Assignment - Budapest

Durell did not get into it until three hours after it began. Matt Breagan was called first, out of the Trenton office, at six o’clock on that January morning. A fine skin of ice glittered on the Limekiln Road where he drove to meet McEneny. By then, everything was coming loose between Jersey and Washington. Breagan did what he could, but it wasn’t enough, and even though the matter lay within the jurisdiction of the FBI, he called in Durell. But that was three hours later.

McEneny’s sedan was parked near the junction of Limekiln and a nameless farm lane that curved over the flat Jersey fields. Two state patrol cars were also parked here, but Breagan went to join McEneny first. To the south, a long line of armed men in hats, coats and boots moved in a slow, plodding search toward a growth of scrub pine and pin oak woods. Dawn was two hours past, and the winter sky was the color of slate, heavy and oppressive, streaked an ochrous yellow in the east. The wind was close to forty an hour, Breagan estimated. And, he thought, if the murdering bastards are still out in this weather, they’ll freeze to death. And that would save a lot of people a bad headache.

But he had small hope that that would happen.

Breagan had had time only for coffee, and his bones felt cold and brittle, and his flesh shivered under his blue overcoat. He was nearly fifty, head of the field office in Trenton, a widower with a son at Princeton, not far away. He was getting old for this sort of thing, he kept thinking, and he wondered with a silent fury how it could have happened at all, how the man could have been ferried from Vienna to the reception center at Kilmer with all the other Hungarian refugees, and then make his break from there.

The long line of armed men moved like ants across the flat, snowy fields and were gradually eaten up by the broken outline of the pine woods. One of the state police cars at the road intersection started up and drove away toward New Brunswick. A trooper from the other car stood out in the wind, a stubby automatic rifle in his gauntleted hand. The man’s face looked blue with cold under his fur helmet. Breagan conjured up in his mind a quick, competent map of the area and spotted himself at this road junction. A radius of over five miles from where Bela Korvuth was last seen. One hell of an area to cover. It wasn’t really possible. They could slip through, or hide out somewhere, in a barn, a shed, a gully or culvert; they could double back toward New Brunswick and hop a bus, a train, or lift a car and take off toward New York or Philadelphia. There weren’t enough men to close the perimeter of this circle tight enough. There were never enough men. Still, you had to try to slam the cork into the bottle somehow; that was your job.

McEneny nodded as Breagan got into the car with him. He was talking quietly on the radio phone to somebody on the opposite side of the perimeter. How many houses, how many people, how many roads, lanes, paths, in and out of this frozen area? The weather might help. It was really their only chance to nip this thing before it got away from them. And the newspapers—dear Christopher, Breagan thought, what a field day the newsmen will have!

There had been enough rumors about enemy agents slipping into Kilmer along with the flood of thousands upon thousands of innocent refugees from Hungary. None of them had checked out to anything. The filtering and screening was as tight as man could make it. Yet it had happened this morning, and with no one less than Bela Korvuth. It was like learning that someone had let loose a plague.

McEneny cradled his radio phone and looked at him. “You look beat, Matt. Are you all right?”

“I’m disgusted,” Breagan said.

"I’ve been talking to Colonel Morsham at the camp.” McEneny was a good-looking, well-fed young man, with bland blue eyes and a mild manner and a mind as quick and devious as any ambulance-chasing lawyer. He was also the crack shot of the Trenton office. “Morsham’s pants are getting wet/’ McEneny said. “He’s asking us for God’s sake to stop Bela Korvuth now. Right now.”

“How did he get in there in the first place?”

“He came through with the last batch of refugees from Vienna. Morsham doesn’t know how he slipped through the screening.”

“He’s got to know,” Breagan said angrily. His fury still goaded him. “Korvuth is like a time bomb, loose in this country. If he was mugged and printed and checked out with all the others, then somebody covered for him.”

“Looks that way. A rat in the woodpile. One of our own people, I’d say.” McEneny looked angry, too, for a moment. “Korvuth couldn’t have made it otherwise. Of course, he isn’t alone, as I told you on the phone, Matt. He went over the fence at the reception center with another man and the woman who came over as his wife. We’ve got them all tagged now—closing the barn door after the old mare is stolen. The other man is named Zoltan Ske. Mean anything to you?” “He was a colonel in the Hungarian AVO.”

“Check. The woman posing as Korvuth’s wife is Ilona Nebro. The same name Korvuth used. All three took off when Morsham nailed down the faked check reports from Vienna. I guess they were tipped it was coming, or expecting it, anyway. They moved fast when they saw Morsham and his M.P.’s enter the barracks. Morsham’s mistake. He let them see him first. God knows how they did it, but they got away.” McEneny chuckled.

“It’s not funny, Harry.”

“They took Morsham’s staff car, that’s what. Ditched it five miles from here, at a farm owned by some people named Dunstermeir. They came into his house to warm up, he says, and took his rifle—a Remington .30-08, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and a Luger pistol.”

“Dear God,” Breagan said. “Quite an armory.”

“And then the three of them—Bela, Zoltan Ske, and the woman—tied up Mr. Dunstermeir and took off in his truck. Fifty-four Chevrolet, red stake-body. I’ve got the license number here. By then we had the check points up on the road and we know damned well they haven’t slipped through yet. They’re somewhere inside this circle, all right.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“They won’t get away, Matt.”

Breagan sighed. “They’re already away.”

Breagan and McEneny drove to meet Colonel Morsham, halfway around the search perimeter. No thought of Durell had yet occurred to Breagan; there was no reason to connect Durell with this, and no reason, particularly in view of the jealously guarded departmental jurisdictions, to call upon State or the CIA. It was after eight o’cock in the morning, and a fine spit of snow began to cover the flat fields and scrubby woods of the New Jersey midlands. There was little traffic on the roads. They passed through two check points manned by the state police, who were cooperating in every possible way. Another barrier was run by Morsham’s M.P.’s. The cold weather was hindering the search as well as helping to pin down the fugitives. The wind was sharper, and the snow slanted in almost horizontal lines across the white fields.

Colonel Morsham was in a construction shack by the Turnpike, standing near a potbellied iron stove that roared and glowed cherry-red with the fire of kindling and scrap lumber. Two Army jeeps, a command car, and a state patrol cruiser were parked outside, and McEneny’s sedan skidded a little on the thickening ice as he pulled up in front of the shack.

Morsham was a stout man in his late forties, red-faced, with prematurely white hair and a small white military mustache. He was the perfect pattern of Colonel Blimp, Breagan reflected, and from past contact with the man he knew that Morsham had been in the Army long enough to know how to pass the buck upward, but not quite long enough to be able to shrug off all sense of responsibility. The shack was crowded, with a couple of non-coms at a field radio and a state trooper near the roaring stove. Breagan nodded, wishing he could stay near the fire to stop his shivering, but he decided there were too many men here now, and he beckoned Morsham outside into the lee of the construction shack, where they could talk alone and freely. McEneny stayed inside.

“I’ve called Washington,” Morsham said. “It’s a kick in the teeth. They told me to turn everything over to you, Breagan. It’s in your lap now, and I can’t deny I’m glad to get it off my hands. Naturally, we’re going to cooperate in every possible way. You can have all the men and equipment you need. It’s chancy, but this Korvuth man and his companions may still be within the area.”

“No trace of the truck they stole from the farm?”

“Nothing. Probably they’re holed up in some barn. With this snow, of course, they’ll leave tracks if they move at all. I’ve got two platoons coming from Signal, up north. The state police are pulling in more cars every minute. I think we’ll find them, all right.”

“What else did Washington say, besides handing me the baby?” Breagan asked.

“They’re already rolling on the other side of the line, checking back in Austria to the people who screened these Hungarians we got in the last batch. The trouble started over there, of course. Not here. After all, I only get these people after they’ve been screened and double-checked.” “Nobody blames you for that,” Breagan said. “But you were damned careless letting Korvuth see your M.P.’s coming.” “We thought he was still asleep. I wasn’t with those men, mind you. Matter of fact, I was still—”

“It’s all right,” Breagan said. He didn’t want to hear any of Morsham’s alibies. The damage was already done. “There’s nothing to do now but tighten the net and see what we find.” “Who is this Bela Korvuth, anyway?” Morsham asked. His red face was even redder now, with the wind sliding around the corner of the shack to cut at them. His pale eyes watered, and his nose looked wet. Breagan kept shuddering inside his overcoat. “What’s so important about the man? Washington didn’t brief me on him at all.”

Breagan felt a coldness that went beyond the bitter morning weather. He thought about it for a moment and decided there was no harm in letting Morsham know something of what he was up against.

“Bela Korvuth is only a name to us. He was a general in the Hungarian secret police, the AVO; but he was more than that, too. We’ve got his pictures now, thanks to the screening, but we’ve heard a lot about him for the past couple of years. He’s the Soviet hatchet man par excellence. He makes Machiavelli and the Borgias look like two-bit clumsy pikers.” “I don’t understand,” Morsham said uneasily.

Breagan’s voice was sharp. “The man is an assassin. Washington thinks he’s responsible for the disappearance of half a dozen dissenters within the Communist hierarchy lately. Killing is his business. He’s clever about it, too. Never works the same way twice—and most of the deaths he’s brought about, among satellite and even Russian big brass, have been filed under all sorts of reasons, but none of them as murder.” “I think I see,” Morsham muttered. He looked away at the bleak expanse of fields behind the construction shack. “But why would Bela Korvuth slip into this country, if his job is that of an intra-party hatchet man?”

“Maybe he’s expanding his field,” Breagan said drily.

“I don’t really see—”

“He must be here to assassinate somebody/' Breagan said. He turned away, back toward the shack door, and Morsham stood looking after him with eyes suddenly bright with ugly knowledge. Breagan tossed his last words over his shoulder. “His intended victim could be anybody from the very top all the way down the line.”

Half an hour at the temporary headquarters in the shack was enough for Breagan. Nothing was happening. The perimeter around the search area had closed in here and there, with the search of scattered and isolated farms, but nothing had turned up. Korvuth, Zoltan Ske, and the woman had vanished into thin air, or burrowed into the ground. Breagan had no illusions about himself. He knew that in spite of all his own training, he was up against an opponent who could probably play rings around him.

“Let’s talk to this farmer, Dunstermeir,” he said.

McEneny drove. The farm was off beyond several snowy fields and a thick stand of second-growth soft maples, with a red dairy barn and a shining aluminum silo and a Victorian farmhouse painted a pristine, silvery white. The place looked as if someone cared for it, worked on it, and loved it. McEneny had left a man, Frank Orzanski, with Dunstermeir and his wife. Orzanski reported nothing new.

“No word from the truck?” Breagan asked.

“Nothing yet. This is Mr. Dunstermeir. And his wife.”

They were frightened. They were trying not to show it, but the fear was there, flickering behind the couple’s pale blue eyes. They looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife, regular Grant Wood characters, Breagan thought, with implacable faces stamped with years of close association with the soil, with the struggle for crops and battles against weather and insects and market prices. The house shone cleanly inside just as the farm buildings and equipment were cared for outside. The rooms were all furnished with the tasseled and rococo elegance of another age and time. A bowed-glass cabinet in the living room gave Breagan a glimpse of a fine collection of Meissen china, and somehow he was not surprised by this.

Breagan spoke gently against the fear here. “It’s all right, now. Just tell us what happened.”

“I have already told this man,” Dunstermeir said.

“Tell it again.”