Ultimate Weapon (5 page)

He had barely been able to read, but Imre would have none of that. He was a demanding teacher. History, philosophy, mathematics, languages, Val sucked it all up like a hungry sponge. Besides Hungarian, he already spoke the Romanian of his infancy, and the gutter Italian that he’d learned from Giulietta, his mother’s roommate. Imre taught him more. English, French, Russian. He even tried to teach the boy to play piano, but after some effort, he had to concede that Vajda had no musical talent at all.

As Val grew bigger and vicious enough to intimidate in his own right, when he’d been promoted from picking pockets and selling tail and smuggled cigarettes to heroin dealing, he returned the favor the only way he could—by making it known on the street that anyone who bothered Imre would be gutted like a fish.

Fucking idiot that he’d been. He should have kept his mouth shut.

“Good God, Vajda! Wake up!”

Imre’s indignant voice jerked Val out of his reverie. “Huh?”

He turned to see the old man scowling from the kitchen door, leaning heavily on his cane. “That kettle’s been wailing like a cat in heat for five minutes!” Imre shouted over the din. “Are you drugged? That would explain your chess game, at least!”

“
Ah, cazzo.
” Val jerked the shrieking kettle off the gas flame.

The familiar ritual of brewing and drinking tea restored a cautious equilibrium between them, but the long silences made Val uneasy.

Finally Imre set down his cup with a decisive click and threaded the tips of his swollen, arthritic fingers together. “Vajda.”

The heavy, preaching way that he pronounced the name made Val brace himself. “Don’t call me that,” he repeated grimly. “I told you.”

Imre waved his hand, impatient. “When I die, you must—”

“You’re not going to die,” Val cut in.

“Don’t be childish,” Imre said sternly. “Let me finish. When I die, do not expose yourself again to come here and bury me. Mourn my death in any way you like—from a distance. I will be safe and happy with Ilona and Tina. Swear it, Vajda.”

Val sprang to his feet, rattling the teacups on the cluttered table, inexplicably furious. “No,” he said. “I swear nothing, to anyone.”

Imre stared at him. His grim mouth was swollen and scabbed at the corner from the split, battered lip his attackers had given him.

Val stalked into the foyer, shrugged on his coat, seething. Imre did not come out of the kitchen to bid him good-bye. It was just as well. There was nothing more to be said, and if Val spoke at all, he would start shouting. He ran down four flights of steps and out into the frigid night air. Snow was falling thickly, just like the night he’d met Imre.

Images rushed unpleasantly back when he saw the black BMW idling on the curb, the driver an anomymous dark shadow. The lock popped as he approached. His stomach clenched. For a horrible half-second, he was eleven years old again, shivering on the curb.

No choice but to get in, and go wherever the car took him.

He hesitated.
Detach
. He was not that helpless boy anymore.

He spat into the gutter, yanked open the back door and got in. He was big, strong. He wore fine clothes, had an expensive haircut, good shoes, a cashmere coat, money in his pocket and far more in the bank. He’d forgone his guns tonight because they distressed Imre, but he had the knives. He had years of fight training. Eyes in the back of his head.

No, he was far from defenseless. Few people on earth were better equipped for that. And still, getting into that fucking car felt like climbing into a fucking crocodile’s mouth.

Fortunately, that phase of his life hadn’t lasted long. He got his growth fast, and became too big, too scary looking for Kustler’s stable. But they found other uses for him soon enough, on the heroin supply chain.

He hated dealing drugs, with his mother’s track marks and hollow eyes haunting him. He had found her body one day when he was eleven years old, sprawled on the bathroom floor. Choked by her own vomit.

That was the same day that fuckhead Kustler, his mother’s pimp, had come by, looked him over and decided that all was not lost. Vajda was unfortunately dark-complected, but pretty even so. Kustler had decided that the son would do nicely to take over his mother’s job.

He flinched from the memory of that day.

Yes, he hated drugs. But one did not say no to Daddy Novak, or to anyone who answered to him. Not if one liked staying alive.

Though “like” was perhaps the wrong word. He had clung to life out of spite. Staying alive was a fuck-you to the world. Anger kept him alive. Imre had been the only one to show him something beyond it.

It was ironic how the best way to protect Imre would be to not care about him at all. Whatever Val dared to care about was liable to end up dead on the bathroom floor. The more he cared, the higher the probability. He wished he could detach completely. Just float away.

The snow fell thickly now, flakes fluttering through the air, obscuring the cityscape until it was a blank, swirling no-man’s-land. Val stared out the car window, trying to orient himself with childhood landmarks. Each one he identified sparked bleak memories.

As he grew older, without really meaning to, he’d come to the attention of Gabor Novak, the big boss, having distinguished himself as a bright young man with unusual language skills and an aptitude for computers. Useful as Novak’s business expanded and went global. Soon he was exiled from Budapest and sent off to Novak’s country palace on the Danube, far from the distractions of the city, to work on encryption software, Internet marketing, front company documentation, etc. The work was endless. But at least it was not bloody.

On the surface anyway. There was always blood at some level.

Gabor Novak was formerly from Ukraina. He had married a Hungarian woman, taken her name and nationality, and proceeded to set up illicit businesses in cities all over eastern Europe: Budapest, Riga, Prague. Before he murdered her, or so the legend went.

Imre tried to persuade him to break free of Novak’s organization, but Val knew in his bones what Imre would not understand—how far men like Kustler would go to protect their territory. Imre would have had his balls cut off and his throat slit for interfering, if he was lucky. If not, there were things that lasted much longer. Val had seen them with his own eyes, unfortunately. He wished he had not.

No, there was no way out. Until he found PSS and Hegel. Or rather, they found him, eleven years ago, after the orders had come down from Daddy Novak to groom Vajda for arms deals. Vajda’s English was quite good, thanks to Imre. Useful for doing business in West Africa. Sierra Leone, to be exact. His first gunrunning assignment.

The car stopped outside a small café in Belváros. The driver sat without turning or speaking. Val got out of the car and went in.

He found Hegel in a corner, tucking away a large steak tartare, and a heaping plateful of spicy goulash and potato croquettes. He gave Val an unfriendly look as the younger man approached.

Hegel was not a handsome man. He was grizzled, thick and square. His coarse, pitted face was heavy-jowled and scowling.

“You’re late,” he growled, wiping his mouth.

Val sat down without explanation or apology, and Hegel ignored him as he shoveled food into his face.

Hegel was an American ex–Special Forces helicopter pilot, Vietnam vet, and covert operative with Prime Security Solutions since its inception. Val had met him eleven years ago in Ouagadougou when he arrived with thirty tons of small arms and ammo, antitank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, RPG tubes, and warheads from a Ukrainian arms manufacturer, destined for the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front.

He was to trade them for a fortune in smuggled diamonds.

A plane waiting for them began to discreetly ferry the weapons to Monrovia, where the final transaction would take place.

Hegel was one of the helicopter pilots who flew the weapons into the rebel strongholds in the jungle. Val discovered afterward that he had been working undercover, investigating sources of arms that flowed to the rebels. Hegel had invited him to go on a weapons run, and out of curiosity and boredom, Val had gone along. They stopped because of mechanical difficulties in Moidu, a small town in the jungle.

By chance, they were there when rebels attacked the town.

It was a massacre. The rebel soldiers were children and teenagers themselves, crazed out of their minds on palm wine and cocaine, armed with the assault rifles and rocket launchers he had just sold to them. They sliced, hacked, and gunned down everything they saw.

Val had seen a great deal of violence in his life, but when he saw the young pregnant girl ripped apart before his eyes by two young thugs with machetes, something tipped inside him. He didn’t remember the dynamics of the fight, how it went or how it ended. It was just a blur of noise, blood. Hegel had dragged him out of it. Alive, amazingly.

He’d awakened in a hospital bed in a fog of agonizing pain and saw Hegel beside him. The man’s metallic gray eyes were looking him over. Coldly, appraisingly. As if considering his purchase.

Hegel told him about Prime Security Solutions, a private mercenary army equipped with armored fighting vehicles, gunships, fighter planes, all manner of weaponry. It provided its clients with military training, VIP protection, airline transport, offshore financial management services, intelligence, infrared photo recon, satellite imagery. PSS could deploy a battalion-strength force anywhere in the world in hours. It was well equipped, sleek, powerful. And it paid well.

Hegel made him an offer. Vajda could be reborn with a new name, a new life—in exchange for service as a covert operative.

Vajda explained that leaving Gabor Novak’s employ was more complicated than it seemed, but Hegel just shrugged. Money would solve that problem, and Vajda was well worth the severance fee Novak would charge them. It would all be taken care of—if Val said yes.

At the time, it was an attractive alternative to his former servitude. He soon realized that there was no difference that mattered. PSS’s agenda was brutally simple: to help their wealthy, powerful clients amass more wealth and power by means of pulling strings all over the world. Openly or secretly. Legally or not. To that end, PSS wanted a killing machine. Killing was killing, whoever you did it for.

So it was that he had become Valery Janos, Italian citizen, resident of Rome, born in Italy of Hungarian parents. The first of many aliases and his best developed innocuous civilian identity.

It was his favorite identity. On paper and on the Internet, Val Janos lived the life he secretly longed for. A hardworking businessman who lived quietly in his lavish apartment on Piazza Navona in Rome.

He loved his adopted country and city. He had absorbed his adopted language as if he had been born to it. He lived in it, thought in it, dreamed in it even, far more so than in the Hungarian he had learned at the age of six when his mother brought him to Budapest or the Romanian he’d been born to. He liked being Val Janos, the perfect, cultured gentleman who minded his business, and bothered no one—unless one counted his disgruntled ex-lovers, of course. The Val Janos persona was a voracious ladies’ man, who bored easily.

But even after investing a fortune in his training, even though he was one of their best operatives, PSS never let him forget what he owed them. He was a tool, like a grenade, bomb, gun—but ultimately, he was just mafiya scum to them, to be kept under careful control.

Vajda was still on the street, just with a more powerful pimp.

Hegel belched and wiped his face on the checkered napkin. “What the fuck are you doing in Budapest?”

“Why even ask?” Val said. “You already know everything.”

Hegel grunted. “I thought you were more professional than this. Although your performance on that last operation gave me doubts.”

Val imitated Imre’s air of impenetrable calm.

“Tight-assed bastard,” Hegel muttered. He grabbed a shot glass, sloshed a generous amount of palinka into it, and shoved it across the table at Val. “Relax, for fuck’s sake. You’re giving me gas.”

Val made no move to taste the liquor. Hegel grabbed the glass and downed the shot himself in one noisy gulp. “If I meant to kill you, I wouldn’t do it in a restaurant,” he announced. “And poison’s not my style. Woman’s weapon. I don’t do chick tricks.”

“You have no style. You do whatever is expedient. It’s the first thing you ever taught me,” Val said. He reached for the shot glass, sniffed it, and set it down, untasted.

Hegel glugged more palinka into his glass. “You want to know a secret, Janos?”

“I’m not sure,” Val said. “Do I?”

“You were supposed to die that day, eleven years back, in Sierra Leone. Did you know that?”

“Really.” His response was emotionless. He was feeding data into the matrix, observing from within a core of utter silence. Waiting until he knew where Hegel was going with it. It was no surprise, in any case.

“We were monitoring the arms suppliers to all of the African conflicts. It was concluded that you were dangerous, young as you were. Better to kill the poisonous snake right out of the egg, right?”

“I see,” Val said.

Hegel shook a cigarette out. “Then I saw you fight in Moidu. You were a fucking maniac, even without any formal training. Natural talent, languages, and brains. All the makings of a brilliant operative. I decided to take a huge risk. For you.”

“I’m touched,” Val said coolly.

Hegel lit his cigarette and took a drag. “That day could have gone one of two ways. Either I held your nose shut, or I offered you a job.”

He gazed at Val, breathing out a long stream of smoke.

Val stared back, expressionless. What did the man expect? Gratitude for not killing him? He’d spat blood for PSS for years.

Hegel’s lips pursed around his cigarette. “I’m starting to regret that decision.”

“I am devastated,” Val murmured.

“Don’t mouth off to me. What happened in Moidu was damn lucky.” He grunted. “For you, anyway.”

Val was not sure that his life over the past eleven years was that much more desirable than a bloody but mercifully quick death.