District VIII by Adam LeBor

Author:Adam LeBor [LeBor, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681778174
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bardossy home, Remetehegyi Way, 10.00 a.m.

Reka stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, her hands resting on the edge of the black granite twin sink. Her face was pale, her blue eyes surrounded by dark shadows. Her blonde hair hung in lank tendrils down the sides of her face. She had stripped off her dress and fallen asleep on the bed without showering, waking up an hour later to find a T-shirt and crawl under the cover. She had slept badly, her recurring nightmare especially vivid last night: she was trapped in a luxurious hotel suite. The door handles were solid gold, but the rooms had no windows and no doors. She ran from room to room, banged and banged on the walls, shouted as loudly as she could, but nobody came. Still, while she looked awful – there was no other word – her face had more or less escaped. She did not have a black eye or split lip. She was alive. Even though someone had wanted her dead. She had fought and she had won.

She glanced down at her hands. She smiled for a moment as she imagined her manicurist’s expression if she saw them. Every nail was scratched, chipped and filthy, the clear varnish scraped away in patches. At least three were broken or torn. Her fingertips were covered with mud and dirt. Her palms were grazed, marked with swipe marks as she had skidded along the ground. Her arms were bruised and her back and shoulders throbbed. Her neck was sore and stiff. Her hands she could patch up; she could claim that she had fallen over and scraped them. Then she remembered what she had done with her hands last night. She stared at her right palm for several seconds, felt it slam into her attacker’s neck. She began to shake, dropped her head down, drew several deep breaths to steady herself.

She looked back into the mirror, traced the vivid red line around the base of her neck with a trembling index finger. That would be harder to explain away. She glanced at the row of men’s toiletries by the second sink. Several had not been opened. The sink was dry and unused, polished to a sheen. Peter was rarely here now, spending more and more time in Gulf or Russia or China, courting investors. Generally, that suited Reka. They had grown – were growing further – apart. She was fairly sure that Peter was having an affair with his executive assistant, Zita, a slender brunette in her mid-twenties, who accompanied him everywhere. But on days like this, she wished her husband was at home.

Reka had two problems, she realised. Both were pressing. The first was that someone had tried to kill her. She had been lured out of the reception by someone who knew that she was there – which was a lot of people – and also knew that the Snapchat messages, detailing the passport operation, would leave her no choice but to show up.

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