The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“I wish God had put me in that hospital bed instead of Úr Kocian,” Tor said, emotionally.

I think I like you, Sándor Tor, Castillo thought.

In 2002, Otto Görner had reluctantly concluded Eric Kocian, in his eighties, needed protection—protection from himself.

The old man was fond of American whiskey—Jack Daniel’s Black Label in particular—and driving fast Mercedes-Benz automobiles. A combination of the former and his age-reduced reflexes and night vision had seen him in half a dozen accidents, the last two of them spectacular. The final one had put him in hospital and caused the government to cancel his driver’s license.

Otto Görner had come to Budapest and sought out Sándor Tor right after he’d been to Kocian’s hospital room.

“We’re going to have to do something or he’s going to kill himself,” Görner had announced. “It won’t take him long to get his driving license back—he knows where all the politicians keep their mistresses. We have to get this fixed before that happens.”

“You mean get him a chauffeur?”

Görner nodded.

“Good luck, Úr Görner,” Tor had said. “I’m glad I’m not the one who’s going to have to tell him that.”

Görner had smiled and, obviously thinking about what he was going to say, didn’t reply for a moment.

Then he said, “Let me tell you what he said in the hospital just now. Not for the first time, he was way ahead of me.”

Tor waited for Görner to go on.

“‘Before you

say anything, Otto,’ he said, the moment I walked in the door, ‘let me tell you how I’m going to deal with this.’”

“I can’t wait to hear this,” Tor said.

“‘Sándor Tor will now drive me around,’” Görner quoted.

“No,” Tor said, quickly and firmly, not embracing the idea at all.

“I told him you were the director of security, not a chauffeur,” Görner said.

“And?”

“‘Did you think I don’t know that?’” Görner quoted. “‘As director of security, he carries a gun. I’m getting too old to do that anymore, too. Further-more, Sándor can be trusted to keep his mouth shut about where I go and who I talk to. I don’t want some taxi driver privy to that or listening to my conversations. And, finally, Sándor’s a widower. Driving me around may interfere with his sex life, but at least he won’t go home and regale his wife with tales of what Kocian did today and with whom.’”

“No, Úr Görner,” Tor repeated, adamantly.

“I told him you would say that,” Görner said. “To which he replied, ‘I’ll handle Tor.’”

“No. Sorry, but absolutely not.”

“Do you know, Sándor, how far back Eric Kocian goes with Gossinger, G.m.b.H.?”

“Not exactly. A long time, I know that.”

“He was with Oberstleutnant Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger at Stalingrad,” Görner said. “They met on the ice-encrusted basement floor of a building being used as a hospital. Both were very seriously wounded.”

“I’ve heard that the Herr Oberst had been at Stalingrad…”

“Eric was an eighteen-year-old Gefreite,” Görner went on. “He and the colonel were flown out on one of the very last flights. The colonel was released from hospital first and placed on convalescent leave. He went to visit a friend in the Army hospital in Giessen and ran into Kocian there. Eric had apparently done something for the colonel in Stalingrad—I have no idea what, but the colonel was grateful—so the colonel arranged for him to be assigned to the POW camp he was going to command. The alternative for Kocian was being sent back to the Eastern Front.

“They ended the war in the POW camp and became prisoners themselves. Kocian was released first. He went home to Vienna and learned that the American bombs that had reduced St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Opera to rubble had done the same to his family’s apartment. All of his family, and their friends, were dead.”

“Jesus!” Tor exclaimed, softly.