When he was certain that she was alone, he quit the shadows in which he had been hiding, walked quickly across the street toward her. She saw him, put her cell phone away. Her look of alarm brought him up short.
“You! How did you find me?” She looked around, rather wildly, he thought. “Have you been following me all this time?”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“My father was shot to death in front of me,” she said shortly. “Why would I be okay?”
He was conscious of the fact that they were standing beneath a streetlight. At night, he always thought in terms of targets and security; it was second nature—he couldn’t help it. “The police here can be difficult.”
“Really? And how would you know that?” Apparently, she wasn’t interested in his answer, for she began to walk away from him, her heels click-clacking over the cobbles.
“Annaka, we need each other.”
Her back was very straight, her head held high on her long neck. “What would make you say such an absurd thing?”
“Because it’s true.”
She turned on her heel, confronting him. “No, it’s not true.” Her eyes blazed. “It’s because of you that my father’s dead.”
“Now who’s being absurd?” He shook his head. “Your father was murdered because of whatever he and Alex Conklin were into. That’s why Alex was murdered in his home, and that’s why I’m here.”
She snorted in derision. Bourne understood the source of her brittleness. She had been forced into a male-dominated arena, perhaps by her father, and was now more or less at war. At the very least, she was highly defended.
“Don’t you want to know who killed your father?”
“Frankly, no.” Her balled fist was on one hip. “I want to bury him and forget I ever heard of Alexsei Conklin and Dr. Felix Schiffer.”
“You can’t mean that!”
“Do you know me, Mr. Bourne? Do you know anything about me?” Her clear eyes observed him from her slightly cocked head. “I think not. You’re completely in the dark. That’s why you came here, posing as Alexsei. A stupid ruse, transparent as plastic. And now that you’ve blundered your way in, now that blood has been spilled, you think it’s your due to find out what my father and Alexsei were up to.”
“Do you know me, Annaka?”
A sardonic smile split her face as she took a step closer to him. “Oh, yes, Mr. Bourne, I know you well. I’ve seen your kind come and go, each one thinking in the moments before he is gunned down that he’s more clever than the last one.”
“So who am I?”
“You think I won’t tell you? Mr. Bourne, I know exactly who you are. You’re a cat with a ball of string. Your only thought is to unravel that ball of string no matter the cost. This is all a game to you—a mystery that must be solved. Nothing else matters. You’re defined by the very mystery you seek to unravel. Without it, you wouldn’t even exist.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.” The sardonic smile widened. “It’s why you can’t fathom how I can walk away from this, why I don’t want to work with you, help you find out who killed my father. Why should I? Will knowing the answer bring him back? He’s dead, Mr. Bourne. He no longer thinks or breathes. He’s just a pile of refuse now, waiting for time to finish what it started.”
She turned and began to walk away again.
“Annaka—”
“Go away, Mr. Bourne. Whatever you have to say, I’m not interested.”
He ran to catch up with her. “How can you say that? Six men have lost their lives because of—”
She gave him a rueful look and he could tell that she was on the verge of tears. “I begged my father not to get involved, but you know, old friends, the lure of the clandestine, who knows what it was. I warned him that it would all come to an evil end, but he just laughed—yes, laughed—and said I was his daughter and couldn’t possibly understand. Well, that put me in my place, didn’t it?”
“Annaka, I am being hunted for a double murder I didn’t commit. My two best friends were shot to death and I’ve been framed as the prime suspect. Can you understand—”
“Jesus, have you not heard a word I’ve said? Has it all gone in one ear and out the other?”
“I can’t do this alone, Annaka. I need your help. I’ve nowhere else to turn. My life is quite literally in your hands. Tell me, please, about Dr. Felix Schiffer. Tell me what you know and I swear you’ll never see me again.”
She lived at 106–108 Fo utca in Víziváros, a narrow neighborhood of hills and steep stairs, rather than streets, wedged between the Castle District and the Danube. From her front bay windows you could see Bem tér. It was here, hours before the 1956 Uprising, that thousands congregated, waving Hungarian flags from which they had painstakingly and joyously cut the hammer and sickle, prior to marching on parliament.
The apartment was cramped and crowded, primarily because of the concert grand piano that took up fully half the space of the living room. Books, periodicals and journals on music history and theory, biographies of composers, conductors, musicians, crammed the floor-to-ceiling bookcase.
“Do you play?” Bourne asked.
“Yes,” Annaka said simply.
He sat down on the piano bench, looked at the music chart splayed on the rack. A Chopin Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 1 in B-Flat Minor. She would have to be quite accomplished to tackle that, he thought.
From the bay window in the living room there was a view of the boulevard as well as the buildings on the other side. A few lights were on; the sound of fifties jazz—Thelonious Monk—drifted through the night. A dog barked and was still. From time to time, the rattle of traffic intruded.
After turning on the lamps, she went immediately into the kitchen, put on water for tea. From a buttercup-colored cupboard, she took out two sets of cups and saucers, and while the tea was brewing, she uncapped a bottle of schnapps, poured a generous dollop into each cup.
She opened the refrigerator. “Would you like something to eat? Cheese, a bit of sausage?” Speaking as if to an old friend.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I.” She sighed and shut the door. It was as if, having made the decision to bring him home, she had also decided to lose the attitude. They made no more mention of János Vadas or Bourne’s fruitless pursuit of the killer. That suited him.
She handed him the laced tea and they went into the living room, sat on a sofa old as a dowager.
“My father was working with a professional intermediary named László Molnar,” she said without preamble. “He was the one who secreted your Dr. Schiffer.”
“Secreted?” Bourne shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Schiffer had been kidnapped.”
Bourne’s tension level rose. “By whom?”
She shook her head. “My father knew, but I didn’t.” She frowned, concentrating. “That was why Alexsei first contacted him. He needed my father’s help in rescuing Dr. Schiffer and spiriting him away to a secret location.”
All at once, he heard Mylene Dutronc’s voice in his head: “That day, Alex made and received many calls in a very short period of time. He was terribly tense and I knew he was at the crisis point of a hot field operation. I heard Dr. Schiffer’s name mentioned several times. I suspect that he was the subject of the operation.” This was the hot field operation.
“So your father was successful in getting Dr. Schiffer.”
Annaka nodded. The lamplight burnished her hair to a deep copper sheen. Her eyes and half of her forehead were cast in its shadow. She sat with her knees together, slightly hunched over, her hands around the teacup as if she needed to absorb its warmth.
“As soon as my father had Dr. Schiffer, he handed him over to László Molnar. This was strictly for security purposes. Both he and Alexsei were terribly afraid of whoever it was who had kidnapped Dr. Schiffer.”
This, too, jibed with what Mylene had told him, Bourne thought. �
�That day he was frightened.”
He was thinking furiously. “Annaka, for all this to start making sense, you have to understand that your father’s murder was a setup. That sniper was already at the church when we came in; he knew what your father was up to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your father was shot before he could tell me what I need to know. Someone doesn’t want me to find Dr. Schiffer, and it seems increasingly clear that this is the same someone who kidnapped Schiffer, who your father and Alex were afraid of.”
Annaka’s eyes opened wide. “It is possible now that László Molnar is in danger.”
“Would this mystery man know of your father’s involvement with Molnar?”
“My father was extremely careful, very security conscious, so it seems unlikely.” She looked at him, her eyes darkened with fright. “On the other hand, his defenses were penetrated at Matthias Church.”
Bourne nodded his agreement. “Do you know where Molnar lives?”
Annaka drove them to Molnar’s apartment, which was in the posh embassy district of Rózsadomb, or Rose Hill. Budapest showed itself in jumbled buildings of pale stone, elaborately iced like birthday cakes, carved into ornamental lintels and cornices, quaintly cobbled streets, wrought-iron balconies with flowerpots, coffeehouses illuminated by elaborate chandeliers whose lemon light revealed ruddy wood-paneled walls, brilliant splashes of glass, stained, etched into fin de siècle patterns. Like Paris, it was a city defined first and foremost by the sinuous river that clove it in two, then by the bridges that spanned it. Beyond that, it was a city of etched stone, Gothic spires, sweeping public staircases, lamplit ramparts, copper-encrusted domes, ivied walls, monumental statuary and glittering mosaics. And when it rained, umbrellas, thousands of umbrellas, unfurled like sails along the river.
All these things and more affected Bourne deeply. It was for him like arriving at a place and remembering it from a dream, with a dream’s suprareal clarity that stemmed from its direct connection to the unconscious. And yet he could separate no specific remembrance from the tide of emotion that arose from his shattered memory.
“What is it?” Annaka said, as if sensing his unease.
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “Remember how I said that the police could be difficult here?”
She nodded. “You’re absolutely right about that. Are you telling me that you don’t know how you know?”
He put his head back against the seat rest. “Years ago I suffered a terrible accident. It wasn’t an accident, really. I was shot on a boat and fell overboard. I almost died of shock, blood loss and exposure. A doctor in Île de Port Noir in France excised the bullet, took care of me. I returned to perfect physical health, but my memory was affected. For some time I had amnesia, and then slowly, painfully, shards of my former life came back to me. The truth I have to live with is that my memory’s never fully recovered and it likely never will.”
Annaka drove on, but by the look on her face he could tell that she had been affected by his story.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like not to know who you are,” he said. “Unless it’s happened to you, there’s no way to know or even to explain what it feels like.”
“Unmoored.”
He glanced at her. “Yes.”
“The sea all around you with no sight of land, no sun or moon or stars to tell you which way you need to go to get back home.”
“It’s not unlike that.” He was surprised. He wanted to ask her how she could know something like that, but they were pulling into the curb in front of a large, ornate stone building.
They got out and went into the vestibule. Annaka pressed a button and a low-watt bulb came on, its sickly illumination revealing the mosaic floor, the wall of bell pushes. László Molnar’s bell remained unanswered.
“It could mean nothing,” Annaka said. “More than likely Molnar is with Dr. Schiffer.”
Bourne went to the front door, a wide, thick affair with an etched frosted-glass panel running upward from waist level. “We’ll find out in a minute.”
He bent over the lock and a moment later he had the door open. Annaka hit another button and a light came on for thirty seconds as she led the way up the wide curving staircase to Molnar’s second-floor apartment.
Bourne had a bit more difficulty picking this lock, but in the end it gave way. Annaka was about to rush inside, but he held her back. He drew his ceramic gun, pushed the door slowly open. Lamps were lit, but it was very quiet. Moving from the living room into the bedroom to the bathroom, the kitchen, they found the apartment neat as a pin, no evidence of a struggle and no sign of Molnar.
“What bothers me,” Bourne said as he put the gun away, “is the lights being on. He can’t be off with Dr. Schiffer.”
“Then he’ll be back any time,” Annaka said. “We should wait for him.”
Bourne nodded. In the living room he picked up several framed photos off the bookshelves and desk. “Is this Molnar?” he asked Annaka as he pointed to a heavyset man with a thick mane of slicked-back black hair.
“That’s him.” She looked around. “My grandparents used to live in this building, and as a child, I used to play in the halls. The children who lived here knew all sorts of hiding places.”
Bourne ran his fingers over the spines of old-fashioned 331/3 rpm record sleeves stacked next to an expensive stereo with an elaborate turntable. “I see he’s an opera buff as well as an audiophile.”
Annaka peered in. “No CD player?”
“People like Molnar will tell you that the transfer to digital music takes all the warmth and subtlety out of a recording.”
Bourne turned to the desk, on which sat a notebook computer. He saw that it was plugged in both to an electrical outlet and to a modem. The screen was black, but when he touched the chassis it was warm. He pressed the “Escape” key and the screen immediately sprang to life; the computer had been in “sleep” mode—it had never been turned off.
Coming up behind him, Annaka looked at the screen, read from it, “Anthrax, Argentinean hemorrhagic fever, cryptococcosis, pneumonic plague…God in heaven, why was Molnar on a Web site that describes the effects of lethal—what does it call them?—pathogens?”
“All I know is that Dr. Schiffer is the beginning and end to this enigma,” Bourne said. “Alex Conklin approached Dr. Schiffer when he was in DARPA—that’s the advanced weapons program run by the U.S. Department of Defense. Within a year, Dr. Schiffer had transferred to the CIA’s Tactical Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. Shortly after that, he vanished altogether. I have no idea what Schiffer was working on that interested Conklin so much that he would go to the trouble of pissing off the DOD and vanishing a prominent government scientist from the Agency’s program.”
“Maybe Dr. Schiffer is a bacteriologist or an epidemiologist.” Annaka shivered. “The information on this Web site is terrifying.”
She went into the kitchen to get a glass of water while Bourne navigated around the Web page to see if he could get any further clue as to why Molnar would be on this site. Finding nothing, he went to the top of the browser, where he accessed a drop-down menu next to the “Address” bar that showed the most recent sites Molnar had been on. He clicked on the last one Molnar had accessed. It turned out to be a real-time scientific forum. Navigating to the “Archives” section, he went back in time to see if he could find out when Molnar had used the forum and what he’d talked about. Approximately forty-eight hours ago, László1647M had logged onto the forum. Bourne, his heart beating fast, spent several minutes reading the dialogue he had had with another forum member.
“Annaka, look at this,” he called. “It seems Dr. Schiffer is neither a bacteriologist nor an epidemiologist. He’s an expert in bacteriological particulate behavior.”
“Mr. Bourne, you’d better come here,” Annaka replied. “Right now.”
The tightness in her voice brought him into the kitchen at the run. She was standing in front of the sink as if held sp
ellbound. A glass of water was suspended halfway to her lips. She seemed pale, and when she saw him, she licked her lips nervously.
“What is it?”
She pointed to a space between the counter and the refrigerator, where he saw neatly stacked seven or eight white-coated wire racks.
“What the hell are those?” he said.
“They’re the refrigerator shelves,” Annaka said. “Someone took them out.” She turned to him. “Why would they do that?”
“Maybe Molnar’s getting a new refrigerator.”
“This one is new.”
He checked behind the refrigerator. “It’s plugged in and the compressor seems to be running normally. You didn’t look inside?”
“No.”
He grabbed hold of the handle, opened the door. Annaka gasped.
“Christ,” he said.
A pair of death-clouded eyes stared sightlessly out at them. There in the depths of the shelfless refrigerator was the curled-up, blue-white body of László Molnar.
Chapter Fifteen
The seesaw wail of sirens brought them out of their shock. Racing to the front window, Bourne looked down onto Rose Hill, saw five or six white Opal Astras and Skoda Felicias drawing up, blue-and-white lights flashing. The officers inside tumbled out, making directly for Molnar’s building. He had been set up again! The scene was so similar to what had happened at Conklin’s house that he knew the same person must be behind both incidents. This was important because it told him two things: First, he and Annaka were being watched. By whom, Khan? He didn’t think so. Khan’s methodology was increasingly confrontational. Second, Khan may have been telling the truth when he claimed he wasn’t responsible for the murders of Alex and Mo. Right now, Bourne couldn’t think of a reason why he’d lie about that. That left the unknown person who’d called the police at Conklin’s estate. Was the person he was working for based in Budapest? There was a convincing logic to it. Conklin was on his way to Budapest when he was murdered. Dr. Schiffer had been in Budapest, along with János Vadas and László Molnar. Every road led back to this city.
The Bourne Legacy Page 25
