Tracker (Sigma Force 7.5)

Tucker glanced to Aliza.

He saw the recognition in her eyes.

The closest gravestone bore a deeply inscribed Star of David.

Here was the lost Jewish cemetery.

They were forced to the side, toward the caretaker’s cottage. A small room in back glowed feebly with light seeping past heavy drapes.

As they neared it, a door opened and allowed that blaze to sweep over them.

A stranger stood there, a tall man with a skeletal frame and thick black-rimmed glasses. His eyes swept past Tucker and focused on Aliza.

She stumbled forward, then restrained herself. “Professor Csorba . . .”

So she knew this man.

“Jó estét, Miss Barta,” he greeted her. “I’m sorry this reunion is under such poor circumstances.”

He stepped clear of the doorway.

“Domonkos, bring our two guests inside.” The professor’s eyes finally found Tucker’s face. “I did not imagine the independent Miss Barta would hire a bodyguard. An oversight of mine, but no harm done in the end.”

The pock-faced hulk named Domonkos shoved Tucker toward the steps and through the door.

Inside, the cottage room was quaint, with a raw-hewn plank floor covered in thick but worn rugs, heavy wood beams strapped to a low ceiling, and a small hearth glowing with embers.

Tucker was forced against one wall, guarded over by Domonkos. One of the other two thugs took a post by a nearby window. The last vanished down a hall, likely to watch the street outside, ready to respond if the brief firefight drew any unwanted attention.

As he settled against the wall, Tucker smelled a familiar sourness to the air, coming from those shadowy spaces beyond this room. Somewhere back there, a body or two moldered and had begun to stink. Likely the original caretakers.

But not all of the bloodshed here was old.

Tied to a chair was an elderly man with a full head of gray hair. His face was bruised, one eye swollen, dried blood running in trails from both nostrils. When Tucker first stepped inside, that remaining eye had blazed with defiance—but no longer, not after the slim figure followed Tucker inside.

“Aliza!” he croaked out.

“Papa!” She rushed forward, collapsing on her knees at his side. Tears were already running down her face. She turned to the man who had greeted her. “How could you?”

“I’m afraid I have ninety-two million reasons why, my dear.”

“But you worked with my father for thirty years.”

“Yes, ten of those years under Communist rule, while your father spent that time in London, raising a family, enjoying the freedom of such a life.” The man’s voice rang with jealousy and pent-up fury. “You have no understanding of what life was like here, if you could call it that. I lost my Marja because they didn’t have enough antibiotics. Then my brave little Lujza, living up to her name as warrior, was shot during a protest. I will not see this treasure handed back to the Hungarian government, one little better than before, with many of the same players in power. Never!”

“So you will take it for yourself?” Aliza asked, not backing down from his vehemence.

“And I will use it for good, to help the oppressed, to heal the sick.”

“And what of my father?” she sobbed. “Will you heal him?”

“I will let him live. If he cooperates, if you do the same.”

Fat chance, Tucker thought.

The same doubt shone from her face.

Csorba held out his palm. “I have contacts enough to know, Aliza, that you have obtained what your father asked. The satellite feed from the Americans.”

“Don’t do it . . .” her father forced out, though each syllable pained him.

She glanced over to her father, then looked at Tucker.

He recognized she had no choice. They’d search her, punish her, and in the end, they’d get what they wanted.

He lowered his chin, passing on his opinion—but also hiding his throat mike. They had taken his phone, his knife, but hadn’t noticed the earpiece shoved deep in his left ear or the thin sensors of the radio microphone taped over his larynx. It was sensitive enough to pick up the slightest subvocalized whisper.

As Aliza handed over the USB flash drive, stirring up excitement in the room, Tucker covered his mouth and whispered quiet commands.

Kane hides in shadow, his heart thunders, his breathing pants quietly.

He remembers the aching blasts, the screech of tires, the spew of oily exhaust. He wanted to run to his partner, to bark and howl and bite.

But he stays in shadow because that was what he was told.

Now new purpose fills his ear.

“RETRIEVE MY GUN. HIDE UNDER CAR.”

He stares out of the darkness to the moonlit pavement, to the gun out there. He knows guns. He watched it slide under the car when his partner threw it. Then the car left. The gun stayed.

Kane shoots out of the darkness, gliding low. He scoops up the gun, smelling smoke and fire and the whisper of his partner’s sweat. He rushes back into darkness, into hiding, but he does not stop. He swerves on silent paws, diving back around. He races through the archway, drawn to the soft putter of a cooling engine, to the reek of burned oil—ready to slide beneath and wait.

But a growl comes from the left.

Shadows break out of the forest, the largest before him.

He has smelled the other dogs, along the road, upon the bushes, in the air. They marked this place as their own. He lowers the gun to the dirt. He recognizes the leader by his stiff-legged movements as he stalks forward in the slink of the shadows that share this space. This was their wild land, and they claimed it for themselves.

To help his partner, Kane must make it his own—if only for the night.

With a low growl, he leaps for the largest shadow.

The howl and wails of a savage dogfight echoed eerily through to the cottage. It sounded like something from a prehistoric epoch, full of blood, anger, and survival.

Tucker heard it through his earpiece, too.

Kane.

His heart clutched in fear.

Domonkos smiled, drawn by that chorus. He said something in Hungarian that made the one at the window laugh.

Csorba did not lift his face from a laptop he had pulled out of a briefcase. “Wild dogs,” he explained as he worked. “They make their home in this forgotten cemetery.”

No wonder no one had reacted to Kane’s earlier canvass of the place. To those here, he was just another shadowy cur skulking about.

“Dogs!” Csorba continued. “That is who you want to hand that great treasure over to, Jakob.”

Aliza’s father lifted his head enough to glare at the man. Father and daughter clutched hands together. Neither was deceived that they would survive.