Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“Welcome to The Great One, Masters’ Admiralty style!” Elena whisked a sparkly gold cloth off the rolling whiteboard with a flourish.
Nikolett resisted the urge to lay her head down on the table and either laugh or cry.
“Can we call her The Great One from now on?” Iacob idly flipped a knife as he lounged in the high-backed conference chair.
“No,” Nikolett said at the same time Nyx replied, “Yes.”
They were clustered in the ground-floor conference room in territory headquarters—otherwise known as Nikolett’s house. The small conference table had eight chairs, but the one at the other end of the table had been pulled to the side to make room for Elena’s rolling white board.
Nikolett sat at the head of the table, with Nyx and Grigoris on her right.
There were three harcosok present—Maxim, who sat on her left, with Iacob beside him, and Elena herself, who was technically a knight, though she functioned as a private physician rather than the law and order for the territory as harcosok were meant to.
Oksana Melnyk, one of Hungary’s new finance ministers, had the last seat on the left.
She was leaning back in her chair studying Elena’s board.
Oksana was here not only because, as a finance minister, she was part of the territory’s leadership but because she was a brilliant strategist. Based in Kyiv, she specialized in post-conflict economic development and recovery strategies.
On the other side of Grigoris, the last seat on the right, had Zoran Baka, one of her newer security officers.
Zoran was famous in tech circles for his development of a mobile payment system that was used by citizens of Northern Macedonia in lieu of the Denar when their currency was destabilized.
That in turn kept the economy from collapsing.
He was also quietly infamous for his development of software to navigate non-indexed digital information—state-of-the-art software that could access the dark web. It made him unparalleled at running background searches, provided they gave him good starting information.
“The Great One or The Bachelorette.” Elena pointed at the block letter title written on the whiteboard.
A Nagy ?/Hajadon
A Nagy ?, The Great One, was the name of the Hungarian version of the reality show The Bachelor while hajadon just meant unmarried rather than being a direct translation of “bachelorette.”
Hajadon felt vaguely insulting, though Nikolett knew Elena hadn’t meant it that way.
“It’s time for our admiral to get married.” Elena grinned, clearly enjoying this. “These are the lucky contestants.”
“Who don’t know they’re participating in this particular competition.” Oksana’s voice was cool and composed, revealing nothing about how she felt.
“I suggest we set up dates with each of them to help her pick.” Elena bounced on her toes in excitement at the idea.
“No,” Nikolett and Grigoris said at the same time.
She said no because the idea of going on test dates with each person made her want to rip out her hair. Grigoris said no because of the risk factors.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and Nikolett shifted, wondering if it was “Cookie Guy.” That was the name she’d put in her phone for a sexy Scotsman named Gus she’d met at a café and had been texting ever since.
A man she’d made tentative plans to meet while trapped in Triskelion Castle with Eric.
Since her dramatic exit that day, she hadn’t texted him again, barely had time to think about him.
Nyx scooted out a little as Nikolett shifted, making sure there was space under the table where Nikolett’s broken leg in the new 3D-printed cast rested on a small stool.
“Are we looking for reasons to eliminate, or are we identifying positives?” Zoran asked.
Nikolett jerked her attention away from the phone in her pocket and back to the display on the board.
Elena had a previously unknown crafty side to go with her love of reality TV competition shows. Large color photos of each potential spouse were backed by different colors of sparkly paper. Each photo was held to the whiteboard by a matching color magnet.
Elena pulled a stack of notecards from her pocket and, yep, they were also color coordinated.
“First, we have Luka Jovanovi?. Serbian born and a current resident of Belgrade.” Elena reached into a small box on the table. She carefully placed a magnet of the Serbian flag beside Luka’s blue-sparkle-backed picture.
Maxim laughed, and for a moment Elena hesitated, looking unsure. Maybe even a little hurt.
Nikolett shot Maxim a hard look, and he blinked.
“Please continue,” Nikolett said to Elena.
“Luka is a thirty-four-year-old attorney. His work is focused on judicial reform.”
“He could look critically at our policies, structures,” Oksana said.
Elena nodded. “Based on public interviews, and private memos and communications from both his colleagues and opponents, he’s described as articulate, principled, and loyal.
” Elena flipped to another card. “On a personal note, he plays the accordion and was in a folk music band for a while, and is also proficient on a gusle—a string instrument with a single string. It had deep cultural importance in Serbia.”
“When was he recruited?” Iacob asked.
“Law school. One of his professors was a member and put his name forward.”
“Not a legacy, then,” Grigoris said. Legacy members were risky because they might have hidden ties to the old admiral.
“But the man who recruited him may have been loyal to Petro.” Nyx’s words were calm, but there was a tightness around her mouth when she said her former husband’s name.
They spent several moments discussing the possibility that Luka was loyal to Petro, the former admiral of Hungary. Most of Nikolett’s tenure as admiral had focused on dismantling the corruption left over from Petro’s long, twisted reign.
“Next up, we have Fedora Chen.”
The pink-sparkle-backed picture was of a smiling woman with chic glasses.
“Publicly,” Elena stressed the word, “she is an influential philanthropist and director of the Chen Foundation. Based in Vienna with most of her operations in the Balkans, her foundation funds education, anti-corruption efforts, and refugee relief. Quiet, charming, and shockingly multilingual, she’s a regular invitee to any sort of diplomatic event or humanitarian conference. ”
“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, she probably 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.