Red Rabbit Read online

  “Okay.” What else can I say? Jack thought. “When?”

  “Two or three days, I think.”

  “Are you going to be packing?” he wondered next.

  “A pistol, you mean?”

  “Not a slingshot,” Ryan clarified.

  Hudson just shook his head. “Not really very useful things, guns. If we run into trouble, there will be trained soldiers with automatic rifles, and a pistol is useless to anyone, except to cause the opposition to fire at us with rather a higher probability of hitting us. No, should that happen, you’re better off talking your way out of it, using the diplomatic papers. We already have British passports for the Rabbits.” He lifted a large envelope from his desk drawer. “Mr. Rabbit reportedly speaks good English. That should suffice.”

  “It’s all thought through, eh?” Ryan wasn’t sure if it seemed that way to him or not.

  “It’s what they pay me for, Sir John.”

  And I don’t have standing to criticize, Ryan realized. “Okay, you’re the pro here. I’m just a fucking tourist.”

  “Tom Trent reported in.” There was a message on Hudson’s desk. “He did not see any coverage on the Rabbit family. So the operation looks entirely unremarkable to this point. I would say things are going very well indeed.” Except for the frozen burned bodies in the embassy basement, he didn’t add. “Seeing them this morning helped. They look entirely ordinary, and that helps. At least we’re not trying to smuggle Grace Kelly out of the country. People like that get noticed, but women like Mrs. Rabbit do not.”

  “Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail . . .” Ryan whispered.

  “Just a matter of moving them to a different hutch.”

  “You say so, man,” Ryan responded dubiously. This guy just lived a different sort of life from his own. Cathy cut up people’s eyeballs for a living, and that would have made Jack faint dead away like a broad confronting a rattlesnake in the bathtub. Just a different way of earning a living. It sure as hell wasn’t his.

  TOM TRENT WATCHED them take the long walk from the hotel to the local zoo, which was always a good place for children. The male lion and tiger were both quite magnificent, and the elephant house—built in a drunken Arabian pastel style—housed several adequate pachyderms. With an ice cream cone bought for the little girl, the tourist part of the day came to its end. The Rabbit family walked back to the hotel, with the father carrying the sleeping child for the last half kilometer or so. This was the hardest part for Trent, for whom staying invisible on a square mile of cobblestone landing field taxed even his professional skills, but the Rabbit family was not all that attentive, and on getting back to the Astoria, he ducked into a men’s room to switch his reversible coat to change at least his outward colors. Half an hour later, the Zaitzevs walked out again, but turned immediately to enter the people’s restaurant just next door. The food there was wholesome if not especially exciting and, more to the point, quite inexpensive. As he watched, they piled their plates high with the local cuisine and sat down to devour it. They all saved room for apple strudel, which in Budapest was just as fine as a man could eat in Vienna, but for about a tenth of the price. Another forty minutes, and they looked thoroughly tired and well stuffed, not even taking a postprandial walk around the block to settle their stomachs before riding the elevator back to the third floor and, presumably, their night’s sleep. Trent took half an hour to make sure, then caught a cab for Red Marty Park. He’d had a long day and now needed to write up his report for Hudson.

  THE COS AND RYAN were drinking beer in the canteen when he arrived back at the embassy. Introductions were made, and another pint of beer secured for Trent.

  “Well, what do you think, Tom?”

  “It certainly appears that they are just what we’ve been told to expect. The little girl—the father calls her zaichik; means ‘bunny,’ doesn’t it?—seems a very sweet child. Other than that, an ordinary family doing ordinary things. He purchased three TV tape machines over on Váci Street. The store delivered them to the hotel. Then they went on a bimble.”

  “A what?”

  “A walkabout, just wandering around as tourists do,” Trent explained. “To the zoo. The little girl was properly impressed by the animals, but most of all by a new red coat with a black collar they bought this morning. All in all, they seem rather a pleasant little family,” the spook concluded.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?” Hudson asked.

  “Not a thing, Andy, and if there is any coverage on them, I failed to see it. The only surprise of the day was in the morning when they walked right past the embassy here on the way to shopping. That was rather a tender moment, but it seems to have been entirely coincidental. Váci Utca is the best shopping area for Easterners and Westerners. I expect the desk clerk told them to take the underground here.”

  “Pure vanilla, eh?” Jack asked, finishing his beer.

  “So it would appear,” Trent replied.

  “Okay, when do we make our move?” the American asked next.

  “Well, that Rozsa chap opens his concert series tomorrow night. Day after, then? We give Mrs. Rabbit a chance to hear her music. Can we get tickets for ourselves?” Hudson asked.

  “Done,” Trent answered. “Box six, right side of the theater, fine view of the entire building. Helps to be a diplomat, doesn’t it?”

  “The program is . . . ?”

  “J. S. Bach, the first three Brandenberg concerti, then some other opuses of his.”

  “Ought to be pleasant enough,” Ryan observed.

  “The local orchestras are actually quite good, Sir John.”

  “Andy, enough of that knighthood shit, okay? My name is Jack. John Patrick, to be precise, but I’ve gone by ‘Jack’ since I was three years old.”

  “It is an honor, you know.”

  “Fine, and I thanked Her Majesty for it, but we don’t do that sort of thing where I live, okay?”

  “Well, wearing a sword can be inconvenient when you try to sit down,” Trent sympathized.

  “And caring for the horse can be such a bother.” Hudson had himself a good laugh. “Not to mention the expense of jousting.”

  “Okay, maybe I had that coming,” Ryan admitted. “I just want to get the Rabbit the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Which we shall do, Jack,” Hudson assured him. “And you will be there to see it.”

  “EVERYBODY’S IN BUDAPEST,” Bostock reported. “The Rabbit and his family are staying in a no-tell motel called the Astoria.”

  “Isn’t there a part of New York by that name?” the DCI asked.

  “Queens,” Greer confirmed. “What about the hotel?”

  “Evidently, it suits our purposes,” the Deputy DDO informed them. “Basil says the operation is nominal to this point. No surveillance on our subjects has been spotted. Everything looks entirely routine. I guess our cousins have a competent Station Chief in Budapest. The three bodies arrived there today. Just a matter of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”

  “Confidence level?” the DDI asked.

  “Oh, say, seventy-five percent, Admiral,” Bostock estimated. “Maybe better.”

  “What about Ryan?” Greer asked next.

  “No beefs from London on how he’s doing. I guess your boy is handling himself.”

  “He’s a good kid. He ought to.”

  “I wonder how unhappy he is,” Judge Moore wondered.

  The other two each had a smile and a head shake at that. Bostock spoke first. Like all DO people, he had his doubts about members of the far more numerous DI.

  “Probably not as comfortable as he is at his desk with his comfy swivel chair.”

  “He’ll do fine, gentlemen,” Greer assured them, hoping he was right.

  “I wonder what this fellow has for us . . . ?” Moore breathed.

  “We’ll know in a week,” Bostock assured them. He was always the optimist. And three out of four constituted betting odds, so long as your own ass wasn’t on the line.

  Judge Moore
looked at his desk clock and added six hours. People would be asleep in Budapest now, and almost there in London. He remembered his own adventures in the field, mostly composed of waiting for people to show up for meets or filling out contact reports for the at-home bureaucrats who still ran things at CIA. You just couldn’t get free of the fact that the Agency was a government operation, subject to all of the same restrictions and inefficiencies that attended that sad reality. But this time, for this BEATRIX operation, they were making things happen speedily for once . . . only because this Rabbit person said that government communications were compromised. Not because he’d said he had information about an innocent life that might be lost. The government had its priorities, and they did not always correspond to the needs of a rational world. He was Director of Central Intelligence, supposedly—and by federal law—in command of the entire intelligence-gathering and -analysis operations of the government of the United States of America. But getting this bureaucracy to operate efficiently was the functional equivalent of beaching a whale and commanding it to fly. You could scream all you wanted, but you couldn’t fight gravity. Government was a thing made by men, and so it ought to be possible for men to change it, but in practice that just didn’t happen. So, three chances out of four, they’d get their Russian out and get to debrief him in a comfortable safe house in the Virginia hills, pick his brain clean, and maybe they’d find out some important and useful things, but the game wouldn’t change and neither, probably, would CIA.

  “Anything we need to say to Basil?”

  “Nothing comes to mind, sir,” Bostock answered. “We just sit as still as we can and wait for his people to carry out the mission.”

  “Right,” Judge Moore conceded.

  DESPITE THE THREE PINTS of dark British beer, Ryan did not sleep well. He couldn’t think of anything that he might be missing. Hudson and his crew seemed competent enough, and the Rabbit family had looked ordinary enough on the street the previous morning. There were three people, one of whom really wanted out of the USSR, which struck Ryan as something entirely reasonable . . . though the Russians were some of the most rabidly patriotic people in all the world. But every rule had exceptions, and evidently this man had a conscience and felt the need to stop . . . something. Whatever it was, Jack didn’t know, and he knew better than to guess. Speculation wasn’t analysis, and good analysis was what they paid him his meager salary for.

  It would be interesting to find out. Ryan had never spoken directly with a defector. He’d read over their stuff, and had sent written questions to some of them to get answers to specific inquiries, but he’d never actually looked one in the eye and watched his face when he answered. As in playing cards, it was the only way to read the other guy. He didn’t have the ability at it that his wife had—there was something to be said for medical training—but neither was he a three-year-old who’d believe anything. No, he wanted to see this guy, talk to him, and pick his brain apart, just to evaluate the reliability of what he said. The Rabbit could be a plant, after all. KGB had done that in the past, Ryan had heard. There’d been one defector who’d come out after the assassination of John Kennedy who’d proclaimed to the very heavens that KGB had taken no part in that act. It was, in fact, sufficient to make the Agency wonder if maybe KGB had done precisely that. KGB could be tricky, but like all clever, tricky people, they inevitably overplayed their hand sooner or later—and the later they did it, the worse they overplayed it. They understood the West and how its people really thought things through. No, Ivan wasn’t ten feet tall, and neither was he a genius at everything, despite what the frightmongers in Washington—and even some at Langley—thought.

  Everyone had the capacity for making mistakes. He’d learned that from his father, who’d made a living catching murderers, some of whom thought themselves very clever indeed. No, the only difference between a wise man and a fool was in the magnitude of his mistakes. To err was human, and the smarter and more powerful you were, the greater the scope of your screwup. Like LBJ and Vietnam, the war Jack had barely avoided due to his age—a colossal screwup foisted on the American people by the most adroit political tactician of his age, a man who’d thought his political abilities would translate to international power politics, only to learn that an Asian communist didn’t think the same way that a senator from Texas did. All men had their limitations. It was just that some were more dangerous than others. And while genius knew it had limits, idiocy was always unbounded.

  He lay in his bed, smoking a cigarette and looking at the ceiling, wondering what would come tomorrow. Another manifestation of Sean Miller and his terrorists?

  Hopefully not, Jack thought, still wondering why Hudson wouldn’t have a gun close by for the coming adventures. Had to be some European thing, he decided. Americans on hostile soil liked to have at least one friend around.

  CHAPTER 27

  RABBIT RUN

  ONE MORE DAY in a strange city, Zaitzev thought, as the sun began to rise in the east, two hours earlier than in Moscow. At home he’d still be sleeping, Oleg Ivan’ch told himself. In due course, he hoped, he’d be waking up somewhere else, in an altogether different time zone yet again. But for now he just lay still, savoring the moment. There was virtually no sound outside, perhaps a few delivery trucks on the streets. The sun was not quite yet above the horizon. It was dark, but no longer night; brightening up, but not yet morning; the middle part of the early day. It could be a pleasant moment. It was a time children could like, a magical time when the world belonged only to those few who were awake, and all others were still unseen in their beds, and the kids could walk around like little kings, until their mothers caught them and dragged them back into their beds.

  But Zaitzev just lay there, hearing the slow breathing of his wife and daughter, while he was now fully awake, free to think entirely alone.

  When would they contact him? What would they say? Would they change their minds? Would they betray his trust?

  Why was he so goddamned uneasy about everything? Wasn’t it time to trust the CIA just a little bit? Wasn’t he going to be a huge asset to them? Would he not be valuable to them? Even KGB, as stingy as a child with the best toys, gave comfort and prestige to its defectors. All the alcohol Kim Philby could drink. All the zhopniki Burgess could ass-fuck, or so the stories went. In both cases, the stories went, the appetites were fairy large. But such stories always grew with the telling, and they depended at least partly on the Soviet antipathy for homosexuals.

  He wasn’t one of those. He was a man of principle, wasn’t he? Zaitzev asked himself. Of course he was. For principle he was taking his own life in his hands and juggling it. Like knives in the circus. And like that juggler, only he would be hurt by a misjudgment. Oleg lit his first smoke of the day, trying to think things through for the hundredth time, looking for another viable course of action.

  He could just go to the concerts, continue his shopping, take the train back to Kiev Station, and be a hero to his workmates for getting them their tape machines and pornographic movies, and the pantyhose for their wives, and probably a few things for himself. And KGB would never be the wiser.

  But then the Polish priest will die, at Soviet hands . . . hands you have the power to forestall, and then what sort of man will you see in the mirror, Oleg Ivan’ch?

  It always came back to the same thing, didn’t it?

  But there was little point in going back to sleep, so he smoked his cigarette and lay there, watching the sky brighten outside his hotel window.

  CATHY RYAN DIDN’T really wake up until her hand found empty bed where it ought to have found her husband. That automatically, somehow, caused her to come fully awake in an instant and just as quickly to remember that he was out of town and out of the country—theirs and this one—and that as a result she was alone, effectively a single mother, which was not something she’d bargained for when she’d married John Patrick Ryan, Sr. She wasn’t the only woman in the world whose husband traveled on business—her father did
it often enough, and she’d grown up with that. But this was the first time for Jack, and she didn’t like it at all.

  It wasn’t that she was unable to cope. She had to cope on a daily basis with worse tribulations than this one. Nor was she concerned that Jack might be getting a little on the side while he was away. She’d often enough wondered that about her father on his trips—her parents’ marriage had occasionally been a rocky one—and didn’t know what her mother (now deceased) had wondered about. But with Jack, no, that ought not to be a problem. But she loved him, and she knew that he loved her, and people in love were supposed to be together. Had they met while he was still an officer in the Marine Corps, it would have been a problem with which she would have had to deal—and worse, she might someday have had to deal with a husband who’d gone in harm’s way, and that, she was sure, was the purest form of hell to live with. But no, she’d not met him until after all that. Her own father had taken her to dinner, bringing Jack along as an afterthought, a bright young broker with keen instincts, ready to move from the Baltimore office up to New York, only to be surprised—pleasantly at first—by the interest they’d instantly found in each other, and then had come the revelation that Jack wanted to take his money and go back to teaching history, of all things. It was something she had to deal with more than Jack, who barely tolerated Joseph Muller, Senior Vice President of Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, plus whatever acquisitions they’d made in the past five years. Joe was still “Daddy” to her and “him” (which translated to “that pain in the ass”) to Jack.