Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(12)

He was tired of kissing the old man’s mummified ass.

A new era was beginning. His heart thudded with excitement.

He could hardly wait.





Chapter


3




Val shifted in the old wingback chair, restless and agitated after spending three days next to Imre’s hospital bed. He’d forgotten how it felt to fidget and tap his feet. He’d been living in a state of cool, floating detachment for so long. Years, in fact.

Twilight was fading, leaching the light out of Imre’s shabby study and leaving only dull shades of gray. In the shadows, Imre’s lean, seamed face was as unrevealing as an ancient statue, despite the bruises and the swelling from the attack mere days before. He had been discharged only hours ago, against Val’s disapproval.

“Stop twitching,” Imre said calmly. “You’re distracting me.”

The elderly man ignored Val’s automatic murmured apology and contemplated the chessboard with sphinxlike gravity. No triumph, despite how blatantly he was winning.

But the magic of a challenging game wasn’t working on Val. It was strenuous mental work, maintaining a shifting matrix of probabilities, strategies, choices, and consequences, but it was also an excellent buzz.

Imre’s gift to him. One of the many. He’d been craving it like a drug, though it was stupid to rely on anything for comfort or refuge.

But there was no buzz, no magic tonight. He could not hold the matrix in his thick head. It kept collapsing in on itself. The heavy, antique chess pieces sat squatly on the board: the white carved of yellowing ivory stolen from African elephants in another century, the black carved of aged, cracked ebony. Inert, revealing nothing, suggesting nothing. No solutions, just a puzzle he was too stupid to solve. Like the puzzle of what to do about Steele and her daughter.

“Knight to king five.” Imre’s cracked voice dragged Val’s attention back to the game just in time to see the old man checkmate him. “Too easy, boy. No sport.”

Val studied the carnage on the chessboard, trying to analyze in a glance what error in judgment had brought him to this. He quickly abandoned the effort. Fuck it. It was too hard, he was too tired. Too many stupidities piled on top of one another to count them all.

He scooped up the pieces, and stood, rolling his shoulders as he gazed out the window into this decaying back alley of Józsefváros. He was stiff, from days of sitting.

Technically, he was not supposed to be here. One condition of his employment with PSS had been that he stay away from Budapest. He had violated that order from the start to visit Imre. He had alternative identities, both PSS-sanctioned ones and ones he had obtained secretly for his personal use. He was skilled at disguise. It had been easy.

But the periods of time that passed between those visits had grown longer and longer as the work he did for PSS pushed him farther from himself. He didn’t want Imre to know what he did or have the old man examine too closely what he’d turned into because of it. He didn’t want to bear Imre’s disapproval. What was the point? Imre could not help him find his way. He had done everything he could for Val.

He was reluctant to feel again at all after years of cultivating chilly detachment, but here he was, twitching. Embarrassed at what he had become. Angry for feeling that way. Bracing himself for judgement.

He sensed the old man was quietly waiting for him to talk, but he was no longer accustomed to explaining himself. It had been years. He had lost the knack of speaking the truth, even to one who had a right to hear it.

After all. His stock in trade for his entire adult life had been lies.

“You are distracted,” Imre observed carefully. “Agitated.”

Val shrugged. “I was worried about you.”

“I am fine,” Imre said firmly. “I had many tests in the hospital. Bruises, contusions. Nothing serious. You overreacted, Vajda.”

Val just looked at him. After days of bullying doctors for details of Imre’s cracked ribs and internal bleeding, he was in no mood to be cajoled with bullshit. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

“Yes. It is. You should not come back here at all,” Imre scolded. “This city is dangerous for you. I am dangerous for you. You must turn your back on the past.”

“Turn my back on you?” Val demanded. “After what happened?”

The old man gazed from his chair, his face unreadable. The ugly bruises were obscured by deep shadow. “If you must,” he said quietly.

Anger wrenched him like a cramp. The old bastard cared so little, then. He was promptly shocked at himself. Getting his feelings hurt like a spoiled little child. So much for his cool detachment.

The phone rang. Imre stared at it, puzzled. Two rings, three, four.

“Who would call me at this hour?” he murmured. He reached for the phone. “Yes?” He listened. His sharp eyes glinted in the dimness as he looked at Val. “I’m sorry. There is no Valery Janos here. You must have misdialed.”

Val shifted into high alert as Imre listened to whatever the man was saying. “Perhaps you were mistaken in the person you saw entering the building,” Imre countered stubbornly. “He is not here.”

There was no point in this charade. Val reached for the phone and pried it out of the old man’s gnarled fingers. “Who is this?”