The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter LIV
Angel was less comfortable than Louis in foreign climes. Before the two men formed their personal and professional partnership, Angel had regarded even certain parts of New Jersey as dangerously exotic, and anywhere without sidewalks as essentially barbarous. Now here he was, traversing the continent of Europe, arranging an approximation of a kidnapping in one country and aiding the planning of multiple assassinations in others, all without the benefit of any communication skills beyond American English, a little Spanish, and a few words of Greek learned from a restaurant owner on West Seventy-fourth Street, most of them grievously insulting.
While he still remained uneasy far from home, and had yet to encounter anywhere preferable to the Upper West Side, he had to admit that Vienna looked exactly the way one might have expected Old Europe to look, and therefore was not a disappointment. Also, as with the Netherlands, everyone appeared to speak better English than he, which didn’t seem fair. Frankly, Angel blamed the American education system, even allowing for his own limited participation in it.
Hendricksen was not in his room when Angel arrived at the hotel, and neither was he answering his phone. Angel was not unduly worried; although he trusted Hendricksen, he was not yet familiar with the man’s routines, and was aware that tracking Frend had already necessitated one unanticipated side trip to Belgrade. He had to trust that, wherever he was, Hendricksen knew what he was doing.
Angel freshened up before eating dinner alone at Ilona Stüberl on Bräunerstrasse, which had been recommended to him by the hotel concierge. It was a small Hungarian restaurant with a white, wood-beamed ceiling, and china plates on the walls, resembling less a big city establishment than a village inn. The waitress fussed over him, delivering a helping of goulash and pasta that could have fed a small family, and chided him gently for not finishing it. He wanted to tell her that it was the largest portion of food he’d tackled since his diagnosis, but decided this was more information than she required. He wondered how Louis was faring, but did not contact him. Where Louis was concerned, no news tended to be good news. If there was an issue, Angel would find out about it in due course.
The waitress brought coffee, which he drank while reading Graham Greene’s novelization of The Third Man, because he’d seen it in the window of a bookstore near the hotel and decided that if he was going to read one book set in Vienna, The Third Man might as well be it. Since it was really a novella, it was also short. As Angel grew older, long books became less appealing to him. He was increasingly conscious of his own mortality, an inevitable consequence of surviving cancer, and was therefore aware that, sooner rather than later, he would start a book he would not live to finish. There was, he had decided, little point in trying to get to grips with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at this late stage of his life, but if he were suddenly to be taken ill with The Third Man in his hand, he could probably manage to finish it in the ambulance.
His cell phone beeped. He checked the message, expecting to see something from Hendricksen, but the text had come from Louis. It read simply: LB located and marked.
So, Luca Bilbija had not only been found but was also in Louis’s sights. All things going well, Bilbija would soon be dead. The effect on the Vuksans, Angel knew, would be similar to throwing a flaming torch into an ants’ nest. The Vuksans would now be aware beyond any doubt that they and their people were being targeted. Their choice would be to remain wherever they were hiding or seek new ground. Angel figured they’d stay where they were; to break cover would mean revealing themselves.
Louis was convinced that the Vuksans were, if not in Vienna, then in the vicinity of the city, because they would want to be close to Frend. If the Vuksans trusted the lawyer as much as Harris and his fellow spooks seemed to believe, then he had access to funds, documents, even passports. Now that the Vuksans were the subject of an Interpol Red Notice – a communication from Ross had informed Louis of this latest development – it meant that receiving electronic transfers of large sums of cash would become difficult for them, especially since their known accounts were being monitored. Whatever they required would have to be sourced and delivered the old-fashioned way, which meant that, at some point, Frend would have to meet the Vuksans face-to-face, or work through someone who was only one step removed from them. Hendricksen might already have made progress on that front.
Angel threw back the last of his coffee and paid the check in cash. He took a detour past the tiny Loos American Bar on the Kärntner Passage but the music was too loud for him and the patrons had spilled out onto the street. Instead he returned to the hotel and tried Hendricksen’s room and cell phone. Once again, he received no reply.
Only then did he begin to worry.