He edged out into the corridor, snapping off the Luger's safety with his thumb. The old woman's apartment would be dead center on the side facing the street. He moved cautiously in that direction, on tiptoe to keep his shoes from scraping the floor.
He had gone less than fifty feet when a door opened up ahead and two young men stepped into the corridor. Carter quickly ducked into the first available niche and pressed himself against the wall among the mops and buckets.
"When a man breaks his bones and sprains muscles lime after time, you have to assume he's doing something wrong," one of them was saying. "Either his technique is bad or he's just clumsy. Janosch may be the greatest goalie in the world, but he's no good to anyone if he doesn't play."
Soccer, Carter thought. At least they aren't security men.
The voices came closer. Carter's heart began to race. Fresh droplets of sweat formed on his forehead- He pressed himself flatter against the wall, then looking down, he noticed to his horror that he had pushed one mop and bucket onto its edge, and it was about to topple to the floor. He grabbed it by the mop handle and eased it down on his foot to keep it quiet just as a third voice from somewhere behind the two men said. "Stop."
The two pairs of footsteps suddenly halted, and another set walked a goodly distance down the hall toward them. "This building has been sealed for purposes of state security," the voice said.
Carter peeked around the comer and saw it was one of the goons from the limousine.
"But we are members of the maintenance committee. We have work to do," the young man with opinions on Janosch, the soccer goalie, protested.
"It will not last long," said the KGB man. "Until then, we'd like everyone to stay in and keep these halls clear." His Hungarian was laden with a thick Russian accent. Most likely he was attached to the Soviet embassy, and he and his friend had driven up from Budapest this morning. But where was the other one?
"State security," grumbled the other young man, speaking for the first time. "That's what they said when my father was killed."
"We all have painful memories of the sacrifices the State calls on us to make," the KGB man said. "This is not a big sacrifice today. Spend a few hours at home, read the paper, whatever pleases you. Let us not stir coals that are better left to cool."
Whether it was the reasonableness of the man's tone that convinced them or the familiar bulge in his trench coat pocket, which had not escaped Carter's notice, it was impossible to say, but the three turned and without a further word walked up the hall in the direction from which they'd come, leaving Carter alone in the corridor. A moment later the lights went out, plunging the corridor into darkness, only a small amount of light coming from the end doors.
He waited a few seconds to make sure they'd really gone, then he began moving again, cautiously but quickly, in the direction of Judit Konya's apartment. The speed with which Kobelev's man had intercepted the two in the hall was disturbing. Obviously, not only were they barring people from entering the building, they were keeping a close watch on the interior as well, probably through the small chicken-wired windows at either end of the hall.
He pushed along, his back against the wall, casting a small shadow, until he reached what he considered to be the most likely door. There was no name on it, nothing to distinguish it from any other door facing the hall except it was situated where he thought her apartment should be based on what the maintenance man had told him, and there were small marks along the bottom of the jamb, the kind made by the knock of the steel footrests of a wheelchair when it's not turned short enough.
The door was unlocked. He came through, low and to one side, the Luger in both hands trained on two figures on the other side of the very dark room. One faced him in an old-fashioned wicker wheelchair, the kind used during World War I, a noble-looking woman with features seemingly carved from stone. Her eyes were closed, her head held at an attentive angle as though she were listening, although to what she was listening was not clear except that it was not in this room, or perhaps even of this world. On the wall behind her and to one side hung a crucifix done in the old Hungarian folk style. Myriad votive candles flickered on the table before it, providing what little light there was.
The other figure kneeled in front of her as though praying, the houndstooth coat stretched across his broad back, over the collar a thatch of snow white hair. Kobelev!
He fired twice, the shots slamming Kobelev forward and to the left. The old woman's eyes sprang open, the knuckle of her left index finger to her mouth.
Carter stood slowly and came toward her, keeping the gun on the body sprawled headlong on the floor. There had been something very peculiar about the way it fell.
He rolled it over with the toe of his shoe. The face was a blank pink cloth stitched in the general proportions of the human countenance. Fleetingly he wondered where the dummy had come from. They certainly hadn't brought it in from the limo.
A noise forced him to turn around. It was one of those sounds that chill the blood several degrees without ever fully registering in the brain, like the rattle of a snake underfoot or the roar of an engine that's too close for comfort. Only in this case it was more muted: the simple metal-on-metal of a hammer drawn back and a cylinder clicked into position.
He started toward the right when a silent tongue of fire lashed out from behind the door. Something sharp and extremely precise, like a power-driven needle, struck his left shoulder and sent him spinning against the wall, knocking over the tables and extinguishing the candles, plunging the room into darkness.
A second silenced shot flashed from the same general location as the first, splintered the table edge, and deflected into the wall a foot or so above Carter's head. Carter fired where he'd seen the light. The bullet whined, glass tinkled, and something heavy hit the floor.
There was dead silence for ten endless seconds, then the very low, agonized moaning of a human being in pain, regular as breathing, like the yawing of a rusty shutter in the wind.
"Yuri?" the old woman queried the darkness.
There was no answer.
"Yuri?"
Carter pulled himself to his feet, his shoulder throbbing with a steady, hot pain, and his fingers growing sticky with blood. He picked up a candle, lit it, and held it up. The flame pulsated to life, and the room's interior became dimly visible. A narrow bed was shoved into a corner, a rustic table beside it served as a nightstand, and above it on the wall were religious pictures of every description. To the left was a doorway that Carter assumed led to some sort of bathroom. The moaning came from inside.
He stepped over with the candle. Lying on the floor, his head supported on one arm draped over the toilet bowl, was one of Kobelev's henchmen. His left eye was a blackened hole from which blood oozed. The other eye stared dumbly at the floor.
Carter turned abruptly and came back across the room toward the old woman. "Who was he?" he hissed at her in Russian.
"You've killed him?" she asked tremulously.
"He's dead."
"My grandson sent him. He told me I needed protection. A man was coming to kill me. Why would you want to kill an old woman like me?" Her head shook as she spoke, whether from fear or old age. Carter couldn't tell.
"Your grandson lied. Carter said. His shoulder hurt like hell. "The other man," he went on, "the one outside. Do you know him?"
"I don't know…"
"Call him. Now." He started to push her wheelchair toward the door.
"That's not necessary. You're not Russian."
He thrust the Luger to within a few inches of her face. "Can you feel this?"