Hegel was an American ex–Special Forces helicopter pilot, Vietnam vet, and covert operative with Prime Security Solutions since its inception. Val had met him eleven years ago in Ouagadougou when he arrived with thirty tons of small arms and ammo, antitank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, RPG tubes, and warheads from a Ukrainian arms manufacturer, destined for the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front.
He was to trade them for a fortune in smuggled diamonds.
A plane waiting for them began to discreetly ferry the weapons to Monrovia, where the final transaction would take place.
Hegel was one of the helicopter pilots who flew the weapons into the rebel strongholds in the jungle. Val discovered afterward that he had been working undercover, investigating sources of arms that flowed to the rebels. Hegel had invited him to go on a weapons run, and out of curiosity and boredom, Val had gone along. They stopped because of mechanical difficulties in Moidu, a small town in the jungle.
By chance, they were there when rebels attacked the town.
It was a massacre. The rebel soldiers were children and teenagers themselves, crazed out of their minds on palm wine and cocaine, armed with the assault rifles and rocket launchers he had just sold to them. They sliced, hacked, and gunned down everything they saw.
Val had seen a great deal of violence in his life, but when he saw the young pregnant girl ripped apart before his eyes by two young thugs with machetes, something tipped inside him. He didn’t remember the dynamics of the fight, how it went or how it ended. It was just a blur of noise, blood. Hegel had dragged him out of it. Alive, amazingly.
He’d awakened in a hospital bed in a fog of agonizing pain and saw Hegel beside him. The man’s metallic gray eyes were looking him over. Coldly, appraisingly. As if considering his purchase.
Hegel told him about Prime Security Solutions, a private mercenary army equipped with armored fighting vehicles, gunships, fighter planes, all manner of weaponry. It provided its clients with military training, VIP protection, airline transport, offshore financial management services, intelligence, infrared photo recon, satellite imagery. PSS could deploy a battalion-strength force anywhere in the world in hours. It was well equipped, sleek, powerful. And it paid well.
Hegel made him an offer. Vajda could be reborn with a new name, a new life—in exchange for service as a covert operative.
Vajda explained that leaving Gabor Novak’s employ was more complicated than it seemed, but Hegel just shrugged. Money would solve that problem, and Vajda was well worth the severance fee Novak would charge them. It would all be taken care of—if Val said yes.
At the time, it was an attractive alternative to his former servitude. He soon realized that there was no difference that mattered. PSS’s agenda was brutally simple: to help their wealthy, powerful clients amass more wealth and power by means of pulling strings all over the world. Openly or secretly. Legally or not. To that end, PSS wanted a killing machine. Killing was killing, whoever you did it for.
So it was that he had become Valery Janos, Italian citizen, resident of Rome, born in Italy of Hungarian parents. The first of many aliases and his best developed innocuous civilian identity.
It was his favorite identity. On paper and on the Internet, Val Janos lived the life he secretly longed for. A hardworking businessman who lived quietly in his lavish apartment on Piazza Navona in Rome.
He loved his adopted country and city. He had absorbed his adopted language as if he had been born to it. He lived in it, thought in it, dreamed in it even, far more so than in the Hungarian he had learned at the age of six when his mother brought him to Budapest or the Romanian he’d been born to. He liked being Val Janos, the perfect, cultured gentleman who minded his business, and bothered no one—unless one counted his disgruntled ex-lovers, of course. The Val Janos persona was a voracious ladies’ man, who bored easily.
But even after investing a fortune in his training, even though he was one of their best operatives, PSS never let him forget what he owed them. He was a tool, like a grenade, bomb, gun—but ultimately, he was just mafiya scum to them, to be kept under careful control.
Vajda was still on the street, just with a more powerful pimp.
Hegel belched and wiped his face on the checkered napkin. “What the fuck are you doing in Budapest?”
“Why even ask?” Val said. “You already know everything.”
Hegel grunted. “I thought you were more professional than this. Although your performance on that last operation gave me doubts.”
Val imitated Imre’s air of impenetrable calm.
“Tight-assed bastard,” Hegel muttered. He grabbed a shot glass, sloshed a generous amount of palinka into it, and shoved it across the table at Val. “Relax, for fuck’s sake. You’re giving me gas.”
Val made no move to taste the liquor. Hegel grabbed the glass and downed the shot himself in one noisy gulp. “If I meant to kill you, I wouldn’t do it in a restaurant,” he announced. “And poison’s not my style. Woman’s weapon. I don’t do chick tricks.”
“You have no style. You do whatever is expedient. It’s the first thing you ever taught me,” Val said. He reached for the shot glass, sniffed it, and set it down, untasted.
Hegel glugged more palinka into his glass. “You want to know a secret, Janos?”
“I’m not sure,” Val said. “Do I?”
“You were supposed to die that day, eleven years back, in Sierra Leone. Did you know that?”
“Really.” His response was emotionless. He was feeding data into the matrix, observing from within a core of utter silence. Waiting until he knew where Hegel was going with it. It was no surprise, in any case.
“We were monitoring the arms suppliers to all of the African conflicts. It was concluded that you were dangerous, young as you were. Better to kill the poisonous snake right out of the egg, right?”
“I see,” Val said.
Hegel shook a cigarette out. “Then I saw you fight in Moidu. You were a fucking maniac, even without any formal training. Natural talent, languages, and brains. All the makings of a brilliant operative. I decided to take a huge risk. For you.”
“I’m touched,” Val said coolly.
Hegel lit his cigarette and took a drag. “That day could have gone one of two ways. Either I held your nose shut, or I offered you a job.”
He gazed at Val, breathing out a long stream of smoke.
Val stared back, expressionless. What did the man expect? Gratitude for not killing him? He’d spat blood for PSS for years.
Hegel’s lips pursed around his cigarette. “I’m starting to regret that decision.”
“I am devastated,” Val murmured.
“Don’t mouth off to me. What happened in Moidu was damn lucky.” He grunted. “For you, anyway.”
Val was not sure that his life over the past eleven years was that much more desirable than a bloody but mercifully quick death.
Hegel made an impatient sound. “Get your ass back to work, Janos. You made me look like shit, going incommunicado for three days. Luksch is riding my ass. He wants that woman now.”
“Sorry,” Val said, unrepentant.
“This is your last chance to redeem yourself for that Fuentes disaster,” Hegel went on. “Do not fuck this up.”
“That op went by the book,” Val argued wearily. “Every member of the Fuentes cartel was dead at the end of the day. What’s to criticize?”
“Emilia Fuentes,” Hegel snarled. “Don’t play dumb with me.”
Val saw the girl in his mind’s eye. Puppy fat, school uniform, eyes huge