The Game (Tom Wood)

SEVENTEEN





Budapest, Hungary

The plane touched down a minute behind schedule at Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport. Victor remained in his economy class seat while the cabin emptied around him. The harried business travellers were first to get up from their seats to try and beat the rush to the exit, followed by the tourists and finally the old or infirm and families with young children. There were a few solitary passengers who, like Victor, were in no rush, and he briefly wondered what had brought them to the city and why time didn’t hold the same power over them as it did so many others.

He made his way off the plane, pausing in the aisle to let a woman use a walking stick at her own pace. A slow walk through the jet bridge tunnel brought him to the arrivals hall, where a stewardess smiled and nodded at him as he passed. He smiled in return and gazed around while he walked, as though he was visiting for the first time and every mundane feature of the airport fascinated him and required him to stop and examine it.

The passport and visa check was conducted with swift efficiency by a round woman in her fifties, but was significantly delayed when Victor had trouble locating his passport. He checked the pockets of his trousers and those of his jacket. He searched through his bag twice. He laughed along with the woman when the passport was eventually found to have been in his inside jacket pocket all along.

He waited near the baggage carousels until only a scattering of people remained, all anxiously waiting for their suitcases to magically appear through the black rubber curtain, but slowly accepting the fact that their trip had been ruined before it had even begun. His overnight bag did three laps until he exhaled, shook his head and lifted it away. It contained a change of clothes and some toiletries, but he wasn’t expecting to use any of the bag’s contents. Whatever guise the meeting with the unidentified broker took, it wouldn’t last all night, but Victor had the bag for another reason.

He strolled through customs, head angled down, trying not to make eye contact, shoulders bunched defensively, and was waved over by an official who looked as bored with life in general as he was with his job. The official checked Victor’s bag and sniffed the contents of the numerous unnecessary miniature bottles of shampoo and shaving balm. The lack of anything even remotely interesting had a palpable effect on the official, who waved Victor away with a heavy sigh, his face a picture of disappointment and hopelessness.

By the time Victor descended the escalator to the ticket hall there were only nine passengers from his flight that hadn’t gone before him. The rest had dispersed throughout the terminal and were now drinking coffee, queuing for taxis or on their way to parked cars, or else were boarding buses and trains. What would have been a dense crowd of people waiting to meet the arrivals had thinned to just four. Two of those four were holding signs with names, where before there might have been dozens. Both of the signs were held no higher than chest height, their holders having endured gravity’s unyielding effect for some time.

Victor ignored the two without signs. If Muir’s intel was correct Kooi had never met the broker or anyone affiliated with him. There could be no visual recognition to identify Kooi to his contact, or vice versa.

Of the two signs, one was held by a man, the other by a woman. The man was about forty and wore a suit and overcoat and a neck brace, and didn’t look at Victor once. Acute disappointment that had once been expectant excitement was etched into the man’s face. Victor had seen no single woman waiting in baggage collection, so the man in the neck brace wasn’t going to break into a huge grin anytime soon.

When the waiting woman saw Victor she grew a little taller as her back straightened and she raised the sign above shoulder level. It was a taxi company whiteboard with a name Victor didn’t recognise written on it by hand in thick black upper-case letters. The name had no doubt been agreed by Kooi and the broker in one of the deleted emails Muir’s team hadn’t been able to recover, or else had some significance to Kooi that would have enabled him to identify who was picking him up. Already the gaps in the information were showing. Victor knew there would be others. Now, there was no fallout. Later might be different.

There was relief in the woman’s expression, but no recognition. There was no first name on the whiteboard but either she had been given one and therefore knew she was collecting a man, or she had been told she was. She wore faded blue jeans, flat shoes and a baggy checked shirt that hung down to her hips. A trucker’s cap covered her long dark hair, which was unwashed and tied back into a loose ponytail. She was pale skinned, five feet seven inches tall, and he estimated about one hundred and thirty pounds. She looked somewhere in her late thirties, a little tired and overworked, but attractive despite the lack of grooming and the clothes that went a long way to hide her figure.

The woman pointed at the name on the sign, then at Victor as he approached and then back to the sign. Victor nodded.

She reached for his bag but Victor moved it outside her reach and shook his head. She shrugged and led him through the airport, walking fast in an attempt to make up some of the time she had lost because of his deliberate tardiness.

Her taxi was parked outside in the allotted area. It was a dented Saab that was painted white but looked grey with pollution under the unforgiving exterior lights. Decals for the Budapest taxi company ran along the bodywork and rear windshield.

She shivered in the chill evening air and rubbed her hands together as she hurried to open the trunk. This time Victor let her take his bag and watched as she dropped it inside. The woman hurried again to open the rear passenger side door. He nodded his thanks and climbed in. She slammed the door shut and he shuffled across the back seat until he was on the far side of the car.

He watched as she moved around the bonnet and climbed into the driver’s seat in front of him. There was a rattle from the beaded seat cover. She started the engine, cranked up the heat, and held her manicured fingers against the air inlet.

Victor had no information as to where in Budapest he was supposed to meet the broker, so if the woman asked him where he wanted to go Muir’s deception would fail at this early stage. But she didn’t ask.

She wriggled against the beaded seat cover to get comfortable while she waited for the heat to warm her hands, then released the handbrake, put the Saab in gear, and pulled away from the kerb. She glanced at him in the rear view mirror.

The taxi driver’s licence that hung from the dashboard stated that her name was Varina Theodorakis. It was a Greek name. The photograph looked exactly like the woman driving.

They followed the airport road around the short stay car park and joined the main highway to the city. Ferenc Liszt was about sixteen kilometres from the city centre.

‘Where are we going?’ Victor asked in German.

She glanced at him again in the rear view mirror and shrugged and shook her head, not understanding him.

‘Where are we going?’ Victor asked in Hungarian.

She didn’t look at him. ‘Speak English?’

He nodded. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Don’t you know where?’

‘Why would I ask if I already knew?’

She tapped the screen of a cell phone sitting in a holder on the dash. ‘The address is in the satnav. I don’t know the area.’

‘Who supplied you with that address?’

She glanced at him in the rear view again and said, ‘The company.’

Victor nodded back, as if her answer explained everything he wanted to know.

The woman kept the Saab at a conservative speed. She passed some cars. Others passed her. She turned on the radio and cycled through several stations until she stopped at one playing seventies dance music. She increased the volume.

It was louder than Victor would have preferred and he did his best not to listen to any music composed after the end of the nineteenth century, but he didn’t comment. He ran through the little intel Muir had on Kooi and the even less intel she knew about the broker. One wrong assumption or one piece of missing information about either could give him away.

After fifteen minutes the driver indicated and slowed to take an exit. She fidgeted in her seat, briefly stretching her back and shifting position. The satellite navigation system on the phone supplied her with directions but the voice instructions had been disabled. Victor could see the phone over the woman’s shoulder, but didn’t have a clear enough view to see the directions. She occasionally glanced at him in the rear view but he pretended not to notice.

They drove along quiet urban roads that passed through rundown neighbourhoods. The sky above Budapest was cloudless but light pollution hid the stars, if not the half moon. The mix of commercial and residential buildings slowly faded into industrial complexes. Alongside the road were factories and warehouses.

Victor said, ‘Pull over here please.’

‘What?’ The driver decreased the radio’s volume.

‘Pull over here,’ Victor said again.

‘We’re almost there.’

‘I’m going to throw up. Stop the car.’

She glanced at him in the mirror, then pulled over and stopped alongside the kerb.

As soon as the handbrake had been applied, Victor reached forward with his left hand and thumbed the release of the driver’s seatbelt. It was a standard three-point Y shaped belt, and with no tension on the spring-loaded retractor, the strap whipped across her torso. Victor caught the clasp in the same hand when it was near her sternum, pulled it up while his right hand extended slack from the belt feeder, wrapped the diagonal strap around the woman’s throat, hooked the clasp around the horizontal strap to lock the noose in place, and let go with both hands.

The mechanism reeled in the unfastened belt and the remaining slack was gone in a split second. The looped straps immediately tightened around the woman’s throat, and her scream became a gasp as her airways constricted under the considerable pressure.

She panicked. It was almost impossible not to when being strangled. She thrashed and bucked in her seat, clawing and pulling at the belt around her neck, but the centrifugal clutch inside the reel did exactly what it was designed to do and locked the belt against the rapid and jerky movements. She was too terrified to act calmly, but managed to jam some fingers of her right hand between the belt and her neck while her left hand went for the gun at her waist in a pancake holster that had been hidden by her baggy shirt.

But the gun wasn’t there.

Victor examined it while the driver wheezed and choked. It was a small Cold War era Soviet pistol. A Makarov. Outdated, inaccurate, but still deadly in the right hands. The gun bore none of the marks or scratches of a long life of use. He released the magazine and checked the load. It was filled with eight 9x18 mm copper-cased rounds. The chamber was empty and the safety was on. It was a backup weapon – for protection, not aggressive use.

The woman made a continuous coughing, spluttering noise as she struggled and suffocated. The fingers of her right hand were still wedged between the strap and her throat in an effort to relieve the constriction, but any benefit would be minimal. It might keep her alive an extra twenty seconds, but it was only delaying the inevitable and extending the pain. Her left hand was reaching up and behind her head in an attempt to unhook the clasp, but it was an impossible feat with one hand. She could have freed herself in seconds by employing both sets of fingers, but she was terrified and panicking and full of adrenaline and in agony.

She had no longer than a minute before she passed out. She would be dead soon after that.

Victor shuffled across on the back seat so he could lean sideways between the front seats to reach for the woman’s taxi licence. She batted him with her left hand, but the blows weren’t hard enough for him to counter. She had no leverage and was weak from oxygen deprivation.

The licence was in a plastic sleeve fixed to the dash with a clip. He ripped the sleeve away from the clip, used a knuckle to silence the radio, and sat back in his seat to examine the licence.

The driver’s movements were growing increasingly sluggish and her wheezing was quieter.

He pulled the licence from the plastic sleeve. It was the size of a credit card and he dug a nail under a corner of the photograph of the woman driver that had been glued to its surface. He then peeled it away to reveal the real Varina Theodorakis’s face. She had a big smile that showed almost every tooth in her mouth. She was about the same age as the woman in the Saab’s driver’s seat, but she had olive skin and curly black hair cut short, and from the plumpness of her cheeks and double chin weighed fifty pounds more.

In the rear view mirror the driver’s face was turning from red to purple.

Victor pocketed the licence and the photograph. He gripped the seatbelt near the reel and pulled it slowly outwards to slacken the tension on her windpipe.

She gasped and sucked in air before coughing violently. He kept his grip on the belt for the minute it took before her coughs subsided and the sound of her breathing approached normal.

Victor met her reflected eyes with his own. ‘You have exactly ten seconds to convince me not to let go of this strap.’

‘Please…’ she gasped, ‘I’m only here… to… drive.’

Victor held up the Makarov. ‘Yet you were armed with this.’

She swallowed and rubbed her throat. ‘I only had it… to defend myself.’ She grimaced and swallowed again.

‘How’s that working out for you?’

‘I’m just a driver. I—’

A fit of coughs cut off her words.

‘Who am I going to meet?’ Victor asked.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

Victor released his grip on the seatbelt. Immediately the inertia reel sucked the slack from the strap and it tightened around her neck. This time she didn’t try to ease the pressure with her fingers or unhook the clasp. She went straight for the strap protruding from the reel housing, to mimic Victor and create slack. He didn’t let her. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away.

‘Nod when you’re ready to tell me everything you know. It’s worth remembering that I can wait longer than you can.’

She didn’t hesitate and nodded as much as the belt around her neck would let her.

Victor released her wrist and she tugged on the strap, too hard, and it didn’t reel out. She panicked and pulled and jerked on it, panicking more and more when the strap didn’t slacken.

He prised her hand away and did it himself. ‘Slowly, remember.’

‘Robert Leeson,’ she spluttered out between heavy breaths. ‘My boss is Robert Leeson… That’s all I know about him. Please…’

‘And what’s your name?’

‘Francesca Leone.’

‘Well, Francesca Leone, stay still for a moment.’

Victor unwrapped the belt strap from around her neck and she collapsed forward, coughing and wheezing, traumatised and out of breath, but alive.

‘There won’t be any lasting damage,’ Victor said. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to get a doctor to check you out.’

‘You’re a bastard,’ she hissed as she sat back. ‘You didn’t need to do that.’

‘You didn’t need to pretend to be a taxi driver.’

She glared at him.

In return, Victor showed no expression.

‘How did you know?’ she asked as she rubbed her throat.

Victor saw no immediate harm in answering but he wasn’t used to explaining his methods. ‘You’ll work it out eventually. It wasn’t hard.’

She stared at him, unsure whether he was being truthful or if he knew something he wasn’t revealing. He had revealed as much as he was going to.

He said, ‘Take another minute to recover and then let’s get going. I don’t want to keep our mutual friend waiting any longer.’