Setting down the coffee cup, he tied on a butcher’s apron. He eschewed his loafers, polished to a wicked shine, for a pair of green rubber garden boots.
Sipping the delicious coffee, he crossed to a wood-paneled wall. There was a small table with one drawer, which he pulled open. Inside was a box of latex gloves. Humming to himself, he drew out a pair, snapped them on. Then he pressed a button and two of the wood panels slid aside. He stepped through into a decidedly odd room. The walls were of black concrete; the floor was composed of white tiles, lower in the center where a huge drain was set. A hose on a reel was attached to one wall. The ceiling was heavily baffled. The only furniture was a wooden table, scarred, stained dark in places with blood, and a dentist’s chair with modifications made to Spalko’s exacting specifications. Beside the chair was a three-tiered cart on which lay a gleaming array of metal implements barbed with ominous-looking ends—straight, hooked and corkscrewed.
In the chair, his wrists and ankles bound in steel cuffs, was László Molnar, as naked as the day he was born. Molnar’s face and body were cut, bruised and swollen, his eyes sunk deep within black circles of agony and despair.
Spalko entered the room as briskly and professionally as any doctor. “My dear László, I must say you’re looking the worse for wear.” He stood close enough to see Molnar’s nostrils flare at the scent of the coffee. “It’s to be expected, though, isn’t it? You’ve had quite a difficult night. Nothing you could have expected when you set out for the opera, eh? But not to worry, the excitement isn’t over yet.” He put down the coffee cup at Molnar’s elbow, took up one of the instruments. “This one, I think, yes.”
“What…what are you going to do?” Molnar asked in a cracked voice, thin as parchment.
“Where is Dr. Schiffer?” Spalko asked in a conversational tone of voice.
Molnar’s head jerked from side to side, his jaw clamped shut, as if to ensure that no words would pass his lips.
Spalko tested the needlepoint of the instrument. “I honestly don’t know why you hesitate, László. I have the weapon, though Dr. Schiffer is missing—”
“Taken from under your nose,” Molnar whispered.
Spalko, smiling, applied the instrument to his prisoner and in short order Molnar was sufficiently stimulated to scream.
Standing back for a moment, he brought the coffee cup to his lips, swallowed. “As you’ve no doubt realized by now, this room is soundproof. You can’t be heard—no one is going to save you, least of all Vadas; he doesn’t even know that you’re missing.”
Taking up another instrument, he spun it into Molnar. “So you see there is no hope,” he said. “Unless you tell me what I want to know. As it happens, László, I’m your one and only friend now; I’m the one who can save you.” He grasped Molnar under the chin and kissed his bloody forehead. “I’m the one who truly loves you.”
Molnar closed his eyes and again shook his head.
Spalko looked directly into Molnar’s eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you, László. You know that, don’t you?” His voice, unlike his actions, was gentle. “But your stubbornness troubles me.” He continued his work on Molnar. “I am wondering whether you understand the true nature of the circumstances into which you’ve fallen. This pain you feel is Vadas’ doing. It’s Vadas who got you into these dire straits. Conklin, too, I shouldn’t wonder, but Conklin is dead.”
Molnar’s mouth opened wide in a terrible scream. There were gaping black holes where his teeth had been slowly and agonizingly pulled.
“Let me assure you that I continue my work most reluctantly,” Spalko said with great concentration. It was important at this stage for Molnar to understand, even through the pain being inflicted on him. “I’m only the instrument of your own stubbornness. Can’t you see that it’s Vadas who must pay for this?”
Spalko let up for a moment. Blood had splattered his gloves and he was breathing as hard as if he had just run up three flights of stairs. Interrogation for all its pleasures was not easy work. Molnar began to mewl.
“Why do you bother, László? You are praying to a god that doesn’t exist and, therefore, can’t protect you or help you. As the Russians say, ‘Pray to God; row to shore.’” Spalko’s smile was an intimation of a confidence shared between comrades. “And the Russians ought to know, eh? Their history is written in blood. First the tsars and then the apparatchiks, as if the Party was any better than a line of despots!
“I tell you, László, the Russians may have failed utterly at politics, but when it comes to religion, they have the right idea. Religion—all religion—is false. It’s the grand delusion of the weak-willed, the fearful, the sheep of the world, who haven’t the strength to lead but want only to be led. Never mind that it’s inevitably to their own slaughter.” Spalko shook his head sadly, sagely. “No, no, the only reality is power, László. Money and power. This is what matters, nothing else.”
Molnar had relaxed somewhat during this discourse, which, in its conversational tone and illusion of camaraderie, had been meant to bind him to his interrogator. Now, however, his eyes opened wide in naked panic as Spalko began again. “Only you can help yourself, László. Tell me what I want to know. Tell me where Vadas has hidden Felix Schiffer.”
“Stop!” Molnar gasped. “Please stop!”
“I can’t stop, László. Surely by now you can understand that. You’re in control of this situation now.” As if to illustrate his point, Spalko applied the instrument. “Only you can make me stop!”
A look of confusion came over Molnar, and he gazed wildly around as if only now realizing what was happening to him. Studying him, Spalko understood. It often happened this way near the end of a successful interrogation. The subject did not come step by step to the altar of confession, but rather resisted as long as he was able. The mind could manage only so much. As some point, like a stretched rubber band, it reached its limit, and when it snapped back, a new reality—the reality artfully erected by the interrogator—was established.
“I don’t—”
“Tell me,” Spalko said in a velvet voice, his gloved hand stroking his victim’s sweating brow. “Tell me and this will all be over, gone like awaking from a dream.”
Molnar’s eyes rolled upward. “Do you promise?” he asked like a small child.
“Trust me. László. I’m your friend. I want what you want, an end to your suffering.”
Molnar was crying now, big tears welling up in his eyes, turning cloudy and pink as they rolled down his cheeks. And then he began to sob as he had not done since he was a small child.
Spalko said nothing. He knew they were at the crucial stage. It was all or nothing now: Either Molnar would step off the precipice to which Spalko had carefully brought him, or he would force himself to drown in the pain.
Molnar’s body shook in the storm of emotion the interrogation had unleashed. In time, he put his head back. His face was gray and terribly drawn; his eyes still with their glaze of tears seemed to have shrunk farther back in their sockets. There was no sign of the bright-cheeked, slightly drunk operaphile Spalko’s men had drugged in Underground. He had been transformed. He was utterly spent.
“God forgive me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Dr. Schiffer is in Crete.” He babbled an address.
“There’s a good boy,” Spalko said softly. Now the final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Tonight, he and his “staff” would be on their way to retrieve Felix Schiffer and finish the process of extracting from him the information required to launch their assault on the Oskjuhlid Hotel.
Molnar made a small animal noise as Spalko dropped the instrument. His bloodshot eyes rolled in his head; he was on the verge of weeping again.
Slowly, tenderly, Spalko placed the coffee cup to the other’s lips, watched with disinterest as he convulsively drank down the hot, sweet coffee. “At last, deliverance.” Whether he was speaking to Molnar or to himself was an open question.
Chapter Thirteen
At night, Bud
apest’s Parliament resembled a great Magyar shield against the invading hordes of yore. To the average tourist, awestruck at its size as well as its beauty, it appeared solid, timeless, inviolable. But to Jason Bourne, newly arrived from his harrowing passage out of Washington, D.C., and Paris, the Parliament seemed nothing more than a fantasy city straight out of a children’s book, a confection of unearthly white stone and pale copper that could at any moment collapse beneath the fall of darkness.
He was in a bleak mood when the taxi dropped him at the glowing dome of the Mammut shopping mall, near Moszkva tér, where he intended to buy himself new clothes. He had entered the country as Pierre Montefort, French military courier, and had therefore been given only the most cursory inspection by Hungarian Immigration. But he needed to get rid of the uniform Jacques had provided for him before he showed up at the hotel as Alex Conklin.
He bought a pair of cords, a Sea Island cotton shirt and black turtleneck sweater, thin-soled black boots and a black leather bomber jacket. He moved through the stores, the crowds of shoppers, gradually absorbing their energy, for the first time in many days feeling part of the world at large. He realized this sudden lightening of mood was because his mind had resolved the enigma of Khan. Of course, he wasn’t Joshua; he was a superb con artist. An entity unknown—either Khan or someone who had hired him—wanted to get to Bourne, shake him up so badly that he would lose his concentration and forget about the murders of Alex Conklin and Mo Panov. If they weren’t able to kill him, then at least they would make him go off on a wild goose chase searching for his phantom son. How Khan or whoever had hired him knew about Joshua was another question he needed to answer. Still, now that he had reduced the shock to a rational problem, his supremely logical mind could parse the problem into its separate parts and this would lead him to devising a plan of attack.
Bourne needed information that only Khan could provide. He needed to turn the tables on Khan, to draw him into a trap. The first step was to ensure that Khan knew where he was. He had no doubt that Khan would be in Paris by now, having known the destination of the Rush Service flight. Khan might even have heard about Bourne’s “death” on the Al. In fact, from what he knew of Khan, he was, like Bourne, an accomplished chameleon. If Bourne were in his place, the first place he’d look for information was the Quai d’Orsay.
Twenty minutes later Bourne strode out of the mall complex, got into a taxi that was letting off a passenger, and in no time he was in front of the imposing stone portico of the Danubius Grand Hotel on Margaret Island. A uniformed doorman escorted him inside.
Bourne, feeling as if he hadn’t slept in a week, crossed the gleaming marble foyer. He introduced himself to the front desk clerk as Alexander Conklin.
“Ah, Mr. Conklin, you’re expected. Please wait a moment, won’t you?”
The man vanished into an inner office out of which, a moment later, emerged the hotel manager.
“Welcome, welcome! I’m Mr. Hazas and I’m at your disposal.” This gentleman was short, squat and dark, with a pencil mustache and hair parted down the side. He extended a hand, which was warm and dry. “Mr. Conklin, such a pleasure.” He gestured. “Would you be so good as to come with me, please?”
He led Bourne through into his office, whereupon he opened a safe, extracting a package roughly the size and shape of a shoebox, which he had Bourne sign for. On the wrapping was printed ALEXANDER CONKLIN. HOLD FOR PICK-UP. There were no stamps.
“The package was hand-delivered,” the manager said in response to Bourne’s query.
“By whom?” Bourne asked.
Mr. Hazas spread his hands. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
Bourne felt a sudden flush of anger. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Surely, the hotel must keep records of delivered packages.”
“Oh, assuredly, Mr. Conklin. As in everything, we are meticulous in this area. However, in this particular case—and I cannot say how—there appears to be no record whatsoever.” He smiled hopefully even as he shrugged helplessly.
After three days of constantly fighting for his life, of having to absorb shock after shock, he found he had no reservoir of patience left. Anger and frustration flared into blind rage. Kicking the door shut, he grabbed Hazas up by his heavily starched shirtfront, slammed him so hard against the wall, the hotel manager’s eyes fairly bugged out of his head.
“Mr. Conklin,” he stammered, “I don’t—”
“I want answers!” Bourne shouted, “and I want them now!”
Mr. Hazas, clearly terrified, was fairly weeping. “But I have no answers.” His blunt fingers fluttered. “There…there’s the ledger! See for yourself!”
Bourne released the hotel manager, whose legs collapsed immediately, depositing him on the floor. Bourne ignored him, went to his desk, took up the ledger. He could see the entries laboriously written out in two distinct handwritings, one crimped, the other fussy—presumably the day and night managers. He was only mildly surprised to learn that he could read Hungarian. Turning the ledger a bit, he ran his eye up and down the columns, looking for any erasures, any hint that the ledger had been tampered with. He found nothing.
He whirled on Mr. Hazas, hauled him up from his curled position. “How do you account for this package not being logged in?”
“Mr. Conklin, I myself was here when it was delivered.” The hotel manager’s eyes showed their whites all around. His skin had gone pale; it crawled with sweat. “That is to say, I was on duty. I swear to you one moment it was there on the top of the check-in counter. It simply appeared. I didn’t see the person who brought it and neither did anyone on my staff. It was noon, check-out time, a very busy period for us. It must have been left anonymously, deliberately—nothing else makes sense.”
He was right, of course. In an instant, Bourne’s intense rage drained away, leaving him wondering why he had so terrorized this perfectly harmless man. He let the hotel manager go.
“My apologies, Mr. Hazas. It’s been a long day and I’ve had a number of difficult negotiations.”
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Hazas was doing his best to straighten his tie and jacket, all the while eyeing Bourne as if at any moment he might launch another attack. “Of course, sir. The business world puts strains on all of us.” He coughed, regaining a semblance of his composure. “May I suggest a spa treatment—there’s nothing like a steam and massage to restore the inner balance.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Bourne said. “Perhaps later.”
“The spa closes at nine o’clock,” Mr. Hazas said, relieved that he had gotten a sane response from this madman. “But it only takes a call from me to keep it open for you.”
“Another time, thanks very much. Please have a toothbrush and paste sent up to the suite. I forget to bring some,” Bourne said, opening the door and walking out.
The moment he was left alone, Hazas opened a drawer in his desk and, with a hand that trembled terribly, he took out a bottle of schnapps. Filling a shotglass, he spilled some onto his ledger. He didn’t care; he swigged it down, felt the liquor burn its fiery path into his stomach. When he had calmed himself sufficiently, he picked up the phone, dialed a local number.
“He arrived not ten minutes ago,” he said to the voice at the other end. There was no need to identify himself. “My impression? He’s a madman. I’ll tell you what I mean. He almost choked me to death when I wouldn’t tell him who delivered the package.”
The receiver slipped in the sweat of his palm and he switched hands. He poured himself another two fingers of schnapps.
“Of course I didn’t tell him, and there’s no record of the delivery anywhere. I saw to it myself. He searched carefully enough, I’ll give him that.” He listened for a moment. “He went up to his suite. Yes, I’m sure.”
He put down the phone, then just as quickly dialed another number, delivered the same message, this time to a different and far more terrifying master. Finally, he slumped back in his chair and closed his eyes. Thank God my part in this is o
ver, he thought.
Bourne took the elevator up to the top floor. The key opened one of the double doors of solid polished teak, and Bourne walked into a large one-bedroom suite furnished in sumptuous fabrics. Outside the window, the one-hundred-year-old parkland loomed dark and leafy. The island had been named after Margaret, the daughter of King Bela IV who lived in a Dominican convent here during the thirteenth century, the ruins of which were brightly lit on the east bank. He was already undressing as he went through the suite, dropping each article of clothing behind him as he made for the gleaming bathroom. He threw the package down on the bed unopened.
He spent ten blessed minutes naked under a spray of water as hot as he could tolerate, then he soaped up, scrubbing the accumulated grime and sweat off him. Gingerly, he tested his ribs, the muscles of his chest, seeking a final assessment of the damage Khan had inflicted on him. His right shoulder was very sore, and he spent another ten minutes carefully stretching and gently exercising it. He had nearly dislocated it when he had grabbed the tanker truck’s rung, and it hurt like hell. He suspected that he had torn some ligaments, but there was nothing he could do about it except try not to overwork the area.
After standing under an icy spray for three minutes, he stepped out of the shower and toweled off. Wrapped in a luxurious bathrobe, he sat on the bed, unwrapped the package. Inside was a gun with extra ammunition. Alex, he asked, not for the first time, what in the world were you involved in?
For a long time, he sat staring at the weapon. There seemed something evil about it, a darkness seeping out of the barrel. And it was then that Bourne realized that the darkness was bubbling up from the depths of his own unconscious. All at once, he saw that his reality was not at all as he had imagined it at the Mammut mall. It wasn’t neat and orderly, rational as a mathematical equation. The real world was chaotic; rationality was merely the system human beings tried to impose on random events in order the make them appear orderly. His explosion of rage was not at the hotel manager, he realized with something of a shock, but at Khan. Khan had shadowed him, bedeviled him, and in the end had tricked him. He wanted nothing less than to pummel that face into the ground, to expunge it from his memory.