The Budapest Protocol (33 page)

“Ouch. She’s not my friend. She’s a spy. But really, we don’t have any proof. It’s all circumstantial. A Nazi plot to take over Europe. But how do we know? Where’s the evidence?”

“It is all around us. Hunkalffy is dismantling democracy. Like the governments in Romania, Croatia and Slovakia. The hatred against Gypsies. Czigex. The Pannonia Brigade. A Gendarme raid at Kultura ten minutes before you were supposed to meet Miklos. Miklos and Vince Szatmari’s murders. The files we got from the KZX computer.”

“It’s not enough,” said Alex, chewing his lip. “We need more.”

“More. Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Natasha, sitting astride him and kissing him deeply.

The telephone rang, waking him. Alex looked at his watch: 10.00am. “Put her down and switch on your television,” said David Jones.

“Put who down?” asked Alex innocently. Natasha stirred and wrapped herself around him. She opened a sleepy eye. He smiled at her and put his finger on his lips.

“Reuters knows everything. You should be at Heroes’ Square. Both of you. I’ve just sent two reporters, a photographer and a camera crew up there. The Pannonia Brigade is inaugurating its first battalion: a thousand members.”

“Thanks. I’m on my way.”

“There’s more. After the inauguration the Brigade is marching to the Eighth District, to protest about ‘Gypsy crime’. There’s going to be trouble. I’m going there with a photographer. Your ex-photographer, actually, Edina Draskovitz. I’m thinking about giving her a job.”

“You should. Thanks for the update. What would I do without Reuters?”

“Stay in bed all day, you lazy sod.”

“That was my plan, actually. Say hi to Edina for me. See you later.”

He pressed the television remote control. Aniko Kovacs appeared, reading the morning news, the end of an item about the Pannonia Brigade. “And so we encourage all true Hungarians to show their support for the Pannonia Brigade at Heroes’ Square today, and accompany them to Budapest’s biggest nest of crime. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hunkalffy and his friend Frank Sanzlermann, soon to be the first President of Europe, this morning greeted the leaders of Croatia, Slovakia and Romania. Presidents Zorvajk, Hrkna and Malinanescu arrived in Budapest to show their support for Mr Sanzlermann, and to attend the gala opening of today’s exhibition at Parliament,” she said.

The screen showed Hunkalffy and Sanzlermann standing on the tarmac at Budapest airport, shaking hands with the three leaders as they stepped off Sanzlermann’s red, white and black campaign aeroplane. Kovacs outlined how the exhibition was entitled “The Life and Times of Four Anti-Bolshevik Heroes: “Hungary’s Admiral Miklos Horthy; Croatia’s Ante Pavelic, Romania’s Martial Ion Antonescu, and Slovakia’s Father Josef Tiso, all wartime leaders and Nazi allies. The exhibition was designed by a subsidiary of the Volkstern Corporation. The highlight was a virtual reality room where visitors could don suits and goggles linked to a computer and pretend they were on the battlefield, engaged in combat with the Red Army.

Alex’s old mobile phone beeped to alert him that a message had arrived. It was a video file. He picked up the handset. Natasha sat up next to him as he opened the message. There was no sound. The first few seconds showed a dark, poor-resolution image of Alex, Natasha, Mike Jakub and Svetlana Todorova crowded together in Novy Marek, in Teresa’s house. It was followed by a shot of Alex entering his apartment building. The next sequence showed a pig being dragged into a field. The animal squealed and struggled as it was held down. Blood gushed as a knife sliced through the pig’s throat and it shuddered in its death throes, sending a red spray across the camera lens. The last frame showed the pig’s head, on a plate, in front of a man’s legs in blue pyjamas. The sender’s number was blocked.

Alex dropped the handset, breathing hard to stop himself from throwing up. Natasha picked it up and replayed the video. “Alex, you aren’t imagining anything,” she said, holding his hand until it stopped shaking.

* * *

Cassandra Orczy leaned back in her office chair and entered her computer password for the second time, a complicated series of letters and numbers that was randomly generated and changed every week. “Access denied” again. She tried once more, carefully checking the sequence was correct. Her computer would lock after three failed attempts. The screen went black, and a small panel declared “Unauthorised Access Attempt: Security Alert.” Cassandra sat back and sipped her coffee, and smiled as she looked at her white Zsolnay porcelain cup. If she wanted a gold-rimmed one now she would definitely have to buy it herself. She looked around the room with nostalgia: the framed quotation from Sun Tzu, the filing cabinets, the chipped desk, its in and out trays both empty, the coffee machine on her desk. She checked the drawers once more. All empty. There was nothing to show that anyone had ever worked here. The view was what she would miss most of all, she mused, as she watched the Danube flowing by.

The door flew open and two burly men in black uniforms marched into her office. Each wore caps emblazoned with a logo showing the letter ‘H’ inside a ‘C’.

“Didn’t your mother teach you to knock before you enter a lady’s room?” she said, as they walked around her desk.

“I didn’t know we were,” sneered one. “Nice view. Shame it’s wasted on communist scum. But not for much longer.”

“Which rock did they find you under?”

“The Volkstern Corporation security department.”

“We already have a security department. And we don’t need protecting, especially not by the Volkstern Corporation’s thugs. So get out of my office.” She pressed a button under her desk.

The Volkstern guard sat on Cassandra’s desk and grabbed her breast, squeezing it hard. She winced in pain. “Don’t fuck with us,” he said. “You’ve got two minutes to get your shit and then we escort you from the building.” He threw a black plastic rubbish bag on her desk.

“I don’t need that. There’s nothing here. Ok, you win. I’ll go quietly,” she said, her voice conciliatory as she tried to twist away. “Please let go of me. It hurts and you’ve made your point.”

The guard dropped his hand.

“Would you like some coffee?” Cassandra asked sweetly, picking up the pot on her desk.

The guard grunted no. She emptied half the pot over his groin. He gasped in agony and grabbed at his trousers, falling to the floor. The second guard spun on his heels and lunged at her. Cassandra threw the remaining coffee in his face. He screamed, reeled backwards and banged against the wall, clawing at his face. The door opened and four well built men walked in, looking alert and dangerous.

Cassandra said: “OK, they’re all yours.” The four grabbed both Volkstern guards, pinned their arms behind them and slammed them to the floor. Cassandra knelt down and whispered near their ears. “Now you tell your masters this: don’t fuck with
us
.”

* * *

Twenty squads, each of fifty Pannonia Brigade members, marched in military formation up Andrassy Avenue towards Heroes’ Square. Each squad leader held the Arrow Cross flag. The square was ringed with Gendarmes. The squads wheeled and turned as they arrived in the square, lining up as though on a parade ground. Csaba Zirta, Interior Minister, stood on a raised platform, at the northern end of the square, flanked by priests from the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist churches. A banner draped the length of the platform proclaimed: “No to Gypsy Crime and no to Cosmopolitan Speculators.” The banner was emblazoned with two red circles with a line through them: one superimposed on a picture of a caricature of a Romany man, the other over the Israeli flag. One by one the Guard members walked up to the podium, shook Csaba Zirta’s hand and were blessed in turn by the priests.

* * *

Jozseftown, Budapest’s largest Romany quarter, stretched north of the Great Boulevard into the heart of the Eighth district. Its dark, narrow alleys were a world away from the trendy bars and cafés of nearby Andrassy Avenue. The dilapidated apartment blocks were untouched since the 1930s. Romany families with five, six, even more children were crammed into dank one or two room flats. Many shared a bathroom and toilet with other families. Electricity and gas supplies were pirated, but no inspectors came calling here. The locals called it
Nyolcker
, pronounced ‘n’yoltscare’, a shortened, slang version of the Hungarian for ‘Eighth district’. But despite the poverty and squalor,
Nyolcker
buzzed with life and vitality. Life was lived on the streets here. The squares were usually crowded with children playing football, teenage rappers, gossiping housewives and unemployed men smoking and reading the day’s newspapers. But today
Nyolcker
was empty and eerily silent.

The gate to
Nyolcker
was Rakoczi Square, an open park, stretching back from the Boulevard, flanked by Jozsef Street on one side and Berkocsis Street on the other. In a half-hearted attempt at community improvement, the local council had installed a giant bank of television screens in the park, which now showed non-stop campaign advertisements for Frank Sanzlermann. The Pannonia Brigade had announced that it would march down Andrassy Avenue, along the Great Boulevard and through Rakoczi Square into the two side streets to “reclaim Jozseftown for true Hungarians” and “clear out the Gypsy criminals”. The whole area had been sealed off. Frustrated television crews argued in vain with the Gendarmes as they stopped journalists from following the Pannonia Brigade along the Boulevard.

Alex and Natasha cut through the back streets to meet Mike Jakub, David Jones and Edina. They stood at the top end of Jozsef Street, fifty metres from where it met the Boulevard. The four journalists and Mike walked out into the middle of the street. Mike and Alex clambered onto a roof of a battered Lada and looked across the road. Mike pointed at the Gendarmerie buses parked across the other side of the Boulevard. Gendarmes milled about dressed in helmets and full body armour. This part of Budapest was usually crowded with traffic at mid-morning, but was empty now. A squad of Gendarmes stood on a corner staring back at them. The sound of the Pannonia Brigade marching down Andrassy Avenue echoed in the distance. The Brigade was almost at Oktogon, where Andrassy Avenue met the Boulevard. It would take the Pannonia Brigade about ten minutes to get to Rakoczi Square. The bank of television screens showed Sanzlermann and Hunkalffy drinking beer and singing, with their arms around each other.

“Ready?” asked Alex.

“Of course,” said Mike, grinning.

Cassandra Orczy sat in the far corner of an internet café not far from Parliament, and logged onto her webmail account. Webmail offered a holding folder for draft emails. The drafts folder was one of the internet’s worst kept secrets: it offered a secure communication channel for everyone from spies to terrorists. Back in the Cold War spies had used dead-letter drops to communicate: a chalk mark on a wall meant that something was hidden in an agreed place, a beer can by a tree, nothing to report.

In the cyber-age emails were far faster and more efficient, but unfortunately for those who wanted to keep their communications private, they left a permanent data trail. Instant messaging was more secure, but not foolproof. Emails could be encrypted but that itself tended to draw the attention of security services and others. Computer to computer internet telephony was almost impossible to tap, but anyone nearby could listen in to the actual conversation. It was useless for internet cafés. But the drafts option of web-based email was almost perfect. The email stayed in the equivalent of a ‘holding’ file, and as it was not sent, there was no data trail to track. All that was needed was for both parties to have the password to the account. No-one had yet worked out how to monitor email drafts, although Cassandra had heard that the Israelis were making great progress. Either way, only one other person had access to her account: ‘Voter.’ She opened her drafts folder:

Dear Mummy,

I’m really getting fed up with all these family rows. Grandma keeps fighting with Auntie and says she is sorry she ever came here. Auntie says Grandma should have stayed at home. Grandma says she thought Auntie had everything under control. There’s even talk that another cousin, that I’ve never heard of, is coming to sort everything out. Meanwhile our French cousin is making lots of new friends, which is making everybody jealous. Plus there’s the big family party at home this afternoon, for all the other relatives that have just arrived. And they are already squabbling all the time. Families!

Much love, Maria.

She read the draft again, slowly. ‘Grandma’ was Sanzlermann. ‘Auntie’ was Attila Hunkalffy. The ‘French cousin’ was Edith Leclerc. The ‘family party at home’ was the exhibition inauguration at Parliament, for the ‘other relatives’, the Presidents of Slovakia, Croatia and Romania. The arguments were good news, and gave her something to work with. But who was ‘another cousin, coming to knock their heads together’?

* * *

The Pannonia Brigade was about 200 yards away, marching in formation along the Grand Boulevard, when the television screens on Rakoczi Square flickered and went black. Sanzlermann and Hunkalffy were replaced by Jamila, the Gypsy queen of the night. Her powerful voice soared across the streets. As Jamila sang, the Romany women poured out of the apartment blocks, their bright headscarves and floral skirts a blaze of colour on the freezing winter day. Grey-haired grandmothers, plump middle-aged housewives and teenage girls, some carrying babies on their arms, all rushed forward to the end of Jozsef and Berkocsis Streets. They formed a line across the streets and along the top end of Rakoczi Square, linking arms, blocking the Pannonia Brigade’s path into
Nyolcker
. Many of the women carried saucepans and frying pans. As the Guard marched nearer they began to hit the pans, at first randomly, and then in a steady beat. Across the other side of the Boulevard the Gendarmes readied for action, putting on their helmets, unsheathing their riot sticks, and loading their CS-gas guns.

Alex, Natasha and David Jones watched as Mike Jakub climbed back onto the Lada at the top of Jozsef Street, a loudhailer in his hand. Edina stood nearby, firing off pictures.