The walls were a faded shade of yellow, spattered with grease behind the ancient gas cooker. Two wooden chairs stood on either side of a creaky table, topped with worn blue Formica. An ancient fridge hummed in the corner. A white enamel boiler was fixed to the wall, its narrow hot-water pipe leading into a cracked sink.
He looked in the fridge – it was empty apart from a box of margarine and half a salami. A half-full bottle of cooking oil, turned dark with age, stood by the cooker.
Balthazar stepped back into the main room, walked across to the bathroom. He pushed the door open, shouted again, stepped aside for a few moments, then moved inside, his gun at the ready. This room too was empty. The fittings were of similar vintage to the kitchen, another sink with its enamel cracked and scored, a bath with large dark stains. He walked over and looked at the stains. They were brown, dry and ancient, encrusted dirt, not blood.
The room smelled as stale as the kitchen with an extra layer of damp and mould. The flat had not been properly inhabited for a long time. There was nobody else here, he was sure.
He holstered his Glock, took out the scrap of paper the taxi driver had given him, blocked his outgoing number, and called the number written on it.
A few seconds later a mobile sounded in the flat. Balthazar listened for a moment and looked around.
The phone was ringing in the dead man’s trouser pocket.
Just as he was about to call the District VIII police station to report the body and to send backup, his screen lit up with the notification of an incoming message. There was no number. He opened the message:
MR CELEBRITY DETECTIVE GET OUT NOW!
TWENTY-EIGHT
Remetehegyi Way, Obuda hills, 7 p.m.
Reka placed the single sheet of paper on the coffee table in front of her, sat back on the leather sofa and carefully placed her stockinged feet on the sheet of smoked glass as she processed what she had just read. The table was an original 1980s Philippe Starck and one of her favourite pieces. The glass top rested on four rubber balls perched on top of each leg and she felt a slight bounce as she settled back. A glass of sparkling water, slowly warming, stood in the centre.
She and her ex-husband Peter had bought the table in Milan on a shopping trip a decade ago, in what now felt like another life. They had loved its quirky style and the high price was no object. Nothing had been too expensive in those days, when money and power flowed towards them like the Danube at high tide.
Reka picked up the glass and took a sip of the water as she contemplated another evening alone. The wine fridge on the other side of the room was crowded with some of Hungary’s finest vintages. But she never drank alone, especially since she became prime minister. Peter was gone now, shacked up with his twenty-seven-year-old executive assistant. The news had not been a surprise – their marriage had been one of form only for the last couple of years; and really, how unoriginal to run off with an awestruck twenty-something – but she had still valued his advice and his company, no matter how sporadic. Now she went home every night to an empty villa in the Obuda hills. There was nobody else to take his place, or even on the horizon. And for now at least it was inconceivable to let another man get close to her.
The envelope had arrived by courier, half an hour ago. The motorcyclist had pulled up outside Reka’s villa, at which point the two police officers on permanent guard had approached him. He had thrust a slim package at them, then roared off. Neither had caught his number plate, which was anyway smeared with mud, doubtless intentionally. The police officers had handed the package to Antal Kondor, Reka’s chief of security. After running it through several checks, he had brought it to Reka.
The envelope inside contained a ‘memorandum of understanding’ between Nationwide and Hayam, an Israeli tech company based in Tel Aviv. Hayam produced a software program called Shomer, Hebrew for guardian.
Reka already knew about Shomer.
Shomer was the world’s most advanced covert surveillance system to be commercially available. It could be implanted on a person’s mobile phone without them knowing. It would track their movements, all their internet and social media activity, their banking and shopping and of course would listen in to all their calls. Every phone had its own file in a giant database to where all the information, including sound files of conversations, was sent back.
All the phone’s files, browsing, emails, texts, photographs and conversations, could be cross-referenced and analysed for patterns. Several intelligence agencies had this capacity, but there was always a question as to what to do with the deluge of information. Shomer had the answer. It analysed not just the content of individual phones but also used advanced pattern analysis to map networks of contacts: their frequency of interaction, their distance from each other, their shared interests and activities. Shomer’s most important USP – unique selling point – was that it used artificial intelligence to predict future patterns of behaviour and network development.
Shomer was fantastic news for authoritarian regimes. But for dissidents, free-thinkers, anyone wanting to organise and challenge the established order, Shomer was a catastrophe. Especially as the software was virtually undetectable, except by the most sophisticated intelligence agencies. Anastasia Ferenczy had already circulated a note to all members of the government and civil service above the level of assistant state secretary, warning them that Israel had developed the world’s most advanced spyware. Anyone involved with the forthcoming visit of Alon Farkas was to be extra vigilant when using their telephones and assume that all communications were being listened to. Meanwhile, the technical division of Hungary’s state security service was working on a means of finding out if Shomer was present on a mobile phone.
What Reka had not known was that her uncle was secretly planning to go into business with Hayam and use Nationwide, and Hungary, as a cloak for a worldwide marketing drive. The memo explained how. So what was she going to do about this?
Cold water, she decided, that would help. She walked across the lounge to the adjacent bathroom and switched on the cold tap over one of the twin black marble sinks. The water system could be adjusted for freezing cold as well as hot. She turned the temperature dial down as far as it would go and put her hands inside the icy stream. Once her skin was thoroughly chilled, she bent over the marble sink and splashed her face several times, rubbing the water into her face.
Reka closed her eyes for a moment, relishing the icy sensation and hoping it might re-energise her, before staring at herself in the mirror. She saw a woman in her late mid-thirties, still attractive but definitely more care-worn than when she first took power the previous autumn.
The skin around her blue eyes was scored with deeper lines and the whites were marked with tiny veins. She tried smiling at herself, watched the thin lines as they shot out of either side of her mouth. She massaged the skin around her lips and smiled again. There was no change. She ran her hands through her dark-blond hair. It was, thankfully, as thick as ever, but its bounce was fading. Her tresses fell more easily through her fingers, and lay flat on her head when she moved them away. She peered up at the top of her head in the mirror. Her highlights needed some attention too, she saw.
Reka splashed herself again, then took a white hand towel from the small pile by the taps. She closed her eyes as she held the soft cloth to her face.
Did she still miss him? Sometimes, she admitted, yes, she did.
Peter was gone, and she was sad about that, but in truth her ex-husband had only been a means to fill the Pal Dezeffy-shaped space in her life. She had known Pal since they were children, the gilded youth of Hungary’s ruling elite. They had been on-off lovers since their late teens, the ultimate power couple.
Marriages, flings, long- and short-term relationships, all these came and went but somehow they could never escape each other. Even at the end, when Pal went berserk, her hold over him had not diminished. Using the gendarmes to take control of Kossuth Square, trying to hijack the sprinkler system, gas the passers-by, all these, she thought, were also a last, desperate, attempt to get her attention.
Now, looking back, she realised that she could have guided Pal in a different direction, one that served the interests of Hungary instead of filling his – and her – families’ Swiss bank accounts. Or even done both.
There had been plenty to go round back in the days of vadkapitalizmus – wild capitalism – in the early 1990s. Both the Bardossys and the Dezeffys had profited mightily as Hungary transitioned from a one-party state to a free market economy. In Romania the Communist Party had organised a violent uprising and executed its crazed leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, to ensure that behind the scenes, the same apparatchiks remained in power. Czechoslovakia no longer existed and had split into two countries. Yugoslavia had plunged into years of war and murderous ethnic cleansing.
But Hungary had managed a smooth transition to democracy. There were no riots, no fighting, no mass arrests. The old one-party system had just faded away. The idealistic democrats and dissidents had, for a while, taken political power. But real power – control of the economy and national assets – had remained with the former communists, reborn and renamed as Social Democrats. When the state no longer existed, who owned its assets? Whoever grabbed them first, it turned out.
Reka, Pal, all the former comrades had gorged on the nation’s wealth like greedy diners at a svedasztal, a buffet brunch at one of the five-star riverside hotels. And yes, she had been part of that, had never questioned the sense of entitlement that had paid for her walk-in wardrobe of designer clothes, this bathroom with its Italian fittings and wet room or the abstract modern art bought in auctions in London, Zurich and New York that hung on the walls of the lounge. But that was then. Enough was enough.
She dropped the face towel into the aluminium basket under the sink. That era, of plunder and corruption, was over.
She would bring Hungary into the twenty-first century, turn the country into a modern state, with a transparent administration and the rule of law for all, not just the privileged elite. That battle would be long and arduous, she knew. The old, dark forces had already begun their fightback to stop her and destroy her government – led, she knew, by her own uncle.
The release of the footage showing Reka killing her assailant had been their first attempt to bring her down. But Eniko’s plan had worked brilliantly. The girl was a marvel. A snap telephone poll Reka had commissioned yesterday showed sixty-five per cent of voters believed Reka’s line that the video was a sophisticated deepfake – with an even higher proportion of voters under thirty believing so.
The story had exploded across social media but was now fading away. Eniko’s hashtag blitzkrieg, and promises to several influencers of a dinner with Reka soon, had also helped. Reka gave herself an ironic smile. Her drive for honesty had started with a gigantic lie. How was she any better than her opponents? Because she wanted to improve the lives of all Hungarians, she told herself.
Reka walked back through the lounge and through the French doors that opened onto a wide, curved balcony, picking up a black merino wool shawl on the way. For a moment she shivered as a cold wind gusted in her face and she pulled the shawl tighter around herself. The house looked over the river and the Pest side of the city. The Danube was a wide ribbon of black, and a single set of lights moved slowly downriver, a barge heading south into the Balkans. The headlights of the cars on the riverbank traced patterns like fireflies. A sea of apartment houses stretched into the distance, windows glowing where families gathered for their evening meal.
Once, it felt like a lifetime ago, she had company in this house – when she had a family, or at least parents. Her father, Hunor, had been killed in a skiing accident in the winter of 1991, soon after the change of system, when he was serving as minister of the interior in Hungary’s first post-communist system. He was an excellent skier and the cause of the accident had never been fully explained. Reka’s mother had never really recovered from his death and two years later had died of a heart attack.
A memory flashed through her mind: Reka was back in her office last autumn, speaking to the Librarian. One of her first acts was to remove the microphones that he used to bug the prime minister’s office. He had walked in immediately:
It would be a mistake to think of me as a fool, Doshi. Your dear father could explain that to you, if he were still with us.
The threat was clear enough, but had the Librarian, or whoever he worked for, really had her father killed? And in whose interest would that be? Now she had taken control of his archive, she might finally find out the truth, or at least some clues.
Why had he gone off-piste and crashed at high speed into a very visible tree, without wearing a helmet, even though he was normally a cautious man? And what had happened to his ski helmet, the one that she had bought him for his fiftieth birthday? It had never been found, and would have saved his life if he had been wearing it.
Part of her was convinced that he had been murdered, but she could not understand why. Sure, her father, like his elder brother Karoly, had done well during the start of the vadkapitalizmus in the early 1990s. Like most of the country’s ruling elite, they had realised by the 1980s that the old regime was no longer tenable and had started preparing for its collapse. Hunor was no saint. Once the Communist dictatorship started to fall apart he gamed the system to make sure that his family was comfortable and would remain so.
But once the family’s wealth was secured, Hunor focused on politics. Unlike his brother Karoly, he did not want to build a massive business empire or compete with the new would-be Magyar oligarchs. Instead his motivation was to build a new democratic Hungary. They had talked about that so many times.
For a moment she wondered at her own motivation. One part, she knew, was her long-running feud with her uncle, who refused to repurpose Nationwide away from being a money-making machine for a handful of directors into something more socially useful. She had commissioned a confidential study from one of Hungary’s leading economists to show how easy that would be and sent it to Karoly.
The economist had suggested breaking up the main holding company and redistributing its assets to a network of local firms, especially in the deprived east of the country. Karoly had never even acknowledged the document. Instead he had recruited the economist at double his previous salary, buried him in the firm’s research department. Another part was Reka’s anger at being manipulated and kept out of the loop over the Hayam deal. Her country would not be used as a front for dictators and corporations around the world to spy on those who threatened their interests.
But overshadowing all of this was the growing realisation that the strands of her life were being woven together into a dark thread – one that reached back through the decades, beyond her childhood, to the most terrible era in Hungarian history: 1944. She needed to make a decision. One which, if she followed her conscience, would have irreversible consequences.
Her relationship with her uncle would not survive. For a moment she felt a pang of regret. For a while, in her younger years, she and Karoly had been close. She had learned a lot from him about the world of business and its intersection with politics – until she had, perhaps, learned too much. The knowledge of how Nationwide Ltd. had been born, and at what cost, had been a burden on her for as long as she could remember, like a heavy weight dragging her down, souring her comfortable life.
Reka had never confronted Karoly with what she had discovered but each time she had tried to steer the conversation to the origins of the company he had made it very clear that this subject was off limits. Once he had walked out of the room.
She watched another light move down the Danube, this time much faster than the barge. It looked like some kind of speedboat. The pilot seemed to be enjoying himself as it weaved back and forth across the waters. Now, she realised, was the time. The weight was about to be lifted.
