She picked up a small cylinder of black plastic with a tab at one end like the ring-pull on a soft-drink can. She tossed it to Rush. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You get to have this.’
He turned the object over in his hands, examining it gingerly as though it might go off in his hands. Then he found the label. WILDWAYS GREEN PAINT BOMB. 400ML. SPRAY AREA 8MTRS DIAMETER. ‘Funny,’ Rush said. ‘Really hilarious.’
Diema wasn’t listening. She’d turned her attention back to Nahir and Shraga. She’d said all that needed saying, but she knew that men often took categorical instructions differently from a woman than they did from another man.
So she spelled it out for them. ‘You’re not part of this,’ she told them. ‘Your role, for now, is to gather information. When I need more from you, I’ll ask for it. I’m speaking with Kuutma’s authority in this, and if you doubt me you can ask him. Keep your eyes open and your hands to yourselves. That’s all.’
Nahir bristled. ‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘You need us.’
‘I disagree,’ Diema said quietly. ‘Do as you’ve been told, my brother. Please. We serve the same god, and the same city. Everything will be fine, so long as you give me the help I need, when I need it.’ She paused, holding his gaze. ‘If you don’t, you’ll have enough blood on your conscience to make an inland sea.’
She turned to Shraga. ‘These weapons are not traceable to you or to any of your people?’ she asked him. She indicated with a nod the guns and other munitions piled in the boot of the car.
Shraga shook his head.
‘Good. Then drive the car to Katona Jószef Utca. Leave it there, locked, but with the keys on top of the rear driver-side tyre. Leave all the weapons where they are. If we need any more equipment while we’re here, we’ll help ourselves. I assume you brought a second car for us to use?’
He gave her a set of keys and nodded towards the car that faced them across the aisle of the car park, a black Audi A4 with a Hungarian licence plate. ‘What about you?’ Shraga asked, dismayed. ‘We were supposed to escort you to the safe house and see you installed there.’
‘We’ll make our own way into the city,’ Diema said, backing across to the other car while still talking to them. ‘Good hunting, cousins. And God favour us all.’
‘May He watch over you,’ Shraga muttered, bowing again.
He’ll need to do a lot more than just watch, Diema thought as she got into the car, followed by Tillman and Rush.
‘The paint bomb was way harsh,’ Rush reproached her, seeming genuinely hurt.
‘So is life,’ Diema told him.
49
Kennedy took a mid-morning flight and got to Budapest around two in the afternoon. The customs officer who took a cursory glance at her EU passport asked her if the purpose of her trip was business or holiday. She told him she was there to work.
She also told that to the taxi driver who took her from the airport to the Hotel Karoly, on Molnar Utca, directly across the Danube from Gellert Hill and a short walk from the Hungarian parliament. She booked in under her own name and, in answer to the desk clerk’s polite query, once again said very emphatically that she was in Budapest because she had a job to do there. Might take one day, might take two or three, but she was staying until it was done.
Then she grabbed another cab and went to the police headquarters building — Police Palace — which was a squat, stepped tower of glass and steel just opposite the northern tip of Margaret Island. She applied for a temporary licence to use legal but controlled surveillance equipment, providing a long and itemised list and giving her profession as ‘freelance investigator’.
She walked back along the Pest side of the river. Here the down-at-heel Soviet-era brutalism seemed tilted to a rakish angle, inviting tourists to fantasise that they were taking a walk on the wild side. But the hotel and restaurant owners maintained their frontages in a precisely calibrated state of decorative distress, so clearly the wild side was only as wild as the market would bear. Kennedy grabbed some lunch — hortobagy pancakes and a sugared fruit skewer — at a café in a square off Bathory Street, in the extensive shadow of the Magyar Televízió building. She watched the people passing, but made no attempt to interact with any of them.
This was the riskiest part. If everything had gone according to plan, Tillman and Diema had picked up her trail at the Police Palace and were now moving with her through the city, keeping track of her — but they had to stay well away, and out in the open there were too many variables for them to be able to stay on top of all of them. Kennedy imagined information flicking through the air around her: streams of data converging, triangulating, defining her position and her vector.
Or maybe she flattered herself.
She did a lot of things on the way back to the hotel that left a footprint. She drew some money from a cashpoint, signed a petition at the parliament building, used her credit card to buy grapes and a four-pack of Staropramen at a mini-market. Probably none of these things would make a difference, but a little overkill certainly wouldn’t hurt.
At the hotel, still thinking about the evidence chain she was leaving, she placed a call to Ryegate House. She spoke to the receptionist there — not Lorraine, who was on extended leave of absence — and left a more or less meaningless message for Valerie Parminter. She called Izzy’s flat, too, and told the answerphone there that she’d be out of contact for a few days but would get back in touch as soon as she could. Izzy never checked her voicemail anyway, so she wouldn’t get the cryptic message and be panicked by it.
There was nothing more to do but wait. Kennedy turned on the TV and flicked through the menus of pay-on-demand movies. She tried a couple, but the comedy wasn’t funny and the conspiracy thriller depressed her by being less implausible than her life had become.
She called room service and ordered a Caesar salad. When it came she felt like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was eat.
The phone in her room rang at about nine o’clock in the evening, as soon as darkness fell — three rings, then silence. Ten minutes later, Kennedy went down to the ground floor and out of the back door of the hotel, where there was a row of five green-painted dumpsters. Between the third and the fourth, there was a large plastic bag carrying the logo of the Europeum Mall. She collected the bag and took it back to her room.
It took a while to familiarise herself with the contents. During her days in the Met, Kennedy had carried a Glock 27 — a true cop’s gun, with a forward-canted grip so it seemed to jump into your hand on the draw, and a dead-straight recoil. She’d lost it in circumstances that still haunted her and had only fired one other in the years that followed. She’d certainly never fired anything like the monstrosity she took out of the bag. The Dan-inject had been Tillman’s suggestion and Diema had seen the virtue of it.
Kennedy put out her light early, but didn’t go to sleep. She sat on the bed and thought about Izzy. Specifically, she thought about sex with Izzy — varied times and places, even more varied sex. It had been sweet at the time, and it was a whole lot sweeter in retrospect.
Kennedy indulged a fantasy in which she was back in the Cask bar in Pimlico, and Izzy was offering — by way of a peace initiative — to take her home and screw her until her brain melted. In the fantasy, Kennedy accepted the offer and brain-melting sex ensued.
In reality, the bedside alarm clock ticked from 11.59 to 12.00 and the world — or the part of it that spoke Hungarian and sprawled around Kennedy on all sides — was silent and sex-free.