Zaitzev called the travel office at 1530. He hoped that this didn't show an unusual eagerness, but everyone was interested in their vacation arrangements, he figured.
"Comrade Major, you are on the train day after tomorrow. It leaves Kiev Station at thirteen hours thirty and arrives in Budapest two days later at fourteen hours exactly. You and your family are booked into Carriage nine-oh-six in compartments A and B. You are also booked into Budapest's Hotel Astoria, Room three-oh-seven, for eleven days. The hotel is directly across the street from the Soviet Culture and Friendship House, which is, of course, a KGB operation with a liaison office, should you need any local assistance."
"Excellent. Thank you very much for your help." Zaitzev thought for a moment. "Is there anything I might purchase for you in Budapest?"
"Why, thank you, comrade." His voice just lit up. "Yes, perhaps some pantyhose for my wife," the functionary said in a furtive voice.
"What size?"
"My wife is a real Russian," he replied, meaning decidedly not anorexic.
"Very good. I will find something-or my wife will assist me."
"Excellent. Have a grand trip."
"Yes, I shall," Zaitzev promised him. With that settled, Oleg Ivan'ch left his desk and went to his watch supervisor to announce his plans for the coming two weeks.
"Isn't there some upstairs project that only you are cleared for?" the lieutenant colonel asked.
"Yes, but I asked Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, and he said not to be concerned about it. Feel free to call him to confirm that, comrade," Zaitzev told him.
And he did, in Zaitzev's presence. The brief call ended with a "thank you, comrade," and then he looked up at his subordinate. "Very well, Oleg Ivan'ch, you are relieved of your duties beginning this evening. Say, while you are in Budapest…"
"Certainly, Andrey Vasili'yevich. You may pay me for them when I get back." Andrey was a decent boss, who never screamed, and helped his people when asked. A pity he worked for an agency that murdered innocent people.
And then it was just a matter of cleaning up his desk, which wasn't difficult. KGB regulations dictated that every desk be set up exactly the same way, so that a worker could switch desks without confusion, and Zaitzev's desk was arranged exactly according to office specifications. With his pencils properly sharpened and lined up, his message log up to the moment, and all his books properly in place, he dumped his trash and walked to the men's room. There he selected a stall, removed his brown tie, and replaced it with his striped one. He checked his watch. He was actually a little early. So Zaitzev took his time on the way out, smoked two cigarettes instead of one, and took a moment to enjoy the clear afternoon, stopping off to get a paper along the way, and, to pamper himself, six packs of Krasno-presnensky, the premium cigarette smoked by Leonid Brezhnev himself, for two rubles forty. Something nice to smoke on the train. Might as well spend his rubles now, he decided. They'd be valueless where he was going. Then he walked down to the metro station and checked the clock. The train, of course, came right on time.
Foley was in the same place, doing the same thing in exactly the same way, his mind racing as the train slowed to a stop at this station. He felt the tiny vibration from the boarding passengers and the grunts of people bumping into one another. He straightened up to turn the page. Then the train lurched off. The engineers-or motormen, whatever the hell you called them-were always a little heavy on the throttle. A moment later, there was a presence to his left. Foley didn't see it, but he could feel it. Two minutes later, the subway train slowed for another station. It lurched to a stop, and someone bumped into him. Foley turned slightly to see who it was.
"Excuse me, comrade," the Rabbit said. He was wearing a blue tie with red stripes.
"No problem," Foley responded dismissively, as his heart leapt inside his chest.
Okay, two days from now, Kiev Station. The train to Budapest. The Rabbit moved a step or two away, and that was that. The signal had been passed.
Skyrockets in flight. Foley folded his paper, and made his way to the sliding doors. The usual walk to his apartment. Mary Pat was fixing dinner.
"Like my tie? You didn't tell me this morning."
MP's eyes lit up. Day after tomorrow, she realized. They'd have to get the word out, but that was just a procedural thing. She hoped Langley was ready. BEATRIX was going a little fast, but why dawdle?
"So, what's for dinner?"
"Well, I wanted to get a steak, but I'm afraid you'll have to settle for fried chicken today."
"That's okay, honey. Steak for day after tomorrow, maybe?" she asked.
"Sounds good to me. Honey, where's Eddie?"
"Watching Transformers, of course." She pointed to the living room.
"That's my boy," Ed observed, with a smile. "He knows the important stuff." Foley kissed his wife tenderly.
"Later, tiger," Mary Pat breathed back. But a successful operation merited a discreet celebration. Not that this one was successful yet, but it was certainly headed that way, and it was their first in Moscow. "Got the pictures?" she whispered.
He pulled them out of his jacket pocket. They were not exactly magazine-cover quality, but they did give good representations of the Rabbit and his little bunny. They didn't know what Mrs. Rabbit looked like, but this would have to do. They'd get the shots to Nigel and Penny. One of them would cover the train station to make sure the Rabbit family got going on time.
"Ed, there's a problem with the shower," Mary Pat said. "The spray thingee isn't right."
"I'll see if Nigel has the right tools." Foley walked out the door and down the hall. In a few minutes, they were back, Nigel carrying his toolbox.
"Hello, Mary." Nigel waved on his way to the bathroom. Once there, he made a fuss about opening his toolbox, then turning on the water, and now any bug the KGB might have here was jammed.
"Okay, Ed, what is it?"
Ed handed over the photos. "The Rabbit and the Bunny. We have nothing on Mrs. Rabbit yet. They'll all be taking the one P.M. train to Budapest, day after tomorrow."
"Kiev Station," Haydock said, with a nod. "You'll want me to get a picture of Mrs. Rabbit."
"Correct."
"Very well. I can do that." The wheels started turning at once. As Commercial Attache, he could come up with a cock-and-bull story to cover it, Haydock reasoned. He'd get a tame reporter to accompany him and make it look like a news story-something about tourism, perhaps. Paul Matthews of the Times would play along. Easily done. He'd have Matthews bring a photographer and take professional photos of the whole Rabbit family for London and Langley to use. And Ivan shouldn't suspect a thing. However important the Rabbit's information might be, the Rabbit himself was just a cipher, one of many thousands of KGB employees not important enough to be taken any note of. So tomorrow morning Haydock would call the Soviet state railroad and say that the Soviets' sister service in Britain-which was also state-owned-was interested in how the Russians ran theirs, and so… yes, that would work. There was nothing the Soviets liked better than others wanting to learn from their glorious system. Good for their egos. Nigel reached over to turn off the water.
"There, I think that has it fixed, Edward."
"Thanks, pal. Any good places in Moscow to buy tools?"
"I don't know, Ed. I've had these since I was a lad. Belonged to my father, you see."
Then Foley remembered what had happened to Nigel's father. Yeah, he wanted BEATRIX to succeed. He wanted to take every opportunity to shove a big one up the Bear's hairy ass. "How's Penny?"
"The baby hasn't dropped yet. So at least another week, probably more. Strictly speaking, she isn't due for another three weeks, but-"
"But the docs never get that one right, buddy. Never," Foley told his friend. "Best advice, stay close. When you planning to fly home?"
"Ten days should be about right, the embassy physician tells us. It's only a two-hour flight, after all."
"Your doc is an optimist, pal. These things never go according to plan. I don't suppose you want a little Englishman to be born in Moscow', eh?"
"No, Edward, we don't."
"Well, keep Penny off the trampoline," Foley suggested with a wink.
"Yes, I will do that, Ed." American humor could be rather crass, he thought.
This could be interesting, Foley thought, walking his friend to the door. He'd always thought Brit children were born at the age of five and sent immediately off to boarding school. Did they raise them the same way Americans did? He'd have to see.
The body of Owen Williams was never collected-it turned out he had no immediate family, and his ex-wife had no interest in him at all, especially dead. The local police, on receipt of a telex from Chief Superintendent Patrick Nolan of London's Metropolitan Police, transferred the body to an aluminum casket, which was loaded in a police van and driven south toward London. But not quite. The van stopped at a preselected location, and the aluminum box was transferred to another, unmarked, van for the drive into the city. It ended up in a mortuary in the Swiss Cottage district of north London.
The body was not in very good shape, and, since it had not yet seen a mortician, it had also not been treated in any way. The unburned under side was a blue-crimson shade of postmortem lividity. Once the heart stops, the blood is pulled by gravity to the lower regions of the body-in this case, the back-where, lacking oxygen, it tends to turn the Caucasian body a pale bluish color, leaving the upper side with a disagreeable ivory pallor. The mortician here was a civilian who occasionally contracted specialty work to the Secret Intelligence Service. Along with a forensic pathologist, he examined the body for anything unusual. The worst thing was the smell of roasted human meat, but their noses were covered with surgical masks to attenuate the odor.
"Tattoo, underside of the forearm, partially but not entirely burned off," the mortician reported.
"Very well." The pathologist lit the flame of a propane blowtorch and applied it to the arm, burning all evidence of the tattoo off the body. "Anything else, William?" he asked a couple minutes later.
"Nothing I can see. The upper body is well charred. Hair is mainly gone"-the smell of burned human hair is particularly vile-"and one ear nearly burned off. I presume this chap was dead before he burned."
"Ought to have been," the pathologist said. "The blood gasses had the CO well spiked into lethal range. I doubt this poor bugger felt a thing." Then he burned off the fingerprints, lingering to sear both hands with the torch so that it would not appear to have been a deliberate mutilation of the body.
"There," the pathologist said finally. "If there's a way to identify this body, I do not know what it is."
"Freeze it now?" the undertaker asked.
"No, I don't think so. If we chill it down to, oh, two or three degrees Celsius, no noticeable decomposition ought to take place."
"Dry ice, then."
"Yes. The metal casket is well insulated and it seals hermetically. Dry ice doesn't melt, you know. It goes directly from a solid to a gas. Now we need to get it dressed." The doctor had brought the underclothing with him. None of it was British in origin, and all of it was badly damaged by fire. All in all, it was a distasteful job, but one that pathologists and morticians get used to very early in their professions. It was just a different way of thinking for a different kind of job. But this was unusually gruesome, even for these two. Both would have an extra drink before turning in that night. When they finished, the aluminum box was reloaded on the van and driven to Century House. There would be a note on Sir Basil's desk in the morning to let him know that Rabbit A was ready for his last flight.
Later that night and three thousand miles away, in Boston, Massachusetts, there was a gas explosion on the second floor of a two-story frame dwelling overlooking the harbor. Three people were there when it happened. The two adults were not married, but both were drunk, and the woman's four-year-old daughter-not related to the male resident-was already in bed. The fire spread quickly, too quickly for the two adults to respond to it through their intoxication. The three deaths didn't take long, all of them from smoke inhalation rather than incineration. The Boston Fire Department responded within ten minutes, and their search-and-rescue ladder men battled their way through the flames under cover of two hose streams, found the bodies, and dragged them out, but they knew that they'd been too late again. The captain of the responding company could tell almost instantly what had gone wrong. There had been a gas leak in the kitchen from the old stove that the landlord hadn't wanted to replace, and so three people had died of his parsimony. (He'd gladly collect the insurance check, of course, and say how sorry he was about the tragic incident.) This was not the first such case. It wouldn't be the last, either, and so he and his men would have some nightmares about the three bodies, especially the little girl's. But that just went with the job.
The story was early enough to make the eleven o'clock news on the rule that "If it bleeds, it leads." The Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Boston field division was up and watching, actually waiting for coverage of the baseball playoffs-he'd been at an official dinner and missed the live broadcast on NBC-and saw the story and instantly remembered the lunatic telex he'd gotten earlier in the day. That caused a curse to be muttered and a phone to be lifted.
"FBI," said the young agent guarding the phones when he picked up.
"Get Johnny up," the SAC ordered. "A family got burned up in a fire on Hester Street. He'll know what to do. Have him call me at home if he has to."
"Yes, sir." And that was that, except for Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Tyler, who'd been reading a book in his bed-a native of South Carolina, he preferred college football to professional baseball-when the phone rang. He managed to grumble on the way to the bathroom, then collected his side arm and car keys for the ride south. He'd seen the telex from Washington, too, and wondered what sort of drugs Emil Jacobs was taking, but his was not to reason why.
Not too long after that, but five time zones to the east, Jack Ryan rolled out of bed, got his paper, and switched on the TV CNN also carried the fire story from Boston-it was a slow news night at home-and he breathed a quiet prayer for the victims of the fire, followed by speculation about the gas pipe connection in his own stove. His house, though, was a lot newer than the standing lumberyard that defined a house in south Boston. When they went, they went big, and they went fast. Too fast for those people to get out, evidently. He remembered his father often saying how much he respected firemen, people who ran into burning buildings instead of away from them. The worst part of the job had to be what they found unmoving on the inside. He shook his head as he opened his morning paper and reached for his coffee, while his physician wife saw the tail end of the fire story and thought her own thoughts. She remembered treating burn victims in her third year of medical school and the horrid screams that went with debriding burned tissue off the underlying wounds, and there wasn't a damned thing you could do about it. But those people in Boston were dead now, and that was that. She didn't like it, but she'd seen a lot of death, because sometimes the Bad Guy won, and that was just how things worked. It was not a pleasant thought for a parent, especially since the little girl in Boston had been Sally's age and now would never get older. She sighed. At least she'd be doing some surgery that morning, something that really made a difference with somebody's health.
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?"
Price 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, Nigel 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.