They had left the young white man unconscious or dead on the cellar floor. Marlon was tempted to leave the matter at that and simply get out of there.
But, though the details were incredibly confusing, he had the strong idea that he and his mates had all just escaped death because of action taken by someone to warn them by switching the power to their flat on and off. The obvious candidates, since they were down in the room with the fuse box, were the black girl and the big white man. Now it seemed as though they were being made to suffer for what they had done. He felt bad that he was unable to help the black girl, owing to her being handcuffed to an armed killer—and not just any killer, but a killer who had killed another killer—which, in the video-game-based metric that Marlon used for keeping score in the world, conferred an elite status—but the white guy was just lying there all by himself, unguarded, and Marlon had the idea that he could get into the cellar through the building’s back entrance and see if the guy was okay.
Normally the back door was, of course, locked. But today someone had left it hanging wide open.
Marlon was just stepping through it when the building exploded. And though his first instinct was to run outside and get away from it, he was glad that he didn’t. A huge amount of the structure collapsed into the basement and caused a piston of dust to shoot up the corridor right toward his face. He spun away from it and took it in his back, facing out into the back alley, and there he saw perhaps a thousand loose pieces of brickwork rain down from above. Any one of them, had it struck him on the top of the head, would have killed him. But the doorway—according to seismic lore, the strongest part of a building—held above him and protected him.
THE MAN CALLING himself Mr. Jones was quite clearly making it up as he went along. Just as clearly, he was comfortable doing so. He did not appear to be aware that the cellar had an exit on the back alley and so, pulling Zula along with him, he went up one flight of stairs to the ground-floor landing. As they approached it he reached across his body with his free hand and clamped this over Zula’s eyes and did not let her see again until they were in a corridor. Zula knew why and didn’t fight it.
From there he made for the building’s main entrance in the front. After a couple of turns in narrow corridors, they reached a place where Zula could look straight down a hallway, across what she took to be the lobby, and out the front doors to the street. Parked squarely in front of those doors was the van. At first Zula could not see Yuxia in the driver’s-side window, but then she noticed movement and realized that Yuxia had leaned over to pull the passenger-side door closed. Then Yuxia sat up behind the wheel again, shifted the van into gear, and turned to look toward the building. Zula enjoyed a moment of hope that Yuxia might see into the corridor and catch Zula’s eye. But this would have been very difficult because the interior of the building would have seemed very dark to anyone looking at it from outside. And not only dark but crowded, since tenants, spooked by the gun battle, were getting out of the place as fast as they could.
They almost reached the lobby. Then Jones, apparently acting on a whim, dodged to his left into a door that he had noticed ajar. It was the apartment that fronted on the street and it seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry; no one was in here, but the television was still going and the smell of hot food was coming from the kitchen. Jones headed for the front window, approached it sidelong, yanked the shade down, then peeled the edge of it back an inch or two and sighted through the gap into the street.
“There’s our ride,” he remarked after a second or two, and Zula thought he might be talking about the van until she noted that he had pressed the side of his head against the wall and was looking some distance down the street.
Then there was a fantastic noise and the limp window shade slammed against the glass and then, an instant later, flailed out into the empty space beyond, since the entire window had been blown out of its frame. Zula cringed instinctively as the shock came up through her feet. But the shocks kept coming.
Jones did not seem in the least surprised.
“The building is collapsing from the top down,” he remarked. “Perhaps we should get out of it.”
“But Csongor!”
“If Csongor is the man in the cellar,” said Jones, “he picked the right place to ride this out.”
HAD THE CHINESE woman not spoken to him in Russian, Sokolov would not have given her a second thought. But now his curiosity had been piqued, and so he devoted a little more time to departing the destroyed office than he might have otherwise. The place had been utterly devastated, with most of the damage caused by a collapsed lath-and-plaster ceiling that Sokolov had to tromp over and wade through as he made his way to the door. Conspicuously located near the exit was a garbage bag tied in a knot, which the Russian-speaking Chinese woman had apparently meant to take with her until Sokolov had vaulted in and scared her to death. He found that it was surprisingly heavy and that it contained a number of discrete rectangular objects.
Turning back to survey the office, he was struck by the sheer number of wires and cables strung about the place. Most of them were not connected to anything; their plugs were splayed on the floor, covered with plaster but not with glass. The shattered glass formed the lowest layer of debris. The cords and plugs had been thrown down after the glass had broken and the ceiling had fallen down afterward. In the rush and confusion of the moment, Sokolov could not draw any definite conclusions from that, only make a note of it as a perplexing bit of data that he would have to make sense of later.
Raising his sights a little, he scanned the office as he was slowly backing out of it and noticed that some wires had been tacked and/or zip-tied to window frames or anything else that would hold them up. At least one of those wires led to what was quite obviously an antenna, and not the sort of antenna that one could buy in an electronics shop but something that said “military” to Sokolov.
His heel struck something heavy but yielding. He looked down and kicked some loose shards of plaster away to reveal a woman’s purse. The blast had knocked it off a table, and a few items had spilled from its open top when it struck the floor. Sokolov gathered those up and shoved them back into the purse and zipped it shut. Then he went to the door. He unknotted the garbage bag and saw that it contained a laptop and several electronic boxes, but nothing that was intrinsically useful to him right now. Besides, it was heavy.
Suspiciously heavy.
He reached in and pulled out one of the boxes at random and wiggled it in the air. All its weight was concentrated in the base. There was a steel plate, or something, in there.
It was meant to sink when thrown into water.
It was spy gear and this was a spy nest, and the Russian-speaking Chinese woman worked here and was trying to shut the place down.
But she must not be Chinese or else she would not need to be so furtive. She was a foreign agent.
Sokolov dropped the purse into the garbage bag, reknotted it, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he walked down the hallway until he found the stairs. He descended a couple of flights, walked into another devastated and abandoned office, approached its blown-out windows, and made a reconnaissance of the street. The van—Sokolov’s ticket out of here—was still there, though there was a gap in the roof where something big had cratered it.
His eye was drawn by movement at the building’s front entrance. Two people wanted to leave the building. To that end, they were standing framed in its doorway. But they were somewhat torn between fear of what was behind them and fear of what was ahead. Behind them the building was undergoing a gradual, staged collapse, or settling, as one failed floor accordioned into the one below it and the weight of the structure was cruelly redistributed. Each of these events led to a vast exhalation of dust from all the building’s orifices including the front door; so the two people Sokolov was looking at tended to vanish at random intervals, for a few seconds at a time, as a nebula of dust puffed out of the door and then subsided. Nothing was quite horizontal or vertic
al anymore, so big messes of debris tended to skid off the top of the pile and accelerate toward the street and strike it with impacts that Sokolov could feel in his gonads and that must be even more impressive to those people in the doorway.
There was another great settling, another one of those horizontal mushroom clouds of dust; and when it cleared, the two people were gone. They had made their move. Sokolov scanned up and down the street, forcing himself to remain calm and do a proper job of it. He saw them running hand in hand away from the building, headed for an intersection about a block away where a vast crowd of spectators had gathered: cars that had simply come to a stop, and pedestrians crouching behind them to look back at the spectacle of the burning and collapsing building.
There was something familiar about each of the two runners. In other circumstances Sokolov would have known them by the color of their skin, but now both of them were chalk-white since, like so many other people in the neighborhood, they were coated with dust.
The tall one was the leader of the mujahideen from Apartment 505.
The short one was Zula.
Why were they running hand in hand? Were they somehow working together? He could not conceive of a way that this would make sense.
Then their feet struck each other, and both of them stumbled and staggered for a few paces, drawing apart. They let go of each other’s hands, and Sokolov saw that they were handcuffed together.
The rifle was at his shoulder. He advanced to a position where he could brace himself against the frame of the window, and he drew a bead on the tall black jihadist. From this distance the shot was feasible, assuming that the former owner of this rifle had taken decent care of it, but he would have to watch his breathing and he would have to wait for the target to stand still. Until then all he could do was track him and think about the fundamentals of the shot: how he was bracing himself and what obstructions might get in the way.
It suddenly became obvious where they were heading: a taxi had pulled to a stop, two wheels on the sidewalk and two on the street, and the driver had climbed out of it and was standing in the open door facing the scene of the disaster with his mouth hanging open and a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
The man in Sokolov’s sights had noticed. Putting on a burst of speed and practically dragging Zula along behind him, he closed on the taxi, stopped his momentum by crashing into the rear driver’s-side door, bounced back, hauling the door open as he did so, wrapped Zula in a bear hug, and with a thrust of the legs dove sideways into the taxi’s backseat, pulling Zula in with him so that the two ended up lying there side by side.
This was perhaps the only thing that could have torn the taxi driver’s attention away from the collapsing building. He turned around and gazed in almost equal astonishment at the sight of four dust-caked legs protruding from the open rear door of his taxi. He tried to say something, discovered he had a cigarette glued to his lip, pulled it loose, stuck his head into the driver’s-side door, and stiffened up.
Sokolov knew why, even though he couldn’t see it: the jihadist was aiming a gun into his face.
After a short discussion, the taxi driver sagged into the driver’s seat, closed the door, put the vehicle in gear, and got it moving. Such was the chaos in that intersection that Sokolov could have caught them by walking. Hell, by crawling on hands and knees. But killing the jihadist and helping Zula, as desirable as both of those things might have been, were not his main concerns now. He had to get out before the PSB threw a cordon around this whole area.
UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY, as Csongor had considered his position in the world, he had never thought of himself as the sort of person who would end up in any situation even remotely like this one. Which might seem odd given that he had been employed, to a greater or lesser extent, by criminals since the age of fourteen. But as he had been at such pains to explain to Zula, most of what criminals did was in fact quite boring and they tended to go to great lengths to avoid such outcomes.
The fact that he was the most stable and levelheaded person in the family said more about the recent history of Hungary than about Csongor himself.
His family, at least on the patrilineal side, had dwelled in Kolozsvár, the capital of Transylvania, since the Middle Ages. The city had for centuries been the object of a vicious and sustained tug-of-war between Hungarians and Romanians, who knew it as Cluj. After the First World War, Hungary had lost it, along with the rest of Transylvania, to Romania. Csongor’s family had suddenly found themselves living in a foreign country. This had not gone well for them, and so when Hungary had allied itself with the Axis in the late 1930s, Csongor’s grandfather had enthusiastically joined the Hungarian Army. He had married a Hungarian woman in Budapest, brought her back to Kolozsvár, impregnated her, and then gone off to help Hitler invade Russia. Along with many of the other Hungarians who participated in the Battle of Stalingrad, he vanished like a grain of salt dropped into the Pacific Ocean, and so his infant son—Csongor’s father—never even laid eyes on him. His mother retreated to her family home in Budapest, where they survived the out-and-out Nazi occupation and the eventual onslaught of the Soviet Red Army with the usual litany of horrors, deprivations, and scrapes with sudden violent death. After things settled down a bit, and Hungary and Romania became, at least in theory, sister nations living in harmony under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact, Csongor’s grandmother moved back into the family’s old house in Kolozsvár, which was now Cluj again since it had been handed back to Romania. There Csongor’s father had endured the remainder of his childhood, and there he had attended the university and become a graduate student in the mathematics department. But circa 1960 the university, which was predominantly Hungarian, had come under the heel of Romanian chauvinists who had subjected the place to a thorough ethnic cleansing. His adviser had committed suicide. Acting now as the man of the household—for his mother had become a bit sick in the head—Csongor’s father had sold the old family residence and picked up stakes and moved to Budapest, where, lacking an advanced degree, he had found work as a schoolteacher.
A bachelor schoolteacher for a long time, since the combination of poverty and living with a difficult, needy mother had made it difficult for him to attract steady girlfriends. But his mother had passed away in the mid-1970s and he had struck up a relationship with a much younger woman—one of his former students, whom he had encountered by chance on the subway, years after her graduation. They had gotten married in 1979. Bartos had been born in 1982 and Csongor in 1985. Father was a lovely man, but already in his midforties. Smoking several packs a day, he had burned his body out like a meat cigarette and died when Csongor was ten years old. Though not before he had succeeded in downloading most of what he knew of mathematics into the mind of Bartos and, to a lesser extent, Csongor.
Hungarians had a thing for math. Contrary to rumor, this was not genetic. It couldn’t be. As anyone could see from walking down the streets of Budapest, they were absolute mongrels—the Americans of Europe. Lots of blue eyes in faces where one would otherwise not expect to see them. Expensive billboards, all over Budapest’s airports, touted the expertise, the might, the global reach of German engineering and construction firms. Engineering! Another luxury of nationalities with huge populations and intact landmasses. Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children. Part of that was awarding recognition to those who excelled at it. Bartos had participated in mathematics contests that were broadcast on national television as if they were football championships. He even looked like a mathematician.
Meanwhile Csongor, who didn’t, was skulking through the corridors of his school trying to avoid the
coach of the wrestling team, who tracked him down at least once a day and did everything short of putting him in a headlock to make him show up for practice. Csongor had just barely managed to keep the athletic department at bay by joining the hockey team. But he could not bring himself to skate backward, so they made him the goalkeeper. This he was actually good at, because of an unusual combination of puck-blocking bulk with extremely fast reflexes (he had once tried to capitalize on the latter by becoming a saber fencer, but, as the coach explained to him, “There is too much of you to hit”).
He could not have known, during his young puck-stopping years, that this would provide so much conversational fodder for his eventual boss: a Russian organized crime figure and hockey fanatic who wanted to be addressed as Ivanov.
Don’t you want to get old and grow the mustache? Drive the bus?
Ivanov insisted that he was a great admirer of the Hungarians and was always marveling over the miracle of their continuing to exist at all, which at first Csongor naively took as a compliment but later came to understand as an implicit threat. His way of bonding with Csongor had been to make all sorts of remarks about Csongor’s appearance. “You do not look like hacker. Seeink you on street, I would say captain of water polo team. Then, bouncer in nightclub. Then, bus driver. When you going to grow the big mustache?” For it seemed as though Hungarian men, though they looked all sorts of different ways when young, converged on a few basic body shapes when old. The Grizzled Bullet Head. The Highbrow, with receding silver hair swept back. The Carpathian Wild Man, preceded everywhere by his eyebrows. Csongor, a classic Bullet Head, knew it was only a matter of time before he grew the Mustache. But for now it was his practice to just mow his hair down to stubble on the first Tuesday of each month and to keep his face, which he thought unobjectionable but far from handsome, clean-shaven.
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