Kossuth Square

by Adam LeBor

  Eszter sat back and stared at the monitor for a moment, her face creased in puzzlement.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Gaspar.

  She tapped the keyboard again, several times. ‘Nothing, I think. The program is just sticking. Wait…’

  The left side of the monitor suddenly filled with feeds from half a dozen cameras. Yellow numbers at the bottom of each marked the current date and time. The cameras covered the entranceway, the pavement outside on the street, the foyer, the internal corridor, the rear of the house and garden and inside the VIP salon. Balthazar looked at the screen for several seconds – all the cameras seemed to be working. The VIP salon camera showed a rumpled bed, now empty, another the foyer. He glanced at the camera covering the street outside: a jogger bounded past, heading downhill – a skinny, balding man who looked to be in his fifties, wearing a white Nike T-shirt and grey shorts.

  The private ambulance had arrived soon after Balthazar made his call.

  They had all watched silently as the ambulance men had worked quickly, as if suddenly aware that the slack skin, lolling limbs, gaping mouth and dead eyes had just a couple of hours before belonged to a living, breathing person. The ambulance men straightened al-Nuri out, zipped him into a body bag, slid him onto a trolley and wheeled him away.

  ‘Can you rewind the footage an hour or so back? For all the cameras?’ asked Balthazar.

  Eszter nodded. ‘Of course.’ Her fingers slid across the keyboard. For a couple of seconds the six screens carried on showing the same images. Then they blurred and turned black.

  Eszter leaned forward, frowning. ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘What is?’ asked Gaspar. He stepped nearer, tapped the monitor. Balthazar’s brother was hopeless with technology and could barely operate his smartphone. He had left school at the age of fourteen and was only haltingly literate. But his instincts for trouble – and potential trouble – were razor-sharp. They kept the Kovacs family businesses in profit and its members safe. ‘Why isn’t it showing anything?’

  Balthazar lifted his brother’s hand away. ‘Leave it, ocsim. And let Eszter do her work.’ Gaspar shrugged, stepped back. Eszter tried again but nothing moved. The six monitors stayed black. Balthazar said nothing, but watched with a growing sense that this morning was becoming a larger and larger problem, even though it was not yet 7 a.m.

  Eszter moved the cursor back to the camera covering the palace. She rewound the footage by an hour or so, to 5.30 a.m., when Kinga had alerted her that the client had collapsed. The CCTV frame stayed black, the computer silent.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Eszter. ‘We checked the system this afternoon, before we opened. Like we do every day. All the cameras were fine. Working perfectly.’

  ‘Try the other cameras,’ said Balthazar.

  Eszter went through the same routine with all six cameras. The result was the same every time.

  Balthazar watched with a growing sense of foreboding. ‘What time did we leave the VIP salon?’

  Fat Vik glanced at his watch. ‘Around 6.40 a.m.’

  Balthazar said, ‘Try the room at that time.’

  Eszter did as he bade. The screen stayed black. She turned around in her chair, her eyes wide with anxiety. ‘I don’t understand. This has never happened before.’

  Gaspar ran his fingers back through his hair. ‘We’ve never had a dead Qatari before.’ He looked at Balthazar. ‘Batyam?’

  Balthazar was about to answer when the screen flickered. All six feeds suddenly lit up. Each showed the same image: Balthazar, Gaspar, Fat Vik and Eszter standing in front of Eszter’s desk, staring at the monitor.

  FOUR

  Prime Minister’s office, Hungarian Parliament, 7.30 a.m.

  Three miles away, on the Pest side of the Danube embankment, in an imposing corner office on the third floor of the neo-Gothic extravaganza that was the Hungarian Parliament, the country’s first female prime minister stood by the window looking down onto Kossuth Square, a cup of coffee slowly cooling in her hand. The workday for many started at 8 a.m. and a stream of commuters were walking quickly across the grey granite flagstones on their way to the nearby ministries, as well as the numerous law firms and companies that kept offices nearby, all making sure they kept close to the hearth.

  Reka Bardossy watched the yellow-and-white number-two tram roll along the front of the square, past the almost equally imposing National Ethnographic Museum. Three guardsmen stood by the enormous flagpole on the edge of the square, still as the Queen’s Life Guards outside Buckingham Palace she had once seen in London. The guardsmen wore olive-green uniforms and peaked caps. They looked very smart, but they were also extremely capable: each was a highly trained officer in the National Counterterrorist Force. Security had been stepped up over the last few months, since Budapest had become the epicentre of Europe’s migrant crisis.

  Reka glanced at her fingertips. The dirt was long gone and her manicurist had done amazing work. But several of the nails were still irregularly shaped and one, which still throbbed occasionally, was only an eighth of an inch long. She slowly exhaled, placed the coffee cup down on a nearby table and called her husband, Peter, for the third time that day. This time, he picked up.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said, tersely. ‘When are you coming back?’

  His voice was emollient. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t talk before. I was in a meeting with the Qataris. I told you darling, I can come back when I am finished out here. We’re nearly done, hopefully. It’s so hot here, it’s unbearable. About forty degrees in the shade.’

  Reka had no interest in the weather. ‘How is it going? Will they invest? Will they go ahead with the project?’

  ‘They are making encouraging noises. They are not saying no. Things move slowly here, lots of elaborate formalities before we get down to business.’ His voice turned affectionate. ‘I cannot just break off in the middle and fly back to Budapest – even if my wife is now prime minister.’

  Reka tapped her fingers on the table, the pace speeding up as she spoke. ‘I am under siege here. I need you here, Peter. Not in Doha. I don’t know if I can do this on my own.’

  ‘Of course you can. We’ve been planning for this for years. You will be fine. What time is he coming for the meeting? They are waiting here for his report back, once he has seen you.’

  ‘At eight o’clock. In a few minutes.’ She paused, took a deep breath, the words tumbling out of her mouth, ‘Peter, someone tried to…’

  ‘Tried to what?’

  Tried to kill me. But I killed him instead, she almost said. But that was not a conversation for an open line on a mobile telephone. ‘…To, oh it doesn’t matter. There’s so much going on. Too much.’

  Noise sounded in the background. It sounded like a female voice. It was a female voice. Peter said, ‘I know. I’ll be there soon for you. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go now, darling. They are calling me back. I’ll call you tonight. Promise.’

  She hung up and looked out again, watching the water shimmer as it flowed across the wide moat that lay behind a row of concrete cubes, both protecting the Parliament from car bombers. Despite the migrant crisis, compared to other European capitals, Budapest took a relaxed approach to the orszaggyuleshaz, the national meeting house, as the Parliament was known. Almost all of Kossuth Square, apart from the areas by the entrance to Parliament, was open to the public. Until recently, protestors had been allowed to gather, even set up protest camps on the green area to the side of the main gate. Pal Dezeffy, her predecessor, had forbidden such gatherings, claiming they were a security risk. Which they were, Reka supposed – but one of her first acts had been to rescind that decree. Kossuth Square was the symbolic heart of the country. It had, in a way, brought her to the prime minister’s office. The Social Democrats had taken power after riots and protests in Kossuth Square in the autumn of 2006, on the fiftieth anniversary of the failed 1956 uprising, an event seared into every Hungarian’s consciousness. The rickety right-wing government had collapsed
, in circumstances that still remained unclear, and Pal Dezeffy had been appointed prime minister, which he had remained until he had resigned last week.

  The square had been recently renovated: the Socialist-style statue of Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the failed 1848 revolution against the Hapsburgs, had been replaced by a gleaming ultra-realist, kitsch new version. As a child of the 1970s – she was thirty-nine years old – Reka preferred the previous version. Now the man many regarded as the greatest Hungarian in history glowered down at the white stone steps in front of him, his companions looking positively lachrymose. Kossuth’s look matched Reka’s mood. Her marriage had long been an arrangement of convenience, a union of political and economic interest between two powerful families rooted in the old, Communist regime. There had been lust at the beginning – Peter was a handsome man – and some affection too. But after a couple of years of watching a succession of ever more gorgeous ‘personal assistants’ trail through Peter’s office, Reka’s on-off affair with Pal had been rekindled. It had started when they were teenagers, had flared up and faded away for years. Once Pal Dezeffy took office as prime minister, it reached new heights. Power, she had learned, was an aphrodisiac and nowhere more than in this room.

  Reka tried to disentangle her competing emotions. Two were the most powerful: exhilaration and fear. Exhilaration – that she had finally taken possession of the room for which she had hungered since she was a teenage girl. Fear – that she had only been in office for four days, and if the combined secret services of the United States, Britain and her own country made good on their threats, might be out again in as many. After fear and exhilaration came a third emotion: determination – that she would stay in the office which her father, and grandfather before him, had promised her. Long enough, at least, to redecorate.

  The room was half-lined with dark-wood panels, above which the walls were painted a light shade of ochre. Her predecessors glowered out from their portraits, from the grandees of the late nineteenth century, through the grey men of Communism to the last in the line: Pal Dezeffy, each in a heavy gilt frame under a polished brass lamp. Only one was missing, Pal’s grandfather, Gyorgy Kiss, the prime minister in the early 1950s, the time of the worst Stalinist terror. Csontvary’s masterpiece, Roman Bridge at Mostar, was hung over a white marble fireplace, bringing a blaze of colour to the room. That, at least, would stay. Perhaps the desk too. It was dark and heavy wood, with a green leather panel in the middle. She smiled for a moment, recalling how she and Pal had celebrated his ascension to power on his first evening in office, how her skirt had slid back and forth across the leather. But her smile quickly faded when she remembered the small silver memory stick that she had been handed at the start of the week, and the consequences if the video footage it contained were released.

  Outside the fountain nozzles hidden in the granite tiles suddenly erupted, breaking her chain of thought, spurting gusts of white mist over the square, catching a gaggle of young female Japanese tourists by surprise. Each wore a different fluorescent-coloured rain jacket. They laughed with delight, quickly pointing their telephones at each other as the water droplets slicked off a riot of wet, bright colours. Reka half watched a tall, well-built man walk across the green area, avoiding the mist and Japanese girls, towards the statue of Ferenc Rakoczi on the side of the square, vaguely noticing that he was carrying a long, narrow package. The number-two tram continued on its journey, winding around the corner of the Parliament area towards the Ministry of Justice, her most recent workplace, then rolled on, parallel with the embankment towards the chain bridge. On one level, she knew, it was a minor miracle that she was still free at all, let alone occupying the highest public office in the land. The ministry – she herself, as former minister of justice – had been deeply implicated in the country’s most explosive political scandal since the change of system in 1990. Hungarian passports linked to the ministry had been sold to people-traffickers, who in turn had passed them on to Islamic radicals, who had used the migrant crisis and the collapse of Europe’s border controls to reach Hungary through the Balkan route and then travel westwards. Several of the Islamists had been detained at airports in London and the United States, where suspicious border officers had quickly established that the supposed Hungarian citizens could not speak a word of the language or name two or three other cities apart from Budapest, which they also mispronounced.

  Reka had not only known about the people-traffickers; she had been taking a cut of each deal. But she had not known about the terrorist connection, in part, she admitted, although only to herself, because she had deliberately not asked enough questions. After the airport arrests she had been called in by the Budapest station chiefs of the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service and an officer in Hungary’s own Allami Biztonsagi Szolgalat (ABS), the domestic security service, to a safe house in the Buda hills. The three spooks had threatened her with a lengthy term in an American super-max prison for her involvement in facilitating the movement of terrorist suspects. The toughest had been the ABS officer, an athletic-looking woman in her early thirties, with dark-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  The three spooks wanted something, of course: information. Reka had put on the performance of her life, claiming that Pal Dezeffy was to blame for the passport racket. She had known nothing about any terrorist connection. Pal, she explained, had cut a deal with shadowy figures in the Gulf: in exchange for a multi-billion-euro investment scheme that would transform the country, he would allow the would-be terrorists to pass through Hungary and give them passports. Hungary would be a transit point, a gateway to the west, a chance for the sclerotic monarchies to rid themselves of their Islamist radicals. Every bomb attack in Europe meant one less in the Gulf. Reka knew her best chance, her only chance, was to claim that she was running a sting operation. Reka said that she had allowed the passport-selling to continue only to draw out the traffickers’ networks and their Islamist contacts. Once they were sufficiently mapped, she was planning to hand everything over. That had bought her some time, a week, to be precise, some of which she had spent angrily asking herself why she had not dug a little deeper into the Gulf connection instead of buying more designer handbags that she did not need.

  Reka sipped her coffee, feeling the caffeine buzz course through her. Her dismay at her conversation with her husband was fading. Perhaps he was right. The most important task at the moment was to get the new Gulf investment package. A clean one, with no murky middle-men or passports slipped across a restaurant table. Everything flowed from that. Then she could drag Hungary into the twenty-first century. She was working on that here in Budapest while Peter focused on Doha. And what use would he be here anyway, running around with yet another ‘assistant’? Reka told herself she was not jealous, not at all. She glanced back at the large antique desk. She almost believed herself. Just as when she told herself that she did not miss Pal Dezeffy and had no choice but to bring him down.

  The sound of a ringing telephone suddenly filled the room. Reka walked across the room, sat behind the desk, and picked up the landline’s handset. She listened while her secretary said a name, then hung up. She looked around the room once more, taking in the gloomy decor, glanced at the reminder she had written to herself on a yellow sticky note: ‘Rainbow Gallery, Brody Sandor Street’, then pressed a button at the side of the desk. The double doors opened and a youthful man walked in carrying a black leather briefcase. He had short light-blonde hair, wore skinny navy trousers and a slim-fitting sky-blue linen shirt that matched his eyes. Akos Feher, formerly an assistant state secretary in the Ministry of Justice, now the chief of staff to the Hungarian prime minister at the tender age of twenty-eight. Akos’s appointment had triggered a sour envy among his older colleagues and had immediately alienated a whole class of apparatchiks whose support Reka would need if she were to stay in office, let alone implement any new policies. Neither she nor Akos fully trusted the other. But they were bound together, each knowing the other’s darkest secr
et.

  Akos stood in front of Reka. ‘Jo Reggelt kivanok miniszter elnok asszony. Good morning, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Hallo, Akos. Did you bring it?’

  Akos nodded.

  Reka gave him a brief smile. ‘Then it will be a good morning.’

  Loczy Lajos Street, 7.30 a.m.

  Balthazar walked down the white gravel path that led from the villa’s front door to the gated entrance, his shoes scrunching on the loose stones. The path through the large front garden was a new addition, Gaspar’s idea. It looked smart, but the gravel was also noisy and made it difficult for people to sneak in and out. The brothel was hidden behind a high fence of grey metal panels topped with metal spikes, with a sliding electric door in the middle. The 1940s modernist villa had once been home to a dynasty of industrialists, from Hungary’s Schwab, ethnic German, minority, most of whom had been expelled after 1945. The Muller family had managed to stay but lost everything after the Communist takeover in 1948, and fled for good during the 1956 uprising. The property had been nationalised. But like most assets appropriated by the one-party state it had not been returned to its original owners, even after the change of system in 1990. Those were the years known as vadkapitalizmus, wild capitalism. Wild capitalism essentially meant that when the state owned lucrative assets, and that state no longer existed, everything was up for grabs at bargain basement prices – at least for the well connected. Balthazar had never bothered to check, but Gaspar had told him that the house was now owned by a property company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Balthazar’s enquiries as to who owned the company had been met with a shrug and ‘mindegy’ – whatever.