reeboks are very popular, you know, and some Western movie tapes. They already have all the tape-player machines they need,” Kovacs explained.
“Be generous,” Hudson suggested, “but not too generous.” Mustn’t make them suspicious, he didn’t have to add. “If they are married, perhaps something for their wives and children…”
“I know Budai’s family well, Andy. That will not be a problem.” Budai had a young daughter, and giving something for little Zsoka would cause no problems for the smuggler.
Hudson made a calculation for distance. Two and a half hours to the Yugoslav border should be about right at that time of night. They’d be using a small truck for the first part of the journey. Istvan would handle the rest in his larger truck. And if anything went wrong, Istvan would expect to be shot by the British Secret Service officer. That was one benefit of the world-famous James Bond movies. But, more to the point, five thousand d-mark went a very long way in Hungary.