CHAPTER 28
BRITISH MIDLANDS
THE CANDLE BURNED NORMALLY, not knowing the part it was playing in the night’s adventures, consuming wick and wax at a slow pace, gradually burning down to the still surface of the alcohol—soon to play the part of an accelerant in an arson fire. All in all, it took thirty-four minutes before the surface of the flammable fluid ignited. What started then is called a class-B fire by professionals—a flammable-liquid event. The alcohol burned with an enthusiasm hardly less than that of gasoline—this was why the Germans had used alcohol rather than kerosene in their V-2 missile—and rapidly consumed the cardboard of the milk carton, releasing the burning quart of alcohol onto the floor. That ignited the soaked surface of the hotel room’s rug. The blue wave of the fire-front raced across the room’s floor in a matter of seconds, like a living thing, a blue line followed by an incandescent white mass as the fire reached up to consume the available oxygen in the high-ceilinged room. Another moment and both beds ignited as well, enveloping the bodies in them with flames and searing heat.
The Hotel Astoria was an old one, lacking both smoke detectors and automatic sprinklers to warn of danger or extinguish the blaze before it got too dangerous. Instead the flames climbed almost immediately to the water-stained white ceiling, burning off paint and charring the underlying plaster, plus attacking the cheap hotel furniture. The inside of the room turned into a crematorium for three human beings already dead, eating their bodies like the carnivorous animal the ancient Egyptians thought a fire to be. The worst of the damage took just five minutes, but while the fire died down somewhat after its first glut of consumption, it didn’t die just yet.
The desk clerk in the lobby had a more complex job than one might have expected. At two-thirty every morning, he placed a please-wait-backin-a few-minutes sign on the desk, and took the elevator to the top floor to walk the corridors. He found the usual—nothing at all in this floor, and all the others, until getting to number three.
Coming down the steps, he noticed an unusual smell. That perked his senses, but not all that much until his feet touched the floor. Then he turned left and saw a wisp of smoke coming out from under the door to 307. He took the three steps to the door, and touched the knob, finding it hot, but not painfully so. That was when he made his mistake.
Taking the passkey from his pocket, he unlocked the door, and without feeling the wooden portion to see if that was hot, he pushed the door open.
The fire had largely died down, starved of oxygen, but the room remained hot, the hotel walls insulating the incipient blaze as efficiently as a barbecue pit. Opening the door admitted a large volume of fresh air and oxygen to the room, and barely had he had the chance to see the horror within when a phenomenon called flashover happened.
It was the next thing to an explosion. The room reignited in a blast of flame and a further intake of air, sufficiently strong that it nearly pulled the clerk off his feet and into the room even as an outward blast of flame pushed him the other way—and saved his life. Slapping his hands to his flash-burned face, he fell to his knees and struggled to the manual-pull alarm on the wall next to the elevator—without pulling 307’s door back shut. That sounded alarm bells throughout the hotel and also reported to the nearest firehouse, three kilometers away. Screaming with pain, he walked, or fell, down the stairs to the lobby, where he first threw a glass of water on his burned face, then called the emergency number next to the phone to report the fire to the city fire department. By this time people were coming down the stairs. For them, getting past the third floor had been harrowing, and the clerk, burned as he was, got an extinguisher to spray on them, but he was unable to climb back to use the fire hose in its little cabinet on the involved floor. It would not have mattered anyway.
The first fire truck arrived less than five minutes after the pull alarm had sounded. Hardly needing to be told—the fire was visible from outside, since the room’s windows had shattered from the heat of the renewed blaze—they forced their way past the escaping hotel guests. Within a minute after arriving, the first seventy-millimeter hose was spraying water into the room. It took less than five minutes to knock the fire down, and through the smoke and horrid smell, the firemen forced their way inside to find what they feared—a family of three, dead in their beds.
The fire lieutenant in command of the first responders cradled the dead child in his arms and ran down and out onto the street, but he could see it was a waste. The child had roasted like a piece of meat in an oven. Hosing her body down only exposed the ghastly effect a fire has on a human body, and there was nothing for him to do but say a prayer for her. The lieutenant was the brother of a priest and a devout Catholic in this Marxist country, and he prayed to his God for mercy for the little girl’s soul, not knowing that the very same thing had happened over four thousand miles away and ten days earlier.
THE RABBITS WERE out of the city in a matter of minutes. Hudson drove carefully, within the posted speed limits, lest there be a cop around, though there was virtually no traffic in evidence, merely the occasional truck, commercial ones with canvas sides, carrying who knew what to who knew where. Ryan was in the right-front seat, half turned to look in the back. Irina Zaitzev was a mask of tipsy confusion, not comprehending enough to be frightened. The child was asleep, as children invariably were at this time of night. The father was trying to be stoic, but the edge of fear was visible on his face, even in the darkness. Ryan tried to put himself in his place, but found it impossible to do so. To betray one’s country was too great a leap of imagination for him. He knew there were those who stabbed America in the back, mainly for money, but he didn’t pretend to understand their motivation. Sure, back in the ’30s and ’40s there had been those for whom communism looked like the leading wave of human history, but those thoughts were all as dead as V. I. Lenin was today. Communism was a dying idea, except in the minds of those who needed it to be the source of their personal power.... And perhaps some still believed in it because they’d never been exposed to anything else, or because the idea had been too firmly planted in their distant youth, as a minister or priest believed in God. But the words of Lenin’s Collected Works were not Holy Writ to Ryan and never would be. As a new college graduate, he’d sworn his oath to the Constitution of the United States and promised to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” as a second lieutenant of the United States Marine Corps, and that was that.
“How long, Andy?”
“A little over an hour to Csurgo. Traffic ought not to be a problem,” Hudson answered.
And it wasn’t. In minutes, they were outside the boundaries of Hungary’s capital, and then the lights of houses and businesses just stopped as though someone had flipped the master switch for electricity to the region. The road was two-lane blacktop, and none too wide at that. Telephone poles, no guardrails. And this is a major commercial highway? Ryan wondered. They might as well have been driving across central Nevada. Perhaps one or two lights every kilometer, farmhouses where people liked to have one on to help find their way to the bathroom. Even the road signs looked decrepit and not very helpful—not the mint-green highway signs of home or the friendly blue ones of England. It didn’t help that the words on them were in Martian. Otherwise they were the European sort, showing the speed limit in black numbers on a white disc within a red circle.
Hudson was a competent driver, puffing away on his cigars and driving as though he were on his way to Covent Garden in London. Ryan thanked God that he’d made a trip to the head before walking to the hotel—otherwise he might lose control of his bladder. Well, probably his face didn’t show how nervous he was, Jack hoped. He kept telling himself that his own life wasn’t on the line, but those of the people in the back were, and they were now his responsibility, and something in him, probably something learned from his policeman father, made that a matter of supreme importance.
“What is your full name?” Oleg asked him, breaking the silence unexpectedly.
“Ryan, Jack Ryan.”
“What sort of name is Ryan?” the Rabbit pressed on.
“My ancestry is Irish. John corresponds to Ivan, I think, but people call me Jack, like Vanya, maybe.”
“And you are in CIA?”
“Yes, I am.”
“What is your job in CIA?”
“I am an analyst. Mostly I sit at a desk and write reports.”
“I also sit at desk in Centre.”
“You are a communications officer?”
A nod. “Da, that is my job in Centre.” Then Zaitzev remembered that his important information was not for the back of a car, and he shut back up.
Ryan saw that. He had things to say, but not here, and that was fair enough for the moment.
The trip went smoothly. Four cigars for Hudson, and six cigarettes for Ryan, until they approached the town of Csurgo.
Ryan had expected something more than this. Csurgo was barely a wide place in the road, with not even a gas station in evidence, and surely not an all-night 7-Eleven. Hudson turned off the main road onto a dirt track, and three minutes later there was the shape of a commercial truck. It was a big Volvo, he saw in a moment, with a black canvas cover on the back and two men standing next to it, both smoking. Hudson pulled around it, finding concealment behind some nondescript sort of shed a few yards from it, and stopped the Jaguar. He hopped out, and motioned to the rest to do the same.
Ryan followed the Brit spook to the two men. Hudson walked right up to the older of the two and shook his hand.
“Hello, Istvan. Good of you to wait for us.”
“Hello, Andy. It is a dull night. Who are your friends?”
“This is Mr. Ryan. These are the Somerset family. We’re going across the border,” Hudson explained.
“Okay,” Kovacs agreed. “This is Jani. He’s my driver for tonight. Andy, you can ride in front with us. The rest will be in the back. Come,” he said, leading the way.
The truck’s tailgate had ladder steps built in. Ryan climbed up first, and bent down to lift the little girl—Svetlana, he remembered, was her name—and watched her mother and father climb up. In the cargo area, he saw, were some large cardboard boxes, perhaps containers for the tape machine Hungarians made. Kovacs climbed up also.
“You all speak English?” he asked, and got nods. “It is a short way to the border, just five kilometer. You will hide in boxes here. Please make no noise. Is important. You understand? Make no noise.” He got more nods, noting that the man—definitely not an Englishman, he could see—translated to his wife. The man took the child, Kovacs saw also. With his cargo hidden away, he closed the tailgate and walked forward.
“Five thousand d-mark for this, eh?” Istvan asked.
“That is correct,” Hudson agreed.
“I should ask more, but I am not a greedy man.”
“You are a trusted comrade, my friend,” Hudson assured him, briefly wishing that he had a pistol in his belt.
The Volvo’s big diesel lit up with a rumbling roar and the truck jerked off, back to the main road, with Jani at the large, almost flat steering wheel.
It didn’t take long.
And that was a good thing for Ryan, crouching in the cardboard box in the back. He could only guess how the Russians felt, like unborn babies in a horrible womb, one with loaded guns outside it.
Ryan was afraid even to smoke a final cigarette, fearing someone might smell the smoke over the pungent diesel exhaust, which was altogether unlikely.
“So, Istvan,” Hudson asked in the cab, “what is the routine?”
“Watch. We usually travel at night. Is more—dramatic, you say? I know the Határ-rség here many years now. Captain Budai Laszlo is good man to do business with. He has wife and little daughter, always want present for daughter Zsóka. I have,” Kovacs promised, holding up a paper bag.
The border post was sufficiently well lighted that they could see it three kilometers off, and blessedly there was little traffic this time of night. Jani drove up normally, slowing and stopping there when the private of the border guards, the Határ-rség, waved for them to halt.
“Is Captain Budai here?” Kovacs asked at once. “I have something for him.” The private headed into the guardhouse and returned instantly with a more senior man.
“Laszlo! How are you this cold night?” Kovacs called in Magyar, then jumped down from the cab with the paper shopping bag.
“Istvan, what can I say, it is dull night,” the youngish captain replied.
“And your little Zsóka, she is well?”
“Her birthday is next week. She will be five.”
“Excellent!” the smuggler observed. He handed over the bag. “Give her these.”
“These” were a pair of candy-apple-red Reebok sneakers with Velcro closures.
“Lovely,” Captain Budai observed, with genuine pleasure. He took them out to look at them in the light. Any female child in the world loved the things, and Laszlo was as happy as his daughter would be in four days. “You are a good friend, Istvan. So, what do you transport tonight?”
“Nothing of value. I’m making a pickup this morning in Beograd, though. Anything you need?”
“My wife would love some tapes for the Walkman you got her last month.” The amazing thing about Budai was that he was not an overly greedy man. That was one of the reasons Kovacs liked to travel across the border on his watch.
“What groups?”
“The Bee Gees, I think she called them. For me, some show tunes, if you don’t mind.”
“Anything in particular? The music from American movies, like Star Wars, perhaps.”
“I have that one, but not the new one, the Empire Attacks Back, perhaps?”
“Done.” They shook hands. “How about some Western coffee?”
“What kind?”
“Austrian or American, maybe? There’s a place in Beograd that has American Folgers coffee. It is very tasty,” Kovacs assured him.
“I have never tried that.”
“I’ll get you some and you can try it—no charge.”
“You are a good man,” Budai observed. “Have a good night. Pass,” he concluded, waving to his corporal.
And it was just that easy. Kovacs walked back around and climbed into his truck. He wouldn’t have to part with the present he had for Sergeant Kerekes Mikaly, and that was good, too.
Hudson was surprised. “No paper check?”
“Laszlo just runs the name through the teletype to Budapest. Some people there are also on my payroll. They are more greedy than he is, but is not major expense. Jani, go,” he said to the driver, who started up and pulled across the line painted on the pavement. And just that easily, the truck left the Warsaw Pact.
In the back, Ryan had rarely felt so good to feel a vehicle start to move. It stopped again in a minute, but this was a different border.
And going into Yugoslavia, Jani handled it, just trading a few words with the guard, not even killing the engine, before being waved forward and into the semi-communist country. He drove three kilometers before being told to pull off onto a side road. There, after a few bumps, the Volvo stopped. Yugoslavian border security, Hudson saw, was sod-all.
Ryan was already out of his cardboard box and standing at the back when the canvas cover was flipped aside.
“We’re here, Jack,” Hudson said.
“Where is that exactly?”
“Yugoslavia, my lad. The nearest town is Légrád, and here we part company.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I’m turning you over to Vic Lucas. He’s my counterpart in Belgrade. Vic?” Hudson beckoned.
The man who came into view might have been Hudson’s twin, except for the hair, which was black. He was also two or three inches taller, Jack decided on second inspection. He went forward to get the Rabbits out of the boxes. That happened in a hurry, and Ryan helped them down, handing the little girl—remarkably, still asleep—to her mother, who looked more confused than ever.
Hudson walked them to a car, a station wagon—“estate wagon” to the Brits—which would at least have ample room for everyone.
“Sir John—Jack, that is—well done, and thanks for all your help.”
“I didn’t do shit, Andy, but you handled this pretty damned well,” Ryan said, taking his hand. “Come see me in London for a pint sometime.”
“That I shall do,” Hudson promised.
The estate wagon was a British Ford. Ryan helped the Rabbits into their seats and then took the right-front again.
“Mr. Lucas, where do we go now?”
“To the airport. Our flight is waiting,” the Belgrade COS replied.
“Oh? Special flight?”
“No, the commercial aircraft is experiencing ‘technical difficulties’ at the moment. I rather expect they will be cleared up about the time we get aboard.”
“Good to know,” Ryan observed. Better this than a real broken airplane, then he realized that one more harrowing adventure lay ahead. His hatred of flying was suddenly back, now that they were in semi-free country.
“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 Budapest.
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.