by Tom Clancy
“Good evening, Oleg Ivan’ch,” she said quietly, handling a parka meant for a girl of three or four.
“Mary, is it?”
“That is correct. Tell me, do you have any vacation days available to you?”
“Yes, I do. Two weeks of it, in fact.”
“And you told me that your wife likes classical music?”
“That is also correct.”
“There is a fine conductor. His name is Jozsef Rozsa. He will start performing in the main concert hall in Budapest on Sunday evening. The best hotel for you to check in to is the Astoria. It is a short distance from the train station, and is popular with Soviet guests. Tell all your friends what you are doing. Arrange to buy them things in Budapest. Do everything that a Soviet citizen does. We will handle the rest,” she assured him.
“All of us,” Zaitzev reminded her. “All of us come out?”
“Of course, Oleg. Your little zaichik will see many wonders in America, and the winters are not so fierce as they are here,” MP added.
“We Russians enjoy our winters,” he pointed out, with a little amour propre.
“In that case, you will be able to live in an area as cold as Moscow. And if you desire warm weather in February, you can drive or fly to Florida and relax on a sunny beach.”
“You are tourist agent, Mary?” the Rabbit asked.
“For you, Oleg, I am just that. Are you comfortable passing information to my husband on the metro?”
“Yes.”
You shouldn’t be, Mary Pat thought. “What is your best necktie?”
“A blue one with red stripes.”
“Very well, wear that one two days before you take the train to Budapest. Bump into him and apologize, and we will know. Two days before you leave Moscow, wear your blue-striped tie and bump into him on the metro,” she repeated. You had to be careful doing this. People could make the goddamnedest mistakes in the simplest of matters, even when—no, especially when—their lives were on the line. That was why she was making it as easy as possible. Only one thing to remember. Only one thing to do.
“Da, I can do that easily.”
Optimistic bastard, aren’t you? “Excellent. Please be very careful, Oleg Ivan’ch.” And with that, she went on her way. But then she stopped five or six meters away and turned. In her purse was a Minox camera. She shot five frames, and then walked away.
* * *
“Well, didn’t you see anything worth getting?” her husband asked, out in their used Mercedes 280.
“No, nothing really worthwhile. Maybe we should try a trip up to Helsinki to get some winter stuff,” she suggested. “You know, take the train, like. Ought to be fun to do it that way. Eddie should like it.”
The Station Chief’s eyebrow went up. Probably better to take the train, he thought. Doesn’t look rushed or forced. Carry lots of suitcases, half of them empty to bring back all the shit you’ll buy there with your Comecon rubles, Ed Foley thought. Except you don’t come back… and if Langley and London get their shit together, maybe we can make it a real home-run ball…
“Home, honey?” Foley asked. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if KGB didn’t have their home and car bugged, and they were doing all this secret-agent crap for no reason at all? he thought idly. Well, at worst, it was good practice, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, we’ve done enough for one day.”
* * *
“Bloody hell,” Basil Charleston breathed. He lifted his phone and punched three buttons.
“Yes, sir?” Kingshot asked, coming into the room.
“This.” C handed the dispatch across.
“Shit,” Kingshot breathed.
Sir Basil managed a smile. “It’s always the obvious, simple things, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Even so, does make one feel rather thick,” he admitted. “A house fire. Works better than what we originally thought.”
“Well, something to remember. How many house fires do we have in London, Alan?”
“Sir Basil, I have not a clue,” the most senior field spook in the SIS admitted. “But find out I shall.”
“Get this to your friend Nolan as well.”
“Tomorrow morning, sir,” Kingshot promised. “At least it improves our chances. Are CIA working on this as well?”
“Yes.”
* * *
As was the FBI. Director Emil Jacobs had heard his share of oddball requests from the folks on “the other side of the river,” as CIA was sometimes called in official Washington. But this was positively gruesome. He lifted his phone and punched his direct line to the DCI.
“There’s a good reason for this, I presume, Arthur?” he asked without preamble.
“Not over the phone, Emil, but yes.”
“Three Caucasians, one male in his early thirties, one female same age, and a little girl age three or four,” Jacobs said, reading it off the hand-delivered note from Langley. “My field agents will think the Director’s slipped a major gear, Arthur. We’d probably be better off asking local police forces for assistance—”
“But—”
“Yes, I know, it would leak too quickly. Okay, I can send a message to all my SACs and have them check their morning papers, but it won’t be easy to keep something like this from leaking out. “
“Emil, I understand that. We’re trying to get help from the Brits on this as well. Not the sort of thing you can just whistle up, I know. All I can say is that it’s very important, Emil.”
“You due on The Hill anytime soon?”
“House Intelligence Committee tomorrow at ten. Budget stuff,” Moore explained. Congress was always going after that information, and Moore always had to defend his agency from people on The Hill, who would just as soon cut CIA off at the ankles—so that they could complain about “intelligence failures” later on, of course.
“Okay, can you stop off here on the way? I gotta hear this cock-and-bull story,” Jacobs announced.
“Eight-forty or so?”
“Works for me, Arthur.”
“See you then,” Moore promised.
Director Jacobs replaced his phone, wondering what could be so goddamned important as to request the Federal Bureau of Investigation to play grave robber.
* * *
On the metro home, after buying his little zaichik a white parka with red and green flowers on it, Zaitzev thought over his strategy. When would he tell Irina about their impromptu vacation? If he sprang it on her as a surprise, there would be one sort of problem—Irina would worry about her accounting job at GUM, but the office was, by her account, so loosely run that they’d hardly notice a missing body. But if he did give her too much warning, there would be another problem—she’d try to micromanage everything, like every wife in the known world, since, in her mind, he was unfitted to figure out anything. That was rather musing, Oleg Ivan’ch thought, given the current circumstances.
So, then, no, he would not tell her ahead of time, but instead spring this trip on her as a surprise, and use this Hungarian conductor as the excuse. Then the big surprise would come in Budapest. He wondered how she’d react to that piece of news. Perhaps not well, but she was a Russian wife, trained and educated to accept the orders of her man, which, all Russian men thought, was as it should be.
Svetlana loved riding the metro. That was the thing with little children, Oleg had learned. To them everything was an adventure to take in with their wide children’s eyes, even something as routine as riding the underground train. She didn’t walk or run. She pranced, like a puppy—or like a bunny, her father thought, smiling down at her. Would his little zaichik find better adventures in the West?
Probably so … if I get her there alive, Zaitzev reminded himself. There was danger involved, but somehow his fear was not for himself, but for his daughter. How odd that was. Or was it? He didn’t know anymore. He knew that he had a mission of sorts, and that was all that he actually saw before him. The rest of it was just a collection of intermediate steps, but at the end of the steps was
a bright, shining light, and that was all he could really see. It was very strange how the light had grown brighter and brighter since his first doubts about Operation -666 until now, when it occupied all his mental eyes could see. Like a moth drawn to a light, he kept circling in closer and closer, and all he could really hope was that the light was not a flame that would kill him.
“Here, Papa!” Svetlana said, recognizing their stop, taking his hand, and dragging him forward to the sliding doors. A minute later, she jumped on the moving steps of the escalator, excited by that ride as well. His child was like an American adult—or how Russians supposed them to be, always seeing opportunities and possibilities and the fun to be had, instead of the dangers and threats that careful, sober Soviet citizens saw everywhere. But if Americans were so foolish, why were Soviets always trying—and failing—to catch up with them? Was America really right where the USSR was so often wrong? It was a deeper question that he’d scarcely considered. All he knew of America was the obvious propaganda he saw every night on television or read about in the official State newspapers. He knew that had to be wrong, but his knowledge was unbalanced, since he did not really know true information. And so his leap to the West was fundamentally a leap of faith. If his country was so wrong, then the alternative superpower had to be right. It was a big, long, and dangerous leap, he thought, walking down the sidewalk and holding his little girl’s hand. He told himself that he ought to be more fearful.
But it was too late to be frightened, and turning back would have been as harmful to him as going forward. Above everything else, it was a question of who would destroy him—his country or himself—if he failed to carry out his mission. And on the other side, would America reward him for trying to do what he deemed the right thing? It seemed that he was like Lenin and the other revolutionary heroes: He saw something that was objectively wrong, and he was going to try to prevent it. Why? Because he had to. He had to trust that his country’s enemies would see right and wrong as he did. Would they? While the American President had denounced his nation as the focus of all the evil in the world, his country said much the same thing of America. Who was right? Who was wrong? But it was his country and his employer that was conspiring to murder an innocent man, and that was as far as he could see into the right/wrong question.
As Oleg and Svetlana turned left to go into their apartment building, he recognized one final time that his course was set. He could not change it, but could only toss the dice and wait to see how they came up.
And where would his daughter grow up? That also rested on the flying dice.
* * *
It happened first in York, the largest city in northern England. Fire-safety engineers tell everyone who will listen that the least important thing about fires is what causes them to start, because they always start for the same reasons. In this case, it was the one that firefighters most hate to discover. Owen Williams, after a friendly night at his favorite pub, The Brown Lion, managed to down six pints of dark beer, which, added to a lengthy and tiring day working his job as a carpenter, had made him rather sleepy by the time he got to his third-floor flat, but that didn’t stop him from switching on the TV in his bedroom and lighting a final cigarette of the day. His head propped up on a plumped pillow, he took a few puffs before fading out from the alcohol and the day’s hard work. When that happened, his hand relaxed, and the cigarette fell onto the bedclothes. There it smoldered for about ten minutes before the white cotton sheets started to burn. Since Williams was unmarried—his wife had divorced him a year before—there was no one nearby to take note of the acrid, evil smell, and gradually the smoke wafted up to the ceiling as the low-level fire progressively consumed the bedclothes and then the mattress.
People rarely die from fire, and neither did Owen Williams. Instead, he started breathing in the smoke. Smoke—engineers often use the term “fire gas”—mainly consists of hot air, carbon monoxide, and soot particles, which are unburned material from the fire’s fuel. Of these, the carbon monoxide is often the deadliest component, since it forms a bond with the red blood cells. This bond is actually stronger than the bond that hemoglobin forms with the free oxygen that the blood conveys to the various parts of the human body. The overall effect on the human consciousness is rather like that of alcohol—euphoria, like being pleasantly drunk, followed by unconsciousness and, if it goes too far, as in this case, death from oxygen starvation of the brain. And so, with a fire all around him, Owen Williams never woke, only fell deeper and deeper into a sleep that took him peacefully into eternity at the age of thirty-two years.
It wasn’t until three hours later that a shift worker who lived on the same floor came home from work and noticed a smell in the third-floor corridor that lit up his internal alarm lights. He pounded on the door, and, getting no response, ran to his own flat and dialed 999.
There was a firehouse only six blocks away, and there, as with any other such house in the world, the firefighters rolled out of their military-style single beds, pulled on their boots and their turn-out coats, slid down the brass rail to the apparatus floor, punched the button to lift the automatic doors, and raced out on the street in their Dennis pumper, followed by a ladder truck. The drivers both knew the streets as well as any taxi driver and arrived at the apartment building less than ten minutes after their bells had chimed them awake. The pumper crew halted their vehicle, and two men dragged the draft hoses to the corner fire hydrant, charging the line in a skillful and well-practiced drill. The ladder men, whose primary job was search and rescue, raced inside to find that the concerned citizen who’d called in the alarm had already pounded on every door on the third floor and gotten his neighbors awake and out of their apartments. He pointed the lead fireman to the correct door, and that burly individual knocked it down with two powerful swings of his axe. He was greeted by a dense cloud of black smoke, the smell of which got past his air mask and immediately announced “mattress” to his experienced mind. This was followed by a quick prayer that they’d gotten here in time, and then instant dread that they had not. Everything, including the time of day, was against them in the dark, early morning. He ran into the back bedroom, smashed out the windows with his steel axe to vent the smoke outside, and then turned to see what he’d seen thirty or more times before—a human form, nearly hidden by the smoke and not moving. By then, two more of his colleagues were in the room. They dragged Owen Williams out into the corridor.
“Oh, shit!” one of them observed. The senior paramedic on the crew put an oxygen mask on the colorless face and started hitting the button to force pure oxygen into the lungs, and a second man began pounding on the victim’s chest to get his heart restarted while, behind them, the enginemen snaked a two-and-a-half-inch hose into the flat and started spraying water.
All in all, it was a textbook exercise. The fire was snuffed out in less than three minutes. Soon thereafter, the smoke had largely cleared, and the firemen took off their protective air masks. But, out in the corridor, Owen Williams showed not a flicker of life. The rule was that nobody was dead until a physician said so, and so they carried the body like a large and heavy limp rag to the white ambulance sitting on the street. The paramedic crew had their own battle drill, and they followed it to the letter, first putting the body on their gurney, then checking his eyes, then his airway—it was clear—and using their ventilator to get more oxygen into him, plus more CPR to get the heart moving. The peripheral burns would have to wait. The first thing to be done was to get the heart beating and lungs breathing, as the driver pulled out onto the darkened streets for Queen Victoria Hospital, just more than a mile away.
But by the time they got there, the paramedics in the back knew that it was just a waste of their highly valuable time. The casualty-receiving area was ready for them. The driver reversed direction and backed in, the rear doors were wrenched open, and the gurney was wheeled out, with a young doctor observing but not touching anything yet.
“Smoke inhalation,” the fireman-paramedic
said, on coming in the swinging doors. “Severe carbon monoxide intoxication.” The extensive but mainly superficial burns could wait for the moment.
“How long?” the ER doc asked at once.
“Don’t know. It does not look good, doctor. CO poisoning, eyes fixed and dilated, fingernails red, no response to CPR or oxygen as yet,” the paramedic reported.
The medics all tried. You don’t just kiss off the life of a man in his early thirties, but an hour later it was clear that Owen Williams would not open his blue eyes ever again, and, on the doctor’s command, lifesaving efforts were stopped and a time of death announced, to be typed in on the death certificate. The police were there, also, of course. They mostly chatted with the firemen until the cause of death was established. The blood chemistry was taken—they’d drawn blood immediately to check blood gasses—and after fifteen minutes, the lab reported that the level of carbon monoxide was 39 percent, deep into the lethal range. He’d been dead before the firemen had rolled off their cots. And that was that.
It was the police rather than the firemen who took it from there. A man had died, and it had to be reported up the chain of command.
That chain ended in London in the steel-and-glass building that was New Scotland Yard, with its revolving triangular sign that made tourists think that the name of the London police force was, in fact, Scotland Yard, when actually that had been a street name years before for the old headquarters building. There, a Post-it note on a teletype machine announced that Chief Superintendent Nolan of Special Branch wanted to be informed at once of any death by fire or accident, and the teletype operator lifted a phone and called the appropriate number.
That number was to the Special Branch watch officer, who asked a few questions, then called York for further information. Then it was his job to awaken “Tiny” Nolan just after four in the morning.
“Very well,” the Chief Superintendent said, after collecting himself. “Tell them to do nothing whatsoever with the body—nothing at all. Make sure they understand, nothing at all.”
