Red Rabbit Read online

  TRAVEL IS INEVITABLY TIRING, and so the Zaitzev family was agreeably surprised to see their beds turned out when they got back to their compartments. Irina got her daughter changed into her little yellow nightgown with flowers on what would have been the bodice. She gave her parents the usual good-night kiss and climbed onto her bed all by herself—she insisted on doing that—and slid under the covers. Instead of sleeping, she propped her head on the pillow and looked out the window at the darkened countryside passing by. Just a few lights from buildings on the collective farms but, for all that, fascinating to the little girl.

  Her mother and father left the connecting door partly open, lest she have a nightmare or other sudden need to get a reassuring hug. Before going to bed, Svetlana had looked under the bed to see if there might be a hiding place for a big black bear, and she was satisfied that no such hiding place existed. Oleg and Irina opened books and gradually nodded off to the rocking of the train.

  “BEATRIX IS RUNNING,” Moore told Admiral Greer. “The Rabbit and his family are on the train, probably crossing into the Ukraine right about now.”

  “I hate waiting like this,” the DDI observed. It was easier for him to admit it. He’d never gone into the field on an intelligence mission. No, his job had always been at a desk, looking over important information. It was times like this that reminded him of the simple pleasures of standing watch on a ship of war—mainly submarines, in his case—where you could look at wind and wave, feel the breeze on your face and, merely by speaking a few words, change the course and speed of your ship instead of waiting to see what the ocean and distant enemy might do to you. You had the illusion there of being master of your fate.

  “Patience is the hardest of the virtues to acquire, James, and the higher you get, the more you need the bastard. For me, this is like sitting on the bench, waiting for the lawyers to get to the damned point. It can take forever, especially when you know what the fools are going to say,” Moore admitted. He’d also been there and done that, out in the field. But so much of that job was composed of waiting, too. No man controlled his fate, a knowledge that came late in life. You just tried to muddle along from one point to another, making as few mistakes as possible.

  “Tell the President about this one yet?”

  Moore shook his head. “No sense getting him overly excited. If he thinks this guy has information that he doesn’t have—hell, why disappoint him? We do enough of that here, don’t we?”

  “Arthur, we never have enough information, and the more we get, the more we appreciate what we need and don’t have.”

  “James, my boy, neither one of us is educated to be a philosopher.”

  “Comes with the gray hair, Arthur.” Then Mike Bostock walked in.

  “Couple more days and BEATRIX goes into the history books,” he announced with a smile.

  “Mike, where the hell did you learn to believe in Santa Claus?” the DCI asked.

  “Judge, it’s like this: We got us a defector who’s defecting right now. We have a good team to get him out of Redland. You trust your troops to do the job you send them out to do.”

  “But they’re not all our troops,” Greer pointed out.

  “Basil runs a good shop, Admiral. You know that.”

  “True,” Greer admitted.

  “So, you just wait to see what’s under the Christmas tree, Mike?” Moore asked.

  “I sent Santa my letter, and Santa always delivers. Everybody knows that.” He was beaming at the possibilities. “What are we going to do with him when he arrives?”

  “The farmhouse out at Winchester, I imagine,” Moore thought out loud. “Give him a nice place to depressurize—let him travel around some on day trips.”

  “What stipend?” Greer inquired.

  “Depends,” Moore said. He was the one who controlled that out of the Agency’s black budget. “If it’s good information . . . oh, as much as a million, I imagine. And a nice place to work after we tickle all of it out of him.”

  “Where, I wonder?” Bostock put in.

  “Oh, we let him decide that.”

  It was both a simple and a complex process. The arriving Rabbit family would have to learn English. New identities. They’d need new names, for starters, probably make them Norwegian immigrants to explain away the accents. CIA had the power to admit a total of one hundred new citizens every year through the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and they’d never used them all up). The Rabbits would need a set of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses—probably driving lessons beforehand, maybe for both, certainly for the wife—from the Commonwealth of Virginia. (The Agency had a cordial relationship with the state government. Richmond never asked too many questions.)

  Then came the psychological help for people who’d walked away from everything they’d ever known and had to find their footing in a new and grossly different country. The Agency had a Columbia University professor of psychology on retainer to handle that. Then they’d get some older defectors to hand-walk them through the transition. None of this was ever easy on the new immigrants. For Russians, America was like a toy store for a child who’d never known such a thing as a toy store existed—it was overwhelming in every respect, with virtually no common points of comparison, almost like a different planet. They had to make it as comfortable for the defectors as possible. First, for the information, and second, to make sure they didn’t want to go back—it would be almost certain death, at least for the husband, but it had happened before, so strong was the call of home for every man.

  “If he likes a cold climate, send him to Minneapolis-Saint Paul,” Greer suggested. “But, gentlemen, we are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.”

  “James, you are always the voice of sober counsel,” the DCI observed with a smile.

  “Somebody has to be. The eggs haven’t hatched yet, people. Then we count the chicks.”

  And what if he doesn’t know squat? Moore thought. What if he’s just a guy who wants a ticket out?

  God damn this business! the DCI completed the thought.

  “Well, Basil will keep us posted, and we have your boy Ryan looking out for our interests.”

  “That’s great news, Judge. Basil must be laughing into his beer about that.”

  “He’s a good boy, Mike. Don’t underestimate him. Those who did are in Maryland State Penitentiary now, waiting for the appeals process to play out,” Greer said, in defense of his protégé.

  “Well, yeah, he was a Marine once,” Bostock conceded. “What do I tell Bob when he calls in?”

  “Nothing,” the DCI said at once. “Until we find out from the Rabbit what part of our comms are compromised, we are careful what goes out on a wire. Clear?”

  Bostock nodded his head like a first-grader. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve had S and T go over our phone lines. They say they’re clean. Chip Bennett is still raising hell and running in circles at Fort Meade.” Moore didn’t have to say that this alleged claim from the Rabbit was the scariest revelation to Washington since Pearl Harbor. But maybe they’d be able to turn it around on Ivan. Hope sprang eternal at Langley, just like everywhere else. It was unlikely that the Russians knew anything his Directorate of Science and Technology didn’t, but you had to pay to see the cards.

  RYAN WAS QUIETLY packing his things. Cathy was better at it, but he didn’t know what he’d need. How did one pack for being secret-agent man? Business suit. His old Marine utilities? (He still had them, butter bar on the collar and all.) Nice leather shoes? Sneaks? That, he thought, sounded appropriate. He ended up deciding on a middle-of-the-road suit and two pairs of walking shoes, one semiformal, one informal. And it all had to fit in one bag—for that, an L.L. Bean canvas two-suiter that was easy to carry and fairly anonymous. He left his passport in the desk drawer. Sir Basil would be giving him a nice new British one, another diplomatic or fuck-you passport. Probably a new name to go with it. Damn, Jack thought, a new name to remember and respond to. He was used to having only
one.

  One nice thing about Merrill Lynch: You always knew who the hell you were. Sure, Jack’s mind went on, let the whole damned world know you were a flunky of Joe Muller. Not in this lifetime. Any opinionated asshole could make money, and his father-in-law was one of them.

  “Finished?” Cathy asked from behind him.

  “Just about, babe,” Jack answered.

  “It’s not dangerous, what you’re doing, is it?”

  “I don’t expect it to be, babe.” But Jack couldn’t lie, and his uncertainty conveyed just enough.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I told you, remember, Germany.” Uh-oh. She caught me again.

  “Some NATO thing?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “What do you do in London, Jack? Century House, that’s intelligence stuff, and—”

  “Cathy, I’ve told you before. I’m an analyst. I go over information from various sources, and I try to figure out what it means, and I write reports for people to read. You know, it’s not all that different from what I did at Merrill Lynch. My job is to look at information and figure out what it really means. They think I’m good at it.”

  “But nothing with guns?” Half a question and half an observation. Jack supposed it was from her work in the Emergency Room at Hopkins. As a group, doctors didn’t much care for firearms, except the ones who liked hunting birds in the fall. She didn’t like the Remington shotgun in his closet, unloaded, and she liked the Browning Hi-Power hidden on the shelf in his closet, loaded, even less.

  “Honey, no, no guns, not at all. I’m not that kind of spook.”

  “Okay,” she semi-conceded. She didn’t believe him completely, but she knew he couldn’t say what he was doing any more than she could discuss her patients with him. In that understanding came her frustration. “Just so you’re not away too long.”

  “Babe, you know I hate being away from you. I can’t even sleep worth a damn unless you’re next to me.”

  “So take me with you?”

  “So you can go shopping in Germany? For what? Dirndls for Sally?”

  “Well, she likes the Heidi movies.” It was a weak offering.

  “Nice try, babe. Wish you could, but you can’t.”

  “Oh, damn,” Lady Ryan observed.

  “We live in an imperfect world, babe.”

  She especially hated that aphorism of his, and her reply was an ungrammatical grunt. But, really, there was no reply she could make.

  Minutes later, in bed, Jack wondered what the hell he would be doing. Reason told him that it would be routine in every respect, except for the location. But except for one little thing, Abe Lincoln had enjoyed that play at Ford’s Theater. He’d be on foreign soil—no, hostile foreign soil. He was already living in a foreign place, and, friendly as the Brits were, only home was home. But the Brits liked him. The Hungarians wouldn’t. They might not take a shot at him, but neither would they give him the key to the city. And what if they found out he was traveling on a false passport? What did the Vienna Convention say about that? But he couldn’t wimp out on this one, could he? He was an ex-Marine. He was supposed to be fearless. Yeah, sure. About the only good thing that had happened at his house a few months back was that he’d made a head call before the bad guys had crashed the party, and so hadn’t been able to wet his pants with a gun to his head. He’d gotten it done, but he damned sure didn’t feel heroic. He’d managed to survive, managed to kill that one guy with the Uzi, but the only thing he felt good about was not killing that bastard Sean Miller. No, he’d let the State of Maryland handle that one, by the numbers, unless the Supreme Court stepped in again, and that didn’t strike him as very likely in this particular case, with a bunch of Secret Service agents dead. The courts didn’t ignore dead cops very often.

  But what would happen in Hungary? He’d just be a watcher, the semi-official CIA officer overseeing the evacuation of some fool Russian who wanted to move out of his place in Moscow. Damn, why the hell does this sort of thing always seem to happen to me? Jack wondered. It was like hitting the devil’s lottery, and his number kept coming up. Would that ever stop? He was paid to look into the future and make his predictions, but inside he knew that he couldn’t do it worth a damn. He needed other people to tell him what was happening, so that then he could compare it with things that everyone knew had happened, and then combine the two into a wild-ass guess on what somebody might do. And, sure, he’d done okay at that in the trading business, but nobody ever got killed over a few shares of common stock. And now, maybe, his cute little ass would be on the line. Great. Just fucking great. He stared at the ceiling. Why were they always white? Wouldn’t black be a better color for sleeping? You could always see white ceilings, even in a darkened room. Was there a reason for that?

  Was there a reason why he couldn’t sleep? Why was he asking damned-fool questions with no answers? However this played out, he’d almost certainly be okay. Basil wouldn’t let anything happen to him. It would look very bad to Langley, and the Brits couldn’t afford that—too embarrassing. Judge Moore wouldn’t forget, and it would become part of CIA’s institutional memory, and that would be bad for the next ten years or more. So, no, SIS wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him.

  On the other hand, they wouldn’t be the only players on the field and, as in baseball, the problem was that both teams played to win, and you needed the right timing to send that 95-mph fastball out to the cheap seats.

  But you can’t wimp out, Jack, he told himself. Others, whose opinions he valued, would be ashamed of him—worse, he’d be ashamed of himself. So, like it or not, he had to suit up and go out on the field and hope he didn’t drop the damned ball.

  Or just go back to Merrill Lynch, but, no, he’d rather face bayonets than do that. I really would, Ryan realized, in considerable surprise. Did that make him brave, or just hardheaded? There’s a question, he thought. And the only answer had to come from someone else, someone who would only see one side of the equation. You could only see the physical part, never the thought that went into it. And that wasn’t enough to judge from, much as newsmen and historians tried to shape reality in that way, as though they really understood such things at a distance of miles or years. Yeah, sure.

  In any case, his bags were packed, and with luck the worst part of this trip would be the airplane ride. Much as he hated it, it was fairly predictable . . . unless a wing fell off.

  “WHAT THE FUCK is this all about?” John Tyler asked nobody in particular. The telex in his hand only gave orders, not the reasons behind them.

  The bodies had been transported to the city coroner, with a request for no action to be taken with them. Tyler thought for a moment and then called the Assistant U.S. Attorney he usually worked with.

  “You want what?” Peter Mayfair asked in some incredulity. He’d graduated third in his Harvard Law School class three years before and was racing up the career ladder at the U.S. Attorney’s office. People called him Max.

  “You heard me.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it comes straight from Emil’s office. It sounds like stuff from the other side of the river, but the telex doesn’t say beans. How do we do it?”

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “Coroner’s office, I guess. There’s a note on them—mother and daughter—that says don’t post them. So I suppose they’re in the freezer.”

  “And you want them raw, like?”

  “Frozen, I suppose, but yeah, raw.” What a hell of a way to put it, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge thought.

  “Any families involved?”

  “The police haven’t located any yet that I know of.”

  “Okay, we hope it stays that way. If there’s no family to say no, we declare them indigent and get the coroner to release them to federal custody, you know, like a dead drunk on the street. They just put them in a cheap box and bury them in Potter’s Field. Where you going to take them
?”

  “Max, I don’t know. Guess I send a reply telex to Emil and he’ll tell me.”

  “Fast?” Mayfair asked, wondering what priority went on this.

  “Last week, Max.”

  “Okay, if you want, I’ll drive down to the coroner’s right now.”

  “Meet you there, Max. Thanks.”

  “You owe me a beer and dinner at Legal Seafood,” the U.S. Attorney told him.

  “Done.” He’d have to deliver on this one.

  CHAPTER 25

  EXCHANGING THE BOGIES

  THE BODIES WERE LOADED in cheap aluminum boxes, the sort used for transporting bodies by air, and then loaded on a van used by the FBI and driven to Logan International Airport. Special Agent Tyler called Washington to ask what came next, and fortunately his car radio was encrypted.

  FBI Director Emil Jacobs, it turned out, hadn’t thought things all the way through quite yet either, and he had to call Judge Moore at CIA, where more rapid dancing was done, until it was decided to load them on the British Airways 747 scheduled to leave Boston for London Heathrow, so that Basil’s people could collect them. This was done with alacrity because BA cooperated readily with American police agencies, and Flight 214 rolled away from the gate on time at 8:10 and soon thereafter climbed to altitude for the three-thousand-mile hop to Heathrow’s Terminal Four.

  IT WAS APPROACHING five in the morning when Zaitzev awoke in his upper bunk, not sure why he had done so. He rolled a little to look out the window when it hit him: The train was stopped at a station. He didn’t know which one—he didn’t have the schedule memorized—and he felt a sudden chill. What if some Second Chief Directorate men had just boarded? In the daylight, he might have shaken it off, but KGB had the reputation of arresting people in the middle of the night, when they’d be less likely to resist effectively, and suddenly the fear came back. Then he heard feet walking down the corridor . . . but they passed him by, and moments later the train started moving again, pulling away from the wooden station building, and presently the view outside was just darkness again. Why did this frighten me? Zaitzev asked himself. Why now? Wasn’t he safe now? Or almost so, he corrected himself. The answer was, no, not until his feet stood on foreign soil. He had to remind himself of that fact, until he stood on foreign, nonsocialist soil. And he wasn’t there yet. With that reminder refixed in his mind, he rolled back and tried to get back to sleep. The motion of the train eventually overcame his anxiety, and he returned to dreams that were not the least bit reassuring.