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He offered a small nod. Nothing else.
I returned it.
“My name is Geza. I am here to—”
“Your lady friend is quite lovely,” the man said, smiling, as he bent, disappearing below the counter for only a second. “Ah, yes, here you are.”
He produced the envelope. It was sealed with the false name—Geza—scrawled across the front. I tore open the package and removed a worn book whose title read,High-Frequency Alternating Currentsby Kenneth S. Johnson.
An American book?In English?
“Thank you,” I murmured.
The bookseller gave a quiet grunt, as if I’d thanked him for directions or the time of day.
I turned and left, the bell chiming again above me.
My driver barely looked back as I climbed into the sedan, though I did catch his eyes through the rearview mirror as they flickered to the book in my hand. I settled in and tried—desperately—not to fidget with the tome. It held secrets, possibly answers, and my heart was racing at the thought of what might be written inside.
I ran my thumb across the spine, then shifted my legs, folded my hands across the book as though shielding it from the cold. We hit a bump, the old sedan jolting hard, and I nearly fumbled it.
We passed shuttered shops, faceless statues, and far too many empty windows. My pulse refused to slow.
The warehouse was as bleak as ever.
From the outside, it was nondescript—little more than a rust-colored shell tucked along the Danube, forgotten even by the rats. Inside, though, it had been transformed into a cathedral of concrete and steel, gas lamps, a dozen desks no one sat at but me, and a tangle of wires strung like cobwebs between machines that breathed and blinked with purpose.
My driver remained in the car, as another team escorted me in—two men, neither familiar. They deposited me at my workspace without a word. One stayed near the entrance; the other disappeared behind a metal partition that served as a false wall.
I was alone—well, as alone as one could be in Stalin’s Hungary.
My private “thinking space,” they called it, was a token of trust, as though the room itself wasn’t bugged and the air didn’t reek of suspicion.
I sat. The light overhead hummed like it was warning me. Of what? I never knew.
Finally, I opened the book.
The worn leather binding creaked as I opened it, the pages smelling of dry dust and time. I skimmed the title page, then began leafing through the rest.
There were no scribbles on the edges.
No slip of paper fell loose.
I found no envelope tucked beneath the cover, not even a whisper of hidden intention.
Growing annoyed, I returned to the beginning and flipped through the first several pages—contents, foreword, preface. Chapter One. Chapter Two. Charts on resistance and transmission. Everything was familiar and clinical.
I turned a few more pages.
Still nothing.
It was . . . just a book.
My fingers moved faster now, the pages rasping beneath my thumb as I skimmed. I reached the center, hopeful it might have been hollowed out, but the binding was untouched. There were no seams; I found no tampering.
A groan escaped my throat—half sigh, half curse. I dropped the book onto the worktable and pushed it aside.
Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe this was just a decoy or a dry run. Maybe whoever had sent it was already gone.