“I will be driving to what destination?”
“I will tell you tonight,” Hudson answered.
“Very well. I shall meet you at Csurgo at two tomorrow morning without fail.”
“That is very good, Istvan.” Hudson finished his coffee and stood. “It is good to have such a reliable friend.”
“You pay me well,” Kovacs observed, defining their relationship.
Hudson was tempted to say how much he trusted his agent, but that wasn’t strictly true. Like most field spooks, he didn’t trust anybody—not until after the job was completed. Might Istvan be in the pay of the AVH? Probably not. No way they could afford five thousand West German marks on anything approaching a regular basis, and Kovacs liked the good life too much. If the communist government of this country ever fell, he’d be among the first to become a millionaire, with a nice house in the hills of Pest on the other side of the Danube, overlooking Buda.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Hudson found Ryan at the front of the line in the embassy canteen.
“Like your eggs, I see,” the COS observed.
“Local, or do you truck it in from Austria?”
“The eggs are local. The farm products here are actually quite good. But we like our English bacon.”
“Developed a taste for it myself,” Jack reported. “What’s happening?” he asked. Andy’s eyes had a certain excitement in them.
“It’s tonight. First we go to the concert hall, and then we make our pickup.”
“Giving him a heads-up?”
Hudson shook his head. “No. He might act differently. I prefer to avoid that complication.”
“What if he’s not ready? What if he has second thoughts?” Jack worried.
“In that case, it’s a blown mission. And we disappear into the mists of Budapest, and come tomorrow morning many faces will be red in London, Washington, and Moscow.”
“You’re pretty cool about this, buddy.”
“In this job, you take things as they come. Getting excited about them doesn’t help at all.” He managed a smile. “So long as I take the Queen’s shilling and eat the Queen’s biscuit, I shall do the Queen’s work.”
“Semper fi, man,” Jack observed. He added cream to his coffee and took a sip. Not great, but good enough for the moment.
SO WAS THE food in the state-run cafeteria next door to the Hotel Astoria. Svetlana had chosen and positively inhaled a cherry Danish pastry, along with a glass of whole milk.
“The concert is tonight,” Oleg told his wife. “Excited?”
“You know how long it has been since I’ve been to a proper concert?” she retorted. “Oleg, I shall never forget this kindness on your part.” She was surprised by the look on his face, but made no comment on it.
“Well, my dear, today we have more shopping to do. Ladies’ things. You will have to handle that for me.”
“Anything for myself?”
“To that end, we have eight hundred and fifty Comecon rubles, just for you to spend,” Oleg Ivan’ch told her, with a beaming smile, wondering if anything she bought would be in use by the end of the week.
“YOUR HUSBAND STILL off on business?” Beaverton asked.
“Unfortunately,” Cathy confirmed.
Too bad, the former Para didn’t say. He’d become a good student of human behavior over the years, and her unhappiness with the current situation was plain. Well, Sir John was doubtless off doing something interesting. He’d taken the time to do a little research on the Ryans. She, the papers said, was a surgeon, just as she’d told him weeks before. Her husband, on the other hand, despite his claim to be a junior official at the American Embassy, was probably CIA. It had been hinted at by the London papers back when he’d had that run-in with the ULS terrorists, but that supposition had never been repeated. Probably because someone had asked Fleet Street—politely—not to say such a thing ever again. That told Eddie Beaverton everything he needed to know. The papers had also said he was, if not rich, certainly comfortably set, and that was confirmed by the expensive Jaguar in their driveway. So, Sir John was away on secret business of some sort or other. There was no sense in wondering what, the cabdriver thought, pulling up to the miniature Chatham train station. “Have a good day, mum,” he told her when she got out.
“Thanks, Eddie.” The usual tip. It was good to have such a generous steady customer.
For Cathy it was the usual train ride into London, with the company of a medical journal, but without the comfort of having her husband close by, reading his Daily Telegraph or dozing. It was funny how you could miss even a sleeping man next to you.
“THAT’S THE CONCERT HALL.”
Like Ryan’s old Volkswagen Rabbit, the Budapest Concert Hall was well made in every detail, but little, hardly filling the city block it sat upon, its architecture hinting at the Imperial style found in better and larger form in Vienna, two hundred miles away. Andy and Ryan went inside to collect the tickets arranged by the embassy through the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. The foyer was disappointingly small. Hudson asked for permission to see where the box was, and, by virtue of his diplomatic status, an usher took them upstairs and down the side corridor to the box.
Inside, it struck Ryan as similar to a Broadway theater—the Majestic, for example—not large, but elegant, with its red-velvet seating and gilt plaster, a place for the king to come when he deigned to visit the subject city far from his imperial palace up the river in Vienna. A place for the local big shots to greet their king and pretend they were in the big leagues, when they and their sovereign knew differently. But for all that, it was an earnest effort, and a good orchestra would cover for the shortcomings. The acoustics were probably excellent, and that was what really mattered. Ryan had never been to Carnegie Hall in New York, but this would be the local equivalent, just smaller and humbler—though grudgingly so.
Ryan looked around. The box was admirably suited for that. You could scan just about every seat in the theater.
“Our friends’ seats—where are they?” he asked quietly.
“Not sure. Tom will follow them in and see where they sit before he joins us.”
“Then what?” Jack asked next.
But Hudson cut him off with a single word: “Later.”
BACK AT THE EMBASSY, Tom Trent had his own work to do. First of all, he got two gallons of pure grain alcohol, 190 proof, or 95 percent pure. It was technically drinkable, but only for one who wanted a very fast and deep drunk. He sampled it, just a taste to make sure it was what the label said. This was not a time to take chances. One millimetric taste was enough for that. This was as pure as alcohol ever got, with no discernible smell, and only enough taste to let you know that it wasn’t distilled water. Trent had heard that some people used this stuff to spike the punch at weddings and other formal functions to… liven things up a bit. Surely this would accomplish that task to a fare-thee-well.
The next part was rather more distasteful. It was time to inspect the boxes. The embassy basement was now off-limits to everyone. Trent cut loose the sealing tape and lifted off the cardboard to reveal…
The bodies “were in translucent plastic bags, the sort with handles, used by morticians to transport bodies. The bags even came in more than one size, he saw, probably to accommodate the bodies of children and adults of various dimensions. The first body he uncovered was that of a little girl. Blessedly, the plastic obscured the face, or what had once been a face. All he could really see was a blackened smudge, and for the moment, that was good. He didn’t need to open the bag, and that, too, was good.
The next boxes were heavier but somehow easier. At least these bodies were adults. He manhandled them onto the concrete floor of the cellar and left them there, then moved the dry ice to the opposite corner, where the frozen CO2 would evaporate on its own without causing harm or distraction to anyone. The bodies would have about fourteen hours to thaw out, and that, he hoped, would be enough. Trent left the basement, being careful to lock the door.
Then he went to the embassy’s security office. The British legation had its own security detail of three men, all of them former enlisted servicemen. He’d need two of them tonight. Both were former sergeants in the British army, Rodney Truelove and Bob Small, and both were physically fit.
“Lads, I need your help tonight with something.”
“What’s that, Tom?” Truelove asked.
“We’ll just need to move some objects, and do it rather covertly,” Trent semi-explained. He didn’t bother telling them it would be something of great importance. These were men for whom everything was treated as a matter of some importance.