Tracker: A Short Story Exclusive

by James Rollins

  “TRACK.”

  He stands and tugs free of the leash, ignoring the clatter of the clasp on the pavement behind him. He slinks behind the bench to where the shadows will hide him. He lifts his nose to the night, senses swelling outward, filling in the world around him with information beyond mere sight, which is keen enough in the dark.

  The ripeness of garbage rises from a pail . . .

  The tang of old urine wafts from the stone wall . . .

  The smoky exhaust of cars tries to wash through it all . . .

  But he stays focused, picking out the one scent he was told to follow. It is a blazing trail through all else: the smell of leather and sweat, the salt of skin, the musky dampness held trapped beneath the long coat as the man walked in front of him.

  He follows that trail now through the air as it hangs like a lighted beacon through the miasma of other scents. He hunts along it from the bench to the stone corner, staying to shadows. He watches the prey come running, circling back into view.

  He slinks low.

  The prey and another man rush past him, blind to him.

  He waits, waits, waits—only then does he follow.

  Belly near the ground, he moves from shadow to shadow until he spots the prey bent over another man. They pick him up, search around, then head away.

  He flows after them, a ghost upon their trail.

  Tucker hurried the woman through the main entrance to the Hilton Budapest. The historic structure was just steps away from the Matthias Church. They had no trouble reaching it unseen.

  He rushed her into the lobby, struck again by the mix of modern and ancient that typified this city. The hotel incorporated sections of a thirteenth-century Dominican monastery, integrating a pointed church tower, a restored abbey, and gothic cellars. The entire place was half modern hotel and half museum. Even the entrance they passed through was once the original façade of a Jesuit college, dating back to 1688.

  He was allowed a room here with Kane because of a special international military passport that declared the dog to be a working animal. Kane even had his own rank—major, one station higher than Tucker. All military war dogs were ranked higher than their handlers. It allowed any abuse of the dogs to be a court martial offense: for striking a superior officer.

  And Kane deserved every bit of his rank and special treatment. He had saved hundreds of lives over the course of his tours of duty. They both had.

  But now they had another duty: to protect this woman and discover what they had stumbled into.

  Tucker led her across the lobby and up to his guest room: a single with a queen-sized bed. The room was small, but the view looked off to the Danube River that split the city into its two halves: Buda here and Pest across the river.

  He pulled out the chair by the desk and offered her a seat, while he perched on the edge of the bed. He glanced to the video feed and saw that Kane continued to track the two men, now carrying their third teammate, groggy and slung between them. The group threaded through a series of narrow winding streets.

  He kept the phone on his knee as he faced her. “So maybe now you can tell me how much trouble I’m in, Miss—?”

  She tried to smile but failed. “Barta. Aliza Barta.” Tears suddenly welled, as the breadth of events finally struck her. She looked away. “I don’t know what’s going on. I came from London to meet my father—or rather look for him. He is a professor at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies.”

  Aliza glanced back at him to see if he knew the university.

  When he could only give her a blank expression, she continued, some family pride breaking through her tears. “It’s one of the most distinguished universities of rabbinical studies, going back to the mid-1800s. It’s the oldest institution in the world for training and graduating rabbis.”

  “Is your father a rabbi?”

  “No. He is a historian, specifically researching Nazi atrocities, with a special emphasis on the looting of Jewish treasures and wealth.”

  “I’ve heard about attempts to find and return what was stolen.”

  She nodded. “A task that will take decades. To give you some scale, the British Ministry that I work for in London estimates that the Nazis looted $27 trillion from the nations they conquered. And Hungary was no exception.”

  “And your father was investigating these crimes on Hungarian soil?” Tucker began to get an inkling of the problem here: missing historian, lost Nazi treasures, and now the Hungarian national security service involved.

  Someone had found something.

  “For the past decade he had been researching one specific theft. The looting of the Hungarian National Bank near the end of the war. A Nazi SS officer—Oberführer Erhard Bock—and his team absconded with thirty-six cases of gold bullion and gems valued today at $92 million. According to reports at the time, it was all loaded onto a freighter steaming up the Danube, headed to Vienna, but the party was bombed by fighter planes, and the treasure was jettisoned overboard, near where the Morava River joins the Danube.”

  “And this treasure was never found.”

  “Which struck my father as odd, since this theft was so well known, as was its fate. And the mouth of the Morava River is quite shallow that time of year, made even shallower by a two-year-old drought at the time. To my father, it seemed like someone would have found those heavy crates before the river mud claimed them.”

  “But your father had another theory, didn’t he?”

  Her bright eyes found his. “He thinks the treasure was never removed but hidden somewhere here in Budapest, stashed away until Erhard Bock considered it safe to return. Of course, that never happened, and on his deathbed, Bock hinted that the treasure was still here, claiming it was buried below where even the claws of the Jewish dead could reach it.”

  Tucker sighed. “Like they say, once a Nazi, always a Nazi.”

  “Then, two days ago, my father left me a cryptic message on my answering machine. Claimed he had made a breakthrough, from a clue he had discovered in some newly restored archive of the university’s library, something from the Prague cave.”

  “The Prague cave?”

  A nod, then Aliza explained, “The university library here contains the largest collection of Jewish theological and historical literature outside of Israel. But when German troops marched into the city, they immediately closed the rabbinical university and turned it into a prison. However, just before that happened, the most valuable manuscripts were hidden in an underground safe. But a significant number of important documents—three thousand books—were sent to Prague, where Adolf Eichmann planned the construction of a Museum of an Extinct Race in the old Jewish Quarter.”

  “What a nice guy.”

  “It took until the eighties for that cache of books to be found in a cave beneath Prague. They were restored to the library here after the fall of Communism in 1989.”

  “And your father discovered something in one of those recovered books.”

  She faced him, scrunching up her face. “In a geology text, of all places. On the message, he asked for my help with the British Ministry to obtain satellite data. Something my father in Hungary couldn’t easily access.”

  “What sort of data?”

  “Ground-penetrating radar information from a U.S. geophysical satellite. He needed a deep-earth scan of the district of Pest on the far side of the Danube.”

  She glanced out the window toward the river as the spread of the city glowed against the coming night. “After I got that message, I tried calling him for more details, but I never heard back. After twenty-four hours, I got concerned and asked a friend to check his apartment. She reported that his flat had been ransacked, torn apart, and my father was missing. So I caught the first flight down here. I spent the day with the Hungarian police, but they had barely made any headway and promised to keep me informed. When I got back to my hotel room, I found the door broken open, and all my luggage searched, the room turned over.”

  She glanced at h
im. “I didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know who to trust, so I fled and ended up at the square. I was sure someone was watching me, following me, but I thought maybe I was being paranoid. What could anyone want with me? What were they looking for?”

  “Did you ever get that satellite information your father asked about?”

  Her eyes widened, and her fingers went to the pocket of her coat. She removed a tiny USB flash drive. “Is this what they were looking for?”

  “That, and possibly you. To use you as leverage against your father.”

  “But why? Where could my father be?”

  Tucker stared down at the cell phone on his knee. The party that Kane tracked had reached a parked sedan beyond the historical district. He saw Kane slow to a stop and slink back into the shadows nearby. The leader was easy to spot, leaning against the hood, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “Maybe these guys can tell us,” he said. “Do you speak Hungarian?”

  “I do. My family is from here. We lost most everyone following the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. But a few survived.”

  He patted the bed next to him. “Then listen to this.”

  She joined him and stared at the live feed on the screen. “Who is filming this?” She leaned closer. “Aren’t those the men who were following me?”

  “Yes.”

  She squinted up at him. “How—?”

  “I had my dog track them. He’s outfitted with a full surveillance package.”

  His explanation only deepened that pinched look. Rather than elaborating in more detail, he simply turned up the speakerphone so the audio from the video feed could be heard. Traffic noises and a whisper of wind ate most of the big man’s words, but a few coarse phrases came through clearly.

  Aliza cocked her head to the side, listening.

  Tucker appreciated the long curve of her neck, the way her lips pursed ever so slightly as she concentrated.

  “What are they saying?” he asked.

  She spoke haltingly, listening and speaking at the same time. “Something about a cemetery. A lost Jewish cemetery.” She shook her head as the man ended his call and vanished into the sedan. “He mentioned something at the end. A street. Salgótarjáni.”

  As the car pulled away, Tucker lifted the phone and pressed the button, radioing to Kane. “Return home. Good boy, Kane.”

  Lowering the phone, he watched Kane swing around and begin backtracking his way to the hotel. Satisfied, he turned to Aliza.

  “I’m guessing that trio went rogue. Some faction heard about your father’s inquiry, about his possible breakthrough in discovering that lost treasure trove. And they’re trying to loot what was already looted.”

  “So what do we do? Go to the police?”

  “I’m not sure that’s the wisest plan, especially if you want your father back alive.”

  She paled at his words, but he didn’t regret saying them. She had to know the stakes.

  “Now that they’ve lost your trail, they’ll run scared.” He saw it even on that grainy footage. “The police are already investigating the disappearance of your father. Since they came after you, to use as leverage, that suggests he’s still alive at the moment. But now with the police closing in and you nowhere to be found, they’ll act rashly. I fear that if they can’t get what they want by tonight, they’ll kill your father to cover their tracks. Likewise, if he gives them what they want, the end result may be the same.”

  “So there’s no hope.”

  “There’s always hope. They’re scared and will be more apt to make a mistake.”

  And be more dangerous, he added silently.

  “Then what do we do?”

  “We find out where they took your father. That street you mentioned. Do you know where that’s located?”

  “No. I don’t know the city that well.”

  “I’ve got a map.”

  He retrieved it and spread it on the bed.

  She leaned next to him, shoulder to shoulder, her jasmine perfume distracting. “Here it is,” she said. “Salgótarjáni Street.”

  He ran a finger along the dead-end street. “It lies near the center of Pest, and it looks like it runs adjacent to . . .” He read the name and looked at her. “Kerepesi Cemetery. Could that be the lost Jewish burial site you heard them talking about?”

  “No. I don’t see how. Kerepesi is the oldest cemetery in all of Hungary.” She shifted her finger closer to the Danube. “This is the Jewish Quarter, where you’ll find most of our burial plots. It’s a good three miles away from Kerepesi Cemetery.”

  “Then I’ll have to take Kane and check out that street myself.”

  “It’s too dangerous.” She touched his arm. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You don’t have to ask. If I don’t end this, they’ll come after me, too. That guy I knocked down in the alley will know you weren’t alone. I’d rather not spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for a rogue agent from the Hungarian NSZ.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “Sorry. Kane and I work alone. You’ll be safer here.”

  She blocked him when he made a move toward the door. “You don’t speak the language. You don’t know what my father looks like. And you don’t know anything about the city. It’s my father’s life that’s in danger. I’m not going to sit idly by, hoping for the best. That didn’t work so well for my people in the past.”

  She was ready to argue, but he shrugged. “You had me at You don’t speak the language. Let’s go.”

  Tucker shared the backseat with Aliza as the taxi swept along the arched magnificence of the Chain Bridge as it spanned the Danube. She sat in the middle, between him and Kane. The shepherd spent most of the ride with his nose pushed out the crack in the window, his tail thumping happily.

  Beside him, Aliza stroked Kane’s shoulder, which probably contributed to much of the tail-thumping. At least the presence of the dog had helped calm her. The tension in her body, while still there, had softened a bit. Still, she clutched an old sweater of her father’s in her lap, her knuckles pale.

  Upon exiting the hotel, they had stopped long enough to collect Kane, who had been dutifully waiting for them outside the entrance to the Hilton. They had also stopped along the way out of Buda to meet with a friend of Aliza’s father, one who was willing to sneak into the taped-off apartment and steal an article of clothing from the hamper in the closet. They needed her father’s scent. It was a risky move, but apparently no one was watching the place.

  Still, Tucker kept an eye out for any tail as they left the bridge and headed into Pest, leaving Buda behind.

  In another fifteen minutes, they reached the heart of this half of Budapest and skirted past the rolling park-like setting of Kerepesi Cemetery, with its massive mausoleums, acres of statuary, and hillsides of gravestones.

  The taxi rolled to a stop at Salgótarjáni Street, on the border of the cemetery. Aliza spoke a few words of Hungarian with the driver, who’d spent most of the cab ride eyeing Kane with suspicion. Aliza paid him, handing over a couple extra bills for his trouble.

  They all piled out and waited for the taxi to leave.

  As it pulled away, Aliza turned to him. “What do we do now?”

  “We will let Kane take point from here, but first I need to prep him.”

  He pointed to a dark park bench, well hidden and shadowed by an ancient oak. The entire street ahead looked overgrown and forgotten, densely forested with beech and birch, thick with broad-leaf bushes and tangles of wild roses. A few homes dotted the way, evident from a scatter of lights glowing through the trees. The road itself was crumbled and pitted, long forgotten.

  He led her to the bench, and they sat down.

  Kane came trotting up to them after lifting his leg on an old stump, claiming this street for himself. Tucker scuffled his scruff and shook the hidden tactical vest, making sure nothing rattled to give the dog away. From here, they needed as much stealth as possible. He t
humbed on the camera, raised the lens, and checked the dog’s earpiece.

  “All suited up, buddy,” Tucker said, nuzzling close. “Ready to hunt?”

  A savage swipe of his tail answered that. His dark eyes shone in the shadows.

  Aliza passed Tucker the wool sweater. Kane had already taken a good whiff of her father’s scent, but it never hurt to reinforce it.

  “Target,” Tucker said as Kane snuffled deep into the woolen garment. As the dog lifted his nose free again, Tucker pointed down the tree-shrouded street. “Track and find.”

  The dog twisted and took off. In seconds, he vanished into the shadows as if he were never there.

  Tucker stood, freeing his cell phone. He had donned his own earpiece and taped on a throat mike to communicate hands-free with the shepherd. In his ear, he heard the dog sniffing and softly panting, the sounds amplified by the sensitive microphones of the surveillance gear.

  Trying one last time, Tucker turned to Aliza. “You could wait here. If we find anything—”

  She looked temped but stood up. “I’m right behind you.”

  He nodded and checked on the stolen FÉG PA-63 pistol tucked into the back of his belt. “Let’s see what Kane can find.”

  They set off down the road. He kept them to the deeper shadows of the overgrown lane, avoiding the pools of light cast by the occasional brick houses. Not that such caution was overly necessary. He heard Kane, and with the aid of the camera, saw through the shepherd’s eyes. The dog was as much an extension of his senses as he was a partner.

  As they continued, other dogs barked in the distance, perhaps scenting the arrival of Kane. While humans had on average six million olfactory receptors in their noses, hunting dogs like Kane had three hundred million, which heightened their sense of smell a thousandfold, allowing them to scent a target from two football fields away.

  Tucker kept one eye on the road ahead and an ear out for any noise behind him. All the while, he monitored Kane’s progress as he crisscrossed and pursued any evidence of a scent trail through here. Tucker felt his perception widening, stretching to match that of his dog, blurring the line between them.

  He became more keenly aware of Aliza: the smell of her skin, the tread of her heels, the whisper of her breath as it wheezed. He even felt the heat of her body on his back when she hovered close.