The Hunted

"No, I don't. But in the event we don't catch him tonight, tomorrow will be your turn."

She bounced off the table and with one hand began nimbly rebuttoning her jacket. "Relax, Sergei. Yeltsin's in China trying to mend a thousand years of bad relations. He'll be kissing Chinese ass for the next three days, bouncing around landmarks and ceremonies, drinking himself into a stupor at every opportunity. He'll be impossible to reach." She headed toward the door. "Everything on my end is taken care of." Malcolm Street Associates was an opulent firm with an operations room fashioned to impress. Only the rare visitor was ever allowed inside, but to a man, they walked out whistling and shaking their head. Large flashing screens overloaded the walls, lights blinked, faxes whirred, computers hummed, phones always jangling with agents reporting in. Day or night, it was a beehive of dizzying activity.

The Vault, as it was called by its stressed-out inhabitants, occupied the entire top floor of the London headquarters, a five-story, stone-faced building located two blocks off Trafalgar Square. According to the brass plaque beside the front entry it had been established in 1830.

The tradition of maintaining eternally expanding profits fell on Lord Eldridge Pettlebone, an intimidating former police superintendent, number eight in the short line of managing partners, and at that moment a man who was annoyed almost to the point of bother. Twenty minutes before, a courier had fought his way past the doorman of his club and dragged him here.

A dead agent, and a missing client. One or the other, maybe. A twofer was unheard of, and the entire firm was reeling with distress. He paced around the long table where the firm's best and brightest were gathered, trying to catch up on a fiasco that had a long head start and took off at a gallop. He stifled a yawn, squared his shoulders, and tried to appear steady for the troops.

He had handled serious crises before, plenty of them. Nearly all came late at night. Each arrived with its own unique twists and turns. The first reports were always wrong, the second and third reports only more so.

"Who exactly confirmed Bernie Lutcher's death?" he asked, staring directly at one of the bloodshot-eyed assistants crowded around the table. This particular man, as a sad result of his previous time at a backwater desk in MI6, had the rare misfortune to be nearly fluent in Hungarian. That peculiar distinction earned him a turn on the hotseat, but he had worked himself into a lather and felt eager and ready for whatever Number Eight threw at him.

The young man straightened his tie, gathered his wits, and sat up. "The coroner of the Budapest police. The body was called in by airport security at one-fifteen, Budapest time. The police arrived a few minutes later. Bernie's corpse was transported to the city morgue, then placed in cold storage until six, when the night shift came on. The preliminary workup was done by a Dr. Laszlo"-he conferred with his notes-"Massouri."

Lord Pettlebone nodded, not at anything the man had said but a gesture to speed this up.

"We requested a full and immediate autopsy, of course. They begged off until tomorrow. That's our Hungarian friends for you. Even a ghastly murder in their capital airport doesn't put a hop in their step. But the preliminary cause of death," the man continued, browsing through his notes, "was a small knife puncture in the back."

He reached over and with a brash forefinger pointed like a dagger scraped an X slightly below the left shoulder blade of the man beside him. He plowed ahead. "A slight tearing around the incision suggests a twisting of the blade. The weapon was a stiletto, twelve or perhaps fifteen inches in length, only a few centimeters in width. Not a garden-variety weapon, I should say, more a specialist's tool, and it went directly for poor Bernie's heart." He waited a beat before he revealed this next revelation. "But his pupils were widely dilated, and his face also had a purplish discoloration, the visual by-products of oxygen deprivation. But no scarring or lesions from ligatures or bruises on his neck. As you know, this could be suggestive of poisoning."

"Assume both. He was poked with a coated blade," Pettlebone concluded swiftly, before the assistant could voice that rather evident opinion himself. "Let's further assume, hypothetically, the assassin was professional."

"Sorry, sir. Did I mention the dark bruise slightly below Bernie's breastbone?"

"Right you are. A pair of assassins." He examined the other faces. Knowing nods all around. "Witnesses?"

"Yes, and here's where it gets interesting," the man said with a relieved grin: this tidbit had fallen in his lap only ten minutes before. "The Budapest police were contacted about two hours ago by a Russian lady and man claiming to be her boyfriend. She swore she observed Konevitch stab his bodyguard in the back, then flee outside and jump into a cab."