Still, if a trap had to be set, he could think of no setting more appropriate. Thirty-five seventeen Miskolc-Lillafüred, Erzsébet sétány 1, was a couple of miles west of Miskolc proper, and the only notable building in the resort area of Lillafüred. The Palace Hotel, as it was now called, stood near the wooded banks of Lake Hámori, surrounded by a sylvan glade that suggested a long-past feudal Europe of parks and palaces. If the place evoked nostalgia, it was in fact a tribute to it. The completion of the faux hunting castle, in the 1920s, was an imperial project of Admiral Horthy’s regime, designed as a monument to the nation’s historical glories. The restaurant, fittingly, was named for King Matthias, the fifteenth-century Hungarian warrior-sovereign who led his people to greatness, a greatness that gleamed with the blood of their enemies. In the post-Communist era, the place was swiftly restored to its former opulence. Now it drew vacationers and businessmen from all over the country. A project borne of imperial vainglory had been co-opted by a still more powerful dominion, that of commerce itself.

Paul Janson strode through the lavishly appointed lobby and down to the cellar-style restaurant on the level below. His stomach was tight with tension; food was the last thing on his mind. And yet any sign that he was on edge would only betray him.

“I’m Adam Kurzweil,” Janson told the maître d’hôtel, in a well-modulated transatlantic accent. It was the sort of language-school English that was common both to educated citizens of the British Commonwealth—Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, India—and to affluent Europeans who had received early instruction in the tongue. “Kurzweil” wore a chalk-striped suit and a scarlet tie, and bore himself with the erect hauteur of a businessman used to being deferred to.

The maître d’, dressed in a swallowtail dinner jacket, his black hair oiled and combed into obsidian waves, gave Janson a sharp, appraising look before his face creased into a professional smile. “Your guest is already here,” he said. He turned to a younger woman beside him. “She will show you to your table.”

Janson nodded blandly. “Thank you,” he said.

The table was, as his guest had obviously requested, a discreet corner banquette. The man he was meeting was a resourceful and careful man, or he would not have survived in his particular line of business for as long as he had.

As Janson walked toward the banquette, he concentrated on entering into a character he would have to make wholly his own. First impressions did indeed matter. The man he was meeting, Sandor Lakatos, would be suspicious. As Kurzweil, therefore, he would be more so. It was, he knew, the most effective countermeasure.

Lakatos turned out to be a small, hunched man; the curvature of his upper spine set his head oddly forward on his neck, as if he were tucking in his chin. His cheeks were round, his nose bulbous, and his wattled neck was continuous with his jawline, giving his head a pearlike shape. He was a study in dissipation.