by Adam LeBor
Pal picked up the remote control and called up a menu on the screen. A new video file appeared. ‘Speaking of Eniko Szalay…’ The first frame showed Reka Bardossy and Eniko sitting in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel.
Newsroom of 555.hu, 9.30 a.m.
‘Where’s the sandbox, Vivi?’ asked Eniko.
Vivien Szentkiralyi kept staring at her screen while she waved her left hand at the pile of computer equipment at the side of her desk. ‘Dunno. In there somewhere.’
The systems manager of 555.hu sat at an enormous right-angled desk, which took up most of a corner of the newsroom. There were two monitors facing her, angled together in a wide V-shape, and another to the side. The part of Vivien’s workspace directly in front of her chair was comparatively tidy: a single keyboard and chipped mug of the green tea that she seemed to mainline all day. The left side of her desk was piled high with ancient laptops, cables, keyboards and wi-fi routers, CDs, DVDs, empty cans of energy drinks and pizza boxes, several of which still contained rock-hard, desiccated crusts.
In the middle of the chaos on the left side of Vivien’s desk, under two other laptops was a black, old-fashioned IBM ThinkPad, at least fifteen years out of date. Eniko reached for the IBM, careful not to start a cascade of computers, parts or pieces of pizza. The IBM was 555.hu’s sandbox. Purchased unused, still in its original box, when the website had launched a couple of years ago, the sandbox had never been connected to the Internet and could not be. The laptop was so old, it needed a special card to connect to wi-fi. There was no wi-fi card – Vivien had filled the wi-fi slot and the cable ports with epoxy glue that was now irremovable. That also prevented the sandbox from ever being connected to 555.hu’s main network or server. The USB ports, however, had been left functional to receive memory cards or sticks. The IBM’s original operating system had been wiped and replaced by Linux. That system, favoured by techies, was regarded as the safest as almost no viruses for Linux were written. The sandbox was a secure space for viewing questionable or unknown files, or opening email attachments from unknown senders, somewhere for the journalists and techies to play around. The sandbox’s hard drive was also divided into several partitions, each firewalled from one another. Even if one was infected by a virus, the others would remain uncontaminated. Eniko planned to use the sandbox to take a look at the memory stick she had been handed on the tram that morning.
Eniko levered the sandbox out, feeling its weight in her hand. ‘Can I take it?’ she asked Vivien. The systems manager nodded. ‘Sure. But bring it back.’
Vivien was a tall, pale, almost gangly woman in her late twenties, with short-cropped jet-black hair and a silver nose ring. Today, like every other day Eniko had seen her, she was dressed in a black T-shirt and black skinny jeans that were ripped at both knees. Vivien was never especially chatty or friendly, never socialised and nobody knew anything about her personal life, if indeed she had one. But she was extremely good at her job and had several times rescued Eniko from computer disasters, and recovered files she had thought were lost forever.
Eniko thanked her, and turned to go. Apart from Eniko and Vivien, the newsroom was quiet. Zsuzsa had gone out for coffee and the other reporters were either not in yet or were scrolling through Hungarian and foreign news websites. Distracted by Zsuzsa’s new look and evening date, Eniko had for a moment put aside her anxiety about the events of the morning and the memory stick the man had had given her on the tram. Now Eniko had the sandbox, she could at least safely view the contents of the memory stick. But for that she would also need somewhere private.
This was Eniko’s third job in journalism. Her first was on a local paper in the south of the country, near the Serbian border. After that she had worked for a respected business weekly, investigating the links between politicians in the ruling Social Democratic Party, the new class of oligarchs and their companies. Then the weekly was bought up by one of the same oligarchs, all the investigations were shut down and the staff given a choice of stay and receive a six-month bonus or resign by lunchtime. Eniko and about half of her colleagues had left. She had joined 555.hu soon afterwards, and had never felt as at home anywhere else.
Eniko looked around the newsroom. This had been the salon of the once-magnificent art nouveau apartment that was now home to 555.hu. Unlike most polgari, or bourgeois flats, it had somehow escaped being chopped up into smaller units during Communism. The apartment’s grandeur had faded, but it had still kept a sense of the old Budapest a century ago, when the Hungarian capital had been the epicentre of a literary and cultural renaissance, spearheaded by its writers. The high-ceilinged rooms were still decorated with plaster cornices, although they were now grey and chipped. The windows rattled in their paint-peeling wooden frames whenever the wind blew hard or the tram passed by underneath, and the varnish on the light-wood parquet slats had long since worn away, but somehow the ramshackle surroundings perfectly suited the website’s irreverent energy. And while the large black marble fireplace might be chipped and cracked in places, it was still the centrepiece of the newsroom, topped with awards that 555.hu and its reporters had won. A poster of H. L. Mencken, a famous American journalist, added to the bohemian atmosphere. Underneath the photograph of his face was his most famous quote: ‘The relationship between the journalist and the politician should mirror that of the dog and the lamp post.’ ‘Especially in Hungary’ someone had added in pen. Eniko looked ruefully at the poster, as she had done every day this week. Mencken’s advice was not an accurate representation of her relationship with Reka Bardossy.
Eniko was about to go, when she heard Vivien exclaim, ‘Bassza meg! Fuck it.’
She glanced at Vivien and the monitor in front of her. The screen showed lines of code rapidly flowing downwards, while another, smaller window on the lower right-hand side showed a terminal command line, that gave access to the operating system. The screen to her right was open to Gmail. The screen to her far left showed the 555.hu website, with a ticker showing the number of visitors. Eniko did a double take when she looked at the numbers the ticker was displaying. The numbers were spinning so fast they were a blur of pixels.
‘What’s happening, Vivi?’
Vivien tapped rapidly at her keyboard. ‘DDOS.’
‘From who?’ asked Eniko.
‘I wish I knew. A whole army of zombie bots, coming in from all around the world. Way beyond the normal stuff.’
A Distributed Denial of Service attack meant that someone was using a massive network of computers – many of which had been surreptitiously hijacked and so were known as zombie bots – to bombard the 555.hu website with requests to view its pages. The website could not handle that number of contacts and crashed. A DDOS was the simplest kind of cyber-attack to organise – programs to run one could be easily downloaded from the Internet. And they were almost impossible to trace.
‘Can you beat it off?’ asked Eniko.
‘I’m trying. We are usually under continual attack, but those are pinpricks, nothing our firewall can’t handle. I’ve never seen anything like this before.’
At that moment a paunchy, balding man in his late forties strode into the newsroom. Roland Horvath, the editor in chief, was indignant. ‘Vivi,’ he demanded in a loud voice, ‘why is our website down?’
TEN
Budapest police headquarters, Teve Street, 11.30 a.m.
Sandor Takacs was standing by the window, looking out at the city, deep in thought, when Balthazar stepped into his office. He breathed in the warm, stale air, was about to sit down in their usual corner alcove where two easy chairs stood next to a small coffee table, when Sandor turned around and said, ‘Don’t bother, Tazi. We’re going out in a few minutes.’
Balthazar frowned. ‘Listen, don’t get me wrong, boss, but why did you call me in just to go straight out? We could have met wherever we are going. Somewhere with AC or a breeze.’
Sandor’s office was like an overheated bathroom. The only thing missing was a large tub of hot water. The lar
ge picture windows showed a panoramic view of the Danube and the city, but did not open. The usually humming air-conditioner mounted on the wall was silent. A small fan stood on Sandor’s desk, rotating back and forth, but merely churned the sticky air. Balthazar continued talking, ‘Haven’t they fixed your AC yet?’
‘No. They haven’t. Missing part, apparently,’ said Sandor as he turned around, his forehead coated with a light sheen of sweat. ‘And we can’t meet where we are going. We need to arrive together.’
‘Sounds exciting. Destination where, exactly?’
‘You’ll see.’
Balthazar walked over to Sandor’s desk, which was unusually tidy. Several case folders were arranged in a neat pile on one side, while that day’s issue of Magyar Vilag lay over Sandor’s keyboard. Instead of the customary king-size ashtray full of shredded cigarettes, there was a small white dish next to his keyboard, containing several thin sticks of raw carrot. Sandor’s office was a large corner room. The walls were painted a light blue, the floor was a plastic laminated parquet. The Budapest police headquarters were located next to the national police headquarters, in a complex of glass and steel buildings in the rougher end of District XIII. The walls of the room were lined with pictures of Sandor at the headquarters of the London Metropolitan police, the New York Police Department and the FBI, as well as an array of framed certificates from the courses he had completed there. A separate display showed Sandor with every prime minister since the change of system.
Balthazar was about to ask about the carrot sticks when he scanned the newspaper headline: ‘More Questions over PM Bardossy’s Passport Connections’. Magyar Vilag was usually a reliably pro-government newspaper. Under Pal Dezeffy’s administration the newspaper, once a venerable institution, had been turned into little more than a propaganda rag for the ruling Social Democratic Party and the government, generously subsidised with lucrative state advertising contracts. He picked up the newspaper and quickly read the article. The story, which had no byline but which was attributed to ‘Magyar Vilag reporters’, was a skilful mix of assertions, insinuations and hypotheses dressed up as fact, backed up by quotes from anonymous sources about Reka Bardossy’s connection to the passport scandal that had brought down her predecessor. The article was a mishmash but its message was clear enough: Hungary’s new prime minister was not as squeaky clean as she claimed to be.
Balthazar put the newspaper down and turned to Sandor. ‘Pal?’
Sandor nodded. ‘Of course. He won’t go down without a fight. And even if he does, he will try and take Reka down with him. Pali bacsi, Uncle Pali, has still got plenty of supporters. There were lots of happy passengers on his gravy train. And now it’s stopped, it’s not certain that they want to take a trip with Reka instead.’
Balthazar looked down at the white dish. ‘Speaking of gravy, you on a diet, boss?’
‘My wife thinks so.’ He gestured at the dish. ‘Help yourself. As many as you like. If I eat any more carrots I will turn orange.’
Balthazar reached down, took a carrot stick and bit into it. It was crisp and surprisingly tasty. ‘Thanks. This is pretty good.’
‘I’m glad. We grow them in our garden. But that’s not why I called you in.’ Sandor gave Balthazar a knowing look. ‘We need to talk.’
‘We do.’ Balthazar had a strong sense, not for the first time, that Sandor knew far more about his doings than was ideal.
The commander of Budapest’s murder squad was of medium height, and stocky build. He had a fox’s quick and alert small brown eyes, and thinning grey hair that every morning he carefully combed over a bald spot that was only spreading as he moved into his early sixties. Lately, Balthazar had noticed that his boss would smooth the tendrils back into place when he was anxious or mildly stressed about something. Born in a small village in the south of Hungary, near the Croatian border, Sandor might well have joined many of his relatives in the smuggling business, or eked out a living on a smallholding after graduating from high school.
But Communist officials were then on the lookout for smart countryside boys – and, occasionally, girls – to bring to the capital as part of the ruling party’s social engineering project, to build a new and loyal cadre of state officials and functionaries. For the first time in Hungary’s history, it had been a plus to be born poor. Sandor had been put through police training school and rapidly promoted to detective, then rose steadily through the ranks until he was appointed commander of the murder squad. Unlike in most Western European capitals, this was not an especially arduous job. The advantage of one-party dictatorships was that they usually kept crime under control. Sealed off behind the Iron Curtain, Hungary had been almost free of organised and international crime, especially because other than antiques and paintings, there had been little worth stealing. The currencies of the Soviet bloc, Hungary’s included, had been almost worthless in the west. Most murders had been domestic, or bar fights that had gone wrong. Sandor’s easy manner, and countryside accent, meant that most criminals – and many colleagues – had not taken him seriously at first. They had soon learned to, as had Balthazar.
Balthazar gave Sandor a resume of the events of the morning: how he had found the dead Qatari on his knees, the private ambulance, the drugs he had given to Anastasia Ferenczy to be analysed and the way the brothel’s CCTV had been remotely wiped and then reversed to show Balthazar and the others in Eszter’s office. ‘How worried should I be? Is my family being targeted?’
Sandor looked thoughtful. ‘A dead man in your brother’s brothel. Someone inside the CCTV system. And they want you to know about it. I would say that’s a yes.’
‘I had breakfast with Anastasia. She says the Gendarmes are filming everything for some kind of final showdown.’
‘She’s right. Pal will fight back. As hard and dirty as he can.’
‘Maybe Gaspar’s CCTV system just went berserk. Computers do that sometimes. Maybe al-Nuri died of a heart attack.’
Sandor picked up a carrot stick, bit it in half and chewed thoughtfully while he looked Balthazar up and down. ‘You’re right. This is pretty good. Maybe I’ll grow organic vegetables when I retire. But meanwhile, I still don’t believe in coincidences. Al-Nuri was supposed to meet Reka Bardossy this morning. All the Gulf investments are up in the air now. That was Pal’s deal. Pal certainly had the motive to get rid of al-Nuri. And he probably had the means. Pal is down but he is certainly not out. And he still has plenty of friends in high – and low – places. Such as our old colleague Attila.’
‘What did the PM want with al-Nuri?’
‘To get the investment deal going again, but openly and transparently. That money can transform this country.’
‘And if she can get the money, she is secure as prime minister,’ said Balthazar. ‘All those wavering politicians in her party and the opposition, wondering how long she will last, will start to support her. She beats off any threat from Pal trying to wreck her from behind the scenes and takes Hungary into the twenty-first century.’
Sandor smiled. ‘That as well. You should go into politics, Tazi, if you ever leave the force. Or with your specialist knowledge and experience, you could be one of her advisers. I’ll put in a good word for you. But not for a while, please.’
‘I’m happy on the streets.’ He paused for a second. ‘You know Reka?’
‘Since she was a baby. Her father was an official at the ministry of the interior when I moved to Budapest as a young policeman, back in the 1970s.’ He smiled for a moment, lost in a memory. ‘Reka’s father brought me to the big city. We hit it off. He took me to their house quite often.’ Sandor paused. ‘What a place. We had a toilet in the garden and no running hot water when I grew up. They had six bathrooms.’
Sandor reached for the carrot sticks, picked one up, shook his head, put it down, then reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a packet of Sopianae cigarettes, a cheap, rough Hungarian brand, now barely available. He opened the packet, took out a cigarette, held it to
his nose and inhaled deeply, closing his eyes for a moment.
‘I thought you had given up,’ said Balthazar.
‘I’ve given up smoking them and I’ve given up pulling them to pieces. This is all that’s left now.’
Sandor took one last sniff, put the cigarette down on his desk and gestured for Balthazar to follow him to the window.
Balthazar had never met anyone more skilled at navigating the complicated currents of political and economic interests, while still keeping his integrity, than Sandor Takacs. Ever since they had arrived in Europe, around 1,100 years ago, the Magyars had suffered centuries of invasion and foreign domination: Tatars, Turks, Austrians, Germans and Russians had all occupied and ruled the country. The collective memories of foreign overlords had nurtured a special skill in reading the runes and working out the best way forward. All of that depended on contacts, especially contacts who could open the kiskapu, the little gate that gave a path around officialdom. Sandor’s network was unrivalled, and reached into the other law enforcement agencies, the security services, across the political spectrum and the new class of economic oligarchs. Which was one reason why Balthazar had decided to come clean about the events of the morning. His boss would hear about the dead Qatari sooner rather than later and it was preferable if he got the news first-hand.
Balthazar and Sandor looked out at the concrete sprawl of Robert Karoly Boulevard, an eight-lane highway that spanned the city’s drearier suburbs and led onto Arpad Bridge. The bridge was a brutalist concrete span that had none of the charm of the Margaret Bridge or the Chain Bridge further south and downriver. Two orange number-one trams rolled along the middle, passing each other on the way. Teve Street, home of the police headquarters, reached through the middle of District XIII. The riverside quarter was one of Budapest’s larger ones. It bordered District V at Jaszai Mari Square to the south, and District IV, known as Ujpest, New Pest, to the north. The southern end of District XIII, known as Ujlipotvaros, New Leopold Town, was a middle-class, liberal area with a substantial Jewish community dubbed ‘Lippy’ by young hipsters, where Eniko Szalay and her mother lived. But gentrification had not reached Teve Street and its surrounds, which were home mostly to drab tenements, basement bars and boxy concrete government buildings.
