Red Rabbit Read online

  THE BRITISH AIRWAYS 747 also flew through darkness, its passengers mainly asleep while the flight crew monitored its numerous instruments and sipped their coffee, taking time to enjoy the night stars, and watched the horizon for the first hint of dawn. That usually came over the west coast of Ireland.

  RYAN AWOKE EARLIER than usual. He slipped out of bed without disturbing his wife, dressed casually, and went outside. The milkman was driving into the cul-de-sac at the end of Grizedale Close. He stopped his truck and got out with the half-gallon of whole milk his kids drank like a Pratt & Whitney engine guzzled jet fuel, and a loaf of bread. He was halfway to the house before he noticed his customer.

  “Anything amiss, sir?” the milkman asked, thinking perhaps a child was ill, the usual reason for the parents of young children to be up and about at this time of day.

  “No, just woke up a little early,” Ryan replied with a yawn.

  “Anything special you might need?”

  “Just a cigarette,” Ryan replied, without thinking. Under Cathy’s iron rule, he hadn’t had one since arriving in England.

  “Well, here, sir.” The man extended a pack with one shaken loose.

  It surprised the hell out of Ryan. “Thanks, buddy.” But he took it anyway, along with the light from a butane lighter. He coughed with the first drag, but got over it pretty fast. It was a remarkably friendly feeling in the still, predawn air, and the wonderful thing about bad habits was how quickly one picked them back up. It was a strong cigarette, like the Marlboros he’d smoked in his senior year of high school, part of the ascension to manhood back in the late 1960s. The milkman ought to quit, Jack thought, but he probably wasn’t married to a Hopkins surgeon.

  He didn’t often get to talk to his customers, either. “You like living here, sir?”

  “Yes, I do. The people here are very friendly.”

  “We try to be, sir. Have a good day, then.”

  “Thanks, buddy. You, too,” Ryan said, as the man walked back to his truck. Milkmen had mostly gone extinct in America, victims of supermarkets and 7-Eleven stores. A pity, Jack thought. He remembered Peter Wheat bread and honey-dipped donuts when he’d been a little kid. Somehow it had all gone away without his noticing it around the seventh grade or so. But the smoke and the quiet air wasn’t at all a bad way to wake up. There was no sound at all. Even the birds were still asleep. He looked up to see the lights of aircraft high in the sky. People traveling to Europe, probably Scandinavia, by the apparent courses they were flying—out of Heathrow, probably. What poor bastard has to get up this early to make a meeting? he wondered. Well . . . he finished the cigarette and flicked it out on the lawn, wondering if Cathy might spot it. Well, he could always blame it on somebody else. A pity the paperboy hadn’t come yet. So Jack went inside and turned on the kitchen TV to get CNN. He caught the sports. The Orioles had won again and would be going to the World Series against the Phillies. That was good news, or nearly so. Had he been home, he would have gotten tickets to catch a game or two at Memorial Stadium and seen the rest on TV. Not this year. His cable system didn’t have a single channel to catch baseball games, though the Brits were starting to watch

  NFL football. They didn’t really get it, but for some reason they enjoyed watching it. Better than their regular TV, Ryan thought with a snort. Cathy liked their comedy, but for some reason it just didn’t click with him. But their news programming was pretty good. It was just taste, he assumed. Non est disputandum, as the Romans had said. Then he saw dawn coming, the first hint of light on the eastern horizon. It’d be more than an hour before morning actually began, but coming it was, and even the desire for more sleep would not hold it back.

  Jack decided to get the coffee going—just a matter of flipping the switch on the drip machine he’d gotten Cathy for her birthday. Then he heard the flop of the paper on the front step, and he went to get it.

  “Up early?” Cathy said, when he got back.

  “Yeah. Didn’t see any sense in rolling back over.” Jack kissed his wife. She got a funny look on her face after the kiss but shook it off. Her tobacco-sniffing nose had delivered a faint message, but her intellect had erroneously dismissed it as too unlikely.

  “Got the coffee going?”

  “Flipped the button,” Jack confirmed. “I’ll let you do the rest.”

  “What do you want for breakfast?”

  “I get a choice?” Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously. She was on another health kick of late. No donuts.

  “GOOD MORNING, ZAICHIK! ” Oleg said to his daughter.

  “Papa!” She reached both her arms out with that smile kids have when they awaken. It was something they lost long before adulthood, and something universally astonishing to parents while it lasted. Oleg lifted her from the bed and gave her a hug. Her little bare feet went down on the carpeted floor, and then she took two steps to her private toilet. Irina came in to lay her clothes out, and both withdrew to the adult side of the accommodations. Within ten minutes, they were on their way to the dining car. Oleg looked over his shoulder to see the attendant hustling forward to make up their compartments first. Yes, there were advantages to being KGB, even if it was just for another day.

  Somewhere during the night, the train had stopped at a state farm and taken on fresh milk, which Svetlana loved for her morning meal. The adults in the party had mediocre (at best) coffee and buttered bread. (The kitchen was out of eggs.) At least the bread and butter were fresh and tasty. There was a stack of newspapers at the back end of the car. Oleg picked up a Pravda and sat down to read it—the usual lies. One other thing about being KGB was that you knew better than to believe what was in the papers. Izvestia at least had stories about real people, some of which were even true, he thought. But a Soviet train would, of course, carry only the most politically correct newspapers, and “Truth” was it, Zaitzev snorted.

  RYAN MAINTAINED TWO complete sets of shaving and grooming things for the occasional exigencies of travel. His Bean bag was hanging by its large brass hook in his closet, ready for whenever Sir Basil dispatched him to Budapest. He looked at it while knotting his tie, wondering when he’d be going. Then Cathy reentered the bedroom and got herself dressed. Her white lab coat doubtless hung on a hook on her office door—both of them, probably, Hammersmith and Moorefields, with the appropriate name tags.

  “Cath?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your office coat—did you keep your Hopkins name tag, or did you get new ones?” He’d never bothered to ask.

  “Local ones. Too hard to explain it to every new patient who might notice.” But some asked about her accent anyway, or would ask why the name tag proclaimed her to be Lady Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS. The “Lady” part appealed to her woman’s vanity. Jack watched her brush her hair out, something that always gave him pleasure. She would have been an absolute knockout with somewhat longer hair, but she never let it grow, saying that the surgical caps ruined whatever set she might have gotten. That would change the next time they got invited to a formal dinner. They were due for one. The Queen liked both of them, and so did the Prince of Wales, and they were on the local version of the A-list. You had to accept such invitations, though Cathy had an excuse if she was doing surgery the next day. Spooks, on the other hand, were expected to be delighted at the honor, even if it meant three short hours of sleep before the next day at work.

  “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “Giving a lecture on the xenon-arc laser. They’re going to be buying one soon, and I’m the only person in London who knows how to use it right.”

  “My wife, the laser jockey.”

  “Well, at least I can talk about what I do,” she responded, “secret-agent man.”

  “Yes, dear,” Ryan sighed. Maybe I should pack my Browning today just to piss her off. But if anyone on the train noticed, he’d at best be regarded as unclean, and at worst would be asked by a police constable what he was doing with such a thing on his person. And even his diplomatic status would
not entirely protect him from the resulting hassle.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Jack and Cathy were in their compartment, heading northwest to London, she again reading her medical journals, and he going through the Telegraph. John Keegan had a column on the inside and he was a historian for whom Ryan had considerable respect as an analyst of complex information. Why Basil hadn’t recruited him for Century House was a mystery to Jack. Maybe Keegan was just doing too well as an historian, able to spread his ideas to the masses—well, at least the smart civilians out there. That made sense. Nobody ever got rich as a British civil servant, and the anonymity—well, it was nice once in a while to get a pat on the head for doing something especially well. Bureaucrats were denied that all over the world.

  ABOUT THE TIME their express train passed by the Elephant and Castle station, Flight 214 rolled to an early stop at Heathrow’s Terminal Four. It didn’t come to a jetway. Instead it came to a halt where the shuttle buses waited to take people to Immigration and Customs. No sooner had the wheels been chocked than the cargo hatch came open. The last two items loaded at Logan had been the two coffins, and they became the first items of baggage to be manhandled off. The tags on one corner of each told the handlers where to send them, and two anonymous men from Century House were there to watch the process anyway. Placed on a four-wheel cart—called a trolley in England—they were pulled off to an area for parked cars and small trucks, where the boxes were quickly loaded on a small four-wheeled truck with no marking on its sides at all. The two men from SIS hopped aboard and drove off, easterly for London, entirely without a clue what this job was all about. It was often that way.

  The truck arrived at 100 Westminster Bridge Road forty minutes later. There the boxes were removed and placed on another trolley for a ride to the freight elevator and a trip down to the second-level basement.

  Two more men were waiting there. The boxes were duly opened, and both men thanked fate that there was a goodly supply of dry ice inside and the bodies were not yet venting the particularly foul smell of dead and mortifying human tissue. Wearing rubber gloves, they lifted the bodies—neither was especially heavy—and transferred them to stainless-steel tables. Neither body was clothed and, in the case of the little girl, their job was particularly sad.

  It would get more so. Comparing the bodies with the Times-generated photograph, it was determined, unsurprisingly, that the child’s face didn’t match the picture. The same was true of the grown woman, though her body mass and configuration were about right. Her face was virtually untouched by the fire, the toxic gasses of which had ended her life. And so both of them would have to be grossly disfigured to be usable for Operation BEATRIX. This was done with propane blowtorches. First, the senior of the two turned on the powerful exhaust fan in the ceiling. Both then donned fire-protective coveralls and lit their torches. These were heartlessly applied to both faces. Hair color was wrong in both cases, and so that was burned off first of all. Then the torches were applied at close range to both faces. It went quickly, but not quickly enough for the two SIS employees. The one doing the little girl breathed a series of prayers for her child’s soul, knowing that she was wherever innocent children went. That which remained was just cold meat, of no value to its previous owner, but of some value to the United Kingdom—and doubtless the United States of America as well, else they would not be doing such ghoulish work as this. It was when the little girl’s left eye exploded from internal pressure that her tormentor had to turn away and vomit. But it had to be done. Her eyes were the wrong color.

  Hands and feet had to be well-charred, and both bodies were examined for tattoos, scars, or other distinguishing characteristics, but none were found, not even an appendectomy scar.

  All in all, it took ninety minutes before they were satisfied with their work. Then the bodies had to be dressed. Clothing of Soviet origin was maneuvered onto the bodies, and then that had to be burned so that the fibers would be enmeshed with the surface burns. With all this grisly work done, the bodies were reloaded into their transport boxes, and more dry ice was added to keep them cool enough to retard decay. The boxes were set near a third identical such box in the corner of the room. By then it was lunchtime, but neither of them cared much for food at the moment. A few shots of whiskey were more what they needed, and there were plenty of pubs within walking distance.

  “JACK?”Sir Basil stuck his head through the door to find Ryan going over his documents, like a good analyst.

  “Yes, sir,” Ryan responded, looking up.

  “Are you packed?”

  “My stuff is at home, but yes, sir.”

  “Good. You’re on the BA flight from Heathrow Terminal Three at eight this evening. We’ll have a car to run you home to pick up your things—say, about three-thirty?”

  “I haven’t gotten my passport and visa yet,” Ryan told C.

  “You’ll have it after lunch. Your overt cover is as an auditor from the Foreign Office. As I recall, you had an accountant’s charter once upon a time. Perhaps you can look over the books while you’re there.” This was funny, Charleston thought.

  Ryan tried to return the favor. “Probably more interesting than the local stock market. Anyone going with me?”

  “No, but you’ll be met at the airport by Andy Hudson. He’s our Station Chief in Budapest. Good man,” Sir Basil promised. “Stop in to see me before you head off.”

  “Will do, sir.” And Basil’s head vanished back into the corridor.

  “Simon, how about a pint and a sandwich?” Ryan said to his workmate.

  “Fine idea.” Harding stood and got his coat. They walked off to the Duke of Clarence.

  LUNCH ON THE TRAIN was pleasant: borscht, noodles, black bread, and a proper dessert—strawberries from some farm or other. The only problem was that Svetlana didn’t care for borscht, which was odd for a Russian native, even a child. She picked at the sour cream topping, then later attacked the noodles with gusto and positively devoured the late-season strawberries. They’d just climbed through the low Transylvanian mountains on the Bulgarian border. The train would pass through Sofia, then turn northwest for Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and finally Hungary.

  The Zaitzevs lingered over lunch, Svetlana peering out the windows as the train approached Sofia.

  Oleg Ivanovich did the same, puffing on his cigarette. Passing through Sofia, he found himself wondering which building housed the Dirzhavna Sugurnost. Was Colonel Bubovoy there, working on his plot, probably with that Colonel Strokov? How far along might they be? Was the Pope’s life in immediate danger? How would he feel if the Polish priest was murdered before he could get his warning out? Could he or should he have moved faster? These damned questions, and no one in whom he could confide them! You are doing your best, Oleg Ivan’ch, he told himself, and no man can do more than that!

  The Sofia station looked like a cathedral, an impressive stone building with an almost religious purpose. Somehow he wasn’t worried now about a KGB arrest team boarding the train. His only thoughts were to press on, get to Budapest, and see what the CIA did there . . . and hope they were competent. KGB could do a job like this with consummate professionalism, almost like stage magicians. Was CIA also that good? On Russian TV, they were frequently portrayed as evil but bumbling adversaries—but that wasn’t what they said at The Centre. No, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square, they were thought to be evil spirits, always on the prowl, clever as the devil himself, the most deadly of enemies. So, which was true? Certainly he’d find out quickly enough—one way or another. Zaitzev stubbed out his cigarette and led his family back to their compartments.

  “LOOKING FORWARD TO the mission, Jack?” Harding asked.

  “Yeah, like the dentist. And don’t tell me how easy it’ll be. You’ve never gone out in the field either.”

  “Your own people suggested this, you know.”

  “So, when I get home—if I get home—I’ll slug Admiral Greer,” Ryan responded, half—but only half—joking. “I’m not trained for this, Simon, re
member?”

  “How many people are trained to deal with a direct physical attack? You’ve done that,” Simon reminded him.

  “Okay, I was a marine lieutenant once, for—what was it?—eleven months or so, before the helicopter crunched on Crete and I got my back broke. Shit, I don’t even like roller-coasters. My mom and dad loved the goddamned things; they were always taking me up in them at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park when I was a little kid. Expected me to like the damned things, too. Dad,” Ryan explained, “was a paratrooper in the One hundred first Airborne, back forty years ago. Falling out of the sky didn’t worry him too much.” That was followed by a snort. One nice thing about the Marine Corps, they didn’t make you jump out of an airplane. Well, damn, Jack thought suddenly. Was he more worried about this than the airline flight? That caused a downward look and an ironic chuckle. “Do your field officers carry weapons?”

  That generated a laugh. “Only in the movies, Jack. They’re bloody heavy to lug about, and they can be difficult to explain. There are no double-o people in SIS—at least not to my knowledge. The French occasionally kill people, and they are actually rather good at it. So are the Israelis, but people do make mistakes, even trained professionals, and that sort of thing can be difficult to explain to the press.”