There were no signs of struggle here, none at all.

The aftermath of a crime, or malfeasance, left a kind of energy. That silent witness sometimes spoke to him. It was one of Balthazar’s gifts, to sense something of what had happened in a place. His mother, Marta, had the same ability. Marginalised, expelled, hated by many for centuries, the Gypsies had developed survival instincts that were rooted in ancient ways, which could not be explained by science. The gadjes, the non-Gypsies, did not understand it at all. In the early days of his career he had tried to explain his sixth sense to his colleagues. They had laughed, looked at him like he was a mad person, or a shaman.

Nowadays, after he had found and arrested several murderers who would otherwise have escaped, his fellow detectives listened with more attention, but he knew that behind his back they still mocked what they called his ‘Cigany boszorkanysag’, or Gypsy witchcraft. Perhaps that was one reason why he had become so close to Eva neni. She too could read the signs, which was one reason why she was still alive.

The air was calm. The flat felt peaceful. There was a faint smell of masculine deodorant, but none of that disturbed feeling, the bad energy that he often sensed in a place where violence had taken place. His instinct told him that if Elad had been abducted, it wasn’t from here. It felt more like someone had come in and very methodically swept and emptied the room.

He watched Eva neni open the wardrobe. It was empty. So were each of the drawers in the cupboard facing the bed. She signalled that she would go into the kitchen and the bathroom. She entered one after the other and each time showed Balthazar her empty hands when she came out. So where were Elad’s clothes, his notes, his laptop?

He thought back to his conversation with Eva neni in his kitchen.

Nationwide.

Nationwide was one of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in Hungary. Its main business was construction, but it also had interests and holdings in manufacturing, transport, property acquisition and had recently branched out into the media. There had long been rumours about how the company had been founded after the end of the Second World War. Questions too, about how both the firm, and its owners, the Bardossy family, had not only survived under communism, but had thrived. But Nationwide had powerful lawyers who soon descended on anyone asking uncomfortable questions or writing articles that displeased its boss, Karoly Bardossy. And now that his niece was prime minister, even fewer investigators were probing the company and its past – except for Elad Harrari, who doubtless would not care about Hungarian lawyers.

But had Nationwide really branched out into the abduction business as well? Kidnapping was a very complicated crime to organise and execute, which was why most kidnappings went wrong. It demanded a snatch team, a holding place, a supply of food and drink, a negotiator who knew what they were doing and for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut. Every crime demanded two questions at the outset of the investigation: who had the motivation? And who had the opportunity? Nationwide, or Karoly Bardossy, would have both, and the resources to abduct Elad. But he would be a very obvious suspect. Abducting a foreign citizen, especially an Israeli, was a serious matter. Still, it certainly sounded like someone was watching Elad and he had been followed. The first step would be to get more information about the blue Mercedes with the cracked right-hand lamp.

If Elad really had gone missing then there was no question: Balthazar would need to call in the forensics team to examine the flat. But the more he thought it through, the more he realised that the case would probably not be left to the District VII cops. They dealt with local crimes. This would be a very sensitive one. Elad was a foreigner, a citizen of a country whose relationship with Hungary was complicated, even fraught. The bosses would want the A-team on this. Which meant that Balthazar could ask to take it over.

They were about to leave when Eva neni stood still for a moment. She frowned for several seconds then stared into the distance. ‘Wait, Tazi. I have an idea. I gave Elad a spare key to my flat, in case he needed to get in.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Hidden, of course. In a place where nobody would think to look.’ She smiled at Balthazar as though he was a small child. ‘We all need hiding places. Wait here.’

He stepped inside and watched as she walked across the room and opened a narrow door that led into the tiny bathroom. There was nowhere to sit down, only a shower cubicle and a small sink. Eva neni bent down, reached for the middle tile in the bottom row and pushed in the lower edge. The tile came loose in her hand. She put it down and reached inside the space, her fingers probing, until they found something.

She stood up and walked out, back to Balthazar, her palm outstretched. ‘Look at this. I didn’t leave it there.’

A small silver-coloured stick lay in her hand. Balthazar picked up the silver object. It was light in his hand, almost weightless, with a clear plastic cap over a narrow metal prong at one end.

‘It’s a memory thing, Tazi,’ said Eva neni. ‘For a computer.’

FOUR

Newsroom, 555.hu, Liberty Square, 8.10 a.m.

Zsuzsa Barcsy sat at her desk, watching the contents of her editor’s hard drive scroll across her laptop screen. The rows of folders looked very tempting: story schedules, future projects, legal and personnel files. The correspondence with 555.hu’s new owners was especially appealing. It might explain why an irreverent news site staffed by smartarse bohemians and hipsters had suddenly moved from a dilapidated apartment overlooking not-very-glamorous Blaha Lujza Square to a state-of-the-art office building in the heart of downtown – and why those who had survived the purge had received such substantial pay rises.

But she had one task to complete and very little time in which to do it. Zsuzsa’s investigation into Nationwide had been held over for two weeks now. Each time she asked the editor Roland Horvath when it would run, he fobbed her off with increasingly feeble excuses about libel and lawyers. Zsuzsa was certain of all her facts and had double-checked everything – she had even sent the few sources prepared to speak on the record their quotes for authorisation. She had unravelled a web of front companies that reached from small villages in eastern Hungary and across the border in Ukraine to the Cayman Islands and Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Zsuzsa had proved that Nationwide was gaming the system to produce immense off-the-books profits for its owners and directors – chief among them Karoly Bardossy, its majority shareholder. The mayor of one small village in the Ukraine had been astonished to learn that he was, on paper, a euro millionaire – but when he started asking questions he had been warned off in no uncertain terms.

And there was something else going on, Zsuzsa and several of her colleagues believed. Roland Horvath had never been the most collegial of leaders, preferring to issue edicts from his glass-walled bunker, but lately he had been positively secretive, lowering the electric blinds for hours for meetings with 555.hu’s news editor, Kriszta Matyas. Roland himself just brushed away all queries, saying they were working on a project on a need-to-know basis and Kriszta was equally unhelpful. In fact neither of the two had let slip anything at all about what they were working on, which the rest of the newsroom had dubbed WTFATUT – What The Fuck Are They Up To? Was WTFATUT connected to the non-publication of her Nationwide article?

Zsuzsa looked around the newsroom, suddenly nostalgic for 555.hu’s former offices, and a simpler life when her stories were published. That large ramshackle flat, on the corner of Rakoczi Way and the Grand Boulevard, had no air-conditioning or proper heating system. But its rattly wooden parquet floors, giant marble fireplace, high ceilings and toilets that pre-dated the change of system in 1990 gave it plenty of atmosphere. She especially missed people-watching from the balcony overlooking Blaha Lujza Square. Very little had survived 555.hu’s move from its old offices. H. L. Mencken, the American journalist and guiding light to generations of reporters, still stared out from a tattered poster, a speech bubble recording his supposed epithet that ‘The relationship of a journalist to a politician should be that of a dog to a lamp post’. A pile of boxes of files and reporters’ research material had come with the poster, and were still stacked up in a corner of the room, but that was about it.

Zsuzsa’s story, she was determined, would appear somewhere. OK, it was edgy, but that was her job. Her investigation, she was sure, was being held because of pressure from on high, but from where? Nationwide was the obvious suspect. Budapest was a small city and its political, business and media elites were closely entwined – to an unhealthy degree. In any case, if Roland continued to refuse to run the story, she would resign and take it elsewhere. Several of her former colleagues, sacked in the move, were now crowdfunding the launch of a new website called newsline.hu. It was a shareholders’ collective, owned by the journalists, structured so that it could never be bought or sold. Survivor’s guilt had already prompted her – and much of the remaining 555.hu newsroom – to donate to the fighting fund. If she did jump ship, the Nationwide story would make a great launch for newsline.hu. But first of all, she had to find out why it was being held over. Roland was a slow, methodical worker and she was sure that he would have kept the lawyers’ notes and any other comments. There was also a chance that there were genuine legal issues – in which case she needed to know what they were.

She glanced nervously across the newsroom at the door again, then down at the printout of her instructions how to get into the computer system using Roland’s login and password. The door was still closed; she was connected not to her work computer, but to her personal laptop, as she had been instructed. So far, so good.

This was the first day Zsuzsa had arrived in the office before Roland but he could still turn up at any moment as she prowled around his folders and files, now accessible on her laptop screen. A paunchy divorcee in his forties, Roland had little life outside the office and was known to appear at all hours of the day. His main topic of conversation, other than work, was his teenage daughter, Wanda, whom he saw once a week. Zsuzsa had once seen them in a popular hamburger restaurant, where Wanda seemed more interested in her telephone than her food, or her father.

Zsuzsa’s desk was at the other end of the newsroom to Roland’s office in the far corner. That would give her a few seconds to shut down her probe before he arrived at his desk, but no more. Part of her felt sorry for him, another slightly guilty for what she was doing. A few days ago Roland had asked her out to dinner, ostensibly to discuss his plans for the website, but his loneliness was almost palpable. But in the end she was a journalist and it was her job to dig out information – especially when her biggest story yet was being stonewalled.

Zsuzsa glanced again at her screen. She needed a folder called Misc. There, she had been told, everything she wanted could be found. The knot of tension in her stomach grew as the list of folders on Roland’s desk expanded until eventually Misc appeared.

She took a deep breath. There was nothing remarkable about the newest icon on her screen – it looked the same as all the others. But this was the point of no return. Until now, she could, just about, concoct a story of a system malfunction that had somehow led her to Roland Horvath’s computer instead of her own. She had not downloaded anything.

But once she started copying files onto her laptop, there would be some sort of data trail. That trail would not automatically lead to her computer – or so she had been assured – but it might be noticed and could trigger an investigation – in which Zsuzsa would be one of the most likely and obvious suspects. Who else would hack into a folder on the editor’s computer where their story was stored?

This was the moment of decision. She looked around the room once more. It was empty and silent, the only sound the soft clicks of her keyboard.

A Bloomberg terminal stood in one corner for the newly recruited business reporters, next to a fancy chrome coffee machine with an impressive array of levers and switches, and bowls of fruit, cookies and muffins, all freshly delivered every morning at 8 a.m., in case of any early bird arrivals. She tapped her desk with her fingers for a few seconds. All of the journalists had a new wide, grey wooden desk, with a new Apple Mac desktop and silver keyboard, as well as a Mac laptop computer and a new iPhone 6, all paid for by the website’s new owners. Once again she wondered why they were spending so much money. But that story would have to wait.

Zsuzsa watched her cursor hover over Misc. She dropped her thumb, let it press down on her touchpad until a faint noise sounded. It was done. She was downloading.

Misc opened to reveal two more folders: one titled ZB and the second, RB. ZB was obviously her initials. She opened the folder, her eyes widening as she saw copies of her article in various drafts as she had sent them to Roland. But there was much more material, which she had not and would never have sent to him: her source notes, transcripts of all her interviews, telephone log, contacts, research files, documents from international databases and web pages that she had saved.

Zsuzsa dug her thumbnail into her index finger as she tried to control her rising anger. She had been sitting here feeling guilty – while the whole time Roland and his bosses and lawyers had been inside her computer, pulling in everything to do with her work. Feeling guilty – for a moment she almost laughed.

A separate folder within Misc was marked Correspondence. She opened that to see various emails back and forth from the lawyers to Roland. That was expected and it was normal practice for lawyers to check contentious articles for libel. Then she opened one of the lawyers’ emails. Her eyes widened as she scanned its contents, her anger turning to incredulity as she read through to the summary:

In short ZB’s investigation has more than served its purpose. Her diligent and insistent probing has revealed numerous weaknesses in the structure of Nationwide Ltd., both in Hungary and its network of satellite organisations abroad, and the network of connections and financial channels between them, which leaves the organisation vulnerable to charges of money laundering and corruption in multiple jurisdictions – as suggest by ZB in her article. Ukraine is an especially weak node in the network and needs immediate attention.

Now that these vulnerabilities have been identified we can chart a clear path to eradicate them and so strengthen our position, both legally and in the many markets in which we operate.

She sat back, closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled. She had been duped. More than duped, she had been played. And how.

Part of her – a small part – was almost admiring. Whose idea had this been? In a way it was quite brilliant – use an investigative journalist to investigate what information could be discovered and so needed to be shut down. Probably not Roland. He was incapable of standing up for himself, or his reporters, but this level of betrayal, she thought, was beyond him. She glanced at her watch. It was after 8.20 a.m. She needed to speed this up. She copied the whole of Misc onto her computer, watching the download bar as it slowly crept forward.

Zsuzsa checked she had everything then closed the ZB folder on Roland’s hard drive. Her task was completed. But the RB folder still showed, unopened. Then she realised what the letters probably stood for: the initials of the prime minister, Reka Bardossy.

She glanced at the newsroom door once again. It was still closed. The RB folder must hold something quite incendiary to be stored alongside her material. Furious now at the violation of her privacy, her workplace, and the confidentiality of her sources, who had trusted her at some risk to their jobs and careers, she clicked on the RB folder and opened it. There were two files inside, a Word document and a video of several hundred megabytes. Just as she started to download them both, the office door opened and Roland walked in. He looked across the newsroom, saw Zsuzsa and waved at her. She waved back, told herself to stay calm.

She glanced again at her desktop. The video file’s download bar was showing just a few per cent. She looked back at Roland, who had started to walk over to his room.

Take control.

She stood up and walked quickly toward to the coffee machine. It stood in the centre of the newsroom, equidistant between their workplaces. As she arrived, Roland was almost at his door.

Zsuzsa called his name and he turned. ‘Could you help me here, Roland,’ she asked, gesturing at the array of handles and shiny tubes. ‘I’m dying for a coffee but I still don’t know how to work this thing.’ She gave him her brightest smile. ‘I think it’s men’s work.’ Playing the ditzy girl worked without fail in Hungary, she had learned over the years – especially with anything mechanical.

Roland turned slightly pink, clearly pleased and flattered to be asked to help. He started walking over to Zsuzsa. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What can I make you?’

‘A cappuccino, if that’s not too much trouble?’ A cappuccino, she knew, would be the most trouble, what with all the steam and milk-frothing business, and so take up the most time.

Roland smiled, his saggy face creasing to reveal yellowing teeth. ‘Coming right up. I’ll make us both one. We can take them back to your desk, if you like. I can spare a few minutes to catch up; you can tell me how you are settling in.’

Zsuzsa nodded, hoping her extreme alarm at that idea did not show. The printout of her hacking instructions was still next to her keyboard. Even Roland would notice it. And what a screaming hypocrite he was. How could you use me like that, you coward? she wanted to yell at him.