Page 104

Sparrow
Weleftthehotelin silence, dressed like shadows, coats plain, boots scuffed, shoulders hunched against the wind. Egret’s gloved hand brushed mine once on the stairs. I didn’t look at him. We were too close to the moment, and I was too full of noise I couldn’t afford to speak aloud.
Three turns and two detours through alleyways.
We lost our tail.
The man in the sedan was nowhere to be seen. At least, not obviously. In this city, you were never completely sure.
The streets thinned. Lamps guttered. We passed a scraggly cat perched on a windowsill like a gargoyle. It licked a paw, not caring enough to look up as we strode by.
Then we saw the house.
Farkas’s street was still.
Still, and far too quiet.
A sedan sat just off the curb, across the street from Farkas’s home, its nose tilted toward the dark. Smoke curled from the driver’s side window—white and lazy and far too careless for someone with orders to guard a valuable asset.
“One,” Egret held up his forefinger.
I followed his gaze.
The soldier in the car was slouched in his seat, the cherry of his cigarette glowing with each breath. He wasn’t asleep, but he didn’t appear alert either, like a man who’d stood post for too many nights without anything happening. He wouldn’t see us, not if we moved like ghosts.
We ducked behind the hedgerow that separated Farkas’s house from his neighbor’s.
The yard was littered with dead leaves and snow-mottled rubbish. Next to the neighbor’s home, a broken rake lay half buried in the dirt beside a rusted washtub.
The back of Farkas’s house opened into a narrow walled garden—or what had once been one. Time and war had starved it of care. Now, the plot was a tired patch of frozen soil ringed by broken paving stones and scattered weeds clinging to life under a crust of early frost. A rust-streaked drain ran from the gutter down into a half-buried cistern.
The rear façade itself was built in the same modest but solid Hungarian style as the front—stucco flaking over brick, with narrow windows framed in faded trim. A stone stoop led down to a patch of grass, just wide enough to pace across. A shutter on the second floor hung askew, the hinge weakened out by some forgotten storm.
As expected, there was a back door, painted a once-pleasant cream color now dulled to the shade of a smoker’s teeth. It opened into the kitchen, we knew.
A line for drying laundry hung limp between the house and the tool shed—a squat, wooden structure at the edge of the garden that looked as if a strong wind could tip it over.
Beyond the shed, the lot ended in a dense hedgerow, a continuation of the one separating the sides of Farkas’s and his neighbor’s homes. Unlike the well-kept side hedge, the one in back was overgrown and tangled, rising a very uneven seven feet tall.
A concrete bench sat beneath the hedge on Farkas’s side, its seat stained from rain and decades of use. Once, perhaps, he and Eszter had sat there. Now, it stood as another relic of better days.
I scanned behind, toward the neighbor’s house, memorizing exit routes and possible threat lines. Dim yellow windowlight flickered from a large window—just enough to silhouette a dining table and anyone craving a nighttime snack.
No one rose from the table. No one peered out the window. No one came outside.
Not this late.
Turning back, the rear door to Farkas’s house loomed ahead—wood, weathered, chipped paint beneath the handle.
It was half past midnight, probably closer to one in the morning. There was no light from the glass of the door or window on the floor above.
I dropped to one knee and pulled the old brass key from my coat pocket. It had been given to us by Commander Raines himself—a relic from one of Farkas’s past handlers, preserved for just such a moment—or, perhaps, for the moment a team had to execute a far darker order. I was glad those were not our orders that night.
Something clicked in the lock like it remembered us.
I eased the door open and stepped inside.
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