Page 35
35
Will
I t was my turn in the chair—or the car seat, more accurately.
The stolen sedan creaked every time I shifted, which wasn’t often. The seat springs were rusted, the frame stiff from a decade of winters, and the windows had a soft glaze of frost that I had to scrape clean every twenty minutes with the edge of a chipped coin.
The warehouse sat across the block, its profile jagged against the gray skyline. Farkas called it his lab, the place where he built the thing everyone wanted, and where his silence bought his daughter’s continued existence.
Following him here had been easy. The Soviets were so engrained in their routines they’d failed to notice us fall into line behind them in traffic and tail them all the way to where Farkas worked. Egret had taken the lead, as he was the sneakiest driver among us. Thomas might’ve been our strategic genius, but Egret—he was a sneaky bastard—and that was exactly what we needed.
Target acquired, we’d taken shifts, four hours on, four hours off. Egret handed off to me with a muttered joke and a pastry that was already cold. That had been almost three hours ago. I was down to a last sip of coffee—and my last shred of patience.
Surveillance equaled unparalleled boredom.
Any spy—hell, any policeman who’d ever cased a suspect—knew that. Minutes turned to hours, which turned to days. There wasn’t enough coffee in Colombia to make up for the way one’s butt tingled with sleep during a stakeout.
And yet, it was necessary.
So there I sat.
Nothing moved.
I knew, from Egret’s handoff, there were two guards inside with Farkas. The Soviets had also posted two guards outside—one at the main entrance, another pacing the side alley with a cigarette that never seemed to die. I almost felt sorry for the men shivering in Budapest’s embrace.
Only the dull tick of time bleeding forward disturbed the silence.
Wind clawed through the seams in the car door like it was searching for something warm to steal. It found my skin, my nose, my ears. It crept beneath my coat and into my gloves.
God, I hated winter.
I was rubbing warmth back into my fingers when something shifted. I felt it before I saw what came next.
A dark car rolled down the street—slower than local traffic, heavier. It was black, with tinted windows, built like a brick with tires. It turned and nosed toward the side of the warehouse, just past the alley.
The pacing guard flicked his cigarette and approached as it stopped.
The rear door opened.
My breath caught.
A man in a dingy gray suit stepped out of the front passenger’s seat. He spoke to the guards, then opened the back door. A small figure stepped out. She had curly, mid-length hair and was bundled up in a coat two sizes too big. She shied from the suited man, but he grabbed her arm and tugged her to follow. The curls beneath her wool hat bounced as she lurched forward and gazed up at the warehouse.
It was Eszter.
Even from this distance, I knew. Thomas had described her eyes as ancient in a child’s face. I couldn’t see them now, but I felt their weight.
She hesitated—or tried to.
The guard said something.
She didn’t move.
Then he forced her, practically dragging her inside.
My heart didn’t restart until the guard and Eszter reappeared, the car door closed again, and the vehicle backed away, pulling into a slow U-turn.
I sat up straight, wiped my palm down my coat.
This was it.
I slumped down in the seat to hide myself from view as the car passed by, counting to five.
Then I turned the key.
The stolen sedan coughed, then started.
I pulled out carefully, keeping distance between us, letting another car squeeze between, then two, then three.
I watched brake lights.
Watched mirrors for tails.
Watched everything.
They weren’t trying to hide, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t notice if someone followed.
This had to work. We needed to know where Eszter was being held. Everything would come apart if this piece of our mission failed.
My skin felt more electric than any of Farkas’s designs. This thrill, this terrible, wonderful excitement, was what I loathed—and loved—about our game. It wasn’t the glory of the win. There was no glory for those who lived in darkness. No, it was the chase, the hunt, the ever-present threat of discovery—and the consequence it carried. The whole thing was a rush, and no matter how often I tried to deny it, how many times I argued with Thomas about finding a farm in Montana and leaving it all behind, being a player in the game was everything our lives had become, everything we worked for, everything we lived for.
The Soviet sedan turned east, gliding down the street like a shark that knew it ruled the ocean. The cold made everything sharper: every engine sound, every flicker of exhaust, every face on the street blurred past my window in flashes of gray and brown.
We moved at a steady pace, cutting through neighborhoods still choking on the dust of the war. We passed rows of apartments with laundry frozen stiff on lines, children in threadbare coats kicking battered balls between their boots, and old men on corners, smoking the same cigarette for what probably felt like years.
Near Rákóczi Square, they turned left into the edge of a busy street market. I cursed under my breath. Dozens of stalls sprung up—crates of potatoes and cabbage, steaming loaves of rationed bread behind cracked glass, a man pushing fish from a barrel that smelled like rust and sorrow.
The Reds crawled through.
I followed, gripping the wheel tighter.
A trio of bicycles wove past me, laughing boys shouting in Hungarian. A cart veered too close, its driver glaring as I edged past.
Then the car slowed—too much.
I tapped my brakes, my heartbeat thumping in my ears.
Was I too close?
I glanced in the rearview mirror—and my heart froze.
There, two cars back, was a black Moskvitch. It wasn’t the same make as mine. It was clean, angular, the kind issued to someone with a badge and a license to kill.
It followed me into the market.
I swallowed.
I wanted to speed up, to break cover, to make a run for it.
But no. Eszter needed us. The world needed us to succeed.
I took the next corner, as though looking for a side street.
The Moskvitch turned, too.
Sweat built at my collar. It was suddenly far too tight, too stiff.
Then a truck rumbled between us, cutting off my line of sight.
I took the gift, turning down a narrow lane, more alley than street, barely wide enough for two cars.
One second. Then two. Then—
Nothing.
The Moskvitch didn’t follow.
A delivery van, puttering with an open back showing two crates of cabbages, rumbled by.
The black car didn’t. It wasn’t a tail.
I let out a breath.
I reemerged three blocks ahead and spotted Eszter’s car again near a crumbling statue of Saint Stephen, pigeons perched like judgment on his outstretched hand.
They were heading north, past the river’s commercial lanes, away from the government offices. There was no reason to go that way unless one sought privacy.
I fell in behind them again, this time farther back, almost out of sight.
We passed train yards and narrow footbridges, an old steel tram rusted and forgotten near the edge of the city’s industrial fringe.
Brick buildings became sparser.
Streets grew darker, even in the dim daylight.
The noise of city life faded into the bones of a nation still healing.
Then a gate appeared. It was iron, wide, and topped with spikes not meant for decoration. It surrounded a large wooden house where a wealthy merchant or Hungarian official likely once lived. There were no wealthy merchants in Stalin’s Russia, only comrades who shared the bounty of the state. The house now belonged to the communal good.
The sedan paused only long enough for the guards to open the gate. One of them had a clipboard. The other fiddled with a submachine gun slung across his chest.
The car passed through, swallowed by leaf-bare trees and thick shrubs.
The windows of the house were dark, an old world dressed in fear.
I kept going, driving past, watching from the corner of my eye.
I noted the corner café with its closed blinds, the burned-out cobbler across the street, the alley just wide enough to ditch a car and disappear on foot.
I kept driving until the neighborhood blurred behind me, and my heart stopped slamming against the inside of my ribs.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35 (Reading here)
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64