One Day In Budapest. A Thriller.

Chapter 9

Aware of the seconds ticking away, Zoltan peered down at the cars streaming over the bridge and assessed the danger from falling masonry. He looked further out at the boats on the Danube, suddenly noticing that Morgan was now on one of the tourist barges, staring out after a motorboat that was speeding away. He didn’t know how she had got down so fast, but he half smiled. She certainly knew how to look after herself, and it was damn attractive.

He glanced down again, feeling a little vertigo. The Danube seemed the only option, for the package wasn’t held in place on the bridge. Zoltan picked it up, as gently as he might a precious child, careful not to dislodge any parts. He walked slowly, barely breathing, to the side of the arched tower. Looking down, he inched his way closer to the edge. His heart thumped in fear, for he didn’t know the power of the bomb, only sure it would be better off at the bottom of the Danube.

Peering over, he saw a gap in the boat traffic on the river. With a gasp of effort, he threw the package out and away from the bridge. It turned end over end in the air and Zoltan flinched, his muscles tight, expecting an explosion. But the package plopped into the river, floating for a moment and then sinking as the water leaked into the casing. Zoltan looked at his watch, reckoning that there would be just over two minutes remaining.

He stood for a moment looking out over the city, his anger welling up, for he would defend this country he loved to the death. He was a Jew but he was also Hungarian, like he was a son and a brother. A man could be many things, and one aspect did not define him. He would not deny any part of himself to conform to some crazy definition of who was considered a ‘real’ Hungarian. So he would fight those who tried to divide this glorious city. Zoltan clenched his fists as the time ticked into its final seconds and then he waited, holding his breath.

But nothing came, only the bellowing horns of the boats below, and the hum of the traffic across the bridge. Zoltan exhaled in a long rush as the seconds continued to tick by. He watched the boat that Morgan was on dock at the Vigadó tér pier and turned, heading for the pylon and the tricky climb down. He felt relief flood his body that they had managed to stop at least one of the plans laid for this chaotic day.

Just as Zoltan started his descent, he heard a muffled explosion. His head jerked towards where he had thrown the bomb, but there was nothing there. No plume of water, no ruined boats. The sound had come from the East and he looked in that direction, suddenly seeing a plume of smoke rising above the skyline as the police sirens began to sound.

***

A short distance down Vigadó tér, Zoltan could see the final passengers emerging from the tourist boat. He ran hard towards the pier, pounding the street like he wanted to thump the terrorists who had set off the bomb. Had the bridge just been a decoy? Or was it meant to be a symbolic attack, drawing attention while innocents were targeted at the same time? Zoltan felt a surge of frustrated anger that he channeled into a burst of speed. How dare these people attack his country, his culture, which had already suffered so much?

He slowed on the approach to the ferry pier and stood getting his breath back, waiting for Morgan to disembark. Tourists gabbled away in various languages, some pointing to the plume of smoke evident in the sky to the East. Some were taking photos with a frisson of excitement at being so close to something significant, as if they were somehow immune to the vagaries of attack. Zoltan shook his head, for they didn’t realize how arbitrary terror had now become. They should be thanking God that it wasn’t their city at the mercy of madmen.

Morgan walked briskly up the metal walkway, having finally extricated herself from the interrogation of the boat’s captain. Her face was serious, her eyes fixed on the dark smoky clouds blooming in the sky. As she drew closer, Zoltan noticed the slash of violet in her right eye, almost a burn across the cobalt blue. Her dark curls were tied back and she moved with economy, the grace of a woman who knew how to fight, and how to dance. Who was she really, Zoltan wondered. He had heard of ARKANE, the name mentioned in a whisper when the Jewish elders met to discuss evacuation plans. He knew that the group had an academic side, well represented at conferences, but it was this secret militant arena that he was interested in. Because Dr Morgan Sierra was clearly not just an academic. He hadn’t seen her jump, but he didn’t know if he could have done the same thing.

“It was the Raven, and the bastard got away,” Morgan said, as she joined Zoltan at street level. “I’m sorry.”
Zoltan shook his head, dismissing her concern.
“You jumped from the bridge to go after him. I don’t think anyone could fault your dedication. What were you thinking?”
Morgan gazed back towards the water.
“I thought I saw the bodies in the Danube, floating there in the water, calling for justice. Those who died today, as well as the ones from seventy years ago.” She paused, looking into the eddies of the fast-flowing river. “Did you find anything up there on the arch?”
“There was a bomb, but I threw it in the Danube before it timed out. It was encased in plastic, tamper-proof.” He gestured upwards to the smoke dissipating in the sky above. “But seeing that, I suspect it was a decoy anyway.”
Morgan nodded.
“They were playing the local news on the boat. The bomb was at the Széchenyi Baths. Twelve dead.” She paused. “It was during an antenatal class, so there were pregnant women amongst the casualties.” 
Zoltan clenched his fists, willing his rage to a simmer, but there was nothing he could do to help those people now. He and Morgan had to focus on what must surely come next.
“There was an anonymous call to the TV station,” continued Morgan. “The bombing has been claimed by a previously unknown Jewish group, in retribution for the Danube murders.”
Zoltan snorted, shaking his head. “As if it could have been organized so quickly. They’ve set this up so well. Whoever is behind this must have been planning it for months.”
“That guy from Eröszak is calling on the government to boycott Jewish businesses until the perpetrators are brought to justice. Of course, he’s not advocating violence officially but his supporters are calling for a march tonight, in solidarity with the victims.” Morgan put her hand on Zoltan’s arm, her voice urgent. “We need to find the Holy Right, it’s the only way to stop a bloodbath after dark.”

Zoltan gazed across the water at the Palace, a dominant presence that loomed above the city. On the edge of the battlements, he could just make out the giant statue of the Turul, the divine messenger bird of Magyar origin. In the myths of the beginning, it had perched on the top of the Tree of Life, along with the spirits of unborn children in the shape of birds. It was a symbol of power, strength and nobility, a bird of prey with a beak that could rip the hearts from the chests of men, sacrificed on its blood-spattered altar.

As he considered the symbol, trying to discern a pattern in the chaos, Zoltan thought about Castle Hill itself. It was the centre of the nation, a symbol of the might of Hungary as it had once been and how some wanted it to be again. While Pest was the realm of the past, the Ghetto, the Basilica and a Parliament that had become too left wing for many, Buda was the proud fortress of might, the dominion of the future. Surely a nationalist cause would want that symbol to be at the heart of their strategy, and something niggled at the back of Zoltan’s mind about the tunnels beneath the hill.

He took out his mobile and dialed Georg, who answered quickly.
“I need you to go back on the right-wing chat boards,” Zoltan said. “Can you see what you can find from 2011?”
While he waited for Georg to search, Zoltan turned back to Morgan.
“There’s an ancient labyrinth beneath Castle Hill. It was shut down a few years ago under suspicious circumstances, around the time when Eröszak was on the rise.”
His attention returned to the phone. “Great, we’ll check it out.”
Zoltan pointed to Castle Hill. “Let’s head up there, it’s the only lead I can think of right now.”
He led the way up the wide boulevard away from the ferry port. Stopping in front of a giant billboard advertising the elections, Zoltan looked up into the face of László Vay. His scar contorted as his mouth twisted with anger.
“This man knows nothing of honor, and he will do anything to further his pursuit of power. None of what has happened today is beyond him, for he wants to win this election, and I think he aims to waltz in on the back of a nationalist uprising. I knew him once, you know, we were friends … but then one day I discovered the true man behind that perfect smile.”
As Zoltan spoke, he remembered that dark day in Bosnia, when his friendship with Vay was obliterated.

***

Srebenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Spring 1995.

“Come on, Zol. Seriously, you’re always so slow. You can’t do anything for it now, let’s just leave.”
Zoltan didn’t look up from the body he was examining, this one just a boy with a gunshot through his forehead. He was used to the taunts of his friend, the dismissive attitude to the people they were there to protect. The child’s arms were curled around himself as if he had tried to find comfort in the moments before death. Zoltan found himself silently reciting the opening words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead, even though the boy was probably Muslim in this part of town. Finally he rose.

László was smoking a cigarette, his body relaxed. He lifted his face to the sun, caught in a brief sunbeam, and reveled in its warmth. There were no dark shadows under his indigo eyes, only the movie star looks that made him the envy of the other soldiers. Zoltan didn’t know how László managed to shrug off the deadening weight of sadness that he found engulfed him every day.

They both worked as part of the peacekeeping force, seconded from the Magyar Honvédség, the Hungarian army, to help the Dutch United Nations team. But Zoltan knew that there was no way of keeping the brittle peace for long and he felt the palpable tension in the air. These people hated each other and there had always been violence in this region. It was a tribal place, united only by the fake lines drawn on maps that were as fragile as the paper they were inked on. Thousands of Christian Serbs, Jews and Gypsies had been sent to camps from here under the Nazis and after the war, Yugoslavia had been created. Now, it had broken down, as Muslim nationalists demanded a centralized independent Bosnia, Serbian nationalists wanted to stay near Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia, and Croats wanted an independent Croatian state.

“Do you even give a shit about this place, Laz?” Zoltan asked as he stole the cigarette from his friend’s fingers.
“Of course not,” László said. “This land should be ours anyway. After all, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a hundred years ago. Maybe if they all kill each other, it will be ours again.”
Seeing the fanatical look in László’s eyes, Zoltan sighed and shook his head. His friend had always been an extreme patriot, harking back to the old days of Hungarian glory. They had been the best of friends once, when their fathers had been business partners in a chain of Jewish shops in Budapest and they had played war games amongst the sacks of goods while the adults talked and drank together. László’s mother wasn’t Jewish, which technically meant that he wasn’t either, but that hadn’t been important to the boys back then.

A rattle of bullets startled the men and they flattened themselves against a wall. This area was known to be raided by Serb incursions and the sound had been close. Behind a nearby fence, Zoltan could hear the harsh laughter of a group of men, and then a woman’s cry. He instinctively raised his gun and stepped forward quietly. László reached out to hold his arm.
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “It’s not your fight.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing here?” Zoltan whispered, his rage rising at the impotence of the peacekeepers to stop any kind of violence. It didn’t matter to him which group was inflicting the pain, only that the suffering of the innocents would stop. This dirty war was marked by systematic rape as a weapon, mainly by the Serbs against the Bosniaks. Zoltan had heard them boasting of the ‘little Chetniks’ they would leave behind in the wake of abused women.

The woman screamed again, but the noise was cut short by shouting voices and the sound of a fist slamming into flesh. Zoltan pulled his arm away from László, stepping forward through the rubble of the streets to peer around the edge of the fence. There were six men, wearing the uniform of Serb nationalists, surrounding a woman who was sprawled, weeping, across the body of a dead man. One of the men said something, nodding at the woman and began to unbuckle his belt.

Zoltan felt his heart beating hard in his chest. In some way, this tiny scene represented a microcosm of this conflict, and of every injustice against the vulnerable. Zoltan had heard the stories of Budapest under the fascists, then the Communists, how friends had given each other up in exchange for another day of freedom. He couldn’t alter his own country’s past, but perhaps he could change this woman’s future.
He stepped out from behind the fence, his gun relaxed by his side. Knowing that he and László were outnumbered, it would be better to reason with them.

“You’re a long way from your camp, guys,” Zoltan said as the men swung round to look at him. Their faces were hostile, and they raised their guns as they formed a phalanx around the woman, claiming their prize. Her sobs filled the air before one of the men spoke, his English halting. 
“You … go. This,” he gestured at the woman. “Ours.”
Zoltan stepped forward, his left hand outstretched in a gesture of placation. His heart was hammering, but he knew that if he walked away now, the woman would be brutally violated. He still had a chance to stop it.
“This woman is under UN protection,” he said. “So I think you had better leave.”
One of the group laughed and turned away, saying a few words and reaching down to pull the woman off the body of her husband by her hair. She screamed again. Zoltan raised his gun and immediately, the other men had their weapons readied. Zoltan’s senses were heightened, the metallic smell of weapons overlaid with the stink of the soldiers’ sweat thick in his nostrils.
He felt rather than heard László emerge from behind. A surge of gratitude washed over him at his friend’s belated backup. But then he heard a click near his ear, and realized that Laszlo’s gun was pointed at his own head. A flush of betrayal rocked him. 
“We’re sorry for the intrusion,” László said, his voice smooth, as if they were at a gentlemen’s club, not on the broken streets of Srebenica. “My friend here was just leaving.”

The Serbs laughed and lowered their weapons. Zoltan felt László pulling him backwards as the six men turned to their prize, two men of them now unbuckling their pants, as the woman wept at their feet.
Zoltan felt as if the world slowed in that moment, his brain frantically searching for a solution. His eyes fell on a pile of weaponry that the Serbs had left discarded to one side.
A grenade. It was the only way.

He felt almost manic, desperate to get to the woman and stop the soldiers. László wouldn’t shoot him, he knew that, but he also knew that his friend would always choose the easy way out. There would be no back up.

The Serbs had their backs turned and as two men held the woman down, another bent to pull off her lower garments as she sobbed in desperation.
“Just walk away, Zol. You can’t help her.” László’s voice was honey, tempting him with the easy path, but the words of Simon Wiesenthal, the persecutor of Nazi criminals, echoed in Zoltan’s mind. For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

Zoltan broke away from László’s grip, running for the pile of weaponry, his eyes fixed on a grenade. He heard swearing and then a gunshot but didn’t flinch, steeling his body and flinging himself down behind the pile as he grabbed a grenade from the top. Looking back briefly, he could see Laz ducking back behind the wall, his face turned away. Zoltan knew that he had mere seconds before the men advanced to kill him, so he pulled the pin from the grenade and launched it, throwing it far enough away that it would explode against a nearby building.

The soldiers shouted and ducked as the grenade landed and then exploded, raining debris down from the scarred and shattered tenement block. They turned towards the weapons pile just as Zoltan pulled the pin and lobbed another grenade. This time the soldiers scattered, firing behind themselves at him and the weapons pile. The last soldier pointed a gun at the woman’s head as he turned away. Zoltan leapt from his hiding place and charged the man as the gun went off. His eyes had flicked up at the movement so the bullet just missed the woman’s head as she curled into a fetal position. 

An explosion rocked the little square and as masonry began to fall, Zoltan threw his body over the woman, trying to protect her from the rain of hell. As the other soldiers ran from the scene, he felt a slicing pain in his cheek and a burning on the side of his face as he lay there, hoping that he could just save this one innocent.

***

Zoltan touched the scars on his cheek as he looked up into László’s face on the billboard, remembering that day. After the incident, their friendship had finally ruptured and split. László had inveigled himself into an officer’s position, allying himself with nationalist interests and eventually pursuing a political career. He was the embodiment of what most would consider success, becoming wealthy and influential in the public arena. Zoltan had followed his moral compass, giving up the pursuit of power to stand up for those who could not defend themselves.

He felt a light touch on his arm, and turned to see Morgan’s face, a question in her eyes. Zoltan knew that he could trust her, their fast friendship built on a shared belief in humanity that men like László would never understand or honor.
“Sorry,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Let’s go. The march will start early and as dusk falls, I fear that evil will stalk this city again.”

***
Thanks for reading!

There are 3 more books in the ARKANE series, so you can join Morgan Sierra on more adventures in Pentecost, Prophecy and Exodus.

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I also have a darker crime novel, Desecration, that opens with a murder in a medical specimen museum. Plus a short story series inspired by Dante’s Inferno, A Thousand Fiendish Angels.

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