Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(39)

Imre tried not to look at it. Not wearing his spectacles helped.

The pain was grinding, unrelenting. He’d had his share of aches and pains even before the doctor’s revelation, and there were the two beatings, but the worst now were his bones, degenerating inside him.

He desperately missed the morphine tablets the doctors had given him. He missed even more the other techniques he used for pain control. Bach was his favorite. The suites for violoncello, or the partitas for violin. Music could make the mind take flight from a failing body. Also poetry, philosophy. Even just the pigeons cooing outside his apartment window, the clouds turned pink by sunset. A cup of tea and a game of chess with his old neighbor down the hall. Humble pleasures. They seemed so precious now.

He tried to call to memory his favorite psalms for comfort. He had tried to pray. He had even called on Ilona for help, and her sweet memory was always a blessing. But he was no saint, no superman.

He was terrified out of his wits.

It had been hard enough, to face up to his own impending death even before the abduction. Pancreatic cancer, they had told him. Advanced stage. They had offered him the usual treatments, but he read the look in the eyes of the doctors, he listened to what they said about infiltration, lymph nodes, metastases to liver and bone. He understood the futility of fighting it. Three months if he did nothing. That was almost a month ago now. And he had not told Vajda.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of death. He was almost eighty. Thirty years of his adult life he had lived without his darling Ilona and little Tina. He was ready—he had faith—he was almost certain that he would find Ilona and Tina on the other side of the veil, but death was still a great unknown. It was hard to let go. But it tormented him that his poor Vajda was being ground up in this monster’s infernal machine for Imre’s sake when Imre was practically a dead man already.

Not that the cancer would matter to Vajda. Seeing his foster father tortured would hurt the boy terribly. Vajda was so brittle, so vulnerable and alone. He had established no other ties, from what Imre could see, tenderhearted though he was beneath his defenses. Imre had always sensed the depth of the boy’s love for him. His need, too. Though his proud Vajda would surely rather die than admit it.

Vajda was the son he had never had. And what a son. Such intelligence, such potential, abandoned in a sewer. Pearls before swine.

He had failed his foster son. He had not succeeded in freeing him from this pigsty. Imre had wanted so badly to see Vajda bloom and grow, to see him take his rightful place in the world. He was wasted as a mercenary soldier, just as he had been wasted as a mafiya thug’s minion. That cruel, stupid waste angered him. Ate at him, for years.

Now, at last, he understood why Vajda had always insisted that he had no choice but to continue working for Novak. How ignorant, how arrogant Imre had been to scold the boy, call him foolish, defeatist. He realized now that Vajda’s caution was just a calculated bid for survival. He’d simply been displaying the pragmatic realism that had kept him alive against all odds. He owed the boy an apology.

More than an apology. He owed Vajda everything. But this was a price that the boy could not afford to pay. This would cost him his soul.

He should have told the boy. He’d been so afraid that Vajda would dig in his heels, insist on staying near if he knew Imre was ill. Budapest was a dangerous place for him, full of bitterness and painful memories. He’d thought it best that the boy stay away from his past. But the past had overtaken them with a speed no one could have foreseen.

Only Imre’s death would liberate Vajda. But how? The room was empty but for the cot, the blanket, the metal toilet sticking out of the wall. They gave him food twice a day on a plastic plate, a plastic tray, with a single flimsy plastic spoon to eat it with. There was no metal in the room to file to sharpness, no glass to break.

He shrank from the idea of taking his own life, but surely it would not be a sin if it was done for love, out of desperation. At the very least, it was less of a sin than the one that Vajda risked for his sake.

If he could only find a way.



Tam still shook with rage when the camo’d doors ground open out of the mountainside to let her into the underground garage. She’d hoped the drive would calm her down, but she was nowhere near calm. She was utterly freaked out. So angry she wanted to vomit.

Perhaps the lure of overtime pay and some abject begging would persuade Rosalia to stay for another couple of hours so Tam could throw herself onto the computer and start thrashing out a plan.

That hope vanished when she heard Rachel’s wails. They had that nails-driving-straight-into-the-brain quality that always meant a very bad night. Shit. Why now? Tonight, of all nights. She was meat.

Tam had barely put down her purse before Rosalia thrust the shrieking toddler into Tam’s arms and lunged for the closet to retrieve her coat and purse.

“Hey, Rosalia, hold on,” she protested, pitching her voice to slice through Rachel’s howls. “I was going to ask you if you could stay a little bit longer tonight, just until I have a chance to—”

“No! I have to go right now! My boys just got arrested over in Olympia! I just got the phone call, a half an hour ago, and I was going to call you, but the baby was crying and I didn’t have a chance. I have to go to my boys right now!”

Tam was startled out of her own problems, finally noticing the ashen cast of Rosalia’s face, the stress sweat on her forehead, her rolling, reddened eyes. “But—but how…” Her voice trailed off.