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20

Thomas

T he station was located just 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 definitely not a 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.

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 was timing me, 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.