Istvan Fabry at fifty felt like an old man, though he would never admit it to Fanni, his American-born wife, or his sons, Richard and Mark, but Iraq, and later Afghanistan, had worn him to the bone.
He left the Bubble, which was the CIA’s auditorium, and drove his three-year-old Fusion over to the Scattergood-Thorne house just off the GW Parkway, but still on the CIA’s campus. It was very late, just a bit before 2 A.M., but he’d always been an extremely light sleeper. Eight hours a night meant a person would be, for all practical purposes, dead for one-third of his life. It wasn’t for Istvan.
The DCI was hosting a dozen influential congressmen plus a like number of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals from the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intel and LE agencies to discuss plans for the top-down reorganization of America’s approach to nontraditional warfare. Fabry was front man for the setup, and he wanted to be well ahead of the curve before the 0800 start.
The Bubble’s projection equipment was loaded with the proper PowerPoint and video programs, mostly of his own creation, and once the presentation was done, the VIPs would be bused over to the house for the actual conference.
Parking in front of the large colonial that sat partially concealed in the woods just off the GW Parkway, he got out of the car and stopped to listen to the nearly absolute silence. Only a light breeze in the treetops, mournful and a little lonely in a way, and a truck passing on the highway, heading into the city or perhaps to Dulles.
But it was safe here, something his wife, who’d been raised in a reasonably upscale environment as the only daughter of a corporate lawyer in Chicago, could never understand. By instinct, at times like this, alone with just his own thoughts, he would catch himself listening for other sounds. Some distant, some very close. The whine of a drone’s engine, or of a Russian Hind helicopter gunship. The clank of metal on metal as a troop of Taliban fighters or Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers approached up a mountain pass. The snick of an AK-47 slide being pulled back and released. Footfalls on loose gravel. Someone or something rising up behind him, carrying a knife or a wire garrote.
Suddenly spooked, he turned and looked down the gravel road toward the Bubble, and then did a careful scan of the woods surrounding the house that had been a private residence until the CIA had taken it over in 1987. But nothing moved. He was absolutely alone, and not in a place where harm was likely to come his way. Of any spot in the world, here was the safest place for him to be, and not a day went by that he didn’t bless his good fortune for surviving Hungary’s turbulence when he was a kid growing up in Rabahidveg, close to the Austrian border.
Two uncles had been shot to death by KGB border patrol pricks, and his father had been taken into custody for reasons they’d never been told. There he’d been tortured day and night for more than a week. Afterward he’d been a broken man, unable even to feed himself or use the toilet without help.
Then Hungary was free, in a large measure because of America’s diplomacy and the harsh realities of a Soviet system that simply could not support its own weight. Istvan had specialized in English in school, and when he was nineteen, he went to the U.S. and joined the army, where he was first made a translator—in addition to Hungarian and English, he was also fluent in Russian—and then into INSCOM, which was the army’s intelligence and security command, where he became a spy.
The transition to the CIA had been easy at first, until he’d been selected to become an NOC and had been sent first to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. Then the nightmares started, and they’d become so bad that, by the time he’d slipped home on a short leave, Fanni, who he’d known from college at Northwestern while he was in the army, almost left him.
They were sleeping together, and after his second morning back, she’d slipped out of bed to make them coffee. She brought the coffee and a plate of sweet rolls on a tray that she set on her side of the bed, then went around to him and bent down to brush a kiss onto his lips.
He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.
They were both in shock.
After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.
“You didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”
They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.
“For survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Orders—”
“Bullshit. I want the truth!”
“My life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”
“Are you a spy, then? Is that what you’ve become? A traitor, spying for the Russians or maybe the Chinese?”
“I’m not a traitor, Fanni,” Istvan said. “You have to believe me.” His heart was aching.
She jumped to her feet, the chair falling over. “I won’t live with you. Not like this.”
“I’m not a traitor.”
“Of course you’re not. I know it. But if you were a spy, you would never be able to tell me where you were, what you were doing. I’d never know when you would come back to me—if you were coming back.”
“I’ll always come back.”
“I can’t be sure. Tell me how I can be sure!”
“Because I love you,” Istvan said.
In the end it had been enough for her, and they’d both somehow survived his long absences until he had come out of the field to work as an analyst and mission planner in the Directorate of Operations and he’d been able to tell her he had indeed been a spy. But all that was past. He was home for good.
He took a portable handcart from the trunk, and when he had it unfolded, he loaded four cartons of agendas, briefing books, copies of the presentation disks, and lined legal pads and pens, and took them inside, where he laid them out in the large conference room. The fit would be tight, but there was room for everyone. The main topic for review would be the threat the U.S. faced right now from cyberterrorism.
State-sponsored cyberterrorism.
It was something Istvan had become an expert in since he’d come home. He had a knack for it and had been a fast learner—his mentor at the end was Special Projects Director Otto Rencke, the smartest, and oddest, man he’d ever known. But a good man, with an equally odd-duck wife and a lovely child.
He’d come to his office in the OHB’s fourth-floor science and technology operations center, where some of the gadgets and ideas that had been created and already evaluated as useful were placed in planning cycles for manufacture and then distribution to stations around the world. After he’d loaded his car, he’d driven over to the Bubble and then here.
Time enough to go home for some breakfast, but he would have to rush to make it back before the guests began to arrive. Anyway, after the field rations he’d eaten over the years, even the cafeteria adjacent to the New Headquarters Building wasn’t half bad.
He went outside, where he refolded the handcart and loaded it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.
Something smelled odd to him, slightly off. At that moment he heard a Bach organ piece and turned around in surprise as the figure of a man who he did not know rose up from the backseat, blood all over his face and lips.
Before Istvan could react, the Cynic yanked Istvan’s head backward, breaking his neck. Before he died, he realized that the side of his neck was literally being eaten.