TURNABOUT

~ 1 ~ Budapest

Thursday, September 5

The three team members had never met their anonymous employer, he who starred in these sinister missions while producing them from afar. Nor had they ever heard a name besides “Herr Direktor.”
      Detailed instructions came via encrypted files. Essential communication was conducted with burner phones destroyed after each mission. Generous payments guaranteed to keep the team closemouthed were wired to numbered offshore bank accounts in Belize.
     Gryta Novak, “Team Leader and Human Resources Scout,” had boarded the night train from Prague, before prowling the city in search of a host for her employer to inhabit during his cryptically described “important medical field trials using a breakthrough technology.”
     During her live job interview conducted via mic and headphone in a booth with a two-way mirror, she’d asked, “Why not conduct these trials in a controlled laboratory environment with volunteers?
     Herr Direktor had answered her with one question. “Do you want this position or not?”
     For the mission at hand, Herr Direktor specified his host should be a Caucasian male, age around thirty, athletically fit, and preferably a tourist. Gryta’s personal specifications were ideal for finding and abducting a suitable victim. Born in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, she’d been schooled by her father in hunting and survival, and eventually graduated with degrees in Criminology and Forensic Psychology from Middlesex University in London. Stifling her curiosity and downplaying her intelligence was difficult, but dealing with her two cohorts in this “Advance Logistics Team” presented by far the greater challenge.
     Mentally, she referred to Bear and Emil Dinkelman as Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. A month earlier, she’d suffered through an entire day hibernating in the rear cabin of the command vehicle for a field trial in France. She’d tried her damndest not to overhear their rowdy ramblings about football, fast cars, and fried food while they played Twenty Questions and The License Plate Game she’d outgrown at age eight. 
     In between missions, Günther “Bear” Dinkelman—the team’s so-called Medical Technician—worked as a freelance paramedic. The sight of his massive arms protruding from a barrel chest prevented anyone from joking about his nickname. His first proper job in the family butcher shop had taught him to be comfortable with flesh, whether intact or filleted, and blood, on the floor, wall, or his hands. After a ten-year stint as a security guard at a bar, Bear the Bouncer now repaired the ruffians he used to fling into the gutters. 
     The third team member, Emil Dinkelman, who struggled to fill his nominal title as Road Crew, had been created from the same angular, bulky mold as his uncle Bear, but contained significantly fewer brain cells. Emil possessed the skill set of three pets: he fetched things like a dog, shouldered heavy supplies like a mule, and could squeeze a man to death like a boa constrictor. Unlike a pet, he was capable of steering a vehicle if supervised, and guzzle any amount of beer set in front of him, although it wasn’t pleasant to watch.
     From their home in Stuttgart, Germany, the Dinkelmans had driven the team’s command vehicle, a Toyota HiAce furniture delivery van remodeled to resemble an ambulance to Budapest. Failing to follow Gryta’s explicit directions to their rendezvous location—“Meet me at noon on the west side of the Szent Ferenc Hospital parking lot”—Bear parked on the east side at 12:35 pm.
     Always efficient, Gryta had arrived at 11:45 am, wearing a gray trench coat and pulling her rolling carry-on luggage. At 12:10, she’d methodically criss-crossed the parking lot like an addled patient trying to locate her car and then returned to the meeting place. Seething at 12:35, she saw the command vehicle park on the east side, stomped back across the lot, and slammed her hand, middle finger raised, on the side window.
     Bear rolled down the window and sheepishly greeted her in German. “Wie gehts?” 
     Gryta kept her hand poised in front of his face, responding in his native language. “Why didn’t you answer your burner phone?”
     “I forgot it at home.”
     “So I’m supposed to call your sister Ernestine to find out where you are?” Gryta slapped his cheek with the back of her hand. “You’re late and on the wrong side of the lot.”
     “We didn’t know which was east or west, so we flipped a coin.”
     “Why didn’t you ask someone?” she demanded.
     “We wanted to make sure our mission is a secret.”
     Gryta slapped Bear again, harder. “No. You didn’t ask because you are fucking idiots! Each of you owes me a half hour of your life!” She flung a city map of Budapest through the window. “We shall find our next host at the Museum of Fine Arts, a five-story building with plenty of sparsely populated spaces for abduction. Take me there, after you purchase a new phone. We can’t complete this mission without it.” She plodded around the vehicle and tossed in her suitcase through the rear double doors.
     The rear cabin of their pseudo ambulance held medical equipment and hardware required for the EDNA (Enhanced DNA) technology, which allowed one human being to inhabit and control another. Its roof carried telecom antennas for communication between the controller and the host. The partition between the driver’s cab and the rear cabin had been removed. A coffee maker hung on the wall next to the medical supplies. A switch on the dash quickly rotated the plate holder between license numbers from four countries.
     The team members didn’t know about the remote code Herr Direktor could enter on his phone to detonate the bank of explosives hidden in the chassis—quickly silencing loose lips and eliminating all evidence, while reducing the team and its command vehicle to smoldering particles.

~~~