by Neil Maresca
“Peter, Lucas, I’d like you to meet Strickland. You’re going to see a lot of this man. He’s the Director of the Student Ambassador’s Program in Sector One.”
Strickland’s close-cropped hair and firm handshake suggested a military background, not at all unusual in the post-World War Two, post-Korean War era.
“What’s Sector One?” Cameron asked, even before Strickland had time to say anything other than “pleased to meet you.”
Washburn chuckled. “Our Mister Cameron is not one to waste time or words.”
“Patience, Mister Cameron, patience. Tomorrow we get down to business and you will find out everything you need to know. Today is a social occasion. But how about you, Mister Hamilton,” Strickland asked, “Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course I am. Curious and excited.”
“You hide it well.”
Lucas couldn’t tell if Strickland’s comment was meant to be complimentary or sarcastic, so he let it pass without a reply.
“I’m told you speak several languages. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Lucas replied, “Spanish, Hungarian, French, German, and a little bit of Russian.”
“Is that all?” Strickland deadpanned.
“No, I forgot to mention Latin.”
“You speak Latin?”
“Four years of Catholic High School.”
“Say something in Latin,” Cameron urged.
Lucas had the vague feeling that he was being made fun of. He wasn’t quite sure—part of the problem of not being an American by birth. He had always been something of an outsider and still found some of the social nuances confusing.
“Veni, Vidi, Vici.”
“Julius Caesar, right? Strickland said.
“Yes. It means: I came. I saw. I conquered.”
“Sounds like MacArthur,” Cameron quipped and the rest chuckled at his joke.
“Speaking Latin is not a very useful talent, I’m afraid,” Lucas added more seriously.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Strickland mused. “You never know. Latin is a lot like Romanian, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is.”
“Do you speak Romanian?”
“No.” This was technically true. Lucas did not speak Romanian, but he understood it and could even read a little.
Strickland weighed Lucas’ response a moment before smiling. “I guess we’ll just have to be satisfied with Hungarian, French, German, Spanish, Latin, and a little Russian.”
Chapter 6
May, 1957
Landstuhl Army Medical Center
Frankfurt, Germany
Doctor Rosenfeld entered the room bringing the cold outside air in with him. It clung to his cloths like cat hair on a pillow and wafted slowly over to Lucas who was sitting in a chair next to his bed.
“Brrr. You could have left the cold outside.”
“You’re talkative today,” the Doctor joked as he removed his hat and coat and placed them on the end of the now unoccupied bed.
Lucas didn’t respond.
“It’s good to see you out of bed—a good sign.”
“They say I’ll be able to go home in a few days if you OK it.”
There it was then; the challenge. “Find something wrong with me or let me go.” Unspoken of course, but there nevertheless. Doctor Rosenfeld had been told almost the same thing by Strickland. “Get a move on,” he had said, “I need to know if I can depend on him.”
Rosenfeld had spent the better part of the night reviewing the file on Lucas Hamilton. It was confusing to say the least. Lucas maintained he was the biological son of Alexandra Carol, the Hungarian-born wife of a French university professor, and the adopted son of the American Harold Hamilton. That much was true, or almost true. Alexandra was his mother, but she had been unable to produce any birth certificates or other documents to support her or Lucas’ identities other than French passports, and the State Department investigation conducted at the time of Alexandra’s application to marry Harold Hamilton could not find any evidence of a “Professor Carol” at any French university. But the investigation was cursory, Europe was in tatters, and the State Department was flooded with thousands of applications for marriage, sanctuary, visas, travel permits, and other requests—and Sasha and Lucas’ French passports and identity documents were in order, so the State Department allowed her to marry Corporal Hamilton and ‘live happily ever after’ in the U.S.
However, when Lucas applied for acceptance into the Student Ambassadors program, the CIA conducted a more thorough investigation that raised more questions than it answered. Alexandra was born in Hungary, but it appears that she married a Hungarian professor, and Lucas had been born Lukács Károlyi in 1935 in Budapest, Hungary, not in France as he claimed. His father, Count Milan Károlyi de Nagykárolyi, was a professor at Eotvos Lorand University, a devout Roman Catholic, and a cousin of Count Mihály Károlyi de Nagykárolyi who had been Prime Minister of the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic.
According to the file, the Károlyi family lived in a never-never land between the Nazis and the Communist partisans, belonging to neither and trusted by neither. Professor Károlyi had many Jewish friends and associates whom he refused to abandon, making him unpopular with the Nazis, while his Catholicism and hereditary connection with the nobility made him equally unpopular with the communists.
In 1944, Milan was shot, whether by the Nazis, or by their fanatical allies ‘The Arrow Cross,’ or the Communists was never established, and in the chaos of war, nobody cared. It was Lucas who, hearing what he later described as a “sharp bang followed by a dull thud” crept out of his room to find his father’s body lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the parlor floor. Milan’s sudden death threw the Károlyi family into desperation. Without a husband, Sasha was forced to move in with Milan’s brother-in-law, Mikhail, a vehement anti-Semite and prominent member of the Arrow Cross. He blamed Milan’s murder on the Communists, who had ample reasons to want him out of the way. This was somewhat plausible. The Nazis may not have liked him, but they had no reason to kill him, and he had the protection of his Arrow Cross brother-in-law—besides, secret assassinations were not their style. If they had wanted Milan dead, they would have sent the SS to arrest him in broad daylight and then they would have shot him in the middle of the square for all to see.
The rest is lost in the fog and confusion of war. Nothing is known of the time between Alexandra’s husband’s death in Budapest and her emergence as the widowed French émigré Alexandra Carol in England.
Unfortunately, there were no surviving documents to support any of the details in the file. It was all hearsay and anecdotal evidence gleaned from neighbors and friends of the Károlyi family who had managed to get out of Hungary before the communist takeover a decade or so earlier.
Rosenfeld was a psychiatrist, not a detective, but he couldn’t help but be intrigued by the Károlyi file. He would have loved to have had the opportunity to interview Sasha, who, he was sure, held the secret to understanding Lucas.
He was convinced the young man was damaged goods, but how or why, he did not know. It would be easy to say that the traumatic experiences of murder and captivity had damaged his psyche, making him an untrustworthy agent—for that is what Strickland wanted to know. But he was equally sure that was the wrong conclusion. Lucas Hamilton was an enigma that Rosenfeld had so far failed to penetrate. He was sure that Washburn, Strickland, and the others in the CIA, along with their adversaries in the KGB had underestimated this quiet, seemingly naïve young man. There were currents running deep in Lucas, currents that had their origins in Budapest in 1944. And Doctor Rosenfeld was expected to uncover them in seven sessions, one hour a day for seven days.
“What do they think I am?” he had stormed, throwing the file across the room in frustration. After a few moments of circling the room, he picked up the contents of the file which had spilled out accusingly across the floor. “Okay, Okay,” he grumped and sat down at his desk once again.
“What is he thinking? Rosenfeld wondered. “Is he mocking me?”
Attempts to get Lucas to talk about either his captivity or the events leading up to it had yielded nothing much more than one-word, factual answers. The young man had revealed nothing of the inner workings of his mind, either at the time of the events or after.
Lucas had exhibited some of the signs of sociopathy, but not enough to convince Rosenfeld that he was irrational. It seemed to him that Lucas was a man so used to pretense, so used to deceiving others, that he did it without effort. With normal people, deception requires an act of will that reveals itself in ‘tells,’ the kind that professional poker players and trained psychologists recognize, but with Lucas, there were no such signals. His reactions always seemed perfectly ordinary—a trifle reserved perhaps, a reticence usually (erroneously) attributed to shyness or naiveté.
Rosenfeld’s examination of the Károlyi’s dossier had convinced him that to understand Lucas, he needed to understand what happened in Budapest, particularly what happened in 1944-45.
“Tell me about your life in Budapest,” he said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Just ordinary things. What was home like? School? Did you have friends? Play football in the schoolyard, that sort of thing.”
“Why do you want to know about that? It has nothing to do with Berlin.”
“I know about Berlin. I want to know about you.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. I was young. There was a war going on.”
“Friends?”
“Family mostly. We didn’t socialize much outside the family.”
“Why was that?”
“Don’t know. I was young. I did what I was told.”
“Did you feel threatened? Was your family in danger?”
“There was a war going on, Doctor—or were you unaware of that? The Allies bombed us during the day. The Communists bombed us at night. The Russians were attacking from the West, the Germans were counterattacking from the East. The Fascists were dragging Jews into the streets and packing them into railroad cars—and you want to know if I felt threatened?”
There was a touch of anger in Lucas’ voice. Rosenfeld heard it. It was faint, and tightly controlled, but it was there, nonetheless. It was the first time that he had shown any significant emotion. He hadn’t shown any when discussing his treatment at the hands of the Stazi, or his discovery of his friend shot dead by a Soviet agent, or his subsequent cold-blooded murder of that agent—but at the mention of his childhood in Budapest, his facade had cracked. Rosenfeld sat back in his chair and made a note in his book. He almost smiled. It was a ‘tell.’ He was right. The answer to the riddle of Lucas Hamilton was to be found, not in Berlin, but in Budapest.
“You are right, of course,” Rosenfeld said. “That was foolish of me, but it must have been extraordinary, growing up where and when you did. You must have experienced a great deal.”
Lucas grew quiet again. Rosenfeld recognized the signs. Lucas was thinking, and if he could be patient enough, sooner or later, the boy would speak, and when he did it would be important.
“How much can I trust you?”
“Completely. I am your doctor.”
“So were the Nazi doctors who experimented on the Jews.”
“I am here to determine the extent of the psychological damage that you may have sustained as a result of your recent experiences in Berlin. I cannot reach a sound conclusion without understanding your history. You know enough about psychology to know that, and I hope you understand the difference between me and the Nazis to know that I would not reveal anything you tell me to anybody.”
“But you work for Strickland, right?”
“I work for the U.S. government, and, yes, in this case I will send my report to Strickland. And, if you want to continue in the role of a Student Ambassador, you will need a clean bill of health from me.”
Lucas thought this over for a while before responding.
“I saw Hitler once,” he said.
Chapter 7
April, 1944
45 Andrássey Út
Budapest, Hungary
Nine-year-old Lukas Károlyi stood alongside his mother and father on the balcony of their four story townhouse on 45 Andrássey Út watching as Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, Regent of Hungary, and the Chancellor of Germany, Adolph Hitler, approached in an open touring car at the head of a column of German troops ostensibly invited into Hungary to protect it from the Russian forces that were massing at its borders.
Crowds lining the broad, tree-lined avenue cheered, and many shouted “Heil Hitler”—but not all. Hidden behind the crowd, hugging the shadows of the buildings, peeking out from doorways cloaked in shadow, some of Budapest’s 600,000 Jews stared in stony silence.
Countess Sasha Károlyi squeezed her husband Milan’s hand as the car passed under the balcony. Neither the Admiral nor the Chancellor seemed to take any notice of the crowds, both sitting rigidly upright, unsmiling, staring straight ahead—except for a brief moment as the car passed 45 Andrássey Út, and Admiral Horthy, “His Serene Highness, The Regent of The Kingdom of Hungary,” reflexively glanced upward at the Károlyi family. Catching his indiscretion, the Admiral quickly looked away, but the movement had not gone unnoticed, for mixed in with the crowds of ordinary Hungarians were agents of the German SS, the Russian NKVD and the fascist Nyilaskeresztes, or Arrow Cross, all watching and recording Admiral Horthy’s every movement, gesture, and word—all of which would be dissected and analyzed in darkened rooms by teams of spies, saboteurs, and assassins, for Hungary was in play, and Horthy was Hungary.
Horthy was born in May 1868 into an aristocratic, Calvinist family. He started his career as a Lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian navy in 1896, and in 1918, by virtue of his family connections, character and exploits, was appointed Admiral. After World War I, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was dissolved and Hungary was declared an independent nation. Landlocked, it had no navy, but that failed to deter Horthy who returned to Budapest as head of the remnants of the Hungarian National Army and established a conservative government with himself as Regent—Hungary was technically still a monarchy, although the Hapsburg King was not invited to rule. From 1920 to 1944, there was only one ruler in Hungary, and it was Horthy.
He was anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, fiercely anti-communist and also anti-fascist. The only thing that Horthy favored—aside from himself—was Hungary, and for two decades after the end of World War I, he had steadfastly guided his country through the labyrinths of international politics, moving from one alliance to another as needed, always following a “Hungary First” policy. It wasn’t easy. Hungary was broke, dependent upon Jewish bankers and the League of Nations for financial support. It needed Germany for its coal and Romania for its oil. The Romanians, Russians and Serbs were always gnawing away at one border, while the specter of a re-emergent Nazi Germany loomed over the other. In early 1940, Horthy chose what he believed to be the lesser of two evils and reluctantly aligned Hungary with Germany. He then outlawed both the Communist party and the Arrow Cross, but it was futile. The two parties continued to exist, growing in power and spoiling for a fight. By mid-1940, Budapest was a seething cauldron of partisans, spies, secret agents and double agents. Violence was a fact of everyday life. Jews were harassed by the fascists, and everybody else was harassed by the communists. Horthy’s circle of support was growing smaller and his number of enemies growing larger.
It was into this dangerous, tense and uncertain environment that Lukas came into awareness. Sasha felt that school was too dangerous and opted to hire a tutor, so for the next five years Lukas left the family’s apartment on 45 Andrássey Út only in the company of his parents, or one of their servants, who, along with his parents, comprised Lukas’s world. Sasha and Milán entertained often, but in accordance with the customs of the times, Lukas would
be introduced to the guests and then discreetly whisked away so the adults could talk and dine in peace. Only on family occasions such as birthdays or religious holidays like Christmas would Lukas be allowed to be a part of the company and join in the festivities, but as the times became more dangerous, family celebrations grew less frequent, and as a result Lukas had little interaction with other children. He spent most all of his time in the care and presence of his tutor, Father Márton Papp, a Jesuit priest, brilliant, demanding, and dedicated to his faith and the Károlyi family.
Many of the nobility had gone to their country estates to escape the violence in Budapest, but for Milán this was impossible because his family estates were located along the Romanian border, which, following Hungary’s pact with Germany had become an active war zone. As dangerous as Budapest was in 1940, it was safer than the front lines. He set up his family in a large twenty room townhouse at 45 Andrássey Út. He brought with him from the country his long-time servant, László Farkas, whose family had served the Károlyi family for generations. He also brought along the housemaid, Ema, and the cook Maja. Father Márton joined the household a few months later.
The atmosphere inside 45 Andrássey Út was almost as tense at the atmosphere outside. The world of Milán Károlyi and his family was crumbling around them. With the war raging on the eastern border, the income from the landholdings was lost, and those friends and family who could help were too busy taking care of themselves to worry about others. Traditional allegiances and family alliances were being forgotten as each person looked out for his or her own interests. Nobody knew who to trust. Nobody could be trusted. Milán tried to protect his family by barricading them inside 45 Andrássey Út, but one bitter cold evening in January 1944, the outside world intruded in the form of a large man, bundled tightly against the weather, his coat collar pulled up, a woolen hat pulled down, and a large scarf wrapped around his neck so high that it obscured his face.
László Farkas responded to the man’s incessant knocking. Wary, he peered through the eye-hole and seeing the man’s sinister appearance, demanded to know who he was and what was his business.