“Right, let’s be off,” Lucas said, starting his engine and pulling off.
Whatever sort of spook Vic Lucas was, he must have thought himself Stirling Moss’s smarter brother. The car rocketed down the road into the Yugoslavian darkness.
“So, how has your night been, Jack?”
“Eventful,” Ryan answered, making sure his seat belt was properly fastened.
The countryside here was better lit and the road better engineered and maintained, or so it seemed, flashing by at what felt like seventy-five miles per hour, rather fast for a strange road in the dark. Robby Jackson drove like this, but Robby was a fighter pilot, and therefore invincible while at the controls of any transportation platform. This Vic Lucas must have felt the same way, calmly looking forward and turning the wheel in short, sharp increments. In the back, Oleg was still tense, and Irina still trying to come to terms with some new and incomprehensible reality, while their little daughter continued to sleep like a diminutive angel. Ryan was chain-smoking. It seemed to help somewhat, though if Cathy smelled it on his breath there would be hell to pay. Well, she’d just have to understand, Jack thought, watching telephone poles flash by the car like fence pickets. He was doing Uncle Sam’s business.
Then Ryan saw a police car sitting by the side of the road, its officers sipping coffee or sleeping through their watch.
“Not to worry,” Lucas said. “Diplomatic tags. I am the senior political counselor at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy. And you good people are my guests.”
“You say so, man. How much longer?”
“Half an hour, roughly. Traffic’s been very kind to us so far. Not much truck traffic. This road can be crowded, even late at night with cross-border trade. That Kovacs chap’s been working with us for years. I could make quite a good living in partnership with him. He often brings those Hungarian tape machines this way. They’re decent machines, and they’re giving the bloody things away, what with the labor costs in Hungary. Surprising they don’t try to sell them in the West, though I expect they’d have to pay the Japanese for the patent infringements. Not too scrupulous about such things on the other side of the line, you see.” Lucas took another high-speed turn.
“Jesus, guy, how fast do you go in daylight?”
“Not much faster than this. Good night vision, you see, but the suspension on this car slows me down. American design, you see. Too soft for proper handling.”
“So buy a Corvette. Friend of mine has one.”
“Lovely things, but made out of plastic.” Lucas shook his head and reached for a cigar. Probably a Cuban one, Ryan was sure. They loved the things in England.
Half an hour later, Lucas congratulated himself. “There it is. Just on time.”
Airports are airports all over the world. The same architect probably designed them all, Ryan thought. The only differences were the signs for the rest rooms. In England they called them toilets, which had always struck him as a little crude in an otherwise gentle country. Then he got a surprise. Instead of driving to the terminal, Lucas took the path through the open gate right onto the flight line.
“I have an arrangement with the airport manager,” he explained. “He likes single malts.” Still and all, Lucas stayed on the yellow-lined car path, right to a lonely aircraft jetway with an airliner parked next to it. “Here we are,” the Brit spook announced.
They all stepped out of the car, this time with Mrs. Rabbit holding the Bunny. Lucas led them up the exterior stairs into the jetway’s control booth, and from there right into the aircraft’s open door.
The captain, hatless but wearing four stripes on his shoulders, was standing right there. “You’re Mr. Lucas?”
“That is correct, Captain Rogers. And here are your extra passengers.” He pointed to Ryan and the Rabbit family.
“Excellent.” Captain Rogers turned to his lead stew. “We can board the aircraft now.”
The second-ranking flight attendant took them to the four front-row first-class seats, where Ryan was singularly surprised to be happy belting himself in to 1-B, the aisle seat just behind the front bulkhead. He watched thirty or so working-class passengers come aboard after sunning themselves on the Dalmatian Coast—a favorite for Brits of late—none of them looking very happy for the three-hour delay on what was already supposed to be the day’s last flight to Manchester. Things happened quickly after that. He heard both engines start up, and then the BAC-111—the British counterpart to the Douglas DC-9—backed away from the jetway and taxied out on the ramp.
“What now?” Oleg asked, in what was almost a normal voice.
“We fly to England,” Ryan replied. “Two hours or so, I guess, and we’ll be there.”
“So easy?”
“You think this was easy?” Ryan asked, with no small amount of incredulity in his voice. Then the intercom turned on.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Rogers speaking. I am glad to say that we finally got the electronic problem repaired. Thank you ever so much for your patience, and after we lift off, the drinks will be free to all passengers.” That evoked a cheer from the back of the aircraft. “For the moment, please pay attention to the flight attendants for your safety message.”
Put your seat belts on, dummies, and they work like this, for those of you stupid enough not to notice that you have the fucking things in your personal automobiles, too. And then in three more minutes the British Midlands airliner clawed its way into the sky.
As promised, before they’d gotten to ten thousand feet, the no-smoking light dinged off and the drink cart arrived. The Russian asked for vodka and got three miniatures of Finlandia. Ryan got himself a glass of wine and the promise of more. He wouldn’t sleep on this flight, but he wouldn’t worry as much as usual, either. He was leaving the communist world behind at five hundred miles per hour, and that was probably the best way to do it.
Oleg Ivan’ch, he saw, drank vodka as though it were water after a hot day of cutting the grass. His wife, over in 1-C, was doing the same. Ryan felt positively virtuous sipping gently at his French wine.
“SIGNAL IN FROM BASIL,” Bostock reported over the phone. “The Rabbit is in the air. ETA Manchester in ninety minutes.”
“Great,” Judge Moore breathed, relieved as always when a black operation worked out as planned. Better still, they’d run it without Bob Ritter, who, though a good man, was not entirely indispensable.
“Three more days and we can debrief him,” Bostock said next. “The nice house out by Winchester?”
“Yeah, we’ll see if he likes horse country.” The house even had a Steinway piano for Mrs. Rabbit to play and lots of green for the kid to run around on.
ALAN KINGSHOT WAS just pulling into the parking area at the Manchester airport, along with two subordinates. There would be a large back Daimler automobile to take the arriving defectors out to Somerset in the morning. He hoped they didn’t mind driving. It would be nearly a two-hour drive. For the moment, they’d be quartering at a nice country house just a few minutes from the airport. They’d probably done quite enough traveling for the moment, with still more to come before the end of the week. But then he started thinking about it. Might that be too hard on them? The question gave him something to ponder at one of the airport’s bars.
RYAN WAS PRETTY well potted. Maybe alcohol interacted with anxiety, he thought, taking a moment to go to the forward rest room on the airliner, and feeling better when he got back and was strapped in. He almost never took his seat belt off. The food served was just sandwiches—English ones, with their unnatural affection for a weed called watercress. What he really wanted now was a good corned beef, but the Brits didn’t even know what corned beef was, thinking it the canned junk that looked like dog food to most Americans. In fact, the Brits probably fed better stuff to their dogs, as enthralled as they were with their pets. The lights passing underneath the airliner proved that they were overflying Western Europe. The Eastern part was never well lit, as he’d learned coming south from Bud
apest.
BUT ZAITZEV wasn’t sure. What if this was a very elaborate ruse to get him to spill the beans? What if the Second Chief Directorate had staged a huge maskirovka village for his brief benefit?
“Ryan?”
Jack turned. “Yes?”
“What will I see in England when we get there?”
“I don’t know what the plan is after we get to Manchester,” Ryan reported.
“You are CIA?” the Rabbit asked again.
“Yes.” Jack nodded.
“How can I be sure of this?”
“Well . . .” Ryan fished out his wallet. “Here are my driver’s license, credit cards, some cash. My passport is fake, of course. I’m an American, but they fixed me up with a British one. Oh,” Ryan realized, “you’re worried that this is all faked?”
“How can I be sure?”
“My friend, in less than an hour, you will be certain it is not. Here—” He opened his wallet again. “This is my wife, my daughter, and our new son. My address at home—in America, that is—is here on my driver’s license, 5000 Peregrine Cliff Road, Anne Arundel County, Maryland. That is right on the Chesapeake Bay. It takes me about an hour to drive from there to CIA Headquarters at Langley. My wife is an eye surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. It is world-famous. You must have heard of it.”
Zaitzev just shook his head.
“Well, a couple years ago, three docs from Hopkins fixed the eyes of Mikhail Suslov. I understand he just died. His replacement, we think, will be Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov. We know a little about him, but not enough. In fact, we don’t know enough about Yuriy Vladimirovich.”
“What do you not know?”
“Is he married? We’ve never seen a picture of his wife, if any.”
“Yes, everyone knows this. His wife is Tatiana, elegant woman, my wife says she has noble features. But no children for them,” Oleg concluded.
Well, there’s factoid #1 from the Rabbit, Ryan thought.
“How is it possible that you do not know this?” Zaitzev demanded.
“Oleg Ivan’ch, there are many things we do not know about the Soviet Union,” Jack admitted. “Some are important, and some are not.”
“Is this true?”
“Yes, it is.”
Something rattled loose in Zaitzev’s head. “You say your name Ryan?”
“That’s right.”
“Your father policeman?”
“How did you know that?” Ryan asked in some surprise.
“We have small dossier on you. Washington rezidentura do it. Your family attacked by hooligans, yes?”
“Correct.” KGB is interested in me, eh? Jack thought. “Terrorists, they tried to kill me and my family. My son was born that night.”
“And you join CIA after that?”
“Again, yes—officially, anyway. I’ve done work for the Agency for several years.” Then curiosity took full hold. “What does my dossier say about me?”
“It say you are rich fool. You were officer in naval infantry, and your wife is rich and you marry her for that reason. To get more money for self.”
So, even the KGB is a prisoner of its own political prejudices, Jack thought. Interesting.
“I am not poor,” Jack told the Rabbit. “But I married my wife for love, not money. Only a fool does that.”
“How many capitalists are fools?”
Ryan had himself a good laugh. “A lot more than you might think. You do not need to be very smart in America to become rich.” New York and Washington in particular were full of rich idiots, but Ryan thought the Rabbit needed a little while before he learned that lesson. “Who did the dossier on me?”
“Reporter in Washington rezidentura of Izvestia is junior KGB officer. He do it last summer.”
“And how did you come to know about it?”
“His dispatch come to my desk, and I forward to America-Canada Institute—is KGB office. You know that, yes?”
“Yes,” Jack confirmed. “That is one we do know.” That was when his ears popped. The airliner was descending. Ryan gunned down the last of his third white wine and told himself it would all be over in a few minutes. One thing he’d learned from Operation BEATRIX: This field work wasn’t for him.
The no-smoking sign dinged back on. Ryan brought his chair to its full upright position, and then the lights of Manchester appeared through the windows, the car headlights and the airport fence, and in a few more seconds . . . thump, the wheels touched down in Merry Old England. It might not be the same as America, but for the moment it would do.
Oleg, he saw, had his face against the window, checking out the tail colors of the aircraft. There were too many for this to be a Soviet Air Force base and a huge maskirovka. He visibly started to relax.
“We welcome you to Manchester,” the pilot said over the intercom. “The time is three-forty, and the temperature outside is fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. We appreciate your patience earlier today, and we hope to see you again soon in British Midlands Airways.”
Yeah, Jack thought. In your dreams, skipper.
Ryan sat and waited as the aircraft taxied to the international-arrivals area. A truck-borne stairway came to the front door, which the lead stew duly opened. Ryan and the Rabbit family were first off and down the steps, where they were guided to some cars instead of the waiting transfer bus.
Alan Kingshot was there to take his hand. “How was it, Jack?”
“Just like a trip to Disney World,” Ryan answered, without a trace of audible irony in his voice.
“Right. Let’s get you all loaded and off to a comfortable place.”
“Works for me, pal. What is it, quarter of three?” Ryan hadn’t changed his watch back yet. Britain was an hour behind the rest of Europe.
“That’s right,” the field spook confirmed.
“Damn,” Jack reacted. Too damned late to call home and tell Cathy he was back. But, then, he wasn’t really back. Now he had to play CIA representative for the first interview of the Red Rabbit. Probably Sir Basil had him doing this because he was too junior to be very effective. Well, maybe he’d show his British host just how dumb he was, Ryan growled to himself. But first it was time for sleep. Stress, he’d learned, was about as tiring as jogging—just harder on the heart.
BACK IN BUDAPEST, the three bodies were at the city morgue, an institution as depressing behind the Iron Curtain as in front of it. When Zaitzev’s identity as a Russian citizen had been confirmed, a call had been made to the Soviet Embassy, where it was speedily established that the man in question was a KGB officer. That generated interest in the rezidentura, just across the street from the hotel where he’d ostensibly died, and more telephone calls were made.
Before five in the morning, Professor Zoltán Bíró was awakened in his bed by the AVH. Bíró was professor of pathology at the Ignaz Semmelweis Medical College. Named for one of the fathers of the germ theory that had transformed the science of medicine in the nineteenth century, it remained a good one, even attracting students from West Germany, none of whom would attend the postmortem examinations ordered by the country’s Belügyminisztérium, which would also be attended by the physician-in-residence at the Soviet Embassy.
The first done would be the adult male. Technicians took blood samples from all three bodies for analysis in the adjacent laboratory.
“This is the body of a male Caucasian, approximately thirty-five years of age, length approximately one hundred seventy-five centimeters, weight approximately seventy-six kilograms. Color of hair cannot be determined due to extensive charring from a domestic fire. Initial impression is death by fire—more probably from carbon monoxide intoxication, as the body shows no evidence of death throes.” Then the dissection began with the classical Y incision to open the body cavity for viewing of the internal organs.
He was examining the heart—unremarkable—when the lab reports came in.
“Professor Bíró, carbon monoxide in all three blood samples are well into lethal
range,” the voice on the speaker said, giving the exact numbers.
Bíró looked over at his Russian colleague. “Anything else you need? I can do a full postmortem on all three victims here, but the cause of death is determined. This man was not shot. We will do fuller blood-chemistry checks, of course, but it’s unlikely that they were poisoned, and there is clearly no bullet wound or other penetrating trauma in this man. They were all killed by fire. I will send you the full laboratory report this afternoon.” Bíró let out a long breath. “A kurva életbe!” he concluded with a popular Magyar epithet.
“Such a pretty little girl,” the Russian internist observed. Zaitzev’s wallet had somehow survived the fire, along with its family photos. The picture of Svetlana had been particularly engaging.
“Death is never sentimental, my friend,” Bíró told him. As a pathologist, he knew that fact all too well.
“Very well. Thank you, Comrade Professor.” And the Russian took his leave, already thinking through his official report to Moscow.
CHAPTER 29
REVELATION
THE SAFE HOUSE WAS palatial, the country home of somebody with both money and taste, built in the previous century by the look of it, with stucco and the sort of heavy oaken timbers used to build ships like HMS Victory once upon a time. But landlocked, it was about as far from blue water as one could get on this island kingdom.
Evidently, Alan Kingshot knew it well enough, since he drove them there and then got them settled inside. The two-person staff that ran the place looked like cops to Ryan, probably married and retired from the Police Force of the Metropolis, as the London Constabulary was officially known. They kindly escorted their new guests to a rather nice suite of rooms. Irina Zaitzev’s eyes were agog at the accommodations, which were impressive even by Ryan’s standards. All Oleg Ivanovich did was set his shaving kit in the bathroom, strip off his clothes, and collapse onto the bed, where alcohol-aided sleep proved to be less than five minutes away.