by Brad Taylor
Standing in a courtyard off of Hajos Avenue, I hoped we were in the right place. Like a lot of buildings in the eastern bloc of the old soviet sphere of influence, this one was an imposing four-story structure that dripped despair. Nothing but concrete and iron, all circling around a depressing inner courtyard that would never have enough light to grow anything. The bottom level housed what could charitably be called honest businesses but were more than likely fly-by-night tourist fleece jobs. I only cared about one thing: The courtyard was surrounded by balconies, giving anyone who walked out the ability to see us.
The key we had found had a brass plate on it with an engraving of the Budapest Opera House on one side, and a room number and “if found, please call” phone number on the other side. Doing some quick research on the phone number, we had come up with a broker of apartments in Budapest who rented to travelers looking for a cheap stay. Further research had located a stretch of apartment rooms he maintained one block from the fabled Budapest Opera House on Andrassy Street on the Pest side of the Danube. We’d been able to glean photos of the building, along with check-in/check-out procedures, but outside of the engraving on the key, we really had no way of knowing if we were in the right place. The broker might have used the same engraving for all of his keys, regardless of location.
It was past midnight, but Andrassy Street was still rocking a block away. Jennifer had dropped us off there, right next to the metro stop, and we’d moved straight to the building we had found from our research.
A lot of people were moving around, even here, off of the main thoroughfare. I would never have expected this Eastern European country to be such a hotspot for nightlife, but apparently it was, which would work in our favor. The building, after all, had at least a few apartments rented by tourists, so it wasn’t like a stranger would be out of place, and with the traffic coming and going, we’d be just one of many. Even so, a fight in here would be hard to escape from. One way in and one way out, along with the fact that we’d be running down four flights of stairs. We couldn’t afford a shoot-out, regardless of the fact that we would win. If this was the right place.
There was a group of people in the courtyard, clearly drunk, and we matched their attitude when they hollered at us, giving them the impression that we were tourists who’d had too much to drink as well. Besides helping us blend in, it would give us an excuse for any mistakes we made looking for the right door.
Moving up the stairs, I saw that there wasn’t any surveillance effort here. No cameras at all, which was odd in this day and age, but a strong indicator that we were in the right place. The Arabs wouldn’t want that.
We found room 406 and staged to fight. Decoy slapped on the radar scope, and we came up negative. I slotted the key, half expecting it to fail, but it slid in easily. I nodded. Right room. I rotated the key and opened the door, leaning back as the team entered, pistols drawn.
I followed in after the last man. While they cleared the apartment, I saw the damage. A man handcuffed to a radiator pipe. His eyes half open, his head lolling to the side, his pants down to his knees. The obscene view of his genitals overshadowed by the barbaric damage to his legs. The torrent of blood from his throat puddling around his waist.
The room stank of meat. Of packed steaks that had lost refrigeration. I waited for the all-clear, unable to take my eyes from the body. The blood off of his neck had blackened, but the pool around his waist was still liquid. I turned away, not wanting the image to become a fixture in my head for later dreams, although I knew it was too late.
Buckshot returned and gave the all-clear, looking at the body.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said. “That’s the guy from Jennifer’s cell phone picture.”
I said, “We’ve got little time. The Arab’s cleaning house. Search the room and body. Find something we can use. But watch yourself. Don’t leave any evidence that can be used against us.”
The team went to work, wearing latex gloves and moving gingerly around the room. It would suffice for a quick check, but I knew it wouldn’t withstand scrutiny if someone really wanted to do an in-depth analysis.
Buckshot turned from the body. “I’ve got a card here. Not sure what it is.”
He held up a small piece of heavy bonded paper the same size as a plastic hotel key card. It had nothing on it but a red arrow pointing to one end and a magnetic stripe down the side.
Decoy said, “It’s a locker rental card. I’ve used them before. You stick that into a slot instead of a key, and your locker opens.”
I said, “Where? Where’s it from?”
“Doesn’t have anything on it,” Buckshot said. “Nothing other than the arrow.”
Decoy said, “Mine was from a train station in Vienna. Probably the same thing here.”
Retro said, “There’re only three train stations in Budapest.”
“We just going to hit all three,” Decoy said, “hoping to luck out?”
“Might as well,” I said. “We have nothing else to go on.”
Jennifer dropped Decoy and me off at the Keleti pu, or eastern railway station. It was our second stop, the first being the western station called Nyugati pu. We’d found some lockers there, but they used old-fashioned metal keys. No help.
Walking up the steps to the entrance, I didn’t have much hope that this card would pan out. After all, for all we knew, every bus station in Budapest had lockers as well. Even that might be irrelevant. Maybe no lockers in this entire city used a computer key card. It was a pretty modern technology compared to the iron curtain amenities I’d seen so far.
The station itself was huge, with an imposing nineteenth-century Victorian look on the outside. Inside, it was a smoky, confusing mash of Cold War construction grafted onto one-hundred-year-old granite. We were in the main hall, with the train platforms straight ahead, and even at this hour, people were coming and going. We went to an information booth on the south end, which was closed, but we could see a man inside. Tapping on the window, I got his attention. He looked at us suspiciously, two older Americans asking about lockers in the middle of the night, but he pointed at the large staircase that dominated the entrance, leading to a basement level.
His gesture appeared simple enough, but there was a ton of construction going on, with plywood walls everywhere and no signs in English. Eventually, after bumping into dead ends like rats in a maze, we found the lockers. A bank extended fifteen feet with an ATM-like digital display in the center, an incongruous bit of modernity housed in the stark surroundings.
Decoy slipped in the card, and the screen flashed twice with a number. To our left, one of the upper locker doors popped open.
We both remained still for a second, completely surprised by the success, then raced each other to be the first to see what was inside. It was empty except for a cell phone. Turning it on, it had one number in the contact menu.
Decoy said, “Jackpot.”
Fifteen minutes later, Decoy was slapping the van seat in frustration. “What the fuck! This guy’s phone has less capability than the damn Jitterbug phone I bought my grandmother last year.”
I’d given the go-ahead to track the number with our technical capability, figuring it was worth the risk since we were reaching an endgame, but that relied on the target phone having specific capabilities, namely a basic software package and the GPS chip that came with just about every cell phone on earth. This one, however, was a pathetically cheap version that did something that no other modern cell phone did: It made calls alone.
Retro said, “What now? We want to dial it?”
I considered the idea. The man in the hotel had been tortured, then killed, which blatantly showed that the Arab was trying to get information, information that could possibly be used against him. The fact that the cell phone in the locker even existed, and hadn’t been taken, indicated that the dead man was, in fact, doing something outside the Arab’s purview. The contact number might be the key, but it would have to be handled carefully.
/> “I think we have Jennifer call. A woman on this end might give us an edge before the guy hangs up. Let him know we’re friends, and that the Arab is dangerous. Maybe we’ll get something.”
Everyone in the van agreed, and we spent a couple of minutes war gaming and rehearsing, going over what we knew. Then Jennifer dialed.
She hung up in seconds, saying, “Straight to voice mail. No answer.”
Retro threw the water bottle he was holding. I took a deep breath, then said, “Track its usage. If it’s been turned on at all, it’s talked somewhere in this city.”
Decoy said, “Already working. It’s an active number, but it shuts down each night, coming on every morning about eight. All tower registers are inside the city, on this side of the Danube, with most popping downtown within two miles of us.”
The timing news actually made me happy, because it didn’t force us to jump through our ass tonight. We needed some rest, and this provided the excuse.
“Okay. Let’s get to a hotel and grab some rack. Plot its habitual track, and we’ll stage there before eight tomorrow.”
56
T
he pilot shivered, telling himself it was the morning chill and not his nerves. He took a sip of his coffee and tried to relax, to appear as calm as the few other patrons around him at the café. Kamil had called him last night and set up this meeting, but he hadn’t said what it was about. Kamil also hadn’t said why he couldn’t return to the apartment. A part of him wanted to believe the meeting was simply to give them the final instructions for their flight to Montreal, but the location raised his suspicions.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Calling to cancel the meeting?
Pulling it out, he was puzzled to see nobody on the other end, then he felt another vibration in his pocket. With a shock, he realized it was the other phone. The special one.
He frantically ripped it out before it went to voice mail. He saw the number and immediately hit the connect button, saying hello in Indonesian.
A woman’s voice came through, telling him it was a wrong number.
“Hello? Can you speak English?”
But it couldn’t be. It was the right number.
He hesitated, half wanting to hang up and half wanting to know how this woman had the phone he’d planted for his partner. In the end, his partner won out. However bizarre it appeared, it was a link that he couldn’t sever.
“Yes. I speak English. Who is this?”
“I’m a friend of a friend. He asked me to call.”
The pilot felt a bump of elation. “He’s free? Let me speak to him.”
“He is free, but he’s not with me. He gave me the phone and asked me to warn you.”
“Warn me? Who is this? Put my friend on the phone or I hang up.”
The woman began speaking rapid-fire, almost overwhelming his grasp of English.
“Don’t hang up! There’s an Arab man that you both know. He’s dangerous. Your friend wanted you to stay away from him. He asked us to pick you up.”
The pilot began to feel light-headed, unsure of what to believe. He swiveled his head looking for Kamil. The man would be here at any second.
He said, “I’m meeting him now. At a café.”
The woman became agitated. “Where? Where are you?”
The pilot hesitated. He had no idea who this was. After the last few days, his ability to trust anyone he didn’t know had evaporated. He needed a cut line, something he could anchor against. He asked a simple question.
“What’s my friend’s name?”
He thought he heard whispering in the background, and a rustling of paper. Then, “I can’t pronounce it. It’s Indonesian.”
Can’t pronounce it? She’s trying to read the name. She hasn’t talked to him.
Which scared him, but also told him she had something from his partner. And, since she wasn’t with the Arab, the fact was something to consider.
He said, “I’m not going to tell you where I am, but I’ll meet you. You tell me where I can see my friend, and we’ll do it that way. Some place public.”
The woman backed off, saying, “Okay, okay, we can do that, but you are in danger now. I mean right now. Get out of there.”
The pilot felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up into the flat eyes of a killer. The same man who had sawed through a crewmember’s neck with all the emotion of cutting up a chicken for dinner.
Thinking fast, the pilot said, “No, no. Don’t file the flight plan yet. I don’t know when I’m departing. Leave the date open.”
And hung up.
Kamil placed a hand on his other shoulder, standing behind his chair. He leaned in and whispered into his ear. “Sorry I’m late. Where did you get that cell phone?”
Jennifer put the phone down and said, “We’ve lost him. The Arab’s there.”
Retro said, “How do you know? What happened?”
“He started babbling nonsense about flight plans, then hung up. He was trying to cover who he was talking to.”
I said, “He’s got about six minutes to live. The Arab gets him into a car, and we lose. We know from the tower track this morning he’s in a footprint within a half mile of here. What else do we know? How can we find him? Think, people.”
Finger raised, Jennifer said, “He’s at a café. He said that.”
She was so sure of herself, yet the information was so vague, it hit my funny bone.
“Jesus, why didn’t you say so? I can’t be expected to plan without all the information. Are you hiding a holocaust cloak as well?”
Jennifer got the reference to The Princess Bride, the single movie we both enjoyed, and rolled her eyes.
Decoy said, “Wait, she’s actually on to something. The Arab knows as much as we do about Budapest, and he’d want a location that would be easy to find. He wouldn’t pick some obscure local place, where he’d stand out. He’d pick a tourist area.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”
“Well, right around the corner is a little promenade that’s lined with cafés on both sides. That’s where I’d plan a meeting.”
I looked at him, waiting on an explanation.
“Hey, I had a life before the Taskforce. On the teams, we used to call this place Booty-Fest.”
“Huh. Your man-whore days might pay off. Lead the way.”
Decoy led us to a park called Jokai Square, a promenade full of gardens and statues. Actually, a pretty cool area that I’d like to come back to when I wasn’t under the gun to stop a terrorist. It had streets on the north and south sides, but the middle was basically an open grassy area, and just like Decoy said, it had restaurants, nightclubs, and cafés lining the way.
We split up left and right, leaving Buckshot as the van driver. I took north with Jennifer. Decoy and Retro took south.
This early in the morning, we would have little trouble getting an ID, since each café had only a few people in them, and most of the restaurants and nightclubs were closed. We slowly trolled the park, Buckshot shadowing us on a parallel path one road over.
We had one false call, which was quickly eliminated when Retro transmitted a cell phone picture of two guys in a café. The team was forcing the issue, wanting to be right, but the photo contained what looked like two Cuban guys. I didn’t need Jennifer to call bullshit.
We reached Andrassy Avenue with nothing.
Retro said, “What now?”
“I don’t know,” said Decoy. “That was the only place I can think of. I’m sure there’re others. Besides the bridal salons, I didn’t do a whole lot of cultural engagement.”
I felt the clock ticking, knowing we were about to lose our only hope of connecting with the EFPs. The contact on the phone was about to die.
Jennifer said, “Why don’t we just keep going?”
She pointed across Andrassy. “I can see umbrellas over there as well.”
Decoy looked and said, “Damn, she’s right. None of that shit was here in ninety-eight.”
O
n the other side of Andrassy Avenue, I could see a large four-story building with some sort of latticework scaffolding built of old rough-hewn lumber, like someone had decided to work on the façade, then quit, leaving the scaffolding in place. Directly to the southwest of the building was another promenade, this one fronted by a sculpture of different-colored flowers in the shape of a cross on a shield. Past it, several statues sprinkled among the trees competed with the outdoor cafés for the attention of the pedestrians walking around. The promenade itself was much narrower than Jokai Square “Okay,” I said. “This one’s a little less open. One street on the right and nothing on the left. We’ll stagger by time. Decoy and Retro go first, taking the path straight down the middle and eyeing the left side. We’ll give you two minutes and follow in your footsteps looking to the right. Both teams be prepared to redirect on the other’s call.”
While Retro and Decoy crossed the street, I contacted Buckshot and told him our position, giving him instructions to shadow us on Terez Boulevard a block to the northwest.
Jennifer and I busied ourselves looking at a statue of some old Hungarian guy to blend in while we waited. When I made some comment about how they could have picked a more attractive subject, she said, “It’s Jokai Mor. The Hungarian novelist this square’s named after. Do you ever do any research?”
“Just enough to get my guy. Although I was thinking about researching those bridal salons Decoy mentioned. Know anything about that?”
She glared at me, making me take a step to the right before she could do some damage. The fact that the comment had aggravated her gave me a small bit of optimism that I was making progress reversing the clock past the incident in Egypt. Before she could say anything, our radios squawked.
“Pike, Decoy. We have ’em. Pictures on the way, but it’s them.”
Jennifer pulled out her phone, looked at the images, and nodded her head.
“That’s the Arab and the Asian man who walked out of the Prague hotel while we were conducting surveillance on the original guy.”