The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  “So what we’re going to do now is proceed very carefully and only when we’re absolutely sure of what we’re doing. I will now entertain suggestions as to how we can do this.” He paused, and then went on: “You first, Andrews.”

  There was no immediate reply.

  “Well?” the President pursued, not very pleasantly.

  “Mr. President,” Mason Andrews said. “In addition to the obvious, I think we have—”

  “What’s the obvious?” the President interrupted.

  “Well, we have to decide whether we are going to raise the threat level to orange, or perhaps red. I tend to think the latter.”

  “Not ‘we have to decide,’” the President said. “I have to decide. Somebody tell me why raising the threat level from yellow wouldn’t cause more problems than it would solve.”

  He looked around the Oval Office. “Comments? Anyone?”

  There were none.

  “What else is obvious?” the President demanded.

  “Well, sir, we have to find out who sent this stuff to the colonel,” Andrews said.

  “First of all, it wasn’t sent to Colonel Hamilton,” the President said. “It was sent to us. The government. Me, as President. Not to Colonel Hamilton. It was sent through him because these bastards somehow knew he was the only man around who would know what it was. And they knew he would tell me. Secondly, at this moment—and I realize this could change in the blink of an eye—there is no immediate threat. If these people wanted to start killing Americans, they would have already done so.”

  “Mr. President,” Ambassador Montvale offered, “their intention might be to cause panic.”

  Clendennen nodded.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. And I’m not going to give them that. That’s why the threat level stays at yellow.”

  The President was then silent, visibly in thought, for a long moment. Then he cocked his head to one side. A smile crossed his lips, as if to signify he was pleased with himself.

  He said, “Fully aware that this is politically incorrect, I have just profiled the bastards who sent Colonel Hamilton the Congo-X. I have decided that the Congo-X was sent to the colonel by a foreign power, or at the direction of a foreign power or powers. And not, for example, by the Rotary Club of Enterprise, Alabama, or any sister or brother organization to which the Rotarians may be connected, however remotely.”

  Ambassador Montvale’s eyes widened, and for a moment he seemed to be on the edge of saying something. In the end, he remained silent.

  “The ramifications of this decision,” the President went on, “are that finding out who these bastards are—and, it is to be hoped, what the hell this is all about—falls into what I think of as the CIA’s area of responsibility, rather than that of the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.”

  He looked at DCI Powell.

  “Those are your marching orders, Jack. Get onto it. I will have the attorney general direct the FBI to assist you in any area in which you need help.”

  “Mr. President, with all respect,” Mason Andrews said, “this crime, this threat to American security, took place on American soil! This situation is clearly within the purview of Homeland Sec—”

  “What situation, Andrews?” the President interrupted him. “What threat to American security? No one has been hurt. What’s happened is that a securely wrapped package of what the colonel has determined to be what he calls Congo-X was sent to Colonel Hamilton in a container clearly marked as a biological hazard.

  “That’s all. There has been no damage to anyone. Not even a threat of causing damage. If we had these people in handcuffs, there’s nothing we could do to them because they haven’t broken any laws that I can think of.

  “What we are not, repeat not, going to do is go off half-cocked. For example, we are not going to resurrect my predecessor’s private James Bond—what’s his name? Costello?—and his band of assassins and give them carte blanche to roam the world to kill people. Or anything like that.

  “What we are going to do is have Montvale—he is the director of National Intelligence—very quietly try to find out who the hell these bastards are and what they want. I think Colonel Hamilton is right about that. They want something. That means they will probably—almost certainly—contact Colonel Hamilton again.

  “What that means, since we can’t afford to have anything happen to him, is that Homeland Security is going to wrap the colonel in a Secret Service security blanket at least as thick as the one around me. That’s your role in this, Andrews. That’s your only role.

  “And then we’re going to wait for their next move. No action of any kind will be taken without my express approval.”

  The President met the eyes of everyone in the Oval Office, and then quietly asked, “Is there anyone who doesn’t understand what I have just said?”

  There were no replies.

  “That will be all, thank you,” the President said.

  [ONE]

  The Hotel Gellért

  Szent Gellért tér 1

  Budapest, Hungary

  2315 4 February 2007

  The silver, two-month-old, top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz S550 drove regally across the Szabadság híd, and on the other side of the Danube River turned left toward the Hotel Gellért, which was at the foot of the Gellért Hill.

  Budapest, which began as two villages, Buda and Pest, on opposite sides of the Danube River, had a long and bloody history. Gellért Hill, for example, got its name from Saint Gerard Gellert, an Italian bishop from Venice whom the pagans ceremoniously murdered there in 1046 A.D. for trying to bring the natives to Jesus.

  Buda and Pest were both destroyed by the Mongols, who invaded the area in 1241. The villages were rebuilt, only to suffer rape and ethnic cleansing when the Ottoman Turks came, conquering Pest in 1526 and Buda fifteen years later.

  By the time the Szabadság híd was built in 1894-96, the villages had been combined into Budapest, and Hungary had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Emperor Franz Josef personally inserted the last rivet—a silver rivet—into the new bridge and then with imperial immodesty named the structure after himself.

  The bridge itself was dropped—like all the other bridges across the Danube—into the river when the Russians and the Germans fought over Hungary during the Second World War. It was the first bridge rebuilt after the war by the Soviet-controlled government and named the Liberty Bridge. When the Russians were finally evicted, it became the Freedom Bridge.

  The silver Mercedes-Benz turned off the road running alongside the Danube and onto the access road to the Hotel Gellért, then stopped.

  Gustav, a barrel-chested man in his fifties who appeared to be a chauffeur but served as a bodyguard and more, got quickly out from behind the wheel and opened the rear passenger door.

  A tall man, who looked to be in his midsixties, got out. He adjusted a broad-brimmed jet-black hat—one side of the brim down, the other rakishly up—and then turned back to the car, bending over, leaning into the car. When he came out, he had two Bouvier des Flandres dogs.

  The larger, a bitch, was several times the size of a very large boxer. The other was her son, a puppy, on a leash. The puppy was about the size of a small boxer.

  As the man had taken them from the car, another burly man in his sixties had gotten out the other side of the car, carrying an ermine-collared black leather overcoat.

  The burly man’s name was Sándor Tor. In his youth, Tor had done a hitch—rising to sergeant—in the French Foreign Legion. On his return to Budapest, he had become a policeman. He had been recruited into the ÁVH, the Államvédelmi Hatóság, Hungary’s hated secret police, and again had risen to sergeant.

  When the Russians had been driven from Budapest, and known members of the Államvédelmi Hatóság were being spat on and hung, Mussolini-style, en masse from any convenient streetlight, Tor had found sanctuary in the American embassy.

  And only then had the CIA revealed to the new leaders of Hungary the id
entity of the man who had not only saved the lives of so many anti-Communists and resistance leaders—by warning them, via the CIA, that the ÁVH was onto them—but also had been one of the rare—and certainly the most reliable—sources of information about the inner workings of the ÁVH, which he’d gained at great risk to his life from his trusted position within the secret police.

  Thus, the best that Sándor Tor could have hoped for had he been exposed was a quick death from ÁVH torture rather than a slow one.

  Tor was decorated by the Hungarian government and appointed as inspector of police.

  But that, despite having triumphed over the forces of evil, didn’t turn out to be a movie scenario in which he lived happily ever after.

  There were several facets of this. For one, his peers in the police, reasoning that if he had been keeping a record of the unsavory activities of the ÁVH, it was entirely likely that he would keep a record of theirs, both feared and shunned him.

  And Tor didn’t like being a cop without an agenda. He had done what he had done not only because he hated the Communists generally, but specifically because his mother and father and two brothers had been slowly strangled to death in the basement of the ÁVH headquarters at Andrássy út 60.

  Getting back at the Communists was one thing; spending long hours trying to arrest burglars—for that matter, even murderers—was something else.

  And his wife, Margo, had cancer. They had had no children.

  He applied for early retirement and it was quickly granted.

  Sitting around the apartment with nothing to do but watch cancer work its cruelty on Margo was difficult.

  Then Tor heard of the return to Budapest of the German firm Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. The company’s intention was to reclaim the properties—farms, a brewery, several vineyards, a newspaper business, and other assets—seized from them by the Communists.

  He also heard they were looking for someone to head their security.

  After he filled out an application form at Gossinger G.m.b.H’s newly reopened downtown offices, he heard nothing for three weeks, and had decided that they weren’t interested in his services.

  Then there was a telephone call saying that if he was still interested, a car would pick him up in an hour, and take him for an interview. He almost didn’t go; Margo had insisted and he went.

  The car—a new, top-of-the-line Mercedes with Vienna plates—took him to the legendary Hotel Gellért, at Szent Gellért tér 1, overlooking the Danube River from the Gellért Hill.

  Tor thought he would be interviewed, probably in the restaurant or the bar, by a personnel officer of the Gossinger organization. Instead, he was led to the elevator which carried him to a top floor apartment, overlooking the Danube, which apparently occupied that entire corner of the building.

  An interior door opened and an enormous dog came out, walked to him, sniffed him, then sat down. Normally, Tor was not afraid of dogs. But this one frightened him. He thought it had to weigh well over fifty kilos. Even when the dog offered his paw, he thought carefully before squatting to take it.

  “You come well recommended,” said a voice in Hungarian with a Budapester accent. “Max usually shows his teeth to people he doesn’t like. Often they wet their pants.”

  Tor had looked up to see a tall silver-haired man who seemed to be in his sixties standing in the doorway.

  “My name is Eric Kocian,” the man said. “Come in. We’ll talk and have a drink.”

  He opened the door wide and waved Tor inside a spacious and well-furnished apartment.

  Kocian walked to a sideboard and turned, holding a bottle in his hand.

  “Wild Turkey Rare Breed all right with you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Tor confessed.

  “One of the very few things the Americans do superbly is make bourbon whisky. This is one of the better bourbon whiskys. My godson gave me a case for my seventy-seventh birthday.”

  Seventy-seventh birthday? Tor had thought. My God, he’s that old?

  “Sir, I don’t know. I’m supposed to be interviewed for a job.”

  “And so you are. Don’t you drink?”

  “Yes, sir. I drink.”

  “Good. My experience has been you can’t trust people who don’t.”

  Kocian poured him a large, squarish glass half-full of the bourbon whisky.

  “This is what they call ‘sipping whisky.’ But if you want water and ice ...”

  Kocian pointed to the sideboard.

  “This is fine, thank you,” Tor said.

  “May I ask about your wife? How is she?”

  How does he know about my Margo?

  “Not very well, I’m afraid.”

  Kocian waved him into a leather-upholstered armchair and seated himself in an identical chair facing it.

  “If you decide to take this position,” Kocian announced, “she will be covered under our medical care program. Most German physicians are insufferably arrogant, and tend to regard their patients as laboratory specimens, but they seem to know what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll have answers you haven’t been able to find here.”

  “Am I being offered the position?” Tor asked, on the cusp of incredulity.

  “I have one or two other quick questions first,” Kocian said.

  “Quick questions? But you don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know just about everything about you that interests me,” Kocian said. “Are you still on the CIA’s payroll?”

  “I was never on their payroll,” Tor said.

  “That’s not what I have been led to understand.”

  “I never took a cent. If I had been exposed, they promised to try to get Margo out of Hungary and give her some sort of pension, but ...”

  “You thought before the ÁVH arrested you, they would have arrested her for her value in your interrogation, so you didn’t give it much thought?”

  Tor nodded.

  “I would have to have your word that you would no longer cooperate with the CIA in any way.”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone in the CIA for over a year.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “I can promise you that,” Tor said. “No cooperation with the CIA.”

  “Welcome to the executive ranks of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.”

  “Just like that?” Tor asked, and then blurted, “We haven’t even talked about what I’m going to do. Or how much—”

  “What you are going to do is relieve me of keeping Hungarian fingers out of my cash box, prying eyes out of any part of our business, provide such other security as I deem necessary, and keep Otto Görner off my back. So far as compensation is concerned, I suggest that twice what you were being paid as an inspector would be a reasonable starting salary. There are of course some ‘perks,’ as my godson would say. Including an expense account and a car.”

  Tor knew that Otto Görner was the managing director of the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire.

  But who is this godson?

  “You’ve mentioned your godson twice. Where does he fit in here?”

  “His name is Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. You’re a policeman. Is that enough of a clue for you?”

  Tor chuckled.

  “You know who Otto Görner is?”

  Tor nodded.

  “Otto has the odd notion that I have to be protected from myself and others, in particular the Russians. He has managed to convince my godson of this nonsense. It will be your job to convince both of them that you are doing so while at the same time making sure that whomever you charge with protecting me from the Russians and myself are invisible to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me top that off,” Kocian said.

  Tor looked at his glass and was surprised to see that it was nearly empty. He didn’t remember taking one sip.

  Sándor Tor had been director of security for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. (
Hungary), for six months when Margo died.

  The doctors in Germany, with great regret, had been unable to do anything for her. When it was apparent the end was near, Margo asked to be returned from Berlin to Budapest so that she could die in her own bed.

  Eric Kocian and a medical team from Telki Private Hospital—Budapest’s best—were waiting with an ambulance at the Keleti Pályaudvar railway station. Staff from the kitchen of the Hotel Gellért was waiting at the Tor apartment.

  Margo died at four in the morning the next day. At the time, her husband was asleep in a chair at one side of her bed and Eric Kocian was asleep in another chair on the other side of the bed.

  Margo was buried the next day, beside Sándor’s mother and father in the Farkasréti Cemetery in Buda (the western part of Budapest). Tor had found—not without great effort—where their Communist murderers had disposed of their bodies, and had them exhumed and reinterred in the Farkasréti Cemetery. He never learned what had happened to the bodies of his murdered brothers.

  When Margo’s crypt had been cemented closed, Eric Kocian had said, “You don’t want to go back to your apartment. Come with me and we’ll have a drink.”

  They had gone to the Hotel Gellért and stayed drunk together for four days.

  Sometime during that period, Sándor had realized that while he might now be alone in the world except for his employer/friend Eric Kocian, Eric Kocian was similarly alone in the world, except for his godson, whom he apparently rarely saw, and his friend/employee Sándor Tor.

  Early in the morning of their fifth day together, Sándor Tor led Eric Kocian to the thermal baths—built by the Romans—below the hotel where they soaked, had a massage, and soaked again. And then they had a haircut and shave.

  At noon, they were at work.

  Sándor returned only once to the apartment he had shared with Margo. He selected the furniture he wanted to keep, and had it moved to the Gellért, where Kocian had arranged an apartment for him on the floor below his own.