“You always did love bugs.” She laughed. “Starting tonight, I’ll activate the disrupters. By the time our target shows, they’ll be so used to minor disturbances, your entry will be covered.”
“You're sending me some of that sleepy-time jerky, right?”
“Package is in the mail,” she assured him.
“Dogs and kids. Not a fan of working around either of them.”
“Yeah, well, don’t think you’re on easy street, B. Elise Serra’s passport was used to exit Belgium and enter Hungary.”
Blake groaned. “How the fuck …”
“Anubis would be the one to ask. I don’t know the specs. I was just asked to monitor her passport and pass on the information to you if she moved.
“All right. Put him on comms, please, Aunt Jewell.”
She chuckled. “On it.”
CHAPTER 5
The Budapest City Library rose in quiet grandeur, its stone façade softened by the morning light. Elise stepped inside, grateful for the hush that wrapped around her the moment the heavy doors closed. The air smelled faintly of beeswax polish and aged paper, with a hint of damp stone lingering from centuries of use. Vaulted ceilings arched high overhead, painted with fading frescoes that lent the building the solemn dignity of a cathedral. Rows of tall windows spilled shafts of autumn sunlight across polished floors and heavy oak tables worn smooth by generations of scholars.
She found a spot near the reference desk where the Wi-Fi signal was strong and unpacked her laptop. Beside it, she stacked several bound volumes the librarian had reluctantly pulled from storage—annual reports and mission statements of obscure maritime charities. Their spines creaked when she opened them, pages yellowed, the text set in the austere fonts of another era.
The first hour was nothing but tedium. She sifted through reports filled with sanitized language:“humanitarian shipments,” “rescue initiatives,”and“educational outreach.”Names of board members blurred together, and photographs ofsmiling volunteers offered little clue. Elise chewed the end of her pen, jotting quick notes into her leather-bound notebook. Nothing stood out.
By the second hour, the world outside the tall windows had shifted. Early morning sunlight softened into mid-morning brightness; shadows slid across the parquet floor. A handful of university students had taken over the table beside her, whispering over stacks of textbooks, their voices hushed in the reverent atmosphere. Somewhere deeper in the building, a librarian’s shoes clicked methodically against tile, fading then returning.
Then a pattern began to surface. In one report after another, one name repeated—always at the top, always as founder or benefactor. Marek Zajac.
Elise’s pulse quickened as she leaned forward, eyes scanning the fine print as though expecting it to vanish if she blinked. All these charities, supposedly different organizations, all shared him as their origin. And her mentor had been circling them. This wasn’t idle philanthropy. It was a trail.
She turned to her laptop, focusing now on the other mystery that had gnawed at her:M-47-BUD.At first glance, it had seemed obvious—BUD for Budapest.That belief had pulled her here. But as she trawled through databases, shipping registries, and forums where logistics experts and hobbyists dissected acronyms, the truth shifted beneath her.
BUD wasn’t a city code. It was an IATA designation for Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport. But in context, paired with the “M” prefix and the numbering, it matched a shipping code.
She dug deeper, the hours bleeding away unnoticed. Noon light gave way to afternoon gray, the library cooling as the autumn day waned. A radiator hissed faintly in the corner, and the smell of dust thickened as more students drifted in,shedding coats and scattering papers. Elise barely noticed them. Her world had narrowed to search bars, maritime registries, and corporate filings hidden behind paywalls she worked around with sheer persistence.
The code identified a vessel. She pulled on the thread, clicking through one maritime registry after another, bouncing between companies with addresses in Panama, Liberia, and Cyprus. Each one led her deeper, with corporate veils designed to frustrate pursuit. But persistence was one of her virtues.
At last, the trail settled into something solid. A company name. An owner.
Her breath caught. The ship belonged to a holding company tied to the same man who’d founded the maritime charities. Marek Zajac.
Elise sat back in her chair, her spine stiff, her notebook open but forgotten at her elbow. Around her, the library hummed softly: the scrape of chairs, the faint shuffle of pages, the muted cough of a man somewhere in the stacks. Yet for her, the silence pressed in.
Zajac’s name connected both the charities and the ship. That couldn’t be a coincidence. No matter how tangled the corporate disguises, they led back to him.
Elise typed “Marek Zajac” into the search bar, and her screen lit up with results that portrayed him in near-mythical tones.
The first articles lauded his humanitarian work. He was the founder of the Danube Aid Foundation,a maritime charity headquartered in Budapest that coordinated shipments of food and medicine to disaster zones. Photos showed crates marked with the foundation’s blue-and-gold emblem being loaded onto freighters, and Zajac standing humbly at the dockside, often in the background of his own publicity. Another group he had established, theChildren of the Current Initiative,claimed to provide scholarships for orphans in coastal regions, “liftingthose cast adrift by tragedy back into safe harbors.” The language was almost poetic, carefully crafted to soften the reader.
Scrolling further, Elise found references to his cultural investments. In Budapest, he had financed the restoration of a derelict riverside warehouse, reopening it as the Zajac Gallery of Contemporary Art.Articles gushed about its mission to give young Hungarian artists “a platform to shine on the European stage.” Opening night photographs captured Zajac among city officials, smiling beneath a vast installation of sculpted glass that glittered like water frozen in mid-motion.
In Antwerp, his influence had been equally profound. He was credited with rescuing the Guildhall of St. Nicholas,a sixteenth-century building on the Grote Markt that had fallen into disrepair. Zajac funded its transformation into the Maritime Heritage Institute of Antwerp, a center for exhibitions and scholarship celebrating Europe’s seafaring past. He was photographed with Belgian dignitaries beneath banners that proclaimed,“Preserving the Soul of the Sea.”
Every article she pulled carried the same refrain: Zajac the philanthropist, Zajac the patron of art, Zajac the savior of heritage. There were mentions of his anonymous donations to children’s hospitals, his role in refugee relief during the Syrian crisis and even a glowing profile in an international magazine that dubbed him“Europe’s Silent Samaritan.”
Elise leaned back, her notes filling fast. On the surface, Marek Zajac was untouchable. A man gilded by generosity, woven into the very fabric of Budapest and Antwerp alike.
