“Anyone who kills Ivanov is my loverboy,” Yuxia remarked.
Csongor had a strong feeling that Ivanov’s killer would make a terrible loverboy. He turned and looked at Marlon.
A human figure, outside the car, caught his eye. He looked out the dust-hazed windshield to see a uniformed PSB officer standing in the median strip, just by the side of the road, facing traffic. Both hands in front of him.
Aiming a gun.
Right at them.
Csongor twitched so hard that he kicked Ivanov’s man-purse under the passenger seat. But as the cop was flashing by, he perceived that it was actually a manikin, planted there on a concrete base, and that the thing in its hands was a mockup of a radar gun. He put his hands to his face and leaned back and tried to compose himself.
First things first. “You have a phone?” Csongor asked.
Marlon hadn’t noticed the manikin. He had been gazing curiously at Csongor’s strange reactions and movements. He nodded, sat up out of his slouch, produced a phone, and yanked its battery. Csongor felt a wave of good feeling pass through him. Not only had Marlon guided him out of hell, but he was the kind of guy who didn’t have to be told how to render his phone silent and untraceable.
“Yuxia?”
“No! Dr. Evil took it.”
“Then it’s probably in Dr. Evil’s bag,” Csongor said. He extricated it from beneath the passenger seat, hauled it up onto his lap, and began zipping it open. The unmistakable lurid pink of Chinese currency gleamed in the gap, and he thought better of opening the thing wide. So he opened it just enough to get his hand inside and began groping around. This went slowly, since he couldn’t see what he was doing. Marlon watched with a mixture of curiosity and nervousness.
“Who was that guy?” Csongor asked, trying to get Marlon thinking of something else. “That black man?”
Marlon’s eyes snapped up from the bag to glare at Csongor. “Who the fuck are you!?” he demanded.
Then Marlon and Yuxia got into an argument. Csongor had the impression that Yuxia had reprimanded Marlon for his bad manners.
“Don’t worry about it,” Csongor said. “It is a reasonable question.” He grinned, trying to convey that he was not offended. Any kind of pronounced facial expression made his head hurt, though.
Perhaps in response to something Marlon had said, Yuxia got an interested look on her face and turned to scrutinize Csongor. Then her eyes dropped to the bag.
Marlon tapped her on the shoulder and nodded toward the windshield, trying to draw her attention to the road, since she had drifted back into the left lane and was passing a lot of cars.
“Marlon is right,” she concluded, turning back around and dropping speed. “Who the fuck are you?”
It was obvious that Csongor’s behavior with the bag had set their nerves on edge. So he dropped it to the floor of the van, in the middle of the space between himself and Yuxia and Marlon. He unzipped it all the way and pulled back its top flap to expose its full contents.
It had some kind of internal stiffeners that held it open in a box shape. Its main central cavity was filled with money: as many as a dozen rubber-banded bricks that, along with the ammunition clips and the electric stun gun, floated around in a stew of loose bills and ten-bill packets. Sewn to the inside walls of the bag were a number of little mesh pockets, filled with clutter. Csongor, recognizing the purplish-red hue of a Hungarian passport, opened one of these and pulled out a clear Ziploc bag containing his passport, his phone, and most of the contents of his wallet. He pulled the battery from the phone and put the other stuff on the seat next to him. Continuing to explore the other pockets, he found two other Ziploc bags, one containing Peter’s stuff and the other containing Zula’s. He made certain that their phones were deactivated.
Yet another phone, a Chinese model, had been thrown into one of the pockets. Csongor pulled it out and held it up. “Is this yours?” he asked, popping out the battery.
No answer came from Yuxia, and he looked up for the first time to discover her and Marlon gazing into the bag in silent astonishment. She, at least, had the presence of mind to glance up at the road from time to time.
“This is Ivanov’s bag,” Csongor said. “Do you guys understand that? It is not mine.”
“It is now,” Marlon said.
“Are those bullets?” Yuxia asked.
Csongor placed Yuxia’s phone and its battery in the cup holder next to her elbow, then reached into the bag and held up one of the ammunition clips. The top couple of cartridges were clearly visible at its top. “Yes.”
“You have a gun?” Her tone of voice was not: It would be really cool and useful if you had a gun. It was, rather, If you have a gun, we are in even worse trouble than I had thought.
“No. Only these. Maybe the other guy took Ivanov’s gun.”
“What is in the end part?” Marlon asked, eyeing a separate compartment on the end of the bag, big enough to hold a couple of paperback books. Something was definitely making it bulge. Csongor unzipped it, reached in, and, to his own shock, pulled out a pistol. This one was smaller than the one Ivanov had been carrying, with woodgrained grips. He recognized it: this was the basic sidearm that Soviet and Russian military had always carried. He simply could not believe that one of them was in his hand.
“OMG,” Marlon said.
In Hungary, Csongor had had very little access to guns. But on a trip to a hacker conference in Vegas two years ago, he had spent a couple of evenings at firing ranges that catered to foreign visitors, and he had learned a few basics. He figured out how to eject the clip from this weapon, then maneuvered it into a shaft of sun coming in through the crack in the roof and pulled back the slide just enough to verify that no rounds were in the chamber. Then he found the safety and flicked it back and forth a couple of times just to get a feel for when it was on and when it was off. When he was certain that the weapon contained no cartridges and that it was inert, he set it on the van’s seat next to him, then reached back into the bag pocket to see what other treasures might be contained in there. He came up with a spare clip for the pistol, fully stuffed with cartridges. Then he pulled out a pair of heavy black cylinders with steel rings affixed to their tops.
He looked up and locked eyes with Marlon. Neither of them had ever seen anything like this before, outside of a video game, but Csongor was pretty certain, and Marlon’s expression confirmed, that these were grenades.
“Make some noise if you are alive,” said Yuxia. Traffic had become complex, and she was doing a lot of lane changing.
“Now we have a pistol and a couple of hand grenades,” Csongor announced.
Marlon had taken one of the grenades and was examining it. The sides of the canister were perforated with large holes, revealing some internal structure. “These are not real grenades,” he announced. “Look. No shrapnel. Holes instead.”
“Stun grenades?” Csongor guessed.
“Or smoke or tear gas.” Marlon and Csongor could communicate very clearly as long as they hewed to vocabulary from video games.
Yuxia intervened. “Csongor’s supposed to be telling us who he is,” she reminded Marlon. “Grenade can be explained later.”
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Csongor promised. “But first please tell me what just happened. What do you know about that tall black guy?”
Marlon was glaring at him. Csongor realized that he had insulted Marlon, or more likely just spooked him, by implying that he, Marlon, might know something about who the guy was. He looked into Marlon’s eyes. “It might be important,” Csongor pleaded.
“He lived upstairs with dudes from the far west,” Marlon said. “We only saw him a couple of times.”
“Did you know that these dudes from the far west had AK-47s?”
“What do you take me for, man?”
“Okay, sorry.”
Csongor leaned back in his seat, hoping that this would ease the throbbing in his head. There was a significant silence: their way of reminding him tha
t he had yet to explain himself. “Okay,” he said. “Do you guys know anything about Hungary?”
Neither of them did. But neither would come out and admit it, perhaps worried about being impolite. Marlon, somewhat surprisingly, made a reference to the 1956 Olympic water polo team. But that was where his knowledge of Hungary began and ended.
Whenever Csongor found himself in an airport, he would go to the newsstand and browse the endless racks of glossy English-and German-language magazines, bemused by the phenomenon of cultures that were large enough to support monthly publications in which people would dither in print over the minutest details of makeup, high-performance motorcycles, and model railways. Hungarians learned those languages so that they could feign membership in that world when it suited them. But their isolation and tininess were nothing compared to what it would have been if Hungary had been part of China. Here, if Hungarians survived at all, they would be trotted out once a year to perform folk dances, simply to prove to the rest of the world that they hadn’t yet been exterminated. Csongor had never heard of Yuxia’s ethnic minority, the Hakka, and yet he didn’t have to look them up on Wikipedia to guess that there were probably ten times as many of them as there were Hungarians.
So where to begin?
“It is a long story. I could start with the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said, “and go on from there. But.” He stopped, sighed, and considered it.
“First, I am an asshole who made a lot of wrong decisions.”
Hungary was an embedded system. It was idle to dream of what it would be like, and of all the brave and noble decisions Hungarians would have made, had it been a thousand times larger and surrounded by a saltwater moat. He paused to rest.
Yuxia checked him in the rearview.
Marlon fixed him with a somewhat incredulous look as if to say, If you’re an asshole who made wrong decisions, what am I?
Csongor couldn’t help chuckling at this. Somewhat to his astonishment, Marlon’s face cracked open with a smile. Cool, tough, world-wise, but unquestionably a smile. He turned back toward the window to hide it.
“And because of certain fucked-up remnants of the past, which we are now getting rid of,” Csongor continued, “things were actually simple and easy for me as long as I kept making the wrong decisions. However”—he checked his watch, and found that its crystal was shattered and its hands had stopped—“something like half an hour ago, I made the correct decision and did the right thing. Look where I am now.”
Another nervous mirror-glance from Yuxia. Csongor realized he’d better explain that remark. “In a car with nice people,” he said.
That was better, but he was still planting his big feet in the wrong places. To Csongor, Marlon would always be the guy who risked his life to enter a collapsing building and lead a stranger to safety. But Marlon, he sensed, didn’t want to be thought of that way. He had the cool insouciance of the skate rats performing their death-defying leaps in the Erszébet Tér, the hackers showing off their latest exploits at DefCon in Vegas.
“Or at least one nice person,” Csongor corrected himself.
Marlon turned around and gave him that smile again, then reached back with his right hand. Some kind of complex basketball-player handshake ensued. Csongor was pretty sure he muffed his end of it; Central European hockey players didn’t go in for such things. But he no longer had that awful feeling that he used to get when he was trying to skate backward, and so he let it rest there.
MR. JONES SAID nothing further in English until an hour into the journey, when he looked at Zula and said, “I give up.”
By that time they had completed a couple of circuits of the ring road that lined the island’s shore. Contrary to the first instruction given, they had not gone to the airport. Zula had been confused by this until she had understood that her companion—if that was the right word—didn’t speak a word of Chinese, and that he assumed (correctly as it turned out) that the taxi driver spoke no English; so he had just shouted the one English word that every taxi driver in the world had to know. This had been just to get him moving. Once that driver had nudged and honked his way clear of the chaos surrounding the exploded building, Mr. Jones had produced a phone, dialed a number, and spoken in Arabic. Zula had known that it was Arabic because she had heard a fair bit of that language while living in a refugee camp in the Sudan. After a brief exchange of news, which Zula could tell had been extremely surprising to the person on the other end of the line—for Mr. Jones had soon grown weary of insisting that every word was true—he had handed the phone up to the taxi driver, who had listened to some instructions, nodded vigorously, and said something that must have meant “yes” or “I will do it.”
Mr. Jones had then exchanged a few more terse Arabic sentences with his interlocutor and hung up. And the taxi driver had begun to drive laps around the ring road.
Zula had been resting her free elbow on the frame of the taxi’s window, turning her hand out, from time to time, to press her fingertips against the tinted glass. There was something about the manufactured environment of a car that engendered a completely bogus feeling of safety.
When Mr. Jones said those three words: “I give up,” Zula opened her eyes and startled a little. Could it really be that she had gone to sleep? Seemed a strange time for a nap. But the body reacted in odd ways to stress. And once they had gotten out onto the ring road, there had been nothing in the way of shootings or explosions to demand her attention. Exhaustion had stolen up on her.
“He was Russian, yes? The big man?”
“The man you … killed?” She couldn’t believe that sentences like this one were coming out of her mouth.
Surprise, then a trace of a smile came over the gunman’s face. “Yes.”
“Yeah. Russian.”
“The others too. Upstairs. Spetsnaz.”
Zula had never heard the word “Spetznaz” until a couple of days ago, but she knew what it meant now. She nodded.
“But there were three others … different.” He raised his cuffed hand, dragging hers with it, and stuck his thumb up in the air. “You.” His index finger. “The one that the big Russian killed in the stairwell. I think he was American.” His long finger. “And the one in the cellar who tried to protect you…”
“He did more than try.”
“He was maybe Russian too—but somehow different from the others?”
“Hungarian.”
“The big man—organized crime?”
“More like disorganized,” Zula said. “We think he was on the run from his own organization. He screwed something up, big-time. He was trying to cover it up. Make amends.”
“You say ‘we.’ What do you mean by ‘we’?”
She twisted her cuffed hand up and around and mimicked his counting-on-the-fingers gesture.
“The three of you,” he said.
Mr. Jones thought about it for a while. His mood seemed to be improving, but he was cautious all the same. “If I take what you say at face value,” he said, “then this is not what I assumed at first.”
“You assumed what?”
“Covert special ops raid, of course.” The phrase was familiar enough, being the fodder of countless newspaper articles and summer movie plots, but he spoke it with an emphasis, an inflection she had never heard before, as one who actually knew of such things firsthand, had seen his friends die in them. “But if this is really what you say—” He blinked and shook his head, like a man trying to fight off the effects of a hypnotizing drug. “Impossible. Stupid. It was absolutely a special ops job. In fancy dress.”
“Fancy dress?”
“What you would call a costume party,” he shot back, slipping into a parody of a flat midwestern accent. “To make it deniable.” Back to the usual British accent now, the one she couldn’t quite place. “Because it would make a hell of a diplomatic mess to send a military team into China. This way, though, they can shrug their shoulders: ‘It’s those crazy Russian mafia guys, we have no control over them, there w
as nothing we could do.’ ”
It sounded so convincing that Zula was starting to believe it herself.
“What was your role?” he asked.
Zula laughed.
His eyes widened slightly. Then he laughed too. “The three,” he said, making the hand gesture again. “Why does a deep cover Russian hit squad need to be dragging around the Three We? Handcuffing them to pipes and shooting them in the head?”
At the reminder that Peter was dead, Zula’s face collapsed and she felt a momentary sick shock that she’d been laughing only a moment earlier. They were silent for a while, just driving.
“So you guys are in the virus-writing business?” she tried.
She now learned what Jones looked like when he was utterly dumbfounded. This would have been satisfying had Zula not been every bit as confused.
“The Russians,” she explained. “That’s why they—we—went to that apartment building. To find someone who had written a virus.”
“A computer virus,” Jones said, stating the question as a fact.
Zula nodded and was left with the unsettling notion that Jones’s group might be working with other kinds of viruses.
“We have nothing to do with writing computer viruses,” Jones announced. “Come to think of it though, might be a good line to get into.” Then his mind snapped into focus. “Oh,” he said. “That lot downstairs. Boys with computers. Always wondered what they were doing.”
Zula swallowed hard and went silent. She had just remembered a fleeting image from just before the start of the gunfire: a coin shoved into the fuse socket, a crescent moon and a star. Someone—perhaps Jones himself—had put that coin in there when they had invaded the vacant flat and set up a squat.
This was all her doing. What would Jones do to her when he understood that?
“So the big Russian—” Jones began.
“Ivanov.”
“He was royally pissed off at those lads.”
“You might say that.”
“How did you get involved?”
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