Chapter 3 – Strange case

After a short flight, Bond was in the heart of Budapest before eleven. A driver was waiting at the airport and took him directly to the Central European University building, where he had his appointment with Dr. Sára Kiss. He gave his name and the purpose of his visit to the security staff on duty at the reception, who passed a phone call and turned back to him.

- "Dr. Kiss is coming, sir. You can wait for her in the main hall."

The receptionist opened the thick wooden doors, and Bond was shown through into a large elegantly renovated hall, where modern architecture was nicely mixed with the original structure of a nineteenth century palace. He hardly had time to admire the building before he spotted a woman coming out of a lift towards him. He recognized her thanks to the file given by Šlesinger, and his first thought was that passport photos seldom do justice to beautiful women. Beyond her blazing and wavy hair hanging loose on her shoulders, her sharp green eyes and thin silhouette, there was something magnetic, slender and feline in her figure, something no photograph could ever give any idea of. She addressed him in spotless Oxford English.

- "Mr. Bond? I'm Sára Kiss. Nice to meet you. Please come to my office, it will be more comfortable to talk there."

She led the way to her office and offered him a seat. The room was small and tidy: two bookshelves, a large cupboard, a desk with two neat piles of files and a laptop were the only furniture. But he noticed an unexpected shape in a corner of the room, something he identified as a cello case. Sára Kiss seamed to size him up for one or two seconds before she started to talk.

- "So, Mr. Bond, our common friend Stan told me you had some important news about Mercurius. I hope it is good, because the last news I had was very sad..."

- "I'm sorry about the death of your colleagues. I've been told you and Prof. Hughes were close friends. "

- "Yes. I met him about ten years ago, when I had a post-doctoral fellowship at University College. He was a very kind man, and a brilliant researcher." She marked a pause, and continued with a sour note in her voice. "In the beginning of Mercurius, I wanted to team up with Michael and Dr. Čermáková. As I understand it, I've been lucky we changed our plans..."

- "Why did you change them?"

She shrugged.

- "We planned to work together on the sixth workpackage, Combination of cryptographic primitives, but the following workpackage needed a coordinator, I accepted the role."

- "And you are now responsible for this part, about..."

She smiled at his brief hesitation. Bond couldn't help noticing the sparkles in the deep green eyes.

- "It's entitled Partitioning algorithms for hardware-software co-design. This is my other field of research. Basically, it consists in the implementation study for the previous work. But as I'm very interested in cryptographic primitives, I've had frequent talks with Michael Hughes about the progress of the work."

Bond looked at her straight in the eyes, seriously and carefully.

- " Dr. Kiss, I'll be straightforward: this connection is the reason for my presence here. You certainly know that, after the death of Prof. Hughes and Dr. Čermáková, most of their current files, and notably those related to their work on Mercurius, seemed to have disappeared?"

She nodded, squinting imperceptibly her eyes. He continued.

- "Those files... reappeared. But the data is in a shambles. Many of these files are sketchy personal notes, very difficult to understand, even for a specialist. We know this workpackage was about to be completed, but if those files cannot be put together, months of work will be lost. And thanks to your connections with Prof. Hughes and your insight on his current works, you are certainly the best expert possible on this case."

- "What do you expect me to do, exactly?"

Bond slowly took a data key out of the inner pocket of his jacket, and put it on the desk between them, casually letting his finger tips rest on the little plastic object.

- "A simple polish of the data. Just have a look at the files, organize them. Hopefully, you'll be able to reconstitute the work done, and deliver the workpackage."

She looked thoughtfully at the data key for a few seconds.

- "I see... I guess I owe this to Michael. In memory of our friendship..." She looked up at Bond. "If I accept, how will we proceed?" She leaned back in her chair, with a thin smile : "Pardon my curiosity, Mr. Bond, but you are the first spy I've ever met!"

He smirked, but ignored the quip.

- "As the late Prof. Hughes was the coordinator of Workpackage 6, England is in charge of the case. My service is therefore responsible for the data as long as the workpackage hasn't been delivered. The data cannot go out of the British embassy until this business is done, but if you accept to give the files a final polish, you'll have an office at your disposal 24/7 at the embassy, a few blocks from there, and I will stay in Budapest as long as necessary, to ensure the security of the data."

- "Do you mean you will escort me?"

He smiled.

- "My duty is to escort the data. But escorting you would be my pleasure..."

Her lips didn't openly return the smile, but her eyes did.

- "I'm sure you're a man of duty, Mr. Bond. I will help you. Shall we meet at your embassy tomorrow morning at nine?"

- "Perfect."

Bond put back the data key in his pocket and rose to take leave. Sára Kiss asked with a mischievous smile:

- "By the way, Mr. Bond... If the files are not to get out of your embassy, what is on this data key?"

Bond laughed:

- "Absolutely nothing. It was just a prop. And by the way, Dr. Kiss, my friends call me James."

Bond employed the end of the morning in seeing to the details of the arrangement with the military attaché at the British embassy. Shortly after noon, everything was set up, and he had a couple of hours before his routine report to MI6. Having bought a copy of The Times at a news-stand, he decided to have lunch before heading to his hotel, and found a little csárda – a local traditional restaurant – he remembered from a previous visit a couple of years before, next to St. Stephen's Basilica. He chose a small table for two in a corner, facing the door, and as an apéritif he indulged himself with a glass of Unicum, a Hungarian bitter herbal liqueur that remembered him the German Jägermeister. Bond liked the cosy atmosphere of the place, the sound of the cheerful conversations around him, in this language he couldn't understand and sounded like none of the languages he could speak. It gave his loneliness a touch of sweet melancholy. Besides, he had always valued Hungarian cuisine as one of the most interesting in Central Europe, with its varied influences brought by the rich and violent history of the land.

When coffee came, after a light lunch of stuffed peppers, he lit a cigarette, and his thoughts irresistibly went back to his interview with Sára Kiss. Bond instinctively sensed a raw charisma in this woman, a powerful liveliness that he didn't expect to meet in a mathematician. Beneath the surface of her golden skin, he felt life sparkling... Her quite strict clothes and the tidiness of her office seemed to him like a thin veil over her inner animal magnetism. He realised that his thoughts were beginning to be less professional... But after all, his main assignment was over, and escorting this data was a simple routine mission.

Yet, he opened The Times and ran through the pages, applying himself to focus his mind on the news. He read attentively a leading article about energy and water related issues in Middle Eastern countries, and sighed at the thought that a thick report on the same subject by some MI6 analysts was certainly waiting on his office desk in London. Blasted paperwork! He looked rapidly through a full page dedicated to an account of a series of conferences given in Europe by Maxim Fokin, a Russian coal mining tycoon who prided himself on promoting peace and friendship in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Bond gave the ghost of a smile, remembering the classified dossiers he had read about the man: Fokin was a former FSB (ex-KGB) field officer, who had mainly developed his familiarity with the coal mining industry a decade before, when he had been assigned the coordination of FSB operations against labour unions in Siberia. What a funny curriculum vitae for a peace enforcer! Bond lit another cigarette, and leafed absent-mindedly through the pages. The headlines about a recent defeat of England in cricket, or even a study demonstrating the superiority of honey over pharmaceutical medicines to heal cough, didn't really catch his eye. Now that his main assignment had been completed in Prague, and that everything was settled for this routine mission, he started to feel slightly depressed. What was awaiting him now? A cold and impersonal hotel room here in Budapest for a couple of weeks, with nothing to do but keeping an eye on some files, then in London endless days of paperwork, acedia and vodka. He felt he was going to be exposed to the only kind of death he had ever really dreaded: the death by boredom...

But maybe he could find an antidote... He smiled: a detail from his interview with Sára Kiss had just came back to his mind. He folded The Times, put it on the table and dialled his mobile phone.

- "Stan? Will you do me a little service? I'm sure you're a music connoisseur..."