It was an open boat with a woman in the back, steering. She was bearing directly for him. In a minute or two he recognized her as the girl from the cafe, whose advances he'd rebuffed the day before.
"I'll be damned…" he said half-aloud.
She cut the motor a few yards from him, and the boat drifted to a standstill inches from his feet. "Get in," she said brusquely in pure American English.
"What in hell…?"
"Just get in. We haven't much time."
Carter swung a leg over and had no more than shifted his weight from the section of hull to the boat when she gunned the motor, spilling him into the bottom. He was up in time to see his tiny island of salvation slipping into the distance.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked.
"Name's Stewart. Roberta. Lieutenant Commander, junior grade. Naval Intelligence."
"You?"
"Right."
"I assumed you were a…"
"A man. I know. Everyone thinks that. Well. I'm not."
"No," he said a little weakly, "I guess not. But how did you know I'd be out here?"
"I followed you after that little meeting we had at the hotel cafe yesterday. You came to within a block of Friedrich Schwetzler's apartment, the local smuggler. His operation is something of a joke around here. The frontier guards tolerate it because they feel sorry for him, but I know one of the guardsmen, a buffoon named Franco. He told me if Schwetzler ever got ambitious, they would have to sink his boat. Then word came through about you, and they closed the border. I guess that meant Schwetzler, too. I was talking to Franco in the cafe last night, and he told me he was on a detail mat moved one of the signal buoys out here in the shallows. When he thought of what that would do to Schwetzler, he laughed so hard he almost choked on his wine. Everyone knows how Schwetzler finds his way down the lake. At any rate, when Schwetzler's man didn't show up in the cafe at the usual time, I figured he'd gotten hung up out here. You with him."
"He got hung up, all right," said Carter solemnly. "Permanently."
"I know his wife. Poor Mardya."
After a moment's silence while they contemplated the widow's sorrow, it occurred to Carter that he should make some apology for the things he'd said to Roberta the day before. But the thought passed. "How do you know so much about what goes on around here?" he said instead.
"I teach English and Hungarian to the children of the Soviet diplomatic mission in Budapest… and play cat-and-mouse with the local KGB."
"Oh?" he said, taking interest. "I suppose they know about Tatiana Kobelev's escape."
"Tatiana the Brave?" The girl laughed. "The children are making a heroine of her. They compare her to Eliza running from the hounds."
Carter looked at her, trying to make the political and literary connection.
"Didn't you know that Uncle Tom's Cabin is required reading for well-bred Soviet children? Simon Legree is the prototype capitalist pig."
"That's an interesting interpretation," he said with a sigh.
"Yesterday they invented a new game," she went on. "One of them is Tatiana, and the other children play the American soldiers. They chase each other all over the schoolyard."
"So the word's out," Carter said. "But does he know?"
"Kobelev? Absolutely not. Word has it that Tatiana has expressly forbidden anyone to contact the train with the news she is free. Something about wanting to see the look of shock on a man's face when she finally shows up. We don't know who she intends to surprise."
"Me," said Carter. "That buys us a little time anyway. Where's the train now?"
"Sidetracked in Györ."
"Györ? It was due in Budapest."
"For some reason he had it pulled off the main line in Györ. He must have something in mind. He's invited the Hungarian circus to come in and entertain during the delay."
"Györ," Carter said. It seemed to suggest something just out of reach. Then suddenly he realized what it was. "We must get to Györ immediately."
Roberta shoved the accelerator as far forward as it would go, and the little boat skimmed across the water at a respectable speed. Within twenty minutes they had reached the Hungarian shore, picked up Stewart's car, a battered Fiat modest enough by Western standards but impossible for a schoolteacher in Hungary if it weren't for the fact that she worked for the Soviets, and were speeding down the main trunk road into Budapest by way of Györ. She drove while Carter talked.
"The entire U.S. intelligence community has been studying Kobelev ever since he started to emerge from the ranks of the KGB. His methodology, his networks, his plans — even his most intimate personal habits — are collated, analyzed, then rotated into the information pool that all services have access to." Roberta glanced at Carter. "I've made it a hobby," he said. "I've spent hours poring over the stuff. I know every flyspeck on every page. Kobelev's maternal grandmother was Hungarian. Her last known whereabouts is a state housing project in Györ."
"Wait a minute," said Roberta, tearing her eyes from the road for a brief second. "You don't really think Kobelev is going to interrupt his dash home just to pay his respects to his grandmother, do you?"
"You don't know him. He's a man given to dramatic gesture. In Russia when I was posing as a defector who wanted to join his ranks, he wanted to test my loyalty. He could have done it any number of ways — left himself exposed at some critical time, waiting to see what I would do, something subtle to trap me into thinking I could kill him and get away with it. But what does he do? He stages an elaborate fencing match in front of his entire family. You see? He's like a bullfighter working close to the horns. He thrives on danger. Besides, we know the grandmother is important to him. She all but saved him from an overbearing father. And we know he hasn't been out of the Soviet Union for almost a decade, so he can't have seen her lately."
"All right," said Roberta, her bright eyes flashing. The prospect of being in on the Kobelev kill obviously excited her. "Suppose you're right about the grandmother. What do we do then?"
"I lay the trap and spring it."
"What about me?"
"I want you at the train," Carter said. "No matter what does or does not happen, one of us must be on that train when it pulls out of here. Do you understand?"
She nodded solemnly, and he reached over and pecked her on the cheek.
Eleven
Translated from the Hungarian, the sign in the dirt and stone plot that passed for a courtyard read: "Béla Kun Housing Project. Erected 1968. Western Hungarian People's Housing Collective." Beyond the sign stood six concrete rectangles, seven stories high, each rectangle composed of many smaller rectangles, each smaller rectangle with an iron balcony railing across it, and from each balcony railing a line of wash flapped in the late morning sunlight. It was Sunday, the family day. People milled on the sidewalk, and promenaded up and down the street, laughing and talking with neighbors and pushing baby carriages.
Carter sat in Roberta's Fiat, parked in a line of cars directly across from Building "A," his eyes sifting the movement on all sides of him, alert for anything unusual.
The grandmother was definitely here — Judit Konya, age ninety-three, first floor center — and she had received a message earlier in the day that had set up a bucket-brigade conversation between her apartment door and the phone because she was too old to make it to the end of the hall. Carter knew this thanks to a garrulous maintenance man with an acute appreciation of fine Hungarian wine who was not averse to receiving several bottles as a present in exchange for a little information.