“Aronson,” he said thickly when the receptionist answered.
“Mr. Aronson is not in. Would you like to leave — ”
He hung up.
Aronson would want him to stay in Budapest. He would want him to shadow Krucevic, find out where he kept the woman, turn informer, and thus seal his death warrant. Aronson would want him — Anatoly Petrovich — to risk his life for someone he knew was as good as dead. He turned, trailing smoke from his splayed fingers, and sought the protective cover of the train.
He cased it from front to back and took a seat at the very end of the last car — a smoking one, of course — folding himself into a corner near the half-open window in the six-person compartment. Otherwise, it was empty. He read his paper and pretended to ignore what he was actually studying frantically, the passage of other travelers along the corridor. Travelers who might be sent to kill him.
The train gave a lurch, compartment doors hissed shut. In a moment, the conductor would ask for his ticket. He closed his eyes again and saw the dead man's face.
Anatoly had never liked killing. He had done it when necessary — in the army, during his first tour in Afghanistan — but the mujahideen were wolves, rabid with violence. Killing them was a matter of survival. He had never watched a man consider his own death before — had never watched the knowledge come with all the inevitability of rain after a stifling day. When the pistol grazed his temple, Lajta's eyes had widened slightly, like a dog's when you pull hard on its ears.
It was the only sign of fear the banker had shown.
The compartment door slid open, and a youngish woman — tired face, raincoat smelling dankly of the streets — shoved a bulky suitcase inside. Its zipper was broken, and she had been forced to tie the lid shut with string. Everything about her suggested a weary struggle against respectable poverty — her dark stockings, her thick-soled shoes. Hair as dry and tousled as an old bird's nest.
She gave Anatoly a furtive glance and took the seat farthest away.
Did he look menacing? Or like a man in terror for his life?
The woman drew a paperback from her purse and opened it. Idly, Anatoly glanced at the cover: something in German. She was going home, then, as he was. Her head drooped, absorbed in words; suddenly, the platform began to slide backward.
Anatoly did not trust himself to gaze out the window.
He was an expert at cracking security systems. The KGB had trained him, and he had worked all over the world, lifting the locks on office doors in Khartoum and Valletta and Santiago and Manhattan. He had defected fifteen years ago during his last tour, in Rome, when he'd been sent to bug the building directly next door to the U.S. embassy — a simple affair of attaching a remote fiber — optic device to one of the ancient pipes running between the walls of the two buildings.
Anatoly had never been a man of politics. He was not much of a man for morality, either, or for debating the finer points of loyalty. The KGB had been good to him. He had been good to the KGB. But it was time for their paths to part.
He had fallen in love with a translator at the Rome embassy, and the last few weeks of her tour were up. Anatoly was moving on to Kabul; Marya was returning to Moscow. He tried to buy time, a transfer, a change in Marya's assignment. The system proved inflexible.
And so, on that night nearly fifteen years ago, he discarded his cigarette, told his partner to take a hike, ignored the placement plan for the listening device, and instead disarmed the American embassy. Then he broke the glass in a ground-floor window at the back of the building, a window that should have been barred. He thrust himself through, grunting as his leather jacket snagged on the ledge — it was a coolish night in February, even the ubiquitous Roman cats gone to ground — until his sneakered feet touched something springy and soft. A tumbledown couch in a minor bureaucrat's office.
Anatoly stretched himself out on the cushions and went instantly to sleep.
In the morning, an extensive debriefing, the Soviet listening device like a peace offering on the table.
Forty-eight hours later, he and Marya were on a plane for Washington.
He spent eighteen months telling the CIA everything he knew about security installations throughout the Soviet empire, and about the hostile listening devices and fiber optics planted in the walls of a hundred U.S. installations.
Then the Soviet empire began to crumble and the KGB heads themselves fled to Washington, and Anatoly decided to look for other work. Two years later he was a freelancer in Hamburg, Marya was thriving, their baby was on its way. He had four employees and a reputation for discretion. The difficult jobs — the problems of access or of imaginative design, the jobs that still made his blood race — he took on himself. That was when he met Krucevic.
The man came to Anatoly with a bunker in mind. Something entirely controlled by computer, with infrared detection zones, motion sensors, video surveillance inside and out. Krucevic wanted his own phone lines monitored, he wanted cellular communications routinely tapped, he wanted the hard drives of his computer systems armed to self-destruct at the first sign of penetration. What he wanted, Anatoly decided, was to live like a villain in a Dick Tracy comic strip.
Anatoly drew up plans. Krucevic paid him and took the blueprints away. Anatoly thought that was the end of it. If the security measures were ever installed, he was not to know.
He had little idea then that he was dealing with the devil. That knowledge came later. After Krucevic had visited a third and even a fifth time, walking into the offices in Hamburg unannounced. He came, always, on the nights Anatoly worked late over the bookkeeping. His knowledge of Anatoly's movements was the least disturbing thing about him.
He began to trade on loyalty. He began to assume complicity. He began to threaten, to presume he owned Anatoly and his office and his pretty house in the suburbs with two children growing in it.
And at last, Anatoly had gone to Berlin, as a penitent goes humbly to confession, and had sought the good offices and advice of the man named Wally Aronson. He had come to know Aronson years before, during the long months of debriefing in Virginia, and while he doubted that Aronson had brilliance or cunning or even great courage, Anatoly believed that the man had no evil in him.
And all the power of American Intelligence at his back.
Sitting now in the drab car of the MAV train while the telephone wires of Hungary dipped and soared like swallows beyond the window, Anatoly prayed that Intelligence might still mean something.
Aronson had told Anatoly that two options were open to him. The first was to throw himself on the mercy of old friends and allow them to relocate his family safely to the United States. He would lose most of what he had built in Hamburg; he would start over again a pauper in a land of wealth. But the Agency might offer some work. Or, Aronson said, Anatoly could take a risk: He could play Krucevic like a fish, tell Aronson everything he learned of Krucevic's movements, and be compensated handsomely. The house in Hamburg, the office with four employees, Marya's contentment in her settled life — all could remain. And he would win the undying respect and gratitude of the United States.
Anatoly was, by nature, a taker of risk. And he liked the freedom he had won for himself; he liked meeting Wally Aronson as an equal, with something to give rather than everything to beg. It made him feel less desperate.
When Krucevic called, he was ready with his overnight bag and his ticket to Hungary.
His instructions were to await instructions.
They came at four a.m., with a ring of his bedside phone and the order to be on the pavement in front of his hotel in ten minutes.
He was there, a small kit of tools resting on the sidewalk at his feet, when the car pulled up. Krucevic sat alone in the back. Otto was at the wheel. Beside him sat another man Anatoly did not recognize but who he later learned was named Tonio. For an instant, he hesitated — the only free space in the car was next to Krucevic, and he instinctively hated the proximity of the man — then slid into the backseat. And kept his tools secure between his feet.