by Tom Clancy
“But the airport is the one place where the határ rség are alert,” Kovacs pointed out. “The poor bastards are always in the light, with their senior officers about. No chance for them to be open to . . . negotiations.”
“I suppose that is so,” Hudson agreed. “Very well. I will call you to keep track of your schedule.”
“That is fine. You know where to find me.”
Hudson stood. “Thanks for the drink, my friend.”
“It lubricates the business,” Kovacs said, as he opened the door for his guest. Five thousand West German marks would cover a lot of obligations and buy him a lot of goods to resell in Budapest for a handsome profit.
CHAPTER 23
ALL ABOARD
ZAITZEV CALLED THE TRAVEL OFFICE at 1530. He hoped that this didn’t show an unusual eagerness, but everyone was interested in their vacation arrangements, he figured.
“Comrade Major, you are on the train day after tomorrow. It leaves Kiev Station at thirteen hours thirty and arrives in Budapest two days later at fourteen hours exactly. You and your family are booked into Carriage nine-oh-six in compartments A and B. You are also booked into Budapest’s Hotel Astoria, Room three-oh-seven, for eleven days. The hotel is directly across the street from the Soviet Culture and Friendship House, which is, of course, a KGB operation with a liaison office, should you need any local assistance.”
“Excellent. Thank you very much for your help.” Zaitzev thought for a moment. “Is there anything I might purchase for you in Budapest?”
“Why, thank you, comrade.” His voice just lit up. “Yes, perhaps some pantyhose for my wife,” the functionary said in a furtive voice.
“What size?”
“My wife is a real Russian,” he replied, meaning decidedly not anorexic.
“Very good. I will find something—or my wife will assist me.”
“Excellent. Have a grand trip.”
“Yes, I shall,” Zaitzev promised him. With that settled, Oleg Ivan’ch left his desk and went to his watch supervisor to announce his plans for the coming two weeks.
“Isn’t there some upstairs project that only you are cleared for?” the lieutenant colonel asked.
“Yes, but I asked Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, and he said not to be concerned about it. Feel free to call him to confirm that, comrade,” Zaitzev told him.
And he did, in Zaitzev’s presence. The brief call ended with a “thank you, comrade,” and then he looked up at his subordinate. “Very well, Oleg Ivan’ch, you are relieved of your duties beginning this evening. Say, while you are in Budapest . . .”
“Certainly, Andrey Vasili’yevich. You may pay me for them when I get back.” Andrey was a decent boss, who never screamed, and helped his people when asked. A pity he worked for an agency that murdered innocent people.
And then it was just a matter of cleaning up his desk, which wasn’t difficult. KGB regulations dictated that every desk be set up exactly the same way, so that a worker could switch desks without confusion, and Zaitzev’s desk was arranged exactly according to office specifications. With his pencils properly sharpened and lined up, his message log up to the moment, and all his books properly in place, he dumped his trash and walked to the men’s room. There he selected a stall, removed his brown tie, and replaced it with his striped one. He checked his watch. He was actually a little early. So Zaitzev took his time on the way out, smoked two cigarettes instead of one, and took a moment to enjoy the clear afternoon, stopping off to get a paper along the way, and, to pamper himself, six packs of Krasnopresnensky, the premium cigarette smoked by Leonid Brezhnev himself, for two rubles forty. Something nice to smoke on the train. Might as well spend his rubles now, he decided. They’d be valueless where he was going. Then he walked down to the metro station and checked the clock. The train, of course, came right on time.
FOLEY WAS IN the same place, doing the same thing in exactly the same way, his mind racing as the train slowed to a stop at this station. He felt the tiny vibration from the boarding passengers and the grunts of people bumping into one another. He straightened up to turn the page. Then the train lurched off. The engineers—or motormen, whatever the hell you called them—were always a little heavy on the throttle. A moment later, there was a presence to his left. Foley didn’t see it, but he could feel it. Two minutes later, the subway train slowed for another station. It lurched to a stop, and someone bumped into him. Foley turned slightly to see who it was.
“Excuse me, comrade,” the Rabbit said. He was wearing a blue tie with red stripes.
“No problem,” Foley responded dismissively, as his heart leapt inside his chest.
Okay, two days from now, Kiev Station. The train to Budapest. The Rabbit moved a step or two away, and that was that. The signal had been passed.
Skyrockets in flight. Foley folded his paper, and made his way to the sliding doors. The usual walk to his apartment. Mary Pat was fixing dinner.
“Like my tie? You didn’t tell me this morning.”
MP’s eyes lit up. Day after tomorrow, she realized. They’d have to get the word out, but that was just a procedural thing. She hoped Langley was ready. BEATRIX was going a little fast, but why dawdle?
“So, what’s for dinner?”
“Well, I wanted to get a steak, but I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for fried chicken today.”
“That’s okay, honey. Steak for day after tomorrow, maybe?” she asked.
“Sounds good to me. Honey, where’s Eddie?”
“Watching Transformers, of course.” She pointed to the living room.
“That’s my boy,” Ed observed, with a smile. “He knows the important stuff.” Foley kissed his wife tenderly.
“Later, tiger,” Mary Pat breathed back. But a successful operation merited a discreet celebration. Not that this one was successful yet, but it was certainly headed that way, and it was their first in Moscow. “Got the pictures?” she whispered.
He pulled them out of his jacket pocket. They were not exactly magazine-cover quality, but they did give good representations of the Rabbit and his little bunny. They didn’t know what Mrs. Rabbit looked like, but this would have to do. They’d get the shots to Nigel and Penny. One of them would cover the train station to make sure the Rabbit family got going on time.
“Ed, there’s a problem with the shower,” Mary Pat said. “The spray thingee isn’t right.”
“I’ll see if Nigel has the right tools.” Foley walked out the door and down the hall. In a few minutes, they were back, Nigel carrying his toolbox.
“Hello, Mary.” Nigel waved on his way to the bathroom. Once there, he made a fuss about opening his toolbox, then turning on the water, and now any bug the KGB might have here was jammed.
“Okay, Ed, what is it?”
Ed handed over the photos. “The Rabbit and the Bunny. We have nothing on Mrs. Rabbit yet. They’ll all be taking the one P.M. train to Budapest, day after tomorrow.”
“Kiev Station,” Haydock said, with a nod. “You’ll want me to get a picture of Mrs. Rabbit.”
“Correct.”
“Very well. I can do that.” The wheels started turning at once. As Commercial Attaché, he could come up with a cock-and-bull story to cover it, Haydock reasoned. He’d get a tame reporter to accompany him and make it look like a news story—something about tourism, perhaps. Paul Matthews of the Times would play along. Easily done. He’d have Matthews bring a photographer and take professional photos of the whole Rabbit family for London and Langley to use. And Ivan shouldn’t suspect a thing. However important the Rabbit’s information might be, the Rabbit himself was just a cipher, one of many thousands of KGB employees not important enough to be taken any note of. So tomorrow morning Haydock would call the Soviet state railroad and say that the Soviets’ sister service in Britain—which was also state-owned—was interested in how the Russians ran theirs, and so . . . yes, that would work. There was nothing the Soviets liked better than others wanting to learn from their glorious syste
m. Good for their egos. Nigel reached over to turn off the water.
“There, I think that has it fixed, Edward.”
“Thanks, pal. Any good places in Moscow to buy tools?”
“I don’t know, Ed. I’ve had these since I was a lad. Belonged to my father, you see.”
Then Foley remembered what had happened to Nigel’s father. Yeah, he wanted BEATRIX to succeed. He wanted to take every opportunity to shove a big one up the Bear’s hairy ass. “How’s Penny?”
“The baby hasn’t dropped yet. So at least another week, probably more. Strictly speaking, she isn’t due for another three weeks, but—”
“But the docs never get that one right, buddy. Never,” Foley told his friend. “Best advice, stay close. When you planning to fly home?”
“Ten days should be about right, the embassy physician tells us. It’s only a two-hour flight, after all.”
“Your doc is an optimist, pal. These things never go according to plan. I don’t suppose you want a little Englishman to be born in Moscow, eh?”
“No, Edward, we don’t.”
“Well, keep Penny off the trampoline,” Foley suggested with a wink.
“Yes, I will do that, Ed.” American humor could be rather crass, he thought.
This could be interesting, Foley thought, walking his friend to the door. He’d always thought Brit children were born at the age of five and sent immediately off to boarding school. Did they raise them the same way Americans did? He’d have to see.
THE BODY OF Owen Williams was never collected—it turned out he had no immediate family, and his ex-wife had no interest in him at all, especially dead. The local police, on receipt of a telex from Chief Superintendent Patrick Nolan of London’s Metropolitan Police, transferred the body to an aluminum casket, which was loaded in a police van and driven south toward London. But not quite. The van stopped at a preselected location, and the aluminum box was transferred to another, unmarked, van for the drive into the city. It ended up in a mortuary in the Swiss Cottage district of north London.
The body was not in very good shape, and, since it had not yet seen a mortician, it had also not been treated in any way. The unburned underside was a blue-crimson shade of postmortem lividity. Once the heart stops, the blood is pulled by gravity to the lower regions of the body—in this case, the back—where, lacking oxygen, it tends to turn the caucasian body a pale bluish color, leaving the upper side with a disagreeable ivory pallor. The mortician here was a civilian who occasionally contracted specialty work to the Secret Intelligence Service. Along with a forensic pathologist, he examined the body for anything unusual. The worst thing was the smell of roasted human meat, but their noses were covered with surgical masks to attenuate the odor.
“Tattoo, underside of the forearm, partially but not entirely burned off,” the mortician reported.
“Very well.” The pathologist lit the flame of a propane blowtorch and applied it to the arm, burning all evidence of the tattoo off the body. “Anything else, William?” he asked a couple minutes later.
“Nothing I can see. The upper body is well charred. Hair is mainly gone”—the smell of burned human hair is particularly vile—“and one ear nearly burned off. I presume this chap was dead before he burned.”
“Ought to have been,” the pathologist said. “The blood gasses had the CO well spiked into lethal range. I doubt this poor bugger felt a thing.” Then he burned off the fingerprints, lingering to sear both hands with the torch so that it would not appear to have been a deliberate mutilation of the body.
“There,” the pathologist said finally. “If there’s a way to identify this body, I do not know what it is.”
“Freeze it now?” the undertaker asked.
“No, I don’t think so. If we chill it down to, oh, two or three degrees Celsius, no noticeable decomposition ought to take place.”
“Dry ice, then.”
“Yes. The metal casket is well insulated and it seals hermetically. Dry ice doesn’t melt, you know. It goes directly from a solid to a gas. Now we need to get it dressed.” The doctor had brought the underclothing with him. None of it was British in origin, and all of it was badly damaged by fire. All in all, it was a distasteful job, but one that pathologists and morticians get used to very early in their professions. It was just a different way of thinking for a different kind of job. But this was unusually gruesome, even for these two. Both would have an extra drink before turning in that night. When they finished, the aluminum box was reloaded on the van and driven to Century House. There would be a note on Sir Basil’s desk in the morning to let him know that Rabbit A was ready for his last flight.
LATER THAT NIGHT and three thousand miles away, in Boston, Massachusetts, there was a gas explosion on the second floor of a two-story frame dwelling overlooking the harbor. Three people were there when it happened. The two adults were not married, but both were drunk, and the woman’s four-year-old daughter—not related to the male resident—was already in bed. The fire spread quickly, too quickly for the two adults to respond to it through their intoxication. The three deaths didn’t take long, all of them from smoke inhalation rather than incineration. The Boston Fire Department responded within ten minutes, and their search-and-rescue ladder men battled their way through the flames under cover of two hose streams, found the bodies, and dragged them out, but they knew that they’d been too late again. The captain of the responding company could tell almost instantly what had gone wrong. There had been a gas leak in the kitchen from the old stove that the landlord hadn’t wanted to replace, and so three people had died of his parsimony. (He’d gladly collect the insurance check, of course, and say how sorry he was about the tragic incident.) This was not the first such case. It wouldn’t be the last, either, and so he and his men would have some nightmares about the three bodies, especially the little girl’s. But that just went with the job.
The story was early enough to make the eleven o’clock news on the rule that “If it bleeds, it leads.” The Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Boston field division was up and watching, actually waiting for coverage of the baseball playoffs—he’d been at an official dinner and missed the live broadcast on NBC—and saw the story and instantly remembered the lunatic telex he’d gotten earlier in the day. That caused a curse to be muttered and a phone to be lifted.
“FBI,” said the young agent guarding the phones when he picked up.
“Get Johnny up,” the SAC ordered. “A family got burned up in a fire on Hester Street. He’ll know what to do. Have him call me at home if he has to.”
“Yes, sir.” And that was that, except for Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Tyler, who’d been reading a book in his bed—a native of South Carolina, he preferred college football to professional baseball—when the phone rang. He managed to grumble on the way to the bathroom, then collected his side arm and car keys for the ride south. He’d seen the telex from Washington, too, and wondered what sort of drugs Emil Jacobs was taking, but his was not to reason why.
NOT TOO LONG after that, but five time zones to the east, Jack Ryan rolled out of bed, got his paper, and switched on the TV. CNN also carried the fire story from Boston—it was a slow news night at home—and he breathed a quiet prayer for the victims of the fire, followed by speculation about the gas pipe connection in his own stove. His house, though, was a lot newer than the standing lumberyard that defined a house in south Boston. When they went, they went big, and they went fast. Too fast for those people to get out, evidently. He remembered his father often saying how much he respected firemen, people who ran into burning buildings instead of away from them. The worst part of the job had to be what they found unmoving on the inside. He shook his head as he opened his morning paper and reached for his coffee, while his physician wife saw the tail end of the fire story and thought her own thoughts. She remembered treating burn victims in her third year of medical school and the horrid screams that went with debriding burned tissue off the underlying wounds, and there
wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it. But those people in Boston were dead now, and that was that. She didn’t like it, but she’d seen a lot of death, because sometimes the Bad Guy won, and that was just how things worked. It was not a pleasant thought for a parent, especially since the little girl in Boston had been Sally’s age and now would never get older. She sighed. At least she’d be doing some surgery that morning, something that really made a difference with somebody’s health.
SIR BASIL CHARLESTON lived in an expensive townhouse in London’s posh Belgravia district south of Knightsbridge. A widower whose grown children had long since moved away, he was accustomed to living alone, though he had a discreet security detail in attendance at all times. He also had a maid service which came in three times a week to straighten up, though he didn’t bother with a cook, preferring to dine out or even fix small meals for himself. He had, of course, the usual accoutrements of a king spook: three different sorts of secure phones, a secure telex, and a new secure fax machine. There was no live-in secretary, but when the office was busy and he wasn’t there, a courier service kept him apprised of the printed material circulating in Century House. Indeed, since he had to assume that the “opposition” kept an eye on his home, he deemed it smarter to remain at home in time of crisis, the better to project the image of calmness. It really didn’t matter. He was firmly tied to the SIS by an electronic umbilical cord.
And so it was this morning. Someone at Century House had decided to let him know that SIS had an adult male body to use in Operation BEATRIX: just the sort of thing he needed with breakfast, Basil noted, with a twisted expression. They needed three, though, one of them a female child, which was really not something to contemplate with his morning tea and Scottish oatmeal.
However, it was hard not to get excited about this BEATRIX operation. If their Rabbit was speaking the truth—not all of them did—this chap would have all manner of useful information in his head. The most useful of all, of course, would be if he could identify Soviet agents within Her Majesty’s government. That was properly the job of the Security Service—erroneously called MI-5—but the two agencies cooperated closely, more closely than CIA and FBI did in America, or so it appeared to Charleston. Sir Basil and his people had long suspected a high-level leak somewhere in the Foreign Office, but they’d been unable to close in on him or her. So, if they got their Rabbit out—it wasn’t done until it was done, he reminded himself—that was certainly one question his people would be asking in the safe house they used outside of Taunton in the rolling hills of Somerset.
