What then?
He pulled his passport out of his breast pocket.
The cop glanced at it indifferently and then handed them both back.
Michael's window slid closed.
Blindly, Tonio grabbed one of the passports with shaking fingers and stuffed it into his jacket.
“What the fuck did you say back there?” he snarled.
“The car's registered to VaccuGen.” He turned left into Bartok Bela Ut, still heading downhill.
“We're traveling salesmen from Berlin. We know nothing about riots.”
“Salesmen.”
“We know nothing about curfews. We're looking for the Gellert Hotel. It's a few blocks from here.”
“Dio, I need a drink.”
The floodlit facade of the hotel loomed before them, an Art Nouveau confection hard by the Chain Bridge, and suddenly, Michael pulled right and then left, into Budafoki Ut. He was still humming “Graceland.” Now Tonio would have the goddamn tune in his head for the next thirty days.
“Here.” Michael jerked the Audi into a space at the curb and killed the engine.
“You're in no shape for this.” He reached into his pocket and handed Tonio some deutsche marks.
“What are you doing?”
“That's Libella.” He gestured toward the bar.
“Last time I checked, a pretty decent place. You'll like the music. They'll take your deutsche marks gladly and rob you blind in the process, but so what? Money's tight these days in Buda.”
“What about the video?”
“I'll deliver it,” Michael said curtly. “I should go on foot anyway. It's safer.”
“But Mian — ”
“Mian turned back at the police checkpoint. Mian will never know. I'll find you in an hour. Two, at the outside. If I'm later than that, take the car and get out.”
Tonio swallowed nervously. He could never leave without Michael — not and expect to see morning.
His eyes flicked to the dull gold light pouring from the bar's windows. How long had it been since he'd had a drink? Mian hated drink like he hated women. He would have to be careful.
Michael was already a block away, heading for the bridge, a shadow under the flame-torn sky.
He waited until he stood on the Pest side of the water before pulling out his cell phone. The number he dialed was one Wally Aronson would recognize. For the past four hours, it had been bugged by the Budapest station.
The click of Mirjana's machine. He dialed his access code and waited for the messages. Then Sharif's voice filled his ear.
He listened, the pace of his heart rising slightly as he understood. Then he hung up. His breathing was audible, less perfectly controlled, and he stared intently across the Danube at the distant mass of the Hilton as though he might see her form backlit in a window. The sight of her face on a television screen had been enough to risk a call in the night. Now, knowing that she was here — A klaxon screamed somewhere behind him. He turned away from the river and strode swiftly toward the rioters on Szabadsag Ter. They had coalesced, he knew, in front of Magyar Television and the National Bank — one across the square, the other just next door to the embassy. It would be impossible to approach the place without a fight.
U.S. installations throughout Europe should be on alert, their marine guards dying to catch a tourist with the key to Sophie Payne's whereabouts stuffed tight inside his jacket. The embassy was out of the question. Where, then?
For an instant, memories of that other Budapest — of the nighttime surveillance, Caroline beside him, the conversation unwinding as it had always done through the relentless grid of streets-filled his mind. There was the ambassador's residence — he knew it well, a nineteenth-century petit palace in a residential quarter of the city, ringed with a sizeable garden. The marines standing vigil there would concentrate on points of egress, not bushes and flower beds. He could toss the tape over the wrought-iron palings and disappear before he was detected.
But first, another call. He slid into the darkened doorway of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and pulled out his cell phone.
“It's me,” he said after the beep. “We're in town. Tell Bela to watch his back. And for Christ's sake, be careful.”
Fourteen
Budapest, 10:53 p.m.
Caroline sat on the floor of her hotel room, drapes pulled wide to the glowing sky over Pest. She couldn't sleep. Sleep would be an insult to the ugliness of what was happening in this city, akin to picnicking on the fringe of battle. How had the British slept during that long spring of 1940? Or the Dresdeners gone to bed with carpet bombs? Did exhaustion take over, relentless? Or did you simply grow accustomed to the mutter of unrest, the flare of violence against the night sky?
She swallowed some whiskey from a diminutive bottle, pulled at random from her generous minibar. Violence. She had taken it to bed with her amid the Hilton's hushed opulence; it patrolled the corridors and stairwells and banks of elevators. Violence had Eric's alias on a piece of audiotape it smelled his ruin in the smoke roiling off the Danube. She supposed she had Vie Marinelli to thank for the nondescript man reading newspaper after newspaper in a hard chair in the lobby, or the young woman with owlish glasses who spoke earnestly into the phone. Marinelli was Chief of Station, Budapest. It was his job to send out the best, to place a sympathetic face behind the front desk, a hulking bruiser among the valet parkers. It was a kind of game for Caroline to play, betting the silent odds on exactly who was who. The Agency's net ringed her round with smiling faces, it strangled her with helping hands. If Michael and Jane ever dared to meet, the two of them were as good as bagged.
Yes, she had Marinelli to thank for the last bars of this cage — but only herself to blame. She had not been able to leave Sharif and his friends alone.
She tipped her whiskey bottle up, let the sweet flame flicker along the lining of her throat, and stared at the orange glow across the river until her eyes burned. She could be honest with herself now. She could tell herself the truth.
She wanted Sophie Payne alive and bound for Washington on a C-130 transport. But she wanted Eric to walk away clean — free of Krucevic and Agency and Caroline alike.
It was a paradox she could not reconcile. She was Jane Hathaway, bona ride in a box; she was Caroline Carmichael, the baited wife. Her whiskey was gone. She tossed the bottle toward a wastepaper basket under the desk, and at that moment her telephone rang.
She froze. Eric. Talking in the dark. And Marinelli would have the hotel phone lines hugged.
She almost didn't answer. Then, as though it moved of itself, her hand grasped the receiver.
“Caroline,” he said.
“Scottie .. .” She felt a knife edge of relief — and disappointment.
“Did I wake you?”
“No” — she glanced at the clock — “its only eleven.”
“How's Buda?”
“Pretty hot. People aren't hurling themselves out of windows yet — but then, most of the windows are already smashed. The Volksturm arrive tomorrow.”
“Ah,” Scottie said with understanding. “Then we can put the Hungarian republic in the chancellor's column.”
So Scottie believed it, too. The Third Reich rising like a phoenix from half a century of ashes.
“What's next?”
“If I knew that, you'd be on a plane home. Caroline, you heard about our mess in Bratislava?”
“Yes. I'm sorry.” She kept her voice neutral, her words vague, in deference to the open phone line. There was a rustle across two continents as Scottie shuffled paper.