‘David,’ she said, ‘it’s me. I need a courier. When? Now, of course.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Rakoczi Square, 7 p.m.
Balthazar stood outside the entrance to the flat where Attila had said he would find Geza Kovacs and pushed the doorbell.
A shrill ringing sounded then faded away. He waited for a few seconds then pressed again. The bell rang again, then nothing. The door was narrow, its dark-brown paint streaked with grime, a match for the gloomy decor of the cramped, dimly lit corridor. A single light bulb hung from a cable halfway down the passageway. The air was stale and unmoving and the smell of frying drifted up the main staircase. A few feet away someone had painted a giant letter Z in black and silver on the wall.
After several seconds of silence Balthazar stepped forward and listened for the sounds of movement or voices inside. There were none. He checked the piece of paper that Attila Ungar had given him: Flat VI/VI, 14 Rakoczi Square. Flat number six on the sixth floor.
He was in the right place. This was number 14, and this was the sixth, top floor of the building. The dwellings here were smaller than those lower down, their ceilings lower and their rooms more cramped. Many had lacked indoor bathrooms until recently.
Balthazar had prepared for his visit. He had several plasticuffs in the pocket of his leather jacket and was also carrying his Glock 17. He had checked the floor plan on the land registry database before he had arrived. Flat VI/VI was a one-room studio, with a small kitchen and bathroom.
The flat was a couple of metres from the old tradesman’s staircase at the rear of the building, which opened onto Nemet Street. The apartment looked out onto the inner courtyard. It was the kind of place he knew well, where many of his relatives had lived, with two, sometimes three, generations somehow eating, sleeping and living together in the same space. Some of them still did.
Balthazar stepped to the side and gently pushed the door with his forefinger.
It swung open.
He suddenly remembered that in all the excitement of losing the people following him, he had forgotten to tell Anastasia where he was going – but now it was too late.
His heartbeat speeded up and he drew his weapon. He stepped inside. The flat stank – a sour mix of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, rancid fat and more. ‘Armed police! Is anyone here? Make yourself known,’ he shouted. ‘I repeat, this is the police,’ he exclaimed, his voice fading as he saw what the room contained.
Geza Kovacs was sitting on a worn green-and-brown sofa bed, his legs splayed, what was left of his head resting against the wall behind him.
His T-shirt was splashed with red, as though someone had squirted him with paint. A grey-and-crimson smear crept up the wall. It did not look like he had tried to reach for a weapon or fight back.
There was no sign of forced entry. That meant two things: Geza probably knew the gunman and had let him into the flat, where he had despatched Geza with chilling efficiency. This was a professional hit.
Balthazar’s heart was pounding as he looked around the room, once, twice, rapidly scanning the space from side to side. The adrenalin dump turbo-charged his senses. The thick, stale air filled his nostrils, the sound of distant traffic hummed, pale fragments of bone peppered the mess on the wall. A large flat-screen television was switched on in the corner, a game of Grand Theft Auto frozen in mid-play. The screen showed a black SUV charging through the night, with several bodies in its wake.
Three pizza boxes were piled on the coffee table in front of the sofa, crusts curling inside. Cans of beer and Coca-Cola were strewn around the room.
Balthazar’s breathing turned ragged and he tried to calm himself by slowly inhaling and exhaling through his nose. The stink of spilled beer and food almost made him gag.
The floor plan had shown two doors leading from the main room – a kitchen to the right and a bathroom to the left. He stood to the side of the kitchen door, then pushed it open, his gun in his hand as he stepped inside.
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.
