Bucharest Unbound: A Cold War espionage thriller by Richard Wake

Author:Richard Wake [Wake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manor and State, LLC
Published: 2024-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

25

The guy working security at the building behind the Telephone Palace knew we were coming and let us in with a nod. Whether he had been paid off, or was a true believer, or both, didn’t matter much to me. It had been arranged, and the guy let us in and then escorted us to a fifth-floor office of some insurance company.

“Pisser’s down the hall,” he said. “Don’t bother flushing — nobody’s here but, well, no sense making any extra noise. Leave from the same door when you’re done, even if I’m not there. In fact, I probably won’t be here — I have to make the rounds every hour. Cleaning crew gets here at 5. Anything happens, you’ve never met me — you’ve never seen me — and I don’t know shit. Here…”

With that, the guard reached into his pocket and handed me a small fabric bag. Inside were several thick bits of wire of varying lengths — but thicker than wire and thinner than, say, a nail.

“Lock picks,” the guard said. “In case you’re caught, that’s how you got in. On the way out, toss them under the chair where I sit. Got it?”

With that, we rolled a couple of chairs closer to the window and looked down on the back of the Telephone Tower. Jake, Bogdan and me.

“What exactly did Constantin say?” I asked.

Bogdan and Jake both spoke at once, and then they both stopped, and then they both started again at the same time, and then Bogdan said, “After you, asshole.”

“He said there’s only one guard at 2 a.m.,” Jake said.

“One guard on the outside, one on the inside,” Bogdan said.

“Like I was going to say,” Jake said.

“And how does he know that?” I said.

The two of them looked at each other.

“He just fucking knows, I guess,” Jake said.

It was about 12:30 p.m., and there were two guards at the back door — bored soldiers leaning on wooden crates and smoking cigarettes, their rifles propped next to them against the crates. We couldn’t hear them — the windows in the insurance office were closed — but you could see them laughing and gesticulating. Smoking, telling jokes, killing time. Soldiers doing the soldier thing — that is, killing time during what otherwise would be a mind-numbing tour.

“Why Palace?” I said. “I mean, it’s a nice enough building and all, but palace? Is there a King of Telephones in Romania that nobody ever told me about in history class?”

“It’s a palace because it was built by Americans, for Americans,” Jake said. “Made in the fucking U-S-of-A.”

“It was built in Romania, by Romanians,” Bogdan said.

“It was built from American plans for the American company that operates the telephones in this godforsaken backwater.”

Bogdan clenched his fists but went quiet. I said, “What are you talking about?”

“They couldn’t run their own telephone system, so they sold it to International Telephone and Telegraph. I-T-T equals U-S-A. Their executives run the thing from here. The building was built for them. Art Deco style, they tell me.

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