Red Rabbit Read online

  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.

  “NOT GOING TO work today?” Irina asked her husband. He ought to have left for the office by now, surely.

  “No, and I have a surprise for you,” Oleg announced.

  “What is that?”

  “We’re going to Budapest tomorrow.”

  That snapped her head around. “What?”

  “I decided to take my vacation days, and there’s a new conductor in Budapest now, Jozsef Rozsa. I knew you liked classical music, and I decided to take you and zaichik there, dear.”

  “Oh,” was all she had to say. “But what about my job at GUM?”

  “Can’t you get free of that?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose,” Irina admitted. “But why Budapest?”

  “Well, the music, and we can buy some things there. I have a list of items to get for people at The Centre,” he told her.

  “Ah, yes . . . we can get some nice things for Svetlana,” she thought out loud on reflection. Working at GUM, she knew what was available in Hungary that she’d never get in Moscow, even in the “closed” stores. “Who is this Rozsa, anyway?”

  “He’s a young Hungarian conductor touring Eastern Europe. He has a fine reputation, darling. The program is supposed to be Brahms and Bach, I think—one of the Hungarian state orchestras and,” he added, “a lot of good shopping.” There wasn’t a woman in all the world who wouldn’t respond favorably to that opportunity, Oleg judged. He waited patiently for the next objection:

  “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “My dear, that is why we’re going to Budapest. You will be able to buy anything you need there.”

  “Well . . .”

  “And remember to pack everything you need in one bag. We’ll take empty bags for all the things we’re buying for ourselves and our friends.”

  “But—”

  “Irina, think of Budapest as one big consumer-goods store. Hungarian VCRs, Western jeans and pantyhose, real perfume. You will be the envy of your office at GUM,” he promised her.

  “Well . . .”

  “I thought so. My darling, we are going on vacation!” he told her, a little manly force in his voice.

  “If you say so,” she responded, with the hint of an avaricious smile. “I will call in to the office later and let them know. I suppose they won’t miss me too badly.”

  “The only people they miss in Moscow are the Politburo members, and they only miss them for the day and a half it takes to replace them,” he announced.

  And so that was settled. They were taking the train to Hungary. Irina started thinking about what to pack. Oleg would leave that to her. Inside a week or ten days, we will all have much better clothes, the KGB communications officer told himself. And maybe in a month or two, they would go to that Disney Planet place in the American province of Florida. . . .

  He wondered if CIA knew how much trust he was putting in them, and he prayed—an unusual activity for a KGB officer—that they would perform as well as he hoped.

  “GOOD MORNING, JACK.”

  “Hey, Simon. What’s new in the world?” Jack set his coffee down before taking his coat off.

  “Suslov died last night,” Harding announced. “It will be in their afternoon papers.”

  “What a pity. Another bat found his way back into hell, eh?” At least he died with good eyesight, thanks to Bernie Katz and the guys from Johns Hopkins, Ryan thought. “Complications of diabetes?”

  Harding shrugged. “Plus being old, I should imagine. Heart attack, our sources tell us. Amazing that the nasty old bugger actually had a heart. In any case, his replacement will be Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov.”

  “And he’s not exactly a day at the beach. When will they plant Suslov?”

  “He’s a senior Politburo member. I would expect a full state funeral, marching band, the lot, then cremation and a slot in the Kremlin wall.”

  “You know, I’ve always wondered, what does a real communist think about when he knows he’s dying? You suppose they wonder if it was all a great big fucking mistake?”

  “I have no idea. But Suslov was evidently a true believer. He probably thought of all the good he’d done in his life, leading humanity to the ‘Radiant Future’ they like to talk about.”

  Nobody’s that dumb, Ryan wanted to retort, but Simon was probably right. Nothing lingered longer in a man’s mind than a bad idea, and certainly Red Mike had held his bad ideas close to whatever heart had finally cashed in. But a communist’s best-case scenario for after death corresponded with Ryan’s worst, and if the communist was wrong, then, quite literally, there was hell to pay. Tough luck, Mishka, hope you took some sunblock with you.

  “Okay, what’s up for today?”

  “The PM wants to know if this will have any effect on Politburo policy.”

  “Tell her no, it won’t. In political terms, Alexandrov might as well be Suslov’s twin brother. He thinks Marx is God, and Lenin is his prophet, and Stalin was mostly right, just a little too nekulturniy in his application of political theory. The rest of the Politburo doesn’t really believe that stuff anymore, but they have to pretend that they do. So call Alexandrov the new conductor of the ideological symphony orchestra. They don’t much like the music anymore, but they dance to it anyway, ’cause it’s the only dance they know. I don’t think he will affect their policy decisions a dot. I bet they listen when he talks, but they let it go in one ear and out the other; they pretend to respect him, but they really don’t.”

  “It’s a little more complex than that, but you’ve caught the essentials,” Harding agreed. “The thing is, I have to find a way to produce ten double-spaced pages that say it.”

  “Yeah, in bureaucratese.” Ryan had never quite mastered that language, which was one of the reasons Admiral Greer liked him so much.

  “We have our procedures, Jack, and the PM—indeed, all of the Prime Ministers—like to have it in words
they understand.”

  “The Iron Lady understands the same language as a stevedore, I bet.”

  “Only when she speaks those words, Sir John, not when others try to speak them to her.”

  “I suppose. Okay,” Ryan had to concede the point. “What documents do we need?”

  “We have an extensive dossier file on Alexandrov. I’ve already called down for it.”

  So this day would be occupied with creative writing, Ryan decided. It would have been more interesting to look into their economy, but instead he’d have to help do a prospective, analytical obituary for a man whom nobody had liked, and who’d probably died intestate anyway.

  THE PREPARATION WAS even easier than he’d hoped. Haydock had expected the Russians to be pleased, and, sure enough, one call to his contact in the Ministry of Transportation had done the trick. At ten the next morning, he, Paul Matthews, and a Times photographer would be at the Kiev station to do a story about Soviet state rail and how it compared to British Rail, which needed some help, most Englishmen thought, especially in upper management.

  Matthews probably suspected that Haydock was a “six” person, but had never let on, since the spook had been so helpful feeding stories to him. It was the usual way of creating a friendly journalist—even taught at the SIS Academy—but it was officially denied to the American CIA. The United States Congress passes the most remarkable and absurd laws to hamstring its intelligence services, the Brit thought, though he was sure the official rules were broken on a daily basis by the people in the field. He’d violated a few of the much looser rules of his own mother service. And had never been caught, of course. Just as he had never been caught working agents on the streets of Moscow. . . .

  “HI, TONY.” Ed Foley extended a friendly hand to the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. He wondered if Prince knew how much Ed despised him. But it probably went both ways. “What’s happening today?”

  “Looking for a statement by the Ambassador on the death of Mikhail Suslov.”

  Foley laughed. “How about he’s glad the nasty old cocksucker is dead?”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Prince held up his scribble pad.

  Time to back up. “Not exactly. I have no instructions in that matter, Tony, and the boss is tied up on other things at the moment. No time loose to see you until later afternoon, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I need something, Ed.”

  “ ‘Mikhail Suslov was an important member of the Politburo, and an important ideological force in this country, and we regret his untimely passing.’ That good enough?”

  “Your first quote was better and a lot more truthful,” the Times correspondent observed.

  “You ever meet him?”

  Prince nodded. “Couple of times, before and after the Hopkins docs worked on his eyes—”

  “Is that for real? I mean, I heard a few stories about it, but nothing substantive.” Foley acted the words out.

  Prince nodded again. “It was true enough. Glasses like Coke-bottle bottoms. Courtly gent, I thought. Well-mannered and all that, but there was a little ‘tough guy’ underneath. I guess he was the high priest of communism, like.”

  “Oh, took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, did he?”

  “You know, there was something of the aesthete about him, like he really was a priest of a sort,” Prince said, after a moment’s reflection.

  “Think so?”

  “Yeah, something otherworldly about the guy, like he could see things the rest of us couldn’t, like a priest or something. He sure enough believed in communism. Didn’t apologize for it, either.”

  “Stalinist?” Foley asked.

  “No, but thirty years ago he would have been. I can see him signing the order to kill somebody. Wouldn’t lose any sleep over it—not our Mishka.”

  “Who’s going to replace him?”

  “Not sure,” Prince admitted. “My contacts say they don’t know.”

  “I thought he was tight with another Mike, that Alexandrov guy,” Foley offered, wondering if Prince’s contacts were as good as he thought they were. Fucking with Western reporters was a game for the Soviet leadership. It was different in Washington, where a reporter had power to use over politicians. That didn’t apply here. The Politburo members didn’t fear reporters at all—much the reverse, actually.

  Prince’s contacts weren’t all that great: “Maybe, but I’m not sure. What’s the talk here?”

  “Haven’t been to the lunch room yet, Tony. Haven’t heard the gossip yet,” Foley parried. You don’t really expect a tip from me, do you?

  “Well, we’ll know by tomorrow or day after.”

  But it would look good for you if you were the first reporter to make the prediction, and you want me to help you, right? Not is this lifetime, Foley thought, but then he had to reconsider. Prince would not be a particularly valuable friend, but perhaps a usable one, and it never made sense to make enemies for the fun of it. On the other hand, to be too helpful to the guy might suggest either that Foley was a spook or knew who the spooks were, and Tony Prince was one of those guys who liked to talk and tell people how smart he is. . . . No, it’s better for Prince to think I’m dumb, because he’ll tell everyone he knows how smart he is and how dumb I am.

  The best cover of them all, he’d learned at The Farm, was to be thought a dullard, and while it was a little hurtful to his ego to play that game, it was helpful to the mission, and Ed Foley was a mission-oriented guy. So . . . fuck Prince and what he thinks. I’m the guy in this city who makes a difference.

  “Tell you what, I’ll ask around—see what people think.”

  “Fair enough.” Not that I expected anything useful from you, Prince thought a little too loudly.

  He was less skillful than he thought at concealing his feelings. He would never be a good poker player, the Chief of Station thought, seeing him out the door. He checked his watch. Lunchtime.

  LIKE MOST EUROPEAN stations, Kiev’s was a pale yellow—just like a lot of old royal palaces, in fact, as if in the early nineteenth century there had been a continent-wide surplus of mustard, and some king or other had liked the color, and so everyone had painted his palace that way. It never happened in Britain, thank God, Haydock thought. The ceiling was glass set in iron frames to let the light in but, as in London, the glass was rarely, if ever, cleaned, and was instead coated with soot from long-gone steam engines and their coal-fired boiler fires.

  But Russians were still Russians. They came to the platform carrying their cheap suitcases, and they were almost never alone, mostly in family groups, even if only one of them was leaving, so that proper goodbyes could be experienced, with passionate kisses, male-to-female, and male-to-male, which always struck the Englishman as peculiar. But it was a local custom, and all local customs were peculiar to visitors. The train to Kiev, Belgrade, and Budapest was scheduled to leave at 1:00 P.M. on the dot, and the Russian railroads, like the Moscow Metro, kept to a fairly precise schedule.

  Just a few feet away, Paul Matthews was conversing with a representative of the Soviet state railway, talking about the motive power—it was all electric, since Comrade Lenin had decided to bring electricity and eliminate lice all across the USSR. The former, strangely, had proved easier than the latter.

  The big VL80T locomotive, two hundred tons of steel, sat at the head of the train on Track Three, with three-day coaches, a dining car, and six international class sleepers, plus three mail cars just behind the engine. On the platform were the various conductors and stewards, looking rather surly, as Russians in service-related jobs tended to do.

  Haydock was looking around, the photos of the Rabbit and the Bunny seared into his memory. The station clock said it was 12:15, and that tallied with his wristwatch. Would the Rabbit show? Haydock usually preferred to be early for a flight or a train, perhaps from a fear of being late left over from his childhood. Whatever the reason, he’d have been here by now for a one o’clock train. But not everyone thought that way, Ni
gel reminded himself—his wife, for example. He was slightly afraid that she’d deliver the baby in their car on the way to the hospital. It would make a hell of a mess, the spook was sure, while Paul Matthews asked his questions, and the photographer shot his Kodak film. Finally . . .

  Yes, that was the Rabbit, along with Mrs. Rabbit and the little Bunny. Nigel tapped the shoulder of the photographer.

  “This family approaching now. Lovely little girl,” he observed, for anyone close enough to listen. The photographer fired off ten frames at once, then switched to another Nikon and fired off ten more. Excellent, Haydock thought. He’d have them printed up before the embassy closed down for the night, get several printed off to—no, he’d personally hand them to Ed Foley, and make sure the others went by Queen’s Messenger—the Brits’ rather more dignified term for a diplomatic courier—so they’d be sure to be in Sir Basil’s hands before he turned in. He wondered how they would arrange for hiding the fact of the Rabbit’s defection—it certainly meant getting cadavers. Distasteful, but possible. He was glad he didn’t have to figure out all the details.

  As it turned out, the Rabbit family walked within ten feet of him and his reporter friend. No words were exchanged, though the little girl, like little girls everywhere, turned to look at him as she passed. He gave her a wink and got a little smile in return. And then they passed by, walked up to the attendant, and showed their paper ticket forms.

  Matthews kept on asking his questions and got very polite answers from the smiling Russian trainman.

  At 12:59:30, the conductor—or at least so Haydock assumed, from the shabby uniform—walked up and down the side of the train and made sure all the doors but one were secure. He blew a whistle and waved a paddle-like wand to let the engineer know it was time to move off, and at 1:00 on the dot, the horn sounded, and the train started inching away from the platform, gaining speed slowly as it headed west into the capacious railyard, heading for Kiev, Belgrade, and Budapest.