Chapter
8
He’d failed. The world as he knew it had ended.
Val stood in the middle of the room, staring at the hole in which she had just stood. She’d left abruptly, distorting space, sucking the air out with her. Leaving a vacuum that made his lungs burn. The one time in his life as a professional liar in which he gave a shit, and the woman had seen right through him, effortlessly. Smoke and mirrors. A gutted hole. A lifetime of training good for nothing. Now what?
McCloud came in, looking baffled. “Hey, Janos,” he said gruffly. “Look alive. You heard the lady. Move it.”
He just looked at the man stupidly. His throat ached. His brain stalled out.
McCloud made an impatient gesture. “Your business here is finished. Go on back to where you came from. And don’t come back.”
Val roused himself, retrieved his briefcase. In the anteroom, Nick Ward silently handed him his coat and knife. He shrugged the garment on, sheathed the knife, moving stiffly, like a robot.
Ward cleared his throat. “Hey, uh, don’t take it too hard.”
Val looked at him, utterly blank. “I beg your pardon?”
“A woman like Tam…” Ward waved his hand helplessly. “That’s, like, her way of showing that she likes you.”
Val felt a crazy urge to laugh. “Likes me? Me, the lying piece of walking shit that you have been ordered to shoot on sight?”
“Oh, don’t take that personally,” Ward encouraged. “At least you made an impression. And let me tell you, that chick is hard to impress.”
“True,” McCloud interjected dourly. “You’re still alive, so you must have something going for you. Now move it. This isn’t a fucking therapy session.”
The men flanked him, escorted him down the elevator and walked him out of the club in stolid silence. They left him a few hundred meters from the building and strode briskly away without looking back.
With an extreme act of will, Val gathered his wits and looked around. There was a bar across the street, a seedy place with few people inside. He would take refuge in a glass of scotch. He might as well continue to act like Val Janos until further notice. He had no better persona to assume. Certainly none he could call his own.
He ordered, and sipped morosely at the shot of Glenfiddich, hunched over the scarred wooden table in the backmost booth. The flavor reminded him of those gleaming, tilted eyes, taking him in, sizing him up over the rim of the cut crystal tumbler.
Piercing him through.
He could not hide from those bright eyes. Empty, paper nonentity that he was after all those years of killing and whoring for PSS.
He rubbed his face. The woman had power, he acknowledged silently. To make him creep into a bar with his shoulders hunched, to suck liquor and feel sorry for himself. But he did not have that leisure.
In forty-eight hours, Novak would start to cut. Val could not acknowledge defeat. Not yet.
He got his laptop out of the briefcase, unfolded the collapsible liquid crystal monitor into a twelve-inch screen, unfolded the tiny skeleton keyboard, and booted up. He took another swallow of scotch, let it burn its way down his gullet, and opened the file of Novak’s photographs that he had scanned into his computer that morning.
They shone, turning in the matrix. It never bored him to meditate upon them. There was always something new to discover in a photograph of Steele, even while squirming under Novak’s boot heel.
He clicked through them until he found his favorite, the most mysterious and enigmatic of them all. The black dress, the sad face. The bouquet of wild daisies and lavender laid on the bronze plaque. He put it in the matrix and took three steps back, letting it turn and shine.
A shiver went up his back as an idea took form. He began to magnify the photograph, enlarging the plaque until it filled the screen.
Other bouquets were piled below the plaque, obscuring what was engraved on it. He barely made out the word Zetrinja, a date, 1992, and some quote in a language he did not know. Then a list of names.
It was a very long list. The names were indecipherable, at least with this program, at this pixelation.
The memorial plaque and the names suggested a mass grave. There were crowds of people. Men in suits, television cameras.
A memorial service, honoring the dead from some wartime atrocity. His mind raced. 1992. The Serbo-Croatian conflict. Not his area of expertise, but Henry had spent time in the Balkans and spoke the language well. PSS had many operatives deployed there. And Henry was the only person he had spoken to about this mission.
He pulled out his phone and called him. His fellow operative was currently at the main PSS headquarters outside Paris. The phone rang six times before his friend answered, his voice thick with sleep.
“Fuck this, Val. It’s five in the morning,” Henry complained.
“I need a favor,” Val said without apology.
“Don’t you always,” Henry grumbled.
“Ever hear of a place called Zetrinja?”
Henry thought about it. “Rings a bell. Croatia, I think.”
“Go into the archives. Find what you can about what happened there in 1992. See if you can get me a list of the girls and young women from the age of, say, ten to twenty who might have been involved in it.”
Henry whistled. “You think Steele is Croatian?” he said finally.
“Could be,” Val said. “Or this could be completely irrelevant.”
Henry was silent for a long moment. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly. “Something off?”
Val hesitated. He’d been trying to decide whether or not to involve Henry in this snakepit ever since he had left Budapest. But if he needed to mount a rescue mission, he was not going to be able to do it alone. He needed backup, and Henry was the only one he trusted.
He took the plunge. “Something’s off,” he said.
He detailed Imre’s hostage situation to Henry in a few terse phrases. His friend was grimly silent afterward.
“That rots, buddy,” he said. “You are truly fucked.”
“Ah. Thank you for the encouragement. I am heartened.”
“What next?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know,” Val said. “I’m improvising. I may come up with something extremely dangerous and crazy. Can I count upon you?”
“Don’t insult me, asshole. I live for dangerous and crazy. Want me to come to—”
“No. Stay in Europe. I’ll let you know what I need. And check on Zetrinja for me as soon as you can. I need a hook into this woman.”
They closed the call, and he pulled up the phone numbers.
Time to start bothering her. In a couple of hours, Steele would know exactly who was putting it to her. With luck, she’d get angry enough to try to track him down and kill him. That old schoolyard attitude: negative attention was better than no attention at all.
He would do anything to make her notice him. Anything at all.
He should have told the boy.
Regret for not having done so ate at him worse than the physical pain. Imre tried to breathe, to relax into it, but he could not. His lungs had contracted, clenching like fists that would not relent.
He rocked back and forth on the small, hard cot,