“Smoke inhalation,” the fireman-paramedic said, on coming in the swinging doors. “Severe carbon monoxide intoxication.” The extensive but mainly superficial burns could wait for the moment.
“How long?” the ER doc asked at once.
“Don’t know. It does not look good, doctor. CO poisoning, eyes fixed and dilated, fingernails red, no response to CPR or oxygen as yet,” the paramedic reported.
The medics all tried. You don’t just kiss off the life of a man in his early thirties, but an hour later it was clear that Owen Williams would not open his blue eyes ever again, and, on the doctor’s command, lifesaving efforts were stopped and a time of death announced, to be typed in on the death certificate. The police were there, also, of course. They mostly chatted with the firemen until the cause of death was established. The blood chemistry was taken—they’d drawn blood immediately to check blood gasses—and after fifteen minutes, the lab reported that the level of carbon monoxide was 39 percent, deep into the lethal range. He’d been dead before the firemen had rolled off their cots. And that was that.
It was the police rather than the firemen who took it from there. A man had died, and it had to be reported up the chain of command.
That chain ended in London in the steel-and-glass building that was New Scotland Yard, with its revolving triangular sign that made tourists think that the name of the London police force was, in fact, Scotland Yard, when actually that had been a street name years before for the old headquarters building. There, a Post-it note on a teletype machine announced that Chief Superintendent Nolan of Special Branch wanted to be informed at once of any death by fire or accident, and the teletype operator lifted a phone and called the appropriate number.
That number was to the Special Branch watch officer, who asked a few questions, then called York for further information. Then it was his job to awaken “Tiny” Nolan just after four in the morning.
“Very well,” the Chief Superintendent said, after collecting himself. “Tell them to do nothing whatsoever with the body—nothing at all. Make sure they understand, nothing at all.”
“Very well, sir,” the sergeant in the office confirmed. “I will relay that.”
And seven miles away, Patrick Nolan went back to sleep, or at least tried to, while his mind wondered again what the hell SIS wanted a roasted human body for. It had to be something interesting, just that it was also quite disgusting to contemplate—enough that it denied him sleep for twenty minutes or so, before he faded back out.
THE MESSAGES WERE flying back and forth across the Atlantic and Eastern Europe all that night, and all of them were processed by the signals specialists in the various embassies, the underpaid and overworked clerical people who, virtually alone, were needed to transmit all of the most sensitive information from originators to end-users, and so, virtually alone, were the people who knew it all but did nothing with it. They were also the ones whom enemies tried so hard to corrupt, and who were, as a result, the most carefully watched of all staffers, whether at headquarters or in the various embassies, though for all the concern, there was usually no compensating solicitude for their comfort. But it was through these so often unappreciated but vital people that the dispatches found their way to the proper desks.
One recipient was Nigel Haydock, and it was to him that the most important of the morning’s messages went, because only he, at this moment, knew the scope of BEATRIX, there in his office, where he was covered as Commercial Attaché to Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, on the eastern bank of the Moscow River.
Haydock usually took his breakfast at the embassy, since with his wife so gravidly pregnant, he felt it improper for him to have her fix the morning meal for him—and besides, she was sleeping a lot, in preparation for not sleeping at all when the little bugger arrived, Nigel thought. So there he was at his desk, drinking his morning tea and eating a buttered muffin when he got to the dispatch from London.
“Bloody hell,” he breathed, then paused to think. It was brilliant, this American play on MINCEMEAT—nasty and grisly, but brilliant. And it appeared that Sir Basil was going forward with it. That tricky old bugger. It was the sort of thing Bas would like. The current C was a devotee of the old school, one who liked the feel of devious operations. His over-cleverness might be the downfall of him someday, but, Haydock thought, one has to admire his panache. So get the Rabbit to Budapest and arrange his escape from there. . . .
ANDY HUDSON PREFERRED coffee in the morning, accompanied by eggs, bacon, fried tomatoes, and toast. “Bloody brilliant,” he said aloud. The audacity of this operation appealed to his adventurous nature. So they’d have to get three individuals—an adult male, an adult female, and a little girl—all out of Hungary covertly. Not overly difficult, but he’d have to check his rat line, because this was one operation he didn’t want to bollix up, especially if he had thoughts of promotion in the future. The Secret Intelligence Service was singular among British government bureaucracies insofar as, while it rewarded success fairly well, it was singularly unforgiving of failure—there was no union at Century House to protect the worker bees. But he’d known that going in, and they couldn’t take his pension away in any case—once he had the seniority to qualify for one, Hudson cautioned himself. But while this operation wasn’t quite the World Cup, it would be rather like scoring the winning goal for Arsenal against Manchester United at Wembly Stadium.
So his first task of the day was to see after his cross-border connections. Those were reliable, he thought. He’d spent a good deal of time setting them up, and he’d checked them out before. But he’d check them out again, starting today. He’d also check in with his AVH contact . . . or would he? Hudson wondered. What would that get him? It could allow him to find out if the Hungarian secret police force was on a state of alert or looking for something, but if that were true, the Rabbit would not be leaving Moscow. His information had to be highly important for an operation of this complexity to be run by CIA through SIS, and KGB was too careful and conservative an agency to take any sort of chances with information of that importance. The other side was never predictable in the intelligence business. There were just too many people with slightly different ideas for everyone to operate in lockstep. So, no, AVH wouldn’t know very much, if anything at all. KGB trusted no one at all, absent direct oversight, preferably with guns.
So the only smart thing for him to do would be to look in on his escape procedures, and even to do that circumspectly, and otherwise wait for this Ryan chap to arrive from London to look over his shoulder. . . . Ryan, he thought, CIA. The same one who—no chance of that. Just a coincidence. Had to be. That Ryan was a bootneck—an American bootneck. Just too much of a coincidence, the COS Budapest decided.
RYAN HAD REMEMBERED his croissants, and this time he’d taken them with him in the cab from Victoria to Century House, along with the coffee. He arrived to see Simon’s coat on the tree, but no Simon. Probably off with Sir Basil, he decided, and sat down at his desk, looking at the pile of overnights to go through. The croissants—he’d pigged out and bought three of them, plus butter and grape-jelly packets—were sufficiently flaky that he risked ending up wearing them instead of eating them, and this morning’s coffee wasn’t half bad. He made a mental note to write to Starbucks and suggest that they open some outlets in London. The Brits needed good coffee to get them off their damned tea, and this new Seattle company might just pull it off, assuming they could train people to brew it up right. He looked up when the door opened.
“Morning, Jack.”
“Hey, Simon. How’s Sir Basil this morning?”
“He’s feeling very clever indeed with this Operation BEATRIX. It’s under way, in a manner of speaking.”
“Can you fill me in on what’s happening?”
Simon Harding thought for a moment, then explained briefly.
“Is somebody out of his fucking mind?” Ryan demanded at the conclusion of the minibrief.
“Jack, yes, it is creative,” Hardi
ng agreed. “But there should be little in the way of operational difficulties.”
“Unless I barf,” Jack responded darkly.
“So take a plastic bag,” Harding suggested. “Take one from the airplane with you.”
“Funny, Simon.” Ryan paused. “What is this, some sort of initiation ceremony for me?”
“No, we don’t do that sort of thing. The operational concept comes from your people, and the request for cooperation comes from Judge Moore himself.”
“Fuck!” Jack observed. “And they dump me in the shitter, eh?”
“Jack, the objective here is not merely to get the Rabbit out, but to do so in such a way as to make Ivan believe he’s dead, not defected, along with his wife and daughter.”
Actually, the part that bothered Ryan was the corpses. What could be more distasteful than that? And he doesn’t even know the nasty part yet, Simon Harding thought, glad that he’d edited that part out.
ZAITZEV WALKED INTO the administrative office on The Centre’s second floor. He showed his ID to the girl and waited a few minutes before going into the supervisor’s office.
“Yes?” the bureaucrat said, only half looking up.
“I wish to take my vacation days. I want to take my wife to Budapest. There’s a conductor there she wants to hear—and I wish to travel there by train instead of by air.”
“When?”
“In the next few days. As soon as possible, in fact.”
“I see.” The KGB’s travel office did many things, most of them totally mundane. The travel agent—what else could Zaitzev call him?—still didn’t look up. “I must check the availability of space on the train.”
“I want to travel International Class, compartments, beds for three—I have a child, you see.”
“That may not be easy,” the bureaucrat noted.
“Comrade, if there are any difficulties, please contact Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy,” he said mildly.
That name caused him to look up, Zaitzev saw. The only question was whether or not he’d make the call. The average desk-sitter did not go out of his way to become known to a senior official, and, like most people in The Centre, he had a healthy fear of those on the top floor. On the one hand, he might want to see if someone were taking the colonel’s name in vain. On the other hand, calling his attention to that senior officer as an officious little worm in Administration would do him little good. He looked at Zaitzev, wondering if he had authorization to invoke Rozhdestvenskiy’s name and authority.
“I will see what I can do, Comrade Captain,” he promised.
“When can I call you?”
“Later today.”
“Thank you, comrade.” Zaitzev walked out and down the corridor to the elevators. So that was done, thanks to his temporary patron on the top floor. To make sure everything was all right, he had his blue striped tie folded and in his coat pocket. Back at his desk, he went back to memorizing the content of his routine message traffic. A pity, he thought, that he could not copy out of the one-time-pad books, but that was not practical, and memorizing them was a sheer impossibility even for his trained memory.
UNDERWAY WAS THE single word on the message from Langley, Foley saw. So they were going forward. That was good. Headquarters was hot to trot on BEATRIX, and that was probably because the Rabbit had warned them about general communications security, the one thing sure to cause a general panic on the Seventh Floor at headquarters. But could it possibly be true? No. Mike Russell didn’t think so, and, as he’d already observed, were it true, some of his agents would have been swept up like confetti after a parade, and that hadn’t happened . . . unless KGB was really being clever and had doubled his agents, operating them under Soviet control, and he’d be able to determine that, wouldn’t he? Well, probably, Foley judged. Certainly they could not all be double agents. Some things were just impossible to hide, unless KGB’s Second Chief Directorate had the cleverest operation in the history of espionage, and while that was theoretically possible, it was the tallest of tall orders, and something that they’d probably avoid since the quality of some information going out would have to be good—too good to let go voluntarily. . . .
But he couldn’t entirely discount that possibility. For sure, NSA would be taking steps right now to examine their KH-7 and other cipher machines, but Fort Meade had a very active Red Team whose only job was to crack their own systems, and while Russian mathematicians were pretty smart—always had been—they weren’t aliens from another planet . . . unless they had an agent of their own deep inside Fort Meade, and that was a worry that everyone had. How much would KGB pay for that sort of information? Millions, perhaps. They didn’t have all that much cash to pay their people and, in addition to being niggardly, KGB was singularly disloyal to its people, regarding them all as expendable assets. Oh, sure, they got Kim Philby out and safely ensconced in Moscow. The Western spy agencies knew where he lived and had even photographed the turncoat bastard. They even knew how much he drank—a lot, even by Russian standards. But when the Russians lost an agent to arrest, did they ever try to bargain for him, do a trade? No, not since CIA had bargained for Francis Gary Powers, the unlucky U-2 pilot whom they’d shot down in 1961 and then traded for Rudolf Abel, but Abel had been one of their own officers, a colonel and a pretty good one, operating in New York. That had to be a deterrent to any American national in the spook business who had illusions of getting rich off Mother Russia’s bank account. And traitors did hard time in the federal prison system, which had to be one hell of a deterrent.
But traitors were real, however misguided they were. At least the age of the ideological spy was largely ended. Those had been the most productive and the most dedicated, back when people really had believed that communism was the leading wave of human evolution, but even Russians no longer believed in Marxism-Leninism, except for Suslov—who was just about dead—and his successor-to-be, Alexandrov. So, no, KGB agents in the West were almost entirely mercenary bastards. Not the freedom fighters Ed Foley ran on the streets of Moscow, the COS told himself. That was an illusion all CIA officers held dearly, even his wife.
And the Rabbit? He was mad about something. A murder, he said, a proposed killing. Something that offended the sense of an honorable and decent man. So, yes, the Rabbit was honorable in his motivations, and therefore worthy of CIA’s attention and solicitude.
Jesus, Ed Foley thought, the illusions you have to have to carry on this stupid fucking business. You had to be psychiatrist, loving mother, stern father, close friend, and father confessor to the idealistic, confused, angry, or just plain greedy individuals who chose to betray their country. Some of them drank too much; some of them were so enraged that they endangered themselves by taking grotesque risks. Some were just plain mad, demented, clinically disturbed. Some became sexual deviants—hell, some started off that way and just got worse. But Ed Foley had to be their social worker, which was such an odd job description for someone who thought of himself as a warrior against the Big Ugly Bear. Well, he told himself, one thing at a time. He’d knowingly chosen a profession with barely adequate pay, virtually no credit ever to be awarded, and no recognition for the dangers, physical and psychological, that attended it, serving his country in a way that would never be appreciated by the millions of citizens he helped to protect, despised by the news media—whom he in turn despised—and never being able to defend himself with the truth of what he did. What a hell of a life.
But it did have its satisfactions, like getting the Rabbit the hell out of Dodge City.
If BEATRIX worked.
Foley told himself that now, once more, he knew what it was like to pitch in the World Series.
ISTVAN KOVACS LIVED a few blocks from the Hungarian parliamentary palace, an ornate building reminiscent of the Palace of Westminster, on the third floor of a turn-of-the-century tenement, whose four toilets were on the first floor of a singularly dreary courtyard. Hudson took the local metro over to the government palace and walked the rest of the w
ay, making sure that he didn’t have a tail. He’d called ahead—remarkably, the city’s phone lines were secure, uncontrolled mainly because of the inefficiency of the local phone systems.
Kovacs was so typically Hungarian as to deserve a photo in the nonexistent tourist brochures: five-eight, swarthy, a mainly circular face with brown eyes and black hair. But he dressed rather better than the average citizen because of his profession. Kovacs was a smuggler. It was almost an honored livelihood in this country, since he traded across the border to a putatively Marxist country to the south, Yugoslavia, whose borders were open enough that a clever man could purchase Western goods there and sell them in Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe. The border controls on Yugoslavia were fairly loose, especially for those who had an understanding with the border guards. Kovacs was one such person.
“Hello, Istvan,” Andy Hudson said, with a smile. “Istvan” was the local version of Steven, and “Kovacs” the local version of Smith, for its ubiquity.
“Andy, good day to you,” Kovacs replied in greeting. He opened a bottle of Tokaji, the local tawny wine made of grapes with the noble rot, which afflicted them every few years. Hudson had come to enjoy it as the local variant of sherry, with a different taste but an identical purpose.
“Thank you, Istvan.” Hudson took a sip. This was good stuff, with six baskets of nobly rotten grapes on the label, indicating the very best. “So, how is business?”
“Excellent. Our VCRs are popular with the Yugoslavs, and the tapes they sell me are popular with everyone. Oh, to have such a prick as those actors do!” He laughed.
“The women aren’t bad, either,” Hudson noted. He’d seen his share of such tapes.
“How can a kurva be so beautiful?”
“The Americans pay their whores more than we do in Europe, I suppose. But, Istvan, they have no heart, those women.” Hudson had never paid for it in his life—at least not up front.