Rise of the Order (12 page)

“Hermann?” Jake asked.

Kopari put his finger on Jake's chest and said, “Hermann Conrad. He's a German. Well, he calls himself a Prussian. But he's a German.”

Jake played it up now, his stare deep into the Hungarian's brown eyes. “Could Jiri be with Conrad?”

“He wishes. Conrad is loaded. He owns places in Berlin and a biotech company in Magdeburg. He has a castle in Austria. I hear it's gorgeous.”

“Is that outside Salzburg?” Jake asked him, uncertain.

“No, no. It's further south than that. By St. Johann.”

The Bratislava priest had mentioned this in his diary, Jake remembered. Something about long training sessions. But the priest didn't know exactly what they were up to, nor did he care to know.

Anna said, “Miko spent some time here in Budapest. Would his friends here know where he is?”

“That man is crazy,” Kopari said, wagging his finger in Anna's face. He thought for a moment and then added, “Another friend of both men maybe. Emil.”

“Emil?” Jake said.

“That's what I said.”

“He have a last name?”

The concierge swished his head no. “Just know Emil.”

“You know how to find him?”

Kopari explained that the man ran a kiosk with furs and knives down on Vaci Street across the river in Pest. Jake had been there before. Vaci was a pedestrian zone that ran for more about a kilometer, with high end stores making it one of the best places to be seen in Budapest. This time of the year would include Christmas markets with food vendors.

“How do we find that kind of kiosk this time of year?” Anna asked him.

“Easy. These people are very territorial. Same place every year. Emil's kiosk is in the square just above the last stop on the Metro Line One—the start of Vaci Street.”

Anna thanked him and headed for the door.

Taking his time to depart, Jake kept thinking he should ask him something else.

Kopari stopped them. “Do you have Jiri's cell number?”

Maybe that was it, Jake thought. He didn't want to tell him he already had the number. Kopari gave them the number, and then Jake thanked him and left, guessing the guy was checking out his ass and not Anna's as they departed.

●

When the man and woman had left out through the front door, Kopari making sure himself, he closed and locked his office door and sat behind his desk. Twisting his head from side to side, his neck cracked and he found his private cell phone inside his suit jacket.

He punched in a number and waited. As the phone clicked on the other end, Kopari said in Hungarian, “They're on the way.” His voice had suddenly changed to deep and resonant.

He listened carefully, nodding his head to himself.

“Right,” he said. “I have them on digital video. I'll make still copies and forward them to you and the others. Be careful. The man, Jake Adams, looks dangerous.”

Hanging up the phone, he thought about the other calls he would have to make in the next hour. But first the video cameras. He glanced to the corner of the room at the small camera. Nobody looks up. He smiled and laughed and then headed to the security control room.

The room was dark and sleet pelted the window. The naked woman on the bed shifted her thin hips up to meet the man's thrusts, his intensity growing like the pistons in his auto building up speed as it enters the autobahn.

“My God,” the woman screamed. “You're so big.”

He smiled, knowing she was lying, and punished her as much as he could for her guile.

When Hermann Conrad was done, he rolled over to his side on the bed and gazed at Alexandra's perfectly round breasts. He had not had to pay for those—they had been perfect when he met her a few months back—but everything else in the apartment, including the rent, was bought and paid for by him. It was better that way. A simple business arrangement. None of the pretense of marriage. She said she loved him, but he knew that was a love of expedience and comfort. He had no illusions of anything else.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him, her fingers running through the gray and blond hair on his chest.

“I was just checking out your sweet body,” he said. “God was good to you.” He knew she liked compliments. Needed them.

“Thank you, Hermann. You are too good to me.”

True. He could have left her in that rat hole apartment in Vienna's worst part of town, working as a “dancer” in a somewhat respectable club—if there was such a place. “You deserve it after what you went through growing up.” Alexandra had grown up in the old Soviet Union, now the Ukraine, where her parents were scientists in Chernobyl. She had survived that disaster because she was staying with an aunt in Kiev at the time. Both parents had died in the initial explosion, though. And that had been some comfort to her.

“I don't remember much of that,” she said, pulling the feather comforter over her nakedness. “I was too young.”

He had heard that before, and then she had cried and told him what she did know. How her older brother and sister had died later from horrible fallout-radiation poisoning.

Hermann ran his hand through her strawberry blonde hair and said, “I will take care of you, Alexandra.”

“Take me with you to Germany,” she pled, her lower lip extended out in a classic pout.

“I'll think about it.”

She rose up to her knees, her naked breasts bouncing to a halt in front of his face. He had never said that to her before. “You will?”

Raising his head, he licked her erect nipple, took it into his mouth and sucked it for a moment, and then said, “I promise. But first I have some business in St. Johann.”

She had been to his castle a few times—a wonderful place like which she had dreamed of living in her youth. “Take me with you to the castle,” she said, her hand reaching down to his flaccid penis. “I will help you decide to take me to Germany.”

Her touch was magic and he was becoming hard again. “How in the hell can I say no to you now?”

She smiled and lowered her head to his rising erection.

●

Having parked his car near a Metro Line Two stop on the west side of Budapest, Jake and Anna took the train under the Danube River, switched to Metro Line One and went to the end.

As they hiked up the stairs to the square above at the end of Vaci Street, Jake realized that darkness had set in, and the square was lit by Christmas lights strung around tree stands, kiosks, and small fires beneath chestnut roasting pans.

On the trip over, he had thought about the brief encounter with the concierge at the Hilton, and how he had freely given up so much information. The man's eyes had given away even more, first inadvertently shifting up and to his right. Was he lying? Or was he trying not to look at the camera in the corner of his office? Jake had a feeling he was about to find out.

Anna wrapped her arm inside Jake's left arm, as if they were a couple. “Nice place,” she said, her breath flowing out in a cloud.

True, he thought. But the chill on the back of his neck was only partially caused by the cold air. “Yeah, I was here a couple of years ago. It was a zoo then, too.”

She looked confused.

“A lot of people,” he explained.

Stopping, as if looking at Christmas ornaments in a kiosk, Anna whispered in his ear, “The kiosk in the corner. Next to the Christmas trees.”

Jake picked up an ornament and glanced past it toward the kiosk. They had no idea what this Emil looked like. The man working the booth had hair to his shoulders, a skinny frame, and his thick gray wool coat couldn't cover that fact. Jake set the ornament down and said, “Let's go. Let me talk.”

The two of them strolled toward the kiosk with furs strung along two sides, and, as they got closer, Jake saw a full row of knives on a counter. Next to them was a tray of Soviet-era military pins. Hanging on the kiosk ceiling were hats—anything from ski hats to Russian military fur hats with red star and sickle in the front.

As they approached, the man's eyes locked onto them, and he lowered himself to grab something. Jake slowed his pace and felt his gun with his arm. When the man came up with a hat from a box and hung it to a line, Jake pulled up to the counter. Anna moved to one side and looked at a hunting knife.

“Emil?” Jake said. “Kopari sent us.”

The man, perhaps mid-forties like the concierge, didn't seem surprised. He said something in Hungarian to a younger man in the kiosk and, to Jake, he shifted his head toward the back of the booth.

Behind the booth was a narrow space, dark and almost impossible for Jake to see more than a few feet. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, but didn't have much time.

As he made out two figures approaching him, Jake heard a step behind him and he swiveled to his right just in time. The knife missed his kidney but grazed his left arm.

Jake kicked back and heard a knee snap, a howl from the man with the knife.

The two other men were on him now, fists flying. Jake took a hit to his left temple, dazing him. He let loose with a flurry of punches and kicks at both men and then turned back toward the front of the kiosk. He needed to move to the light.

Jake ran and almost knocked Anna over. He grabbed her and pulled her toward the center of the square.

“What happened,” Anna said, concerned.

“It was a set-up,” he said. “Emil and two friends. That fuckin' concierge.” Jake turned and saw the three men at the corner of Emil's kiosk. One man now had a gun at his side. “Let's go. We gotta move.”

Pulling her toward the Metro stop, Jake rushed to the steps, the two of them hand-in-hand, jumping down two steps at a time. Down at the bottom and into the station platform, Jake could feel a rush of air and hear a train approaching. He pulled Anna toward the end of the platform so they would be on the first car.

The train pulled in, the doors opened, and before Jake and Anna got inside, he saw the three men coming down the stairs. They would also make the train.

Moments later the train's doors closed and it pulled away. Jake wasn't entirely familiar with the train route, but knew when they got out the men would see them and do the same. Standing and holding onto a bar, Jake looked above the train door for a route map. Opera. Oktogon. There. It came to him. The Szechenyi Furdo stop. He had been there before. The Szechenyi Baths. But he had no intention of going to the baths. It was what was near there that made the most sense. He noticed a few people on the train had ice skates.

“Jake,” Anna said, her arm around his waist. Her eyes looked down to the train floor. Blood was dripping there from his arm.

Jake held onto the metal bar with his stabbed arm and grasped the wound on his arm with his right hand. Then he stepped onto his blood on the floor to cover it. “Damn it. That means there's a hole in my leather jacket.”

“Very funny. It looks bad.”

“Listen, look at the map above. We're going to the Szechenyi Furdo stop. The second to the last on this line. I've got an idea.”

She nodded her head.

A few minutes later they reached their stop. Jake noticed the stairs were toward the front of the train. Good. They wouldn't have to pass the men.

Jake hurried out, Anna at his heels, and they rushed up the stairs. Behind them, Jake saw the three men shoving their way through people to take up chase. He thought about simply pulling his gun once they got to the top of the stairs. They'd have the high ground and the obvious advantage. But with all the people making their way up the stairs, someone would take a stray shot.

Instead, at the top of the stairs, Jake took off in a fast run across an open area toward a brightly lit area. The closest buildings were more than a block away. The Szechenyi Baths were to the north, Vajdahunyad Castle within that complex just to the south of the baths, and, he knew, adjacent to that at this time of year was a huge pond frozen and turned into a public skating rink.

Anna seemed to sense where Jake was heading, her strides keeping up with his easily.

The first bullet whizzed by, the sound coming a microsecond later. Jake and Anna came to a road. They didn't stop, weaving through the traffic, cars honking and skidding to a halt. Ignoring that, they kept on running, the skating rink just ahead over a small rise. They were now running through four inches of crunchy snow.

The second bullet hit a tree. Jake pulled his gun and yanked Anna behind the large oak. Cars honked as the three men made their way across the road. Jake shot once toward the three men. They stopped suddenly and looked for cover, but they were pretty much in the open. They only found a few naked bushes to scoot behind. The man returned fire with two shots. They hit the tree with a thud.

“We can't stay here,” Anna said. She now had her gun out, had taken two shots, and her eyes searched for a better location. Looking toward the skating rink a hundred meters away, the bright lights were blinding. Turning back, she said, “Damn, Jake. I'm glad you're on my side. They're blinded as they look at us, but we've got a great view of them in the light.”

“Right. I just hoped it had been cold enough in the past few weeks to freeze the pond. Seeing the people with skates, I knew it had to be open.”

Another bullet smashed into the tree.

Suddenly sirens approached from the south, their wailing getting closer.

“Do you know your Budapest counterparts in Interpol?” Jake asked her.

“Not well,” she said. “And I sure as hell have no reason to be here pulling my weapon.”

Neither did Jake. He couldn't explain either gun. His permit was for Austria. “Then you better get going. We'll have to split up.” Sliding around the edge of the tree, Jake shot twice and pulled back behind the tree trunk.

“Where do we meet up?”

“Go around the outside of the ice rink. There's a path around the castle to the Baths. Wait in the trees for me to show up.”