The Istanbul Decision

Twelve

On the other side of the utility tunnel, Carter found himself in a basement room. It was lower and larger than the boiler room, lit by a series of narrow windows at ground level. Against the far wall stood a line of washtubs. Half the floor space was given over to parked bicycles.

He took the Luger out and screwed on the silencer, then headed up a crude stairway made of two-by-fours. At the top he opened the thin plywood door a crack and peered into the hallway. A single line of fluorescent tubes illuminated the unremarkable milk white walls and a broken linoleum floor. Along one wall, about the height of a man's thigh, ran a grimy hand streak, and a tricycle lay overturned in a corner. Evidence of children, but there were no children, not even the murmur of their voices. Everything was quiet. Too quiet.

They've cleared the building, Carter thought. Told everyone to either stay in or get out.

He edged out into the corridor, snapping off the Luger's safety with his thumb. The old woman's apartment would be dead center on the side facing the street. He moved cautiously in that direction, on tiptoe to keep his shoes from scraping the floor.

He had gone less than fifty feet when a door opened up ahead and two young men stepped into the corridor. Carter quickly ducked into the first available niche and pressed himself against the wall among the mops and buckets.

"When a man breaks his bones and sprains muscles lime after time, you have to assume he's doing something wrong," one of them was saying. "Either his technique is bad or he's just clumsy. Janosch may be the greatest goalie in the world, but he's no good to anyone if he doesn't play."

Soccer, Carter thought. At least they aren't security men.

The voices came closer. Carter's heart began to race. Fresh droplets of sweat formed on his forehead- He pressed himself flatter against the wall, then looking down, he noticed to his horror that he had pushed one mop and bucket onto its edge, and it was about to topple to the floor. He grabbed it by the mop handle and eased it down on his foot to keep it quiet just as a third voice from somewhere behind the two men said. "Stop."

The two pairs of footsteps suddenly halted, and another set walked a goodly distance down the hall toward them. "This building has been sealed for purposes of state security," the voice said.

Carter peeked around the comer and saw it was one of the goons from the limousine.

"But we are members of the maintenance committee. We have work to do," the young man with opinions on Janosch, the soccer goalie, protested.

"It will not last long," said the KGB man. "Until then, we'd like everyone to stay in and keep these halls clear." His Hungarian was laden with a thick Russian accent. Most likely he was attached to the Soviet embassy, and he and his friend had driven up from Budapest this morning. But where was the other one?

"State security," grumbled the other young man, speaking for the first time. "That's what they said when my father was killed."

"We all have painful memories of the sacrifices the State calls on us to make," the KGB man said. "This is not a big sacrifice today. Spend a few hours at home, read the paper, whatever pleases you. Let us not stir coals that are better left to cool."

Whether it was the reasonableness of the man's tone that convinced them or the familiar bulge in his trench coat pocket, which had not escaped Carter's notice, it was impossible to say, but the three turned and without a further word walked up the hall in the direction from which they'd come, leaving Carter alone in the corridor. A moment later the lights went out, plunging the corridor into darkness, only a small amount of light coming from the end doors.

He waited a few seconds to make sure they'd really gone, then he began moving again, cautiously but quickly, in the direction of Judit Konya's apartment. The speed with which Kobelev's man had intercepted the two in the hall was disturbing. Obviously, not only were they barring people from entering the building, they were keeping a close watch on the interior as well, probably through the small chicken-wired windows at either end of the hall.

He pushed along, his back against the wall, casting a small shadow, until he reached what he considered to be the most likely door. There was no name on it, nothing to distinguish it from any other door facing the hall except it was situated where he thought her apartment should be based on what the maintenance man had told him, and there were small marks along the bottom of the jamb, the kind made by the knock of the steel footrests of a wheelchair when it's not turned short enough.

The door was unlocked. He came through, low and to one side, the Luger in both hands trained on two figures on the other side of the very dark room. One faced him in an old-fashioned wicker wheelchair, the kind used during World War I, a noble-looking woman with features seemingly carved from stone. Her eyes were closed, her head held at an attentive angle as though she were listening, although to what she was listening was not clear except that it was not in this room, or perhaps even of this world. On the wall behind her and to one side hung a crucifix done in the old Hungarian folk style. Myriad votive candles flickered on the table before it, providing what little light there was.

The other figure kneeled in front of her as though praying, the houndstooth coat stretched across his broad back, over the collar a thatch of snow white hair. Kobelev!

He fired twice, the shots slamming Kobelev forward and to the left. The old woman's eyes sprang open, the knuckle of her left index finger to her mouth.

Carter stood slowly and came toward her, keeping the gun on the body sprawled headlong on the floor. There had been something very peculiar about the way it fell.

He rolled it over with the toe of his shoe. The face was a blank pink cloth stitched in the general proportions of the human countenance. Fleetingly he wondered where the dummy had come from. They certainly hadn't brought it in from the limo.

A noise forced him to turn around. It was one of those sounds that chill the blood several degrees without ever fully registering in the brain, like the rattle of a snake underfoot or the roar of an engine that's too close for comfort. Only in this case it was more muted: the simple metal-on-metal of a hammer drawn back and a cylinder clicked into position.

He started toward the right when a silent tongue of fire lashed out from behind the door. Something sharp and extremely precise, like a power-driven needle, struck his left shoulder and sent him spinning against the wall, knocking over the tables and extinguishing the candles, plunging the room into darkness.

A second silenced shot flashed from the same general location as the first, splintered the table edge, and deflected into the wall a foot or so above Carter's head. Carter fired where he'd seen the light. The bullet whined, glass tinkled, and something heavy hit the floor.

There was dead silence for ten endless seconds, then the very low, agonized moaning of a human being in pain, regular as breathing, like the yawing of a rusty shutter in the wind.

"Yuri?" the old woman queried the darkness.

There was no answer.

"Yuri?"

Carter pulled himself to his feet, his shoulder throbbing with a steady, hot pain, and his fingers growing sticky with blood. He picked up a candle, lit it, and held it up. The flame pulsated to life, and the room's interior became dimly visible. A narrow bed was shoved into a corner, a rustic table beside it served as a nightstand, and above it on the wall were religious pictures of every description. To the left was a doorway that Carter assumed led to some sort of bathroom. The moaning came from inside.

He stepped over with the candle. Lying on the floor, his head supported on one arm draped over the toilet bowl, was one of Kobelev's henchmen. His left eye was a blackened hole from which blood oozed. The other eye stared dumbly at the floor.

Carter turned abruptly and came back across the room toward the old woman. "Who was he?" he hissed at her in Russian.

"You've killed him?" she asked tremulously.

"He's dead."

"My grandson sent him. He told me I needed protection. A man was coming to kill me. Why would you want to kill an old woman like me?" Her head shook as she spoke, whether from fear or old age. Carter couldn't tell.

"Your grandson lied. Carter said. His shoulder hurt like hell. "The other man," he went on, "the one outside. Do you know him?"

"I don't know…"

"Call him. Now." He started to push her wheelchair toward the door.

"That's not necessary. You're not Russian."

He thrust the Luger to within a few inches of her face. "Can you feel this?"

Her hands flitted over Wilhelmina's barrel like liver-spotted butterflies. "It's a gun."

"This isn't a matter of choice. You'll do as I say or I'll kill you."

"I'm ninety-three. What makes you think I'm afraid to die?"

"Everyone's afraid to die. Everyone."

Her dry, lined lips broke into a tiny smile. "Hand me my cane." She gestured toward a curved walking stick propped against the end of the bed. Carter fetched it.

Stuffing the Luger back in its holster, he took hold of her arm, which was as light as a dry twig, and eased her forward. As he did, his gaze was drawn to the floor, to the blank features of the dummy.

If they hadn't brought the dummy with them, he thought, beginning the logical sequence that had been interrupted earlier, men it must have been here to begin with.

She was standing erect now, supporting herself with the cane. "Clear me a path," she snapped. The fear was gone from her voice.

Carter pushed back the table and scraped away the broken glass and candles.

And if it was here all along, then she must have known about it…

She teetered suddenly and he came to her aid, holding her by the elbow and shoulder with his one good arm, and they proceeded together, she taking one tiny step at a time, and he guiding, shoring her up.

And if she knew about it, then she's in on it; and all that bullshit about her life being in danger is just that, bullshit…

Simultaneous with this last thought came the curious sound of metal being drawn across metal, and he became dimly aware she had grown suddenly stronger in his grasp. Abruptly she pulled away from him, and for a brief instant he stared in wonderment, amazed at how well she stood without his help. In the same instant he saw a flash above her head like light glinting off a blade, and he realized suddenly the walking stick had disappeared. He jumped back in barely enough time to avoid being run through by her initial thrust. The sword grazed his lower abdomen and opened an oblong slash in his shirt. He grabbed her wrist, twisted, and the blade clattered to the floor. He pushed her roughly toward the door, which he eased open a few inches.

He held the Luger against her back as she stuck her head out and called down the hall.

"Comrade Tremloff!"

They waited several seconds.

"Louder." Carter urged.

"Comrade Tremloff!"

The door at the end of the hall clicked open, then wedged shut, and footsteps came quickly down the linoleum. "Yes, Madam Konya?"

"Invite him in," Carter whispered.

"One of the candles has fallen to the floor and I fear a fire. Comrade," she said.

"Where is Yuri? Can't he help?"

He never received an answer. As he spoke he edged in through the door, exposing a long pink oval of scalp to Carter's waiting gun butt. Carter swung, and the man sank heavily to the floor. Carter rolled him over and extracted his revolver from the holster under his arm. It was a Graz-Buyra, identical to the one he'd taken off another flunkie named Mandaladov in an airport washroom in Phoenix. "Must be the gun of the day in Kobelev's private army," he muttered, but the thought struck him that he had not seen this man on the train, which meant he was probably stationed here in Hungary, another link in Kobelev's vast network that seemed to reach everywhere.

"You will run now like a dog to save your skin, but it is too late," the old woman said above him.

"My skin and others'," he replied.

"My grandson will kill you," she said resolutely.

"One of us will die, that much is certain."

"He will hunt you on every continent after what you did to my poor great-granddaughter."

"I don't have time to argue," said Carter, unloading the big Russian's automatic and pocketing the shells. He tossed the gun aside.

"Crippling a girl in the prime of her life before she's had a chance to bear children…"

Carter ignored her. He glanced around the room. It had been nothing more than an elaborate trap. He brushed past the old woman and hurried out the door.

"She was beautiful," she shouted after him, her words ringing in the narrow hall. "The cream of Russian manhood sought her in every capital of the world, and now she must live in a wheelchair like a dried, juiceless old crone!"

Outside he walked quickly to the Fiat and climbed in. As he started the engine, a bright silver gash appeared on the hood.

Turning, Carter saw another of Kobelev's bodyguards crouched by the building entrance, his gun out in front of him and a pale ghost of barrel smoke disappearing over his shoulder.

Carter gunned it. The car jerked forward, and the second shot missed.

He took the first comer standing on the accelerator. The rear wheels skidded crazily, and he ripped out a kiosk on the far side of the street. The little engine had more power than he thought. By the time he'd gotten himself righted and into third gear, he was doing better than sixty.

Side streets flew by at a dizzying rate. He looked frantically down each one, trying to find a likely route to the train station, but each of them was choked with horse-drawn carriages and carts. It was as though the whole of Hungarian peasantry had come to the city for a Sunday visit.

He came to an intersection marked with an international stop sign, ignored it, cranked the wheel to the left with his one good arm, and narrowly missed a knot of pedestrians in front of a cafe. A military-type van swerved to avoid a collision, and its several passengers glared at him from its windows.

He careened down three more blocks, spotted a likely alley, turned into it, and stopped. Rolling down the window, he listened anxiously. Nothing. Just the motor ticking under the hood. He listened for another thirty seconds, longer than he dared, and still nothing. No sirens, no screaming engines in pursuit. He started the car again, put it into gear, and drove much more slowly down the street.

He had lost the way to the train station. He had a feeling it lay further in the direction he'd been traveling when he first left the housing project, but he wasn't certain, and it was too dangerous to return that way to see. He would just have to wend his way through the lesser-used back roads and alleys and hope he chanced on it soon.

He turned into a promising-looking thoroughfare, but it soon reduced itself to a wagon rut that disappeared into someone's vegetable plot. Another street was blocked by a peasant's wagon hitched to an obstinate workhorse. The horse's master, a quarrelsome old man with no teeth, seemed in no hurry to move him, and it took several minutes of honking before two other men, obviously relatives, came out from one of the buildings, and amid much shouting and gesturing, finally convinced the old-timer to clear the way.

A half dozen blocks back the way he had come, he turned a corner and suddenly was there. He pulled into a parking spot several hundred yards from the station's entrance, got out, and went into a cafe across the street. Roberta was to have been waiting for him at the table by the window. The place, however, was deserted.

A short husky man wearing an apron came from the back.

"There was a girl here," Carter said.

The man stopped in his tracks and stared open-mouthed at Carter.

"The girl," Carter said, looking over his shoulder out at the street and across at the station behind which the Orient Express had been waiting. But it was pulling out now. It was leaving!

A black sedan jerked to a stop across the street. Its door swung open, and a young woman got out and rushed around the station, running after the departing train.

Someone aboard the train had opened a door, and hands reached down to help the running woman swing aboard.

But even from where Carter was standing, there had been no mistaking that graceful, athletic young figure. It had been Tatiana Kobelev, one hundred percent restored.