Baron nudged her elbow. “In case you’re wondering, AMF stands for—”
“Adios, motherfucker,” Danny finished for him. “Yeah, I know.”
Both he and Henry stared at her, startled.
“Oh, come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What am I, a five-year-old?”
Henry shook his head. “A better question is, how the hell did he know I was here?”
CHAPTER 16
Vajdahunyad Castle was in the middle of the City Park of Budapest, which according to Danny’s phone was the oldest urban green space in Europe. Or was it the world? Henry had forgotten already. He did remember Danny telling him that Vajdahunyad Castle wasn’t just one big fortress like San Felipe Castle back in Cartagena but actually a complex comprising several buildings. Henry had chosen it as a meeting place because both park and castle were located in the middle of Budapest. He thought Danny would be much safer there. If Junior tried to abduct her, the city’s narrow streets would slow him down. Unless, of course, he went vaulting over the rooftops instead, although Henry didn’t think he’d try that with Danny. If he did, Henry was sure Junior was more likely to end up splattered on the sidewalk than she was.
But now as he sat in the car with Danny a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Vajdahunyad Castle complex, Henry was beginning to think this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It was all he could do not to keep himself from calling the whole thing off and taking her as far away from Junior as possible.
There was no question that she was a tough professional; he’d seen her in action and he knew she was anything but helpless. Or a coward, although Henry thought that a good part of her courage was down to youth and inexperience—she didn’t know how bad the bad guys could be. Of course, if she stuck with the DIA she was going to find out; she’d encounter things that most civilians never had to deal with, never even imagined. Right now, he wished more than anything that Danny Zakarewski was a civilian.
He could see how nervous she was; it made her look even younger than her years, which in turn made it harder for him to justify sending her to meet a trained killer without so much as a nail file for defense. His instincts were telling him to get her out of there, to protect her, not expose her to danger.
If Danny had known what he was thinking she would have accused him of sexism and ageism and who knew how many other -isms—capitalism, anarchism, antidisestablishmentarianism—all while going upside his head. So much had changed since he’d started out in the DIA as a young, strong, capable agent whose career was on the rise. The world was so different these days that sometimes he wasn’t sure what planet he was on. And now Danny was the young, strong, capable agent whose career was on the rise, while he was getting older.
Or trying to.
Danny took hold of the car door handle, then paused. “This is going to work, right?”
“Yep,” Henry assured her, hoping he wasn’t lying.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“He’s not exactly me but I know his taste,” he replied.
Danny turned to get out of the car, then turned back to him again. “Wait a second. You’re attracted to me?”
I talk too goddam much, Henry thought unhappily. “Me, personally, right now? Hell no,” he said. “But a younger, less mature version of me? Probably.”
She laughed and he laughed with her, as if they weren’t both scared shitless. He couldn’t let her do this, he thought, and opened his mouth to tell her it was off.
“Henry?” she said.
His name hung in the air between them and he could hear all the unspoken questions she wanted to ask:
Do I have a hope in hell of getting out of this alive? Do you? If we don’t, is this something worth dying for? Is anything worth dying for? Is this really what our lives have been leading up to and is it right, is it good? Are we good? Will it even make a difference? Will anyone care what happens to us?
Even after twenty-five years, he still knew all those questions by heart. With any luck, she would get more answers than he had.
All of this ran through his mind in less time than it took for him to smooth an errant strand of dark hair back from her face. “When I came to get you in Georgia,” he said quietly, “I didn’t have to think about it. It was instinct, wanting to keep you safe. He’s got that, too—he’s not going to hurt you.”
He could sense her seizing on that and holding it close, willing it to be true.
“And hurting you doesn’t help him,” he added. “What he wants is me. In his sights.”
Danny took a deep steadying breath, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance to Vajdahunyad Castle without looking back.
Henry stared after her, all his instincts still screaming for him to call it off.
Danny walked across the footbridge at an even pace, not slow, not fast, toward the Gatehouse Tower of Vajdahunyad Castle. The outside of the castle was surrounded by very bright, yellow-gold lights; although the illumination spilled over a bit on the inside, the place was still very dark and shadowy. The gate was up, its sharp points hanging over the entrance. She was pretty sure it was normally lowered after hours but Henry’s clone was clever enough to fix it so she wouldn’t have to scale the tower to get in. And the open gate absolutely did not in any way remind her of an animal’s gaping jaws, not even a little.
On the other side of the bridge, the paving went from smooth to brick. Danny still didn’t hurry, except as she passed under the raised gate; she did a quick little trot, so as not to be under those pointed metal bars for more than a second.
Which was silly—why would the clone agree to meet here only to impale her with a metal gate? Henry’s words came back to her: Hurting you doesn’t help him. What he wants is me. In his sights. She really hoped Henry was right, at least about the first part. And anyway, clone-Henry would have orders from Janet Lassiter to take her back to the States safe and sound. If he were going to disobey those orders and kill her, he could have done it when she was on the footbridge. Or he could shoot her right now.
Danny felt a rush of shame for being so scared. She wasn’t doing this alone. Henry and Baron had her back and she had theirs. The three of them were a team.
Her steps began to slow until she came to a stop, with a church on her left and on her right a statue sitting on a bench, mostly in shadow despite the spillover from the lights outside. Count Sándor Károlyi, according to the information she’d downloaded to her phone, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember the name of the church opposite. Then she discovered that she couldn’t get her feet to move, either.
“Forward march,” she whispered between clenched teeth. “Yo left, right, left.”
Nothing; her feet might as well have been super-glued to the bricks.
“Yo left, right, left,” she whispered again—still nothing. Maybe she should try counting cadence. I had a dog, his name was Blue, Blue wanna be a seal too…
No, she was damned if she was going to make a fool of herself while clone-Henry watched. And he was watching her, she saw, from behind an iron gate off to the side of the church’s front door. Danny felt an intense surge of hostility and indignation. How long had he been there? Could he tell how spooked she was? Goddammit, it was after midnight in a castle that had been Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula’s crib. Anyone not creeped out would have to be made of stone.