at all times. The only people who even knew of his existence were the president, the secretary of defense, and the head of the NSA.
And now, of course, her. But that was by choice, not necessity or command.
The Nokia sent its signal. Even if they were monitoring the Prius’s electronic transmissions, they would never be able to detect it. Devlin’s infrequent field communications bounced through a row of encrypted cutouts, with a ping off Fort Meade, where they were re-encrypted via the Dual_EC_DRBG, a pseudo-random number generator, and then redirected, so that whoever was on the receiving end would have no way of telling the signal’s provenance. In the never-ending war between the hunter and the hunted, The Building’s encryption technology was subjected to relentless and rigorous upgrades; sometimes it seemed that half the best minds in the Puzzle Palace were at work and making sure their own SIGINT was safe from predatory eyes and ears, while the other half penetrated the bad guys’ innermost defenses. Whether anyone would ever win this game was moot, but once you were in it, you were in it to win it.
Still, the Mercedes-Benzes shadowed them, keeping to parallel streets when necessary, but always on their tail, as if they were electronically tracking them.
“Are you sure this car is clean?” barked Devlin.
“Stole it myself this morning, completely randomly,” she replied. “There’s no way they could have known about it.”
“Then they were following you.”
“Impossible. I just got in country.”
“Then they picked you up at origination.”
“Also impossible. I bought three tickets to three different destinations, each one in a different name. No ghosts.”
“That you saw.”
She shot him a quick, angry glance. “Are you challenging my professionalism?” she asked, zipping the Prius between two oncoming vehicles and splitting them perfectly.
“Absolutely not,” he replied, and that was the truth. She was as good as they came. Where she had grown up, and what she’d had to endure, had made her so. “But you know the old saying: when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Wild Bill Donovan?”
“Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four…”
“Hold on!”
The car careered to the left, nearly tipped, then righted itself and regained traction. Behind them, the two Benzes gained.
“Slow down and let them pass us,” said Devlin. Just as their pursuers were about to pull even, Maryam hit the brakes and the SUVs, their drivers caught by surprise, went zipping by. “Got ’em both,” said Devlin. “Now lose ’em while I digest this.”
Maryam wheeled left onto the Irányi utca, then made her way back north a couple of blocks to pick up the Kossuth utca, named after the 19th-century freedom fighter, a wide boulevard heading into the heart of Pest and then out to the motorway. They might be able to ditch them in the warren of back streets on either side, but Devlin doubted it. Unless they wanted to lose both their prisoner and their lives, they were going to have to stand and fight.
“Who are they?”
Devlin knew he had less than two minutes before the unknown tormentors would pick them up again. “There are six in all, two in the lead car and four shooters in the trailing vehicle.”
“Not good.”
“Up to us to make it better. Even things out.”
She gave him a quick smile, then glanced back at the rearview mirror. There was no sign of the SUVs. “I think we might have lost them.”
“Impossible. Even an amateur on a bicycle could follow this piece of Nipponese plastic. They’re waiting for us, up ahead somewhere. Stop the car—over there.”
Maryam pulled off into a side street, and circled the block three-quarters of the way. There was no place to park, but then there was never anyplace to park in Budapest, so she wedged the car perpendicularly between an ancient Lada and a new Ford and killed the lights.
Devlin climbed into the back and lowered one of the fold-down seats, keeping his HK trained on their unwilling passenger. “Farid, are you all right?” he asked his unwilling passenger in Arabic.
There was no sound from the trunk. Devlin turned the Nokia backlight on and peered in. Belghazi was relaxed, his eyes open, but he didn’t look happy, and no sound came from his mouth.
“Maybe he didn’t understand you,” suggest Maryam. “I told you to polish your street Arabic.”
“Yeah, well, let’s see how you do in the back alleys of Magdeburg with that Bavarian honk,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s move. Pop the trunk.”
Cautiously, Devlin switched off the dome light, opened the door and slid out, concealing himself between the other cars. Senses on full alert, he listened for the sound of a motor, but heard nothing. He moved around to the trunk and, standing, hoisted Farid out, and slung him over his shoulders. Maryam was already out of the car, weapons over her shoulder, searching for a place to hide.
European cities were not like American ones, full of open spaces, wide streets, and generous yards. Here, they nestled up against one other, sharing walls on both sides, and you were lucky to get a garden the size of a postage stamp in the back. Not that you entered the garden from the street: what gaps there were between buildings were closed off by high cement and stucco walls, their gates tightly locked. This part of the world had seen too many conquerors come and go to trust the good nature of their fellow man, or his benign designs.
A row of big European trash cans stood near the curb, the kind into which you could easily stuff a body or two. Devlin dumped Farid into one of them and closed the lid, marking it with a felt-tipped pen he produced from one of his pockets. He didn’t care how unpleasant it might be inside, with the coffee grounds, rotten vegetables, and soup bones; that was Farid’s tough luck. He should have thought ahead, before he started stealing secrets from CERN and passing them along to al-Qaeda. If that, in fact, was what he’d been doing. But with the rapid proliferation of nuclear technology, this was no time to take chances. The apocalyptic genie that had been confined to the bottle, largely successfully since the day after Trinity, was now well and truly loosed upon the earth.
Devlin scanned the street—and didn’t like what he saw; at either end of the road, blocking access and egress, were the two SUVs. They were trapped.
Devlin checked the Surge. He punched a couple of buttons and the video display suddenly turned to a four-block map of the area, right down to the smallest detail. He thought a moment, then entered a series of cipher codes and hit send.
In the distance, he could hear the sounds of one of the SUV’s doors opening, and voices. As they approached they would be close enough to scan, but he didn’t need a device to tell him what he already knew; they were outnumbered at least two to one, and there was no way out. Softly, Devlin cursed in Italian under his breath. He liked cursing in Italian. There was music to it, and somehow the mellifluousness of the language made almost every situation seem not so bad. He was hoping that was still true.
“Over here.” He turned to see Maryam in a
