As he drew level with Karamov's table, he let his arm sweep down, knocking against the bottle of wine so casually that it looked like an accident. The bottle rolled off the table and onto the floor, giving Tomas all the excuse he needed. He muttered an apology in the few words of Hungarian he knew and dropped to his knees. His fingers reached for the bottle and he let them touch but not grasp it, so that it rolled right under the table. He dived under the tablecloth after it.
Karamov was cursing him, the young man too, and the bodyguards were beginning to turn around in their seats. In the background he could hear another raised voice. Probably the waiter. Tomas had seconds, if that.
The space under the table was crowded with legs. The bottle had wedged itself between Karamov's, his fleshy calves terminating in improbably delicate winkle pickers. There was one suitcase down there, too, but Tomas couldn't tell which. They were too similar in size and design - no doubt deliberately.
He knocked the case over as he pulled the bottle out and it fell sideways with a musical tinkle. This was the other one, then - the payment and not the prize.
That meant the case he wanted was in Karamov's lap. There was no way he could pull it away discreetly.
Tomas reached up, scrabbling his fingers across Karamov's massive thigh. The big man grunted and swore but he still seemed to be assuming that Tomas was just a clumsy waiter. Do something stupid enough, Tomas thought sourly, and at least no one thought you were a pro.
Not much longer, though. The waiter's voice was getting louder. The chair legs scraped at the other side of the table as the young man rose to his feet and Tomas thought that he, at least, had realised something was wrong.
And then, finally, he felt the leather of the case under his fingers. He clutched and pulled, dragging himself and the case away from the table in one smooth movement.
Karamov let out a cry that was more startled than angry and more chairs scraped as the bodyguards started rising to their feet.
Tomas kept low, crawling on hands and knees underneath the nearest table and out the other side, the case tucked under his arm. A hand grabbed at his ankle but he kicked out as hard as he could. There was a yelp of pain and the pressure released.
It was odd to be so frightened, and feel no physical manifestation of it. No pounding heartbeat, no ragged breath. Only his racing thoughts told him this was one of the stupidest stunts he'd ever tried to pull.
He pulled his knees under him and rose to his feet while he was still half underneath the table, setting his shoulder to the wood. It was much heavier than it looked. Tomas wobbled in a half-crouch for a second, sure that his knees were about to give. He gritted his teeth and heaved, putting his back into it as well as his thighs.
The table rose and then toppled, showering cutlery and crockery all over Karamov's men. The waiter, who'd been reaching for Tomas, paused to gape in shock. Karamov was shouting, the other customers were screaming, and there was cream sauce spattered everywhere.
Tomas turned on his heel and sprinted up the stairs, the outraged cries of the restaurant staff and the enraged bellows of Karamov's men echoing after him. He had five seconds' start on them, if that.
CHAPTER FIVE
Morgan was in a daze of boredom, looking at the narrow-fronted houses around him and idly wondering how much they cost, when Tomas sprinted round the corner and straight into him.
"What -?" he said, but Tomas just grabbed his arm and ran. A moment later Morgan knew what he was running from. Four, five - no, every bloody bodyguard Karamov had came barrelling round the corner towards them. They hadn't drawn their guns, but from thirty feet away Morgan could see them bulging out their trousers at the ankle. Adrenaline surged through him and his own legs started pumping as Tomas released his arm.
The streets were still crowded, and Tomas had to shoulder people aside as he ran. Morgan heard him muttering "Sorry, sorry" to everyone he hit. Karamov's bodyguards didn't bother to apologise and step by step they were gaining.
Morgan leapt up, getting a brief view over the heads of the crowd. It went on forever, clogging the cobbled road all the way down to the main junction.
They'd never evade Karamov's men here. But there was a narrow, darker street snaking off to the left twenty feet ahead. Morgan started curving round towards it. He thought he heard Tomas say something and he felt the brush of fingers against his arm, but there was no time to ask what he wanted. Karamov's men were so close now that he could hear the rasp of their breathing. He put on a burst of speed, forcing energy into muscles that were already protesting the fierce workout. Sweat was sluicing from his face and arms, soaking his green t-shirt.
Ten more feet and he'd managed to cut his way across the crowd to the side street. The instant he was in there, the gloom hit, the street too narrow to let in the sun. It was damp too, as if all the humidity in the air had condensed to water on the decaying brick walls. A welcome cool washed over him.
Morgan suddenly felt a hand, pulling at his shoulder. He'd almost lashed out before he realised it was Tomas.
"We've lost them, for a minute at least," the other man said. He didn't even sound winded.
Morgan bent over, hands on his knees, as he struggled to get his breathing back under control. When he straightened, he noticed for the first time that Tomas was carrying something clasped against his chest, a small briefcase. "That what this is all about?"
Tomas nodded. "I took it from Karamov. I'm fairly sure it's what we were sent here to retrieve."
"And what happened to keeping a low profile?"
"Last-minute change of plan."
Morgan laughed helplessly, punchy with exhaustion. "No shit."
Tomas grinned for just a moment, the smile slipping as he darted a look behind them. "We won't have lost them for long, there are only so many places we could have gone. We need to keep moving."
"Back to the hotel?"
"They've seen you now. If any of them recognised you... it's too big a risk."
"Sorry," Morgan said grudgingly. "It was stupid going down to the baths."
Tomas cocked his head suddenly, and then swore. A moment later Morgan heard the clamour of running footsteps over the background wash of traffic. "They're coming," Tomas said.
Morgan spun round, took two steps - and collided with a small body he hadn't expected to be there. He tripped and fell, desperately trying to roll away from the blonde girl he'd knocked to the ground. His chin connected with the pavement so hard it snapped his teeth shut, and for a moment all the could think about was the bright flare of pain. By the time he'd shaken the confusion from his head, the girl was already on her feet.
She held out a hand to him. He took it, too surprised to refuse - and found himself pulled to his feet with surprising strength.
"Y'all will be wanting to come with me now," she said with a Southern drawl.
"I... what?"
Tomas turned around, realising Morgan was no longer following. Tomas's eyes tracked over Morgan's shoulder and narrowed, and Morgan realised that Karamov's men must be very close.
Morgan tried to pull his hand away from the blonde girl's soft fingers.
They tightened like a steel band around his wrist. "You'll never outrun 'em, you know," she said. Morgan saw that her bright golden hair was caught back in a red bow. She couldn't have been older than ten. He pulled his arm again, harder this time, less worried about hurting her, but she wouldn't let him go.
Tomas took a step back towards them. "Sweetheart, it's not safe for you here," he said to the girl.
She sighed and shook her head. "I'm not the one being chased by a whole parcel of men with guns, Mr Len."
Morgan saw a brief moment of shock on Tomas's face, and then something like recognition.
"Follow me," she said, and this time when she pulled Morgan went with her, bewildered, as Tomas trotted along silently beside. He couldn't imagine where she was taking them. Karamov's men were only fifty feet behind.
"In here," she said, finally rele
asing Morgan's wrist as she stepped through the door of a shabby, white-fronted building.
Morgan hesitated, looking at Tomas. The other man nodded impatiently and pressed Morgan forward, a hand against the small of his back.
Tomas followed Morgan through and slammed the door behind him. He turned the mortice lock and the Yale, but Morgan didn't think it would slow Karamov's men for long.
"What now?" he said to the girl.
She smiled happily, as if they were playing a game. "If y'all will follow me..." She turned and led them to the back of the room, dropping to her knees to fumble at the wooden floor.
Morgan flicked a light switch on the wall beside him as he heard the first muffled blow against the outside of the door. In the pale light of the room's one bare bulb, he could see that the building was half derelict. There was a hole in the ceiling above where the cross-hatched floorboards were visible, and most of the paper on the walls had been scraped away to reveal the mouldering plaster beneath. There was only one piece of furniture, a scuffed table, wobbling on three legs.
The girl was kneeling just to the left of it, and Morgan could see what she'd been looking for - a round metal ring embedded in the floor. As another kick landed on the door, hard enough to splinter the wood, her small white fingers closed around the ring and pulled.
Nothing happened.
"Botheration," she said. "It's stuck."
The blows on the door were coming two at a time now. When Morgan snatched a look he could see that one of the hinges was buckling, the wood around it torn away and the screws anchoring it to nothing but air.
"Let me," Tomas said. He knelt beside the girl and replaced her hand with his own. When he heaved, there was a protesting screech and then a three-foot square of floorboards began to rise. There was nothing beneath but darkness.
"Down," Tomas said, already clambering through the opening.
His head quickly disappeared, and the girl followed, frowning as her feet searched for the steps that must have been below. Morgan crouched beside her, watching the door. He found himself trying to guess whether the wood or the hinges would give out first.
The hinges, it turned out. As the girl's blonde head finally cleared the entrance, there was one final blow, and the door broke away and flew through the air, straight towards Morgan. He dived to the side as the heavy rectangle of wood crashed to the ground, snapping the trapdoor as it landed.
"Shit!" Morgan said. Now they wouldn't be able to close off the route behind them.
An instant later a figure appeared in the doorway, the shadow-puppet outline of a man clutching a gun, silhouetted against the bright sunlight.
Morgan knew he only had a few seconds till the man's eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the house. He used them to swing himself over the lip of the hole. His feet scrabbled beneath him to find purchase, and it took him a second to realise that the thing banging against his leg was the ladder, rope and not wood as he'd expected.
He slithered quickly down it, a hundred cold slogs round assault courses making him nimble. It was long, sixty foot or more, but he reached the bottom before anyone had followed him, the light from the trapdoor above shining uninterrupted into the darkness below. At the bottom, his feet landed in a thin layer of water which splashed up cold and a little slimy against his ankles.
Beyond the small, pale square of light in which he stood was complete darkness. Tomas and the little girl were dim figures on the periphery of it, none of their features visible.
"This way," the girl said. She'd produced a small torch from somewhere, but the beam barely troubled the darkness, only revealing a thin strip of uneven, rocky ground and nothing of what lay ahead.
After a short, stumbling run, they arrived at a rectangular entranceway to a tunnel as clearly man-made as the cavern was natural. Another, faster run through that, and they were at a T-junction leading off into darkness left and right. The girl led them right without hesitation, then left at the next junction.
Hurrying in her wake, Morgan soon lost count of the turnings. It was an endless, shadowed flight through featureless stone tunnels and wider, echoing caverns. Sometimes the floor was smooth, sometimes pockmarked. On one occasion it was beneath a foot of water. The air was chilly to the point of discomfort, as if they were buried somewhere beneath Siberia, not Budapest sweltering under its midsummer sun.
The ceiling dipped so low at one point that Morgan was forced to his hands and knees, but he scrambled through anyway, trusting the girl to lead them out and not into a fatal dead end.
"Where the hell are we, man?" he whispered to Tomas. He'd already given up asking who the girl was. Tomas couldn't, or wouldn't answer him.
"It's called the Labyrinth, I think," Tomas said. "A huge network of tunnels beneath Buda."
"Who built them?" Morgan asked some time later, when they were crossing a big open chamber bisected by a clear stream.
"Some are World War Two bomb shelters. Some are much older than that - hundreds of years. People have always needed a place to hide."
After that, Morgan saved his breath for the flight. They'd lost their pursuers long ago, but the girl didn't seem to want to stop running. Morgan couldn't figure out why he was willing to trust her, except that she was ten years old, and what the hell was she going to do to them? He guessed someone must have been using her as a go-between, and she'd found herself caught up in the action when Tomas had stolen whatever it was that Karamov was trading.
It was when Morgan finally felt safe that Karamov's man found them. He loomed out of the darkness ahead, a solid lump of black until the torch's beam picked out his features, the sharp nose and wide mouth.
It only took the man a moment to recover from his shock, and then he was fumbling for the Glock he'd tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
Tomas grabbed the girl by the shoulders and Morgan thought he meant to shield her with his own invulnerable body. But she skipped forward two steps before Tomas could stop her.
Karamov's man hesitated, then brought his weapon to bear.
The girl didn't even flinch. She kept the beam of her torch trained straight in his eyes and - brighter as she drew closer - it blinded him. The bodyguard cursed and backed away. Morgan knew that any moment he'd give up trying to get a clear view of his target and just start shooting.
"Now, what would your mamma think of you standing here waving a gun at little old me?" the girl said.
The man's gun instantly zeroed in on the source of the voice. "Don't move," he grated in heavily accented English.
The girl flicked back her head to move a lock of long blonde hair out of her eyes. "Marinka brought you up nice, didn't she? Taught you the golden rule?"
Morgan saw the man's mouth working, a dark hole in his face.
"That's right," the girl continued. "She took you to mass every Sunday, I know she did. But you stopped going when you joined the Bratva. Stopped seeing her too - cut yourself off from all your family, just like they told you to. Broke her heart, didn't it? She didn't last but two more years after that. Everyone said she could have pulled through the stroke, if she'd only had the will."
"Who told you this?" the man asked. His voice shook and so did his hand. The barrel of his gun pointed at the ceiling one moment, the cracked stone floor of the tunnel the next.
"I know everything about you, Fiodor. I know that sometimes you cry at night, when you think about the daughter you left behind and the mother who was cursing your name as she died." The girl's voice had taken on a different cadence as she spoke, deeper and darker. But Morgan could still see the same little blonde-haired figure in front of him, face as blank and innocent as a doll's.
"She's in Heaven now, Fiodor, but she's still crying. She's seen what you've done, all the things you've done - that girl you beat and cut before you killed her. She shouldn't have given in so easily, should she? Shouldn't have cried and begged and told you that you could do whatever you wanted, if only you'd let her live. Because that just took the fun
right out of it for you, didn't it? Killed your - let's call it your passion - right there. You would have let her live, you meant to - but not after she'd seen your humiliation. What if she'd told anyone else?"
"No," said Fiodor. "No." He was backing away now, one shuffling step at a time.
The girl took a step forward for every one he took back. "Your mother sees it all, Fiodor. And she's weeping up there in Heaven, she's weeping because she knows she'll never see you again. Because when you die, you won't be joining her. When you die, Fiodor, you're going somewhere else."
The bodyguard was crying silently, a thin stream of tears glistening in the torchlight as they flowed down his cheeks. The Glock had dropped to his side, hanging limply from his fingers.
"No," he whispered. "I can repent. It's not too late."
The little girl moved almost too quickly to see, darting forward to pry the gun from his unresisting hand. She had to use both of her own to hold the heavy, black metal weight of it as she shot him between the eyes. A fine spray of red blood splattered her gold hair and pale, freckled face.
"It's too late now," she said.
Morgan was still shivering when, fifteen minutes later, they emerged at last into a lighted section of the tunnels. The walls were smoother here, decorated with crudely faked cave paintings that suggested they'd stumbled on some kind of tourist attraction. A ghost walk, maybe - the place was still very dim, probably designed to scare people.
"This is the part that's open to Joe Public," the girl confirmed. "But it's shut for the day, so we won't be disturbed." Her voice had returned to its earlier, high-pitched lilt. In the pale lighting Morgan could see that she was wearing a lacy white top over a demure blue-green skirt. Her shoes were black patent leather, perfectly polished.
They finally stopped in a small, octagonal chamber covered in fake plastic greenery. In the centre was a fountain with liquid spurting from a tap on each of its four vine-covered sides.
Cold Warriors Page 7
