Red Rabbit

  “Thanks a bunch, Andy.” Ryan looked up with a very crooked smile. “I got plenty already, pal.”

  “Well, then, the next time you do a memo, you’ll have a better appreciation for how things are at the sharp end.”

  “Fine with me, just so I don’t get blunted by a brick wall.”

  “It’s my job to prevent that.”

  Ryan took a long sip of the coffee. It wasn’t up to Cathy’s but, for industrial coffee, not too shabby. “What’s the plan for today?”

  “Finish breakfast, and I’m your tour guide. We’ll get you a feel for the land and start thinking about how we complete Operation BEATRIX.”

  THE ZAITZEV FAMILY was agreeably surprised by the quality of the food. Oleg had heard good things about Hungarian cuisine, but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and the surprise was a pleasant one. Eager to see the new city, they finished, got dressed, and asked for directions. Since Irina was the one most interested in the local opportunities, she asked for the best shopping street. This, the desk clerk said, was Váci Utca, to which they could take the local metro, which, he told them, was the oldest in Europe. And so they walked to Andrassy Utca and walked down the steps. The Budapest Metro, they saw, was really an ordinary streetcar tram, just underground. Even the tram car was of wooden construction, with the same overhead catenary you usually found over the street. But it was underground, if barely so, and it moved efficiently enough. Barely ten minutes after boarding, they were at Vorosmarty Tér, or Red Marty Square, a short walk from Váci Street. They didn’t notice the man who accompanied them at a discreet distance—Tom Trent—who was quite amazed to see them walking directly toward the British Embassy on Harm Utca.

  RYAN WENT BACK to his room to get his raincoat—Hudson had advised a topcoat for the morning’s jaunt—and then hustled down to the foyer, then outside onto the street. The weather was broken clouds, which suggested rain later in the day. Hudson nodded at the security officer at the door and led Ryan out, rather to his surprise when he got there. Hudson’s first look was to the left at police headquarters, but there was Tom Trent, not seventy-five yards away. . . .

  Following the Rabbit family?

  “Uh, Jack?”

  “Yeah, Andy?”

  “That’s our bloody Rabbit, Mrs. Rabbit, and the little Bunny.”

  Ryan turned to look, and was startled to see the three people from the photos walking right toward him. “What the hell . . . ?”

  “Must be going shopping on the next block. It’s a tourist area—shops and everything. Bloody strange coincidence,” Hudson observed, wondering what the hell this might mean.

  “Follow them?” Jack asked.

  “Why not?” Hudson asked rhetorically. He lit a smoke of his own—he liked small cigars—and waited for his companion to ignite a cigarette as the Rabbits passed. They waited for Trent to pass by before heading that way as well.

  “Does this mean anything?” Ryan asked.

  “I do not know,” Hudson answered. But while he wasn’t visibly uneasy, the tone of his voice carried a message of its own. They followed anyway.

  Things were clear almost immediately. Within minutes, it was apparent that the Rabbits were shopping, with Mrs. Rabbit taking the lead, as all mama rabbits usually do.

  Váci Street was seemingly an old one, though the buildings must have been restored after World War II, Ryan thought. This city had been fought for, and viciously so, in early 1945. Ryan looked in the shop windows and saw the usual variety of goods, though of poorer quality, and lesser quantities than one saw in America or London. Certainly they were impressive to the Rabbit family, whose matriarch gestured with enthusiasm at every window she passed.

  “Woman thinks she’s on Bond Street,” Hudson observed.

  “Not quite.” Jack chuckled back. He’d already dropped a fair bit of his personal exchequer there. Bond Street was perhaps the finest shopping street in all the world, if you could afford to walk the sidewalk there. But what was Moscow like, and how did this shopping area look to a Russian?

  All women, it seemed to Jack, were alike in one respect. They liked window shopping, until the strain of not buying things drove them over the edge. In Mrs. Rabbit’s case, it lasted about 0.4 blocks before she walked into a clothing store, dragging little Bunny with her, while Mr. Rabbit went in last, with visible reluctance.

  “This is going to be a while,” Ryan predicted. “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.”

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  “You married, Andy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two boys.”

  “You’re lucky. Girls require more expensive upkeep, buddy.” They walked forward to eyeball the store in question. Women’s and girls’ stuff. Yeah, Jack thought, they’ll be a while.

  “Well, good, we know what they look like. Time for us to be off, Sir John.” Hudson waved up and down Váci Utca as though describing it to a new visitor to Budapest, and then led his guest back to the embassy, his eyes sweeping like radar antennae. He kept gesturing out of sync with his words. “So, we know what they look like. I don’t see any obvious coverage. That is good. If this were one of your sting operations, they would not have let the bait come so near to us like this—at least, I would not do it that way, and KGB is fairly predictable.”

  “Think so?”

  “Oh, yes. Ivan is very good, but predictable, rather like they play football, or chess, I suppose: a very straightforward game with excellent execution, but little in the way of originality or flair. Their activities are always circumscribed. It’s their culture. They do not encourage people to stand out from the crowd, do they?”

  “True, but their leaders often have.”

  “That one died thirty years ago, Jack, and they do not want another one.”

  “Concur.” No sense arguing the point. The Soviet system did not encourage individualism of any sort. “Now where?”

  “The concert hall, the hotel, points of interest. We’ve had enough surprises for one morning, I think.”

  LITTLE BOYS GENERALLY detest shopping, but that is not ordinarily true of little girls. It was certainly not true of zaichik, who had never seen such a variety of brightly colored clothing, even in the special shops to which her parents had recently achieved access. With her mother selecting and watching, Svetlana tried on a total of six coats, ranging from forest green to an incandescent red with a black velvet collar, and while she tried two after that one, the red one was the one they purchased, and which zaichik insisted on wearing right away. The next stop was for Oleg Ivan’ch, who bought three videocassette recorders, all unlicensed Hungarian copies of Sony Betamax machines from Japan. This shop, he learned, would deliver them to his hotel room—visiting Westerners shopped there—and this purchase took care of half of his office shopping list. He decided to toss in some tapes also, the sort that he didn’t want his daughter to see, but which would have gone over well with his friends at The Centre. And so, Zaitzev parted with nearly two thousand Comecon rubles, for which he would have little use in the West anyway.

  The shopping expedition continued nearly to lunch, by which time they were carrying more goods than it was comfortable to lug about, and so they walked back to the ancient metro and headed back to their hotel to dump them off before doing something for their daughter.

  HEROES SQUARE WAS a place built by the Hapsburgs to honor their royal (but not entirely willing) possession of Hungary at the end of the previous century, with statues of previous Hungarian kings, back to St. Stephen—“Istvan” in the Magyar language—whose crown Jimmy Carter had returned to the country just a few years before, the one with the bent cross on the top.

  “That happened, so they say,” Hudson explained, “when Stephen slammed his crown atop the other one. Returning it was probably a clever move on Carter’s part. It’s a symbol of their nationhood, you see. The communist regime could not very well reject it, and in accepting it, they had to acknowledge that t
he history of the country long predates Marxism-Leninism. I am not really a fan of Mr. Carter, but that was, I think, a subtle move on his part. The Hungarians mainly detest communism, Jack. The nation is fairly religious.”

  “There are a lot of churches,” Ryan observed. He’d counted six or seven on the way to this park.

  “That’s the other thing that gives them a sense of political identity. The government doesn’t like it, but it’s too big and too dangerous a thing to destroy, and so there’s rather an uneasy peace between the two.”

  “If I had to bet, I’d put my money down on the church.”

  Hudson turned. “As would I, Sir John.”

  Ryan looked around. “Hell of a big square.” It looked like more than a square mile of pavement.

  “That goes back to 1956,” Hudson explained. “The Sovs wanted this to be large enough to bring in troop carriers. You can land an AN-ten Cub right here, which makes it quicker to bring in airborne troops if the locals ever revolt again. You could bring, oh, say ten or twelve Cubs, a hundred and fifty soldiers each, and they would defend the center of the city against the counterrevolutionaries and wait for the tanks coming in from the east. It’s not a brilliant plan, but that is how they think.”

  “But what if you park two city buses here and shoot the tires out?”

  “I didn’t say it was perfect, Jack,” Hudson replied. “Even better, a few land mines. Might as well kill a few of the bastards and start a nice little fire. No way a pilot would be able to see them on his approach. And transport pilots are the blindest and dumbest lot going.”

  And Ivan figures he’d insert his troops before things really got out of hand. Yeah, it made sense, Ryan thought.

  “You know who the Soviet ambassador was in ’fifty-six?”

  “No—wait a minute, I do . . . wasn’t it Andropov?”

  Hudson nodded. “Yuriy Vladimirovich himself. It explains why he is so beloved of the locals. A bloody great lot of people lost their lives in that adventure.”

  Ryan remembered being in grammar school then—too young to appreciate the complications: It was the fall of a presidential election year, and at the same time Britain and France had decided to invade Egypt to protect their rights with the Suez Canal. Eisenhower had been hamstrung by two simultaneous crises, and had perforce been unable to do much of anything. But America had gotten a good bunch of immigrants out of it. Not a total loss.

  “And the local Secret Police?”

  “Just down Andrassy Utca from here, Number sixty. It’s an ordinary-looking building that positively drips with blood. Not as bad now as it used to be. The original lot there were devotees of Iron Feliks, more ruthless than Hitler’s Gestapo. But after the failed rebellion, they moderated somewhat and changed their name from Allamvedelmi Osztaly to Allavedelmi Hivatal. State Security Bureau instead of State Security Section. The former boss was replaced, and they got gentler. Formerly, they had a deserved reputation for torture. Supposedly, that is a thing of the past. The reputation alone is enough to make a suspect crumble. Good thing to have a diplomatic passport,” Andy concluded.

  “How good are they?” Jack asked next.

  “Oafish. Perhaps they recruited competent people once, but that is well in the past. Probably a lingering effect of how evil they were in the forties and fifties. Good people don’t want to work there and there’s no real benefit from doing so, of the kind that KGB can offer its recruits. In fact, this country has some superb universities. They turn out remarkably good engineers and people in the sciences. And the Semmelweis medical school is first-rate.”

  “Hell, half the guys in the Manhattan Project were Hungarians, weren’t they?”

  Hudson nodded. “Indeed they were, and many of them Hungarian Jews. Not too many of those left, though in the big war the Hungarians saved about half of theirs. The Chief of State, Admiral Horthy, was probably killed over that—he died under what are euphemistically called ‘mysterious circumstances.’ Hard to say what sort of chap he actually was, but there is a school of thought that says he was a rabid anti-Communist, but decidedly not a pro-Nazi. Perhaps just a man who picked a bad place and time to be born. We may never know for sure.” Hudson enjoyed being a tour guide for a change. Not a bad change of pace from being a king—well, maybe prince—spook.

  But it was time to get back to business. “Okay, how are we going to do this?” Jack asked. He was looking around for a tail, but if there was one about, it was invisible to him, unless there was a team of the ubiquitous—dirty—Lada automobiles following them about. He’d have to trust Hudson to scan for that possibility.

  “Back to the car. We’ll go see the hotel.” It was just a few minutes of driving time down Andrassy Utca, a route of remarkably French-style architecture. Ryan had never been to Paris, but, closing his eyes, he thought he might well have been.

  “There, that’s it,” Hudson said, pulling over. One nice thing about communist countries: It wasn’t hard to find a parking space.

  “Nobody watching us?” Ryan wondered, trying not to look too obvious in his turning around.

  “If so, he’s being very clever about it. Now, right there across the street is the local KGB station. The Soviet Cultural and Friendship House, sadly lacking in culture or friendship, but we reckon thirty or forty KGB types there—none interested in us,” Hudson added. “The average Hungarian would probably rather catch gonorrhea than go inside. Hard to tell you how detested the Soviets are in this country. The locals will take their money and perhaps even shake hands after the money is exchanged, but not much more than that. They remember 1956 here, Jack.”

  The hotel struck Ryan as something from what H. L. Mencken had called the gilded age—champagne ambition on a beer budget.

  “I’ve stayed in better,” Jack observed. It wasn’t the Plaza in New York or London’s Savoy.

  “Our Russian friends probably have not.”

  Damn. If we get them to America, they’re going to be in hog heaven, Jack thought at once.

  “Let’s go inside. There’s a rather nice bar,” Hudson told him.

  And so there was, off to the right and down some steps, almost like a New York City disco bar, though not quite as noisy. The band wasn’t there yet, just some records playing, and not too loudly. The music, Jack noted, was American. How odd. Hudson ordered a couple glasses of Tokaji.

  Ryan sipped his. It wasn’t bad.

  “It’s bottled in California, too, I think. Your chaps call it Tokay, the national drink of Hungary. It’s an acquired taste, but better than grappa.”

  Ryan chuckled. “I know. That’s Italian for ‘lighter fluid.’ My uncle Mario used to love it. De gustibus, as they say.” He looked around. There was nobody within twenty feet. “Can we talk?”

  “Better just to look about. I’ll come here tonight. This bar closes after midnight, and I need to see what the staff is like. Our Rabbit is in Room 307. Third floor, corner. Easy access via the fire stairs. Three entrances, front and either side. If, as I expect, there’s only a single clerk at the desk, it’s just a matter of distracting him to get our packages up and the Rabbit family out.”

  “Packages up?”

  Hudson turned. “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  Bloody hell, Hudson thought, they never get the necessary information out to everyone who needs it. Never changes.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he told Ryan.

  Uh-oh, Ryan thought at once. Something was up that he wouldn’t like. Sure as hell. Maybe he should have brought his Browning with him. Oh, shit. He finished his drink and went looking for the men’s room. The symbology helped. The room had not been recently scrubbed, and it was a good thing he didn’t need to sit down. He emerged to find Andy waiting for him, and followed him back outside. Soon they were back in his car.

  “Okay, can we discuss that little problem now?” Jack asked.

  “Later,” Hudson told him. It just made Ryan worry a little more.

  TH
E PACKAGES WERE just arriving at the airport—three rather large boxes with diplomatic stickers on them—and an official from the embassy was at the ramp to make sure they weren’t tampered with. Someone had made sure to put them in identifying boxes from an electronics company—the German company Siemens, in this case—thus making it seem that they were coding machines or something else bulky and sensitive. They were duly loaded in the embassy’s own light truck and driven downtown with nothing more than curiosity in their wake. The presence of an embassy officer had prevented their being x-rayed, and that was important. That might have damaged the microchips inside, of course, the customs people at the airport thought, and so made up their official report to the Belügyminisztérium. Soon it would be reported to everyone interested, including the KGB, that the U.K. Budapest Embassy had taken on some new encryption gear. The information would be duly filed and forgotten.

  “ENJOY YOUR TOUR?” Hudson asked, back in his office.

  “Beats doing a real audit. Okay, Andy,” Ryan shot back. “You want to walk me through this?”

  “The idea comes from your people. We’re to get the Rabbit family out in such a way that KGB think them dead, and hence not defectors who will cooperate with the West. To that end, we have three bodies to put into the hotel room after we get Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail out.”

  “Okay, that’s right,” Ryan said. “Simon told me about it. Then what?”

  “Then we torch the room. The three bodies are victims of domestic fires. They ought to have arrived today.”

  All Ryan could still feel was a visceral disgust. His face showed it.

  “This is not always a tidy business, Sir John,” the SIS COS informed his guest.

  “Christ, Andy! Where are the bodies from?”

  “Does that matter to anyone?”

  A long breath. “No, I suppose not.” Ryan shook his head. “Then what?”

  “We drive them south. We’ll meet with an agent of mine, Istvan Kovacs, a professional smuggler who is being well paid to get us over the border into Yugoslavia. From there into Dalmatia. Quite a few of my countrymen like to get some sun there. We put the Rabbit family aboard a commercial airliner to take them—and you—back to England, and the operation is concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.”