Page 81 of Shadowfox

A quick turn, a half glance.

Yes—there, across the street. One of them had chosen me. Gray coat. Hat too low.

I ducked into an alley beside a tailor’s shop. The scent of motor oil hit me hard as I passed the back of an auto yard.

Left again.

Right.

I crossed a street without waiting for the light and disappeared into a small bakery that somehow remained open later than most of the surrounding shops. The doorbell rang with a jangle. I paused, my head down, careful not to look the woman behind the counter in the eye, then murmured my thanks in garbled Hungarian and waved a hand as though nothing struck my fancy, and slipped out the back as the owner watched in stunned confusion.

Our rendezvous spot was silent when I arrived. The moon was a sliver, and clouds obscured any stars who might deign to shed light. Even nearby lamps failed to shatter the Hungarian night. I shifted from one foot to the other, begging my eyes to adjust more quickly—and for the others to arrive unharmed.

My mind couldn’t take the utter silence, spinning faster than the gears on Farkas’s machine.

What the hell had happened?

What if we were too late?

What if he cracked?

What if the wrong whisper had reached the wrong ear and the Soviets scooped him up before he ever had a chance to escape?

I kept replaying it—his voice at the meeting, low and strained, the way he said, “my daughter,” like she was the last sacred thing left in a burned-down church. He wouldn’t abandon her. Of that, I was certain. Farkas would sooner hand himself over to the wolves than risk them taking her.

So if he hadn’t come, it wasn’t cold feet.

It was something worse.

Or maybe it was us.

Maybe we’d been too visible, too bold, acquired too many glances in too short a time.

Maybe someone at the station had put it all together.

Maybe the watchers weren’t just watching.

Maybe Farkas saw them and ran.

God, what if he was still running?

What if he was out there right now, ducking between alleys with a girl too small for her age and too smart for her safety, clutching her coat and whispering, “Quiet now, little one, almost there”?

Or worse.

What if they came for him, took him from his apartment?

Was Eszter sitting on the floor alone right now, knees pulled to her chest, waiting for a rattle of the door handle that would never come?

I didn’t want to believe that.

I couldn’t believe that.

He was alive. He had to be.

Surely, he’d hesitated for good reason. He would come tomorrow, or the next night, with trembling hands and a story about how the world almost ended but didn’t.

But espionage never ran on hope. It ran on timing.

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