her head, and peeked up with a flirtatious smile.
“Honey baby, it’s time for you to have a bath,” Steele said briskly. “I’ll go run it for you.” She squinted at him. “And you will talk. Quietly, outside the bathroom door, while she bathes.”
A few minutes of preparation got Rachel paddling happily in a shallow bath with an assortment of floating rubber toys, produced from the miraculous black bag. Steele sat in the bathroom doorway where she could keep an eye on the child, and gestured for Val to sit opposite her on the floor.
“Talk,” she ordered. “Who were those guys?”
“I had no chance to interrogate them, so I cannot be sure,” he said. “But I assume they were a local team put in place by PSS.”
“PSS?” She looked perplexed. “Aren’t you PSS?”
“I was,” he said. “I had a disagreement with the organization. I suspect that after that, my boss no longer trusted me to carry out the mission, so he mobilized another team. They will consider me rogue after what happened this morning.”
“A disagreement? Over what?” she demanded.
“You,” he said baldly. “My boss insisted that I take Rachel and manipulate you with her.”
Her face was a pale, impenetrable mask. “And why didn’t you?”
He thought of several answers. Dangerous, inappropriate answers. But he was not yet ready to voice them. And she was definitely not yet ready to hear them.
“I don’t like hurting children,” he said finally. “It was often a problem for me in this work. When the issue came up again, I said enough, vaffanculo a tutti. I did not like the job in any case. Coercing a woman into going with a depraved pig like Luksch by threatening her child, che schifo. It is squalid.” He shrugged. “My boss said that a man in my position cannot afford such scruples. He was right. So I decided to change my position.”
“I see.” She examined her fingernails. “So, ah, let me get this straight. You followed me and helped me and Rachel in the shuttle just because you’re noble and heroic?”
“Ah…” He floundered, taken aback.
“I take it this is the part in the story where I’m supposed to be deeply impressed by how honorable you are? And melt like chocolate?”
He took the three steps back in his mind and waited until his anger at her sarcasm faded. “It is not a story,” he replied. “It is the truth.”
“Hmm.” She gazed at her daughter, splashing and humming in the tub. “So they took over all the data on me that you gathered for them and had this B team act on it?”
“No,” he said. “This is the part that troubles me. They knew the location of your home because I could not hide it from the satellite. But I do not know how they found you at the airport this morning. I did not share the frequencies that I tagged you with.”
She looked thoughtful. “They found me, but you don’t know how. Hmmph. I smell a ramped-up version of Good Cop, Bad Cop.”
His teeth began to grind. “The good cop does not usually kill the bad cops when that game is played,” he said.
“It depends on the stakes,” she said. “How hard the game is being played, how ruthless the players, how big the payoff. The psychological effects would be intense with murder thrown in.”
He stared at her. “I did not do that,” he said.
Her eyes slid away. “Hmm,” she murmured. “How noble. And very moving, Janos, but it doesn’t explain what you’re doing here with us. You should be lying on a beach on another continent, sipping an umbrella drink, putting all the unpleasantness behind you. If what you say is true, nobody is paying you a salary to cramp our style any longer. So why are we here?”
The woman was mercilessly focused. He had hoped to ease around the danger zone for a while, to warm her up, gain her trust. But no. She shoved him straight toward the perilous moment of truth.
“There is…something else,” he forced out.
She leaned back with a sigh. “Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”
He had scripted several persuasive ways of approaching the dangerous bargain he meant to offer her, but all of them evaporated out of his head, leaving him with the blunt, unlovely truth.
“I grew up in Budapest,” he said, his voice halting.
She tilted an eyebrow. “And this is relevant exactly why, Janos?”
“My mother…” He stopped and swallowed. “She was a prostitute, from Romania. She worked in a brothel there, run by a mafiya boss from Ukraina.”
Steele’s eyes dilated. “Daddy Novak,” she said.
He nodded. “I was very young when she died,” he said. “I got swept up into his organization as a child. I worked for him for years.”
“I see.” Her voice was as hard as glass. “And what does your mafiya past have to do with me?”
He closed his eyes, tried to organize his thoughts. This was not going well. He was not making sense, even to himself. “I am trying to explain the connection,” he said wearily. “There was a man…who helped me years ago. He was kind to me. Educated me, tried to get me out. He failed with the second, through no fault of his own. I care about this man. Novak knows this. He abducted my friend, and now he threatens to torture him to death if I do not…deliver you to him.”
He did not dare to look at her. The heavy silence was underscored by the child’s burbling and splashing from the bathtub.
Steele’s face was ashen. She was so startled, she had no sarcasm to counter him. “Does he know about Rachel?” she whispered.
“From what I could tell, no. He did not mention her.”
“He must not find out,” she said with hushed intensity. “He would never rest until he got her.”
He nodded.
She looked down at her hands. They were trembling visibly. She clenched them into fists. “Why are you telling me this, Janos?” she asked. “It’s not an efficient tactic if you want to save your friend. Why not just knock me on the head and do the deal?”
Val shook his head. “I was hoping to find a better solution to the problem,” he confessed. “One that would not damn me to hell.”
She looked dubious. “You think that a solution exists?”
“I hope so,” he said. “I do not want to hurt you. And Imre would not thank me for saving him from death and torture at your expense.”
“Hmmph,” she snorted. “This Imre must have very high standards if he can reason like that in Novak’s clutches.”
“Oh, God, yes. That he does,” Val agreed fervently. “His high standards have been a pain in my ass for most of my life.”
Tam
