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László

T he car didn’t pull away until I’d closed the door behind me.

Even then, I heard it reposition, grinding against the icy curb just twenty meters down. A second car idled up the street, pointed in the opposite direction. Both cars held dark windows and darker intentions.

My Soviet minders’ presence was no longer subtle. They were no longer hiding.

I stood at the entryway of my home—no, our home—peeling off my gloves with slow fingers, letting the silence settle in around me. Eszter’s coat still hung on its peg by the stairs. Her scarf was looped in a lazy knot, the one I’d tied for her so many times before school. The soft multicolored fabric looked faded in the winter light.

It had been seven days since I last saw her.

Seven days since the Soviets took her.

Seven days of pretending to work on the machine, pretending I wasn’t unraveling, pretending I wasn’t counting every tick of every second until I could try, hopelessly, to bargain for her release.

I kicked off my shoes and turned toward the kitchen to begin the ritual of another empty evening. That’s when I noticed something odd.

Milk.

There were two glass bottles, capped in red wax, sweating in the cold beside my stoop.

“That is odd,” I said to no one. “Milk wasn’t due for another two days.”

I crouched and carefully retrieved the bottles. The tops had frozen, a rim of white snowflakes forming under the wax caps. I turned one in my hand, examining it through the frost-speckled glass.

Nothing unusual jumped out, but the off-schedule delivery sat poorly with me. It wasn’t alarming, not yet. It was just . . . off.

Still, I brought them in. It wouldn’t do to leave them out there. The last thing I needed was for a neighbor to ask questions.

I set the bottles on the kitchen counter and moved to change clothes. My shoulders ached from the long day of feigned calculations and tightened tension. The guards at the facility had hovered from their sentry posts near the door. One of them—the taller one, the one with eyes like sharpened iron—had asked, too casually, what I was “really building.”

I told him the truth, though I doubted he believed me.

Desperate for warmth, I changed into an old cardigan and house trousers. The sleeves of the sweater were too long, as always. Eszter had loved to pull them over her hands and laugh about how “Papa looked like a scarecrow.”

I left my bedroom door ajar as I padded back into the kitchen, the wood floors cold underfoot. I opened a cupboard, stared at the rows of dry lentils and dusty tins, and let my eyes rest on the box of pasta Eszter had once tried to cook all by herself. She’d nearly burned the house down. I hadn’t had the heart to throw the box away.

Despite my searching, there was no hunger in me, but I needed to eat, for her, if nothing else.

I filled a pot of water from the tap and lit the stove.

Then I glanced again at the milk bottles.

Something about them itched against my mind. Was it the delivery? The frost? The way the light caught inside the glass?

I opened the icebox and set one bottle inside.

The other I left out.

Curiosity bested caution.

Slowly, I removed the wax cap and poured myself a glass. The milk hit the bottom with a soft glug, swirling in the cold tumbler. Lifting the milk, I tilted the bottle again, watching the liquid descend.

And then—

Faint but legible.

A message revealed as the white veil lowered: Your daughter’s book is at Antikvárium under the name Geza.

I stared.

The glass trembled in my hand.

It was a hallucination. It had to be. I was going mad, seeing messages in bottles—or on bottles, more accurately. The ink had been written on the inside of the glass, disguised by the opaque white of the liquid until it was just low enough to reveal the words.

Antikvárium.

Geza.

I felt the air leave my lungs like a tide receding after a storm.

They hadn’t forgotten her.

Someone was reaching out.

Someone wanted to help us.

I set the bottle down gently, as though it might explode, and for the first time in seven days, I felt something spark behind the dread.

Thoughts of the mysterious book sat like a ghost in my chest—it held no weight, no shape, just a presence, haunting, hopeful. I dreamed of the tome, though my mind’s eye had no idea how it should look. I woke and sipped another glass of milk. All my hopes hung on what it might contain.

When I stepped out of my house, buttoning my coat to the throat, my usual driver glanced up from his newspaper and gave a grunt.

“Ready?” he asked in Russian-accented Hungarian.

“Yes, but I need to make a stop on our way to the lab.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Dr. Farkas, we have instructions. Home and the lab, those are your destinations.”

“I know,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “But this should not take long. I ordered a volume—months ago, before everything . . . changed—and just remembered it might have come in. It is a treatise on high-frequency resistance fields that I believe may help with my work.”

The soldier snorted. “You don’t have enough books at the compound?”

“It is a specific edition,” I replied, using the same tone I’d developed when explaining quantum phase shift to first-year students. “Books with advanced technical specifications are rare. This one covers many of the latest theories.”

He blinked and said nothing for a moment.

Then, with a shrug that suggested annoyance more than suspicion, he jerked his head toward the car. “Five minutes.”

We drove through streets still crusted with half-melted snow and soot. When we reached the bookshop on Károlyi Mihály, my driver put the car in park but didn’t step out.

“It’s too fucking cold,” he muttered. “I stay here. Five minutes, or I come in.”

I nodded, masking the relief that bloomed behind my ribs.

“If they have tea, I will bring you some.”

He grunted again but didn’t look up as I climbed out.

Warm air greeted me as I entered to the tinkling of the bell above the door. The shop’s shelves were tall and narrow, bending under the weight of a million forgotten thoughts. A single bulb buzzed weakly above the counter.

The bookseller glanced up.

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 Currents by 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.

Or . . .

Had this come from the Soviets themselves? Were they baiting a trap, setting a snare? Had they become suspicious and decided to test my loyalty to them—to my daughter?

That thought made flames flow through my veins. How dare they—how dare anyone—question my love for Eszter. How dare they take her, threaten her, no doubt hurt her if I failed to follow their orders.

How dare they.

I turned back to the corner of the lab and began my morning routine.

Coffee.

A few calibration checks.

Heat measurements from the coil bank, which still vibrated from last night’s test run.

I sorted through numbers I didn’t care about and scribbled results that no one understood.

But my eyes kept drifting back to the book.

It lay there like a patient with no pulse—inert, inert, inert.

Until finally, I relented and pulled it close again, flipped through the chapters.

Again.

Still, there was nothing new, just circuits, voltage equations, impedance charts.

Damn it.

I slammed the book closed with more force than necessary, the clap of the covers ringing too loudly against the warehouse walls, then stood and tossed it toward the end of the bench where it landed with a dull thud, skidding before coming to rest face down.

That’s when I saw it.

On the back cover, printed in a line of cataloging numbers, two digits were circled in blue ink. The circles weren’t part of the book’s design, and I could barely see them, even in the blinding fluorescent light of the lab. The printed numbers had begun to fade, but the circles, while faint, remained fresh.

1 . . . 8 . . . 3.

One hundred eighty-three?

What could—?

I tore open the pages and found page one hundred eighty-three.

My breaths grew shallow.

At first glance, it looked like any other page, half filled with scientific prose, while the other half was covered with a diagram of phase shift in signal pathways and a graph detailing resistance curves under voltage load.

But then I saw them.

Circles. Small, faint, hand-drawn. Blue.

One around the letter L. Another down below, an I. Then an F, an A, a T.

Random letters, dozens of them, circled amid the sea of text and formulae. They made no sense. There was no pattern my tired mind could immediately decipher—but they were there.

I grabbed a notepad and transcribed the letters in order, careful not to miss a single one.

They were not random.

Not at all.

This was the message.

A coded message.

I grinned up at my invention, the machine my Soviet jailers coveted so greatly.

It broke codes. It was better than code keys, smarter than Enigma, more powerful than any group of human minds ever assembled.

I recognized the code sequence immediately, a common syntax used by many intelligence agencies. Without a key, few men could read it. With my machine, no secrets could hide.

A quick peek over my shoulder revealed my bored sentry half asleep in an uncomfortable wooden chair by the door some thirty yards away. The other was out of sight.

I stepped around the table I used for a desk and flipped on the power to my machine, then toggled the encryption mode from “Encrypt” to “Decrypt.” A few more turns of rotor dials had the date and time correctly set. Finally, I inserted a blank strip of punch tape and returned to my desk.

The guard was now staring but remained rooted in his chair.

I smiled at him and said, “This might get a little loud. I am testing some codes your people gave me.”

He blinked as though I’d spoken in ancient Aramaic rather than Hungarian. Clearly, his role was not to care about my work, only to ensure I kept working at it.

I allowed myself a deep breath.

Snatching up the page with all the circled letters, I returned to the machine and began typing, one finger at a time, one letter at a time, until the entire sequence had fed my beast. Each keystroke spun a small reel around which the paper had wound itself. A mechanical counter ticked with each turn. Once the string had been entered, I sucked in another breath, blew it out, and pressed the “Execute” button.

Rotors whirred into motion.

Hidden gears ticked and groaned.

At last, tiny pins began pecking, embedding their ink on the unblemished strip. Had there been no code, no hidden missive, my machine would have stopped at this step and left the strip bare. I would have received a blinking red light indicating a failure to find any meaning.

Instead, it pecked . . . and pecked . . . and pecked.

Enigma spit out one letter at a time. My improved model would deliver the entire message on one page. So, I waited.

And tried not to pace before the altar of my own imagination.

The tape reel spun, and I watched as the paper vanished, leaving only shiny metal. Another whirr from another wheel was followed by a sound that reminded me of someone spitting.

The strip fell into the tiny metal output cup.

I stared, blinking, my hands trembling.

The guard shifted. His chair scraped against the cold cement floor.

My hand shot out and snatched up the tape, cupping it as though cradling a baby bird.

Turning back toward my desk, I watched as the guard shifted in the chair again and leaned his head back against the wall. He hadn’t been coming to check my work. He’d been in search of a more comfortable position.

I almost chuckled aloud at my own paranoid silliness. The guard was muscle, nothing more.

Sitting, I unfurled the tape and held it beneath my desk lamp.

To find your lost one, we need your help. Ask your friends to see her. We are watching and will help you both. Do not lose hope.