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István took me through two levels of the facility, each one colder than the last.
No one we passed made eye contact.
The few technicians we met looked down or away, speaking only when spoken to. If they spoke any language beyond Hungarian, I never heard it. That restricted their conversations, however brief, to them and István.
Equipment buzzed and ticked. Signals passed along hard lines in ancient rhythms. The ghosts of the war still echoed in the walls.
I remained at the station for nearly four hours.
The tour ended, but I lingered, asking to examine a different section of the relay array. István obliged me.
The longer I stayed, the more certain I became that I wasn’t merely being watched; someone wastimingme, waiting to see if I made a mistake, looked too long—or not long enough—at the wrong diagram. Would I open the wrong drawer, ask a question too precise to come from someone who didn’t already know the answer—or one so stupid an expert would laugh?
I kept everything slow. Boring. Routine.
By the time the sun began to set, I thanked István for his time and made a note to “report positively” to my nonexistent superiors.
He smiled, nodded, and said he looked forward to collaboration.
I didn’t believe a word of it.
I doubted he did either.
21
Sparrow
ThesheetswereEgyptiancotton, the soap smelled of rose oil, and the radiator worked so well I had to crack the window just to breathe. My feet sank into the plush carpeting every time I moved, muffling my steps like I was walking through a cloud.
Everything in the room was beautiful.
Which was exactly why I hated it.
The hotel had been chosenforme. Not by me. It was a “show hotel,” the Soviets called it, where they put foreigners with credentials and clean coats, a place that said, “Look how well we treat our guests. Look how far we’ve come. Isn’t communism glorious?”
It was a lie built with velvet drapes and polished brass. The light switches were gold-plated. The towels were embroidered. There was a small bottle of brandy in a crystal decanter on the desk, sealed with wax stamped by the state.
I hadn’t touched it—not because I wasn’t tempted—but because I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to ask what I’d been doing while I was sick.
I lay in bed, a silk robe thrown over my clothes, one hand resting on my stomach like I was shielding it from further betrayal. My hair was mussed, lips paled with a dab of powder. A teacup sat on the nightstand—half full, cooling in the artificial warmth of my room.
At precisely 8:37 a.m., I called the front desk and requested hot water and a mild digestive. My voice was thin and apologetic, that of a woman in a foreign land with a disagreeable constitution.
They bought it.
Or they pretended to.
The porter arrived seven minutes later, impeccably dressed in a crimson uniform jacket that looked absurd against the city’s gray decay. His shoes were shined to a mirror finish. His mustache was neat. His smile was sympathetic.
“Chamomile, miss,” he said, placing the tray down on the cart near the bed. “And a peppermint tonic. It is our own recipe, very soothing.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, managing the right kind of tight-lipped smile, the kind that said, “I want to be polite, but I might be sick on your boots.”
He didn’t leave right away. I thought he waited for a tip, but then his eyes flicked over the room—casually butnotaimlessly. They passed over the open wardrobe, the empty writing desk, the undisturbed nightstand drawer.
Over the radiator, the sill, the window latch.
He was searching. Not with his hands. With training.