“And privately?” Oksana asked.
“Spy,” Maxim guessed.
“Assassin,” Iacob countered.
Her two harcosok turned to look at Nikolett.
“You want me to guess?” she asked.
They nodded.
Nikolett studied Fedora’s picture. “Power behind the throne. Puppeting several prominent politicians by money, blackmail, or both.”
“Maxim got it,” Zoran said with a grin. “She’s an intelligence operative.”
“Whose?” Grigoris asked.
“Whoever she likes. She’s not blindly loyal to any one nation, as a swing toward conservative political views—anti-immigration, homophobia, etc—and she’ll stop working for that government. She uses her foundation’s outreach as cover, and given that she’s of East Asian descent, many people don’t expect her to speak Hungarian or Romanian. She’s fluent in both.”
“She speaks French and English too,” Zoran added. “But I think maybe there are even more languages she knows, but won’t publicly admit to knowing. I found some correspondences in Bulgarian that my analysis said weren’t AI translation. There were a few grammatical mistakes a human translator wouldn’t have made, but could be made by someone who isn’t entirely fluent in that language.” Zoran raised a brow. “Or at least writing in that language. If she can write in it to that degree, sheprobably speaks it fluently, but there are no official reports to confirm that.”
“Who recruited her?”
They discussed the possibility that she was loyal to Petro, then the possibility that she had closer ties to the Masters’ Admiralty territories of Germany or Rome than Hungary. Vienna was in eastern Austria, but the modern country of Austria was divided between the territories of Hungary, Germany, and Rome. The border between Hungary and Germany hovered around Vienna and was a bit fuzzy. Technically Fedora had been recruited into Hungary, and her work in the Balkans indicated she was aligned with Nikolett’s territory, but at the end of their discussion, Elena popped a big question mark magnet on Fedora’s picture next to the Austrian flag.
One by one, they went through the rest of the candidates.
Louis Mercier—a legacy member with a French father and Hungarian mothers. Louis grew up predominately in Bordeaux where he learned wine-making from his paternal family but settled in Hungary. He was an influential figure in Hungarian wine-making, with estates in Tokaj and Lake Balaton. Elena gleefully informed them that the maroon-colored sparkly paper behind his picture was meant to replicate the color of the wine he made.
When Nikolett raised her brows, waiting to hear what skills or connections had put him on this list—he was secretly an assassin, he was somehow related to an important head of state—Nyx and Grigoris shared a look.
“This one is just…” Grigoris petered off and rubbed the back of his neck.
“He’s kind,” Nyx said. “Smart. Caring. Calm. He starts every day sitting on the patio, looking out at the vineyard or taking a leisurely walk among the vines.”
Nikolett leaned back in her chair, grabbing her knee to adjust her casted leg as she moved. “He’s on the list because…”
“He’d be a good spouse. A good partner. You deserve that.”
Nikolett froze in surprise, then nodded, swallowing against the lump in her throat that might have been appreciation for their concern, but equally could have been embarrassment. She decided not to look too hard at which emotion it was.
Danylo Kovalenko was a thirty-year-old Ukrainian journalist and war correspondent turned documentary filmmaker from Kyiv. He was one of the main forces sharing real-time on-the-ground images and reports of what was happening in the current conflict. His latest documentaryThe Situation is Still Developing, had won numerous awards, and been banned in several countries for showing a reality that countered their government’s narrative. His success was in large part due to his ability to talk to people—to find something in common with everyone he met and to use that common ground as a basis for deep conversation and incredible honesty.
After some debate, he was eliminated, his pale green-sparkle-framed image removed from the board. Given that his focus was, and would continue to be, on reporting on the current conflict and it would be unfair to pull him away from that meaningful work. Nikolett tried to say he could just come back for a quick ceremony and then leave again, but everyone hated that idea. Apparently if she was going to have partners in name only, they would have an entirely different list.
Katarina Vukovic (purple sparkly paper) was the youngest female executive director at the National Bank of Serbia. An Oxford-educated economist, she began her career managing risk portfolios for Deutsche Bank before returning home to Serbia to modernize financial regulation and champion digital banking after nearly twenty years abroad.
While attending Oxford, she’d represented Serbia in both the world championships and the Olympics as a fencer, and apparently was combat-level good with several bladed weapons.
Nikolett rubbed her temples. “We have no idea who’s attacking me, so there’s very little opportunity to stab them with a sword.”
“The point is she could,” Nyx countered.
Anca Ionescu was a Romanian information broker who started her career in wealth management for an investment firm. Zoran had dug up several private memos from a rival wealth management company that described her as a chameleon. She could become whomever she needed to be in order to gain the trust of the person she was working with. No longer employed by a firm, she selectively took jobs that appealed to her as an independent contractor, and those jobs ranged from acting as a fixer to high-risk financial strategy execution.
“Anca enjoys mountain trekking, gourmet cooking, and restoring traditional Romanian farmhouses,” Elena finished.
They all looked at her.
