The Budapest Protocol (21 page)

“The chance to masquerade as the Panamanian ambassador again.” Every couple of months David took Alex out for an epic three bottle lunch on expenses, claiming Alex was a diplomat. “We’re running tomorrow?”

“You’re on,” said Alex, smiling as he hung up.

He switched on Hungarian television news. Twelve high court judges had been summarily sacked after it was discovered that they had all once held high-ranking positions in the Communist Party, Aniko Kovacs announced brightly. Investigations were underway to see if they had been guilty of human rights abuses during the former regime. If so, they could expect to be brought to trial. The new Financial Police had started their raids. The screen cut to a clip of Gendarmes kicking down the doors of “World Writers’ Review”, a small liberal literary publication. Two elderly men in crumpled suits were led away, looking frightened and bewildered, one with his glasses askew, the other holding a sheaf of papers.

“And now we go live to Novakpuszta, where our reporter has news of some disturbing events,” said Kovacs. A tall male journalist was interviewing a frightened old lady in a village in eastern Hungary. The woman plucked at her headscarf as she spoke: “There were lots of them, Israelis, shouting in Hebrew, taking photographs. They banged on my door and rang my bell. Shouting how they were coming back to get everything and that I should start packing. I didn’t know what to do.”

The reporter smiled encouragingly. “Are you sure they were Israelis?”

“Absolutely. They told me they were from Tel Aviv. Terrifying, it was,” the woman continued. “They were very aggressive. But these are our houses now and we are keeping them.”

That was bizarre, thought Alex, even by Hungarian state television’s standards. Why would Israelis care about Novakpuszta? Alex added Novakpuszta to his notebook, when there was a tentative knock on his door.

Natasha walked in, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, smiling. “You should be out partying.”

“I’m meeting Kitty later. I thought we should also celebrate together,” she said, pouring two glasses of red wine. She pulled up a chair and sat down. Alex thanked her, and tried not to stare as they clinked glasses. She looked even prettier than usual, and he realised that it was the first time he had seen her wearing make-up: subtle mascara and lip gloss.

“Your interview will be all over the world tomorrow,” said Alex, sipping his wine. “You’ll get a glamorous job offer and then you’ll leave us,” he joked.

“I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere. Journalism is my
vocation
,” she said, laughing.

“It certainly is,” said Alex, as he switched the television off. “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Last time you did, we nearly got arrested. But OK.”

“What drives you, Natasha? Lots of Hungarians hate the Roma. They would be pleased if they couldn’t have any more babies. Why do you care so much? And where did you learn Lovari?”

She swallowed hard. “That is personal.” She looked at Alex. “I’ve never told anyone this.”

Alex knew enough to stay silent.

“My parents couldn’t have any more children after me, so they adopted a Gypsy boy.” She smiled, but her voice was full of sadness. “His name was Anton. He was five when he came to live with us, a lovely child, bright, happy. It was the usual story. His parents split up, his mother thought he would be best off in a children’s home so she gave him up. She used to visit us sometimes. Anton did well at school. He wanted to be a teacher.”

She paused, looked at the ceiling and inhaled deeply. “One day we all went out for Sunday lunch. Anton was hit by a car. The driver didn’t stop. He died on the pavement. He was sixteen. I’m sorry Alex, it’s not much of a celebration is it?” she said, her eyes brimming. “They caught the driver. But he was an important man, much more important than Anton. Nothing happened to him. He didn’t even lose his licence.”

“Who was he?” asked Alex.

Natasha stared into her wine glass. “Attila Hunkalffy.”

Alex contemplated the length of Margaret Island and wondered again about the wisdom of agreeing to a lunchtime jog. The running path looped around for more than five kilometres. Flanked at one end by its namesake bridge, and at the other by the Arpad bridge, named for the Grand Prince of the Magyars, Margaret Island was Budapest’s loveliest park, filled with landscaped gardens, medieval ruins and pavement cafés. He and Zsofi had enjoyed several summer evenings here, curled up in a glade near the water tower with a blanket and a bottle of wine. But in winter it was less welcoming. The bicycles and pedal-carriages for hire during the summer were locked away. The paths that in warmer months were full of snogging teenagers were empty, the kiosks bolted shut. An icy wind blew in off the water, cutting through Alex’s sweatpants and track top. The river moved fast, a cold gunmetal grey.

David Jones was already stretching and doing knee bends, his skin-tight lycra oufit highlighting his athlete’s physique. “Hup, hup, let’s go,” he proclaimed, running on the spot, clapping his hands together.

“What about going for lunch instead,” said Alex. “It is lunchtime,” he added hopelessly.

David started padding down the path. Alex followed, and a gust of wind almost blew him sideways. He counted through the markers in his head: the canoe club, the children’s zoo, the ruins of St Margaret’s nunnery, the spa hotels and the Arpad bridge, that meant half a circuit. The zoo soon came into sight. The animals were relocated for the winter, but the pungent aroma remained. Alex took in a lungful of manure-scented air and forced himself forward. The trick was to think about something else, not how heavy his legs felt. Like Natasha’s revelation about the death of her adopted brother Anton. She had quickly composed herself but left soon afterwards. He supposed she was embarrassed, but was pleased she had confided something so personal. He ran faster and caught up with David.

“Natasha’s Sanzlermann interview was brilliant,” said David. “Compulsory DNA tests. These people are really crazy. Our story went out on the wire at dawn. London put an ‘urgent’ on it. Last time I looked, it had been picked up sixty-seven times, everywhere from Auckland to Alaska. We’re making the
Budapest News
famous around the world.”

“I think we are making you famous,” said Alex, jamming his hat down over his ears. “I didn’t see any Reuters reporters in the Hotel Savoy on Monday morning.” The news that Attila Hunkalffy was a hit and run driver he decided to keep to himself.

David grinned and pulled ahead. “Don’t worry, Your Excellency. The Panamanian ambassador is about to get the longest lunch of his life.”

Alex pushed himself on. Had someone put lead weights in his shoes? “We’re going to get raided by the financial police,” he panted.

“You too? They’ve promised us a visit as well. It’s not just your paper and Reuters, you know. Virtually every foreign news organisation is getting a visit from these guys. Except the correspondents for media owned by...”

“Let me guess. The Volkstern Corporation,” said Alex, a sheen of sweat forming as they came up to the Grand Hotel.

“Yes. And did you see the new law: directors and managers of companies defaulting on their tax, VAT or customs obligations are now personally liable for those debts, with the possibility of a five year prison sentence. What is the legal definition of a manager? Anyone would think they were trying to intimidate us.”

Alex’s calf muscles began to ache. It was getting harder to talk and run at the same time. They ran in silence for several minutes, past the hotels, until Arpad Bridge came into sight. It was a concrete monstrosity, flat and functional with six lanes of traffic. It had none of the grace of the Chain Bridge, or the Elizabeth Bridge. Fresh graffiti had been painted across its base: “Immigrants Out: Magyars Arise.” They turned left through the trees and headed down the other side of the island and up towards the water tower.

Almost halfway around and Alex had his second wind now. He breathed easily and steadily, sprinted ahead of David and swerved around two old ladies in fur coats, walking small, yapping dogs. Sea gulls soared and squawked above him. There were moments, rare enough, but they did occur, when he felt he could do anything. Alex looked closer as he approached the water tower. A small figure sat on a bench with her arms wrapped around her legs, watching the river. She looked familiar. Very familiar.

Alex sat down, breathing hard.

“Back from your business trip?” asked Zsofi, staring out at the water. She looked waif-like and vulnerable, wrapped in a man’s army parka. It was his, he realised, ‘borrowed’ several weeks earlier when she had left in the early morning hours.

“And you didn’t call me, or send me an email, or even a text message.”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “No. I didn’t. Congratulations, Juliet. When do you start?”

“Next week.” She paused. “Alex, I, we... I just keep wishing that I had two lives,” she said, her voice small and uncertain as she turned to him.

He reached for her hand. She wrapped her fingers through his.

“I know, Zsofi. We won’t be able to see much of each other. You’ll be spending most of your time in Vienna.” He watched an empty box bouncing on the waters, moving fast as the current pulled it towards Margaret Bridge. A running figure, wearing blue trousers and a hooded turquoise sweatshirt appeared in the distance, moving with graceful strides.

“You let me go that easily,” Zsofi said, loudly sniffing and wiping her eyes.

Alex drew her close to him. They sat together silently for several minutes, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. He watched the box rush towards the bridge, bounce off one of the stanchions, and disappear into the distance.

“Alex,” she asked. “We will always be friends, won’t we?”

“Of course.”

“Will you come and watch me dance in Vienna?”

He smiled. She really was incorrigible. “Maybe. But that’s all,” he said, pulling her close and kissing her cheek.

The runner drew closer and slowed down. Alex looked up to see Natasha staring at him as she passed the bench. She waved hallo, quickly looked away and sprinted off into the distance.

* * *

Cassandra Orczy settled down to work late into the night again. As soon as one pile of papers on her desk went off to her bosses, suitably marked and annotated, another appeared. Budgets had been blown, agents dispatched before their training was finished, and still the questions came from on high: what were the implications of Frank Sanzlermann becoming the first President of Europe for Hungarian national security? Despite all her endeavours, the gold-rimmed Zsolnay coffee cups were no nearer, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter any more. Even the quote from Sun Tzu framed on her wall failed to work its usual magic.

The truth was, she was lonely. She and Mubarak had broken up twenty years ago. He had proposed, but she had said no. She wanted a career, and an officer in the security service could hardly be married to a money-changer. So she had thought, until she found out how many of her colleagues were using their contacts abroad to run black market businesses, and their Communist Party connections to lavishly enrich themselves. As she had done, by buying the former Farkas family summer villa for $5,000. That was profiteering, pure and simple.

Of course she hadn’t known then that the villa had once belonged to her father’s best friend’s family. But that was hardly the point. Her father had advised against marrying Mubarak, although of course he would never admit that he did not want his daughter to marry an Arab. Instead she had married Laszlo Orczy, rising star in the Hungarian theatre. Who, she soon discovered, rose to every opportunity to bed the fans who flocked to his dressing room. The marriage had not lasted. Perhaps if she had said yes to Mubarak, he would not have stayed a money-changer. What a hypocrite she was. What was the use of being chief of the Threat Assessment and Analysis Department when you woke up alone every morning?

She picked up the latest report on Frank Sanzlermann. It was raw intelligence, from an agent dubbed ‘Voter’. Voter was their only source inside Sanzlermann’s inner circle. Signals intelligence, microphones and radio transmitters had brought in a meagre harvest. They had bugged the candidate’s room of course, placing tiny transmitters in the power sockets, light circuits, even the curtain rails. But his security people had swept the room and found every one; even the latest models that the British MI6 had said were undetectable. Sanzlermann’s people did not use the hotel telephone other than to speak to room service. Their mobile phones were encrypted and the security service could not crack the code. Their emails were bland, confirmations of meetings, times and places. There was so much car and bus traffic around the hotel that laser bugging – bouncing the beam off the window to pick up speech vibrations – was not very effective, and the few smatterings they had gleaned up had too much background noise.

The Israelis had passed over some material on Istvan Matonhely, the leader of the Pannonia Brigade, and his international links. There was an interesting money trail, leading from Zurich to South America. The Americans had sent satellite pictures of Sanzlermann meeting senior executives of KZX and the Volkstern Corporation at a remote hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps. MI6’s economic analysts had promised a report on Sanzlermann’s campaign financing. What she needed, Cassandra knew, was to get people inside the hotel. Her watchers in the nearby buildings had reported a steady procession of Austrian and German businessmen passing through Sanzlermann’s campaign headquarters, together with some very powerful figures in the Swiss banking world.

One of the Swiss had substantial interests in the Budapest property market. He had recently invested heavily in a riverside block of flats, bought cheaply from the state. But the development had run into difficulties. The son of the original pre-war owner had suddenly turned up alive and well, living in Hampstead, London. From where he was demanding the return of his family property, or substantial compensation. Reminded of this, and promised the security service’s help in ‘smoothing out legal problems’ the Swiss banker had suddenly proved remarkably cooperative. Some kind of top-security gala dinner or party was planned for the evening of November 9, he had told her. Dignitaries would be flying in from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South America. She reminded herself to tell the London station that ‘Operation Hampstead’ had proved most successful. Voter’s report was flagged ‘Top Secret’. So secret that it existed only in one paper copy. It would not be circulated to the former business partner of Attila Hunkalffy who had just been appointed director of the State Security Service. The secret service was now spying on its own Prime Minister and his associates. An inner cabal was keeping the chief out of the loop. Well, she smiled to herself, that’s nothing new.