The Armageddon Protocol

TEN

Zalan Szabo sipped his milkless darjeeling as he watched Hungary turn into Austria outside the train’s window. He was sitting in a private cabin on board the Venice Simplon-Orient Express as it made its way west toward his home in Vienna, a substantial townhouse in Unter Sankt Veit. The sophisticated Art Deco surroundings did nothing to calm his rising anger as he turned to look at his iPad one more time.

He was watching the CCTV footage from the casino. In the short clip, a well-built man in his late thirties was drinking at the bar when the floor manager interrupted him. After a short conversation the traitor’s girlfriend arrived, visibly distressed and covered in blood. Then they left together.

Szabo returned to his telephone call and sighed. “Name?”

“We don’t know,” Steiner replied. “But English.”

“I’m certain you mean to say, you don’t know yet.”

A few seconds of tense silence followed, then Steiner spoke up. “Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Good.”

The Ministry would not tolerate such interference. Not in a thousand years had anyone been allowed to disrupt the Ministry and its good works, and it surely wasn’t going to start now on his watch. He had a reputation to consider, not to mention the gravest responsibility to his fellow man.

How Steiner had allowed things to get out of control to such a degree would be addressed later, but for now all that mattered was the containment of the problem, and that meant neutralizing the threat posed by this Englishman. Whoever he was, he clearly had skills — in the last few hours he had evaded the Ministry’s attempt to frame him and the girl for the murder of Reyes, and extracted critical information from the dead professor’s apartment — information Steiner’s goon had failed to find.

Szabo admired the fighting spirit up to a point, but then it became just another problem to deal with. Now the Prefect replayed the clip as he studied the man’s face. Deducing nothing in particular he turned his attention to the girl. What did she know? Had Reyes let the cat out of the bag one night when they were together in bed? He had no way of knowing, but there was a certain haunted expression on her face which he recognised from others who had learned the dark secret. The terrible burden he had carried all these years.

“Where are they now?”

“Aleksi just called. They’re at a friend’s apartment in North Salamanca. Should I have him kill them both now?”

“No, we need to know if they’ve talked to anyone. We’ll have to… interview them both.”

“Of course.”

Szabo squeezed his temples and sighed.

The burden.

That was how his predecessor, the previous Prefect, had described it to him, and he looked like he’d meant it. Each Prefect carried the burden until he or she was too old or fragile to discharge the responsibility, and then a new Prefect was selected by the Minister. Most were lucky, never having to discharge that responsibility, but the luck had run out while Szabo was in the Big Chair, and now he had no choice but to see the whole nasty business through. While the Ministry itself was above the law, he tried not to think too much about God.

“Be careful with this one,” Szabo said. “He looks more dangerous than the others. There’s a look in his eye.”

“Yes, sir.”

And there was a look in his eye. Where did that look come from, he wondered? Some kind of Special Forces perhaps — or maybe the security services. There was a jaded quality about him that pushed Szabo towards the latter, but only time would tell. “Whatever that bastard Reyes hid in his apartment they now have in their possession. Follow them and make sure you aren’t seen. I want to know where the professor was pointing them to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you have the information Reyes stole from us, you are to terminate both of them, is that clear?”

“Kein Problem,” Steiner said flatly.

Szabo cut the call and leaned back in the soft leather seat, turning his face until he was observing the night time landscape outside his window once again. He peered at the blurred fields with something approaching disgust as he thought about the young Englishman and all the trouble he had caused the Ministry.

But it was ever thus. The Ministry had cleansed the world of greater men than this troublemaker. No, he was no threat, Szabo decided. As soon as Steiner had secured the stolen information, the Englishman and Reyes’s girl would be dispatched with the usual surgical ruthlessness for which Aleksi Karhu was so well known.

He smiled and returned his attention to the table where a cloud of steam was rising from his darjeeling, but the smile fell from his lips when his mind drifted back to the burden.

The terrible, dreadful burden.