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Which was worse than if he had.
Was I being followed? Were they watching me? Had I been noticed?
Yes.
And also no.
That was the trick of it—we never really knew until we were already in the trunk of a car.
I leaned back, stretched, and feigned boredom. A woman passed behind me with a stack of dossiers, and I caught her glancing at the fake embassy seal on my folder.
Just once.
Then she moved on.
By the fourth hour, my fingers were numb, and my eyes ached. I was certain my butt would never have feeling again. Even the ink from my pen refused to dry, as if the air itself had stopped trying.
By my fifth hour in the dungeon, I decided the only thing more dangerous than Soviet surveillance was the Hungarian filing system.
When I emerged into the street, the sun had dimmed to a muted smear behind the clouds. Snow hadn’t started yet, but the air tasted like it might. I tucked my scarf higher and walked two blocks before hailing a taxi. The driver looked at me like he knew too much. Or maybe I was just tired.
“Gellért Hotel,” I said, voice soft but sure.
He nodded, and we pulled away from the curb, Budapest’s city hall folding itself behind us like a closing book.
20
Thomas
Thestationwaslocatedjust north of the Buda Hills, housed in a squat, soot-stained building with too many windows and not enough life behind them. A faded Ministry of Communications placard hung crookedly near the door, flanked by rust-streaked walls and a guard smoking a cigarette with the indifference of a man who’d forgotten what he was guarding.
I gave my name, handed over the forged paperwork, and waited in the cold. The guard barely glanced at the papers before waving me through.
I was expected. Of course I was.
That didn’t comfort me.
Inside, the air was stale with dust and the faint tang of overheated wiring. The lobby was silent but for the buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. The receptionist behind the cracked veneer desk greeted me with a nod so shallow it could’ve been a twitch. His eyes lingered a half second longer than necessary on my credentials.
That was the first alarm bell. Quiet but present.
“Welcome, Dr. Beckett,” he said in Hungarian-accented English. “You are here to observe the switching upgrades, yes?”
“That is correct,” I said, coolly pleasant. “As part of the post-war cooperation review, our office is studying a variety of infrastructure efforts across sectors. I believe this station was recommended for its resilience.”
The man didn’t ask who recommended it. He didn’t care.
Or he already knew.
He pressed a button on his desk and said something into a wall-mounted intercom. Then gestured for me to wait.
My guide’s name was István, a narrow man in a gray utility jacket and boots too clean for anyone who actually worked here. He was polite, if hurried, and his speech pattern was too polished for a station tech. His hair was neatly parted. His hands didn’t carry the grime of someone handling relays. His fingernails had been freshly trimmed.
He was most definitelynota technician.
“This way, please,” he said, his English accented but flawless. “We’ve just completed an overhaul on our northern junction board. There were issues with grounding distribution in the winter, but the new Soviet-built plates have compensated well.”
He spoke quickly, efficiently, as if reading from a memorized file. I nodded, took notes with a fountain pen that left precise, legible marks, and pretended to care about coil load management and interlock designs.