He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.
They were both in shock.
After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.
“You didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”
They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.
“For survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Orders—”
“Bullshit. I want the truth!”
“My life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”
“Are you a spy, then? Is that what you’ve become? A traitor, spying for the Russians or maybe the Chinese?”
“I’m not a traitor, Fanni,” Istvan said. “You have to believe me.” His heart was aching.
She jumped to her feet, the chair falling over. “I won’t live with you. Not like this.”
“I’m not a traitor.”
“Of course you’re not. I know it. But if you were a spy, you would never be able to tell me where you were, what you were doing. I’d never know when you would come back to me—if you were coming back.”
“I’ll always come back.”
“I can’t be sure. Tell me how I can be sure!”
“Because I love you,” Istvan said.
In the end it had been enough for her, and they’d both somehow survived his long absences until he had come out of the field to work as an analyst and mission planner in the Directorate of Operations and he’d been able to tell her he had indeed been a spy. But all that was past. He was home for good.
He took a portable handcart from the trunk, and when he had it unfolded, he loaded four cartons of agendas, briefing books, copies of the presentation disks, and lined legal pads and pens, and took them inside, where he laid them out in the large conference room. The fit would be tight, but there was room for everyone. The main topic for review would be the threat the U.S. faced right now from cyberterrorism.
State-sponsored cyberterrorism.
It was something Istvan had become an expert in since he’d come home. He had a knack for it and had been a fast learner — his mentor at the end was Special Projects Director Otto Rencke, the smartest, and oddest, man he’d ever known. But a good man, with an equally odd-duck wife and a lovely child.
He’d come to his office in the OHB’s fourth-floor science and technology operations center, where some of the gadgets and ideas that had been created and already evaluated as useful were placed in planning cycles for manufacture and then distribution to stations around the world. After he’d loaded his car, he’d driven over to the Bubble and then here.
Time enough to go home for some breakfast, but he would have to rush to make it back before the guests began to arrive. Anyway, after the field rations he’d eaten over the years, even the cafeteria adjacent to the New Headquarters Building wasn’t half bad.
He went outside, where he refolded the handcart and loaded it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.
Something smelled odd to him, slightly off. At that moment he heard a Bach organ piece and turned around in surprise as the figure of a man who he did not know rose up from the backseat, blood all over his face and lips.
Before Istvan could react, the Cynic yanked Istvan’s head backward, breaking his neck. Before he died, he realized that the side of his neck was literally being eaten.
FOUR
Bambridge had spent only a few minutes in his office, making sure everything for the cyberconference was in place for later this morning. He was giving a short presentation at the Bubble once the PowerPoint and video had been played, emphasizing the necessity for boots on the ground in the likely spots where such acts of terrorism might originate. Like Beijing. He knew the reaction he would get, but what he had to tell them needed saying. Even Page had agreed.
“You’ll be ruffling some feathers, Marty, but maybe someone from the Hill will sit up and take notice, toss us an extra few millions to fight the good fight.”
“More like billions,” Bambridge had replied glumly. His mood, like everyone else’s in the Company, was in the toilet. Change was coming, that much was for sure, but no one was looking forward to what it would bring.
He passed through the main gate, and at the bottom of the slight hill he turned right onto the Parkway, traffic even less at this hour than it had been when he’d come in. By rights he should have stayed till the conference — he still had plenty to do, including rereading the dossiers on all the conferees, to refresh his memory. But he’d told Blankenship the truth: he needed to go home and take a shower to get rid of the stench of death that hung around him like a dark cloud.
Never in his life had he seen or even imagined anything so gruesome as what had been done to Walter Wager. It was beyond his comprehension that one human being could do something like that to another.
Blankenship had called in every available security officer as Bambridge was heading toward town, and dozens of cars were converging on the main gate. If the killer were still on campus, he would not be getting out anytime soon.
Bambridge’s phone went off, and for just an instant he debated not answering it, but the caller ID read Blankenship.
“Something new?”
“There’s been another one,” the chief of security said. He sounded seriously pissed off.
Bambridge’s heart lurched. “Who?”
“Istvan Fabry. One of my people found his body — what was left of it — in his car, parked in front of the Scattergood-Thorne house.”
“What the hell was he doing there at this hour of the morning?” Bambridge shouted, but Fabry was the front man on the PowerPoint and video presentation, and would have gone over to the house to set up for the second part of the conference.
“We’re checking. But it was the same MO. Whoever it was waited in the backseat for Mr. Fabry to come out of the house and then attacked him.”
“Are the cops at the OHB?”
“They’ll be here all morning. The Bureau sent out a CSI unit, and they’ve taken control. Special Agent Morris Wilkinson is in charge.”
“Has he been told about the second… incident?”
“I wanted to talk to you first, sir.”
Bambridge came to a narrow gravel pass over through the median, and he took it. “I want our people to collect whatever evidence they can first.”
“We’re already on it.”
“Soon as you’re ready, turn it over to the Bureau. I want the campus locked down. No one in or out without personal recognition. Get two of your people on both gates to make sure it gets done.”
“What about the conference?”
“It’s canceled. In the meantime, I want a room-by-room search of every square inch of every building. That includes elevator shafts, air ducts, closets, maintenance spaces, all the subbasements. Every cabinet, under every desk, on top of the roofs, and when your people are finished, I want you to do it again. And again. And again.”