Red Rabbit

  What the hell is he working on? she wondered. Bonn? Germany? NATO stuff? The goddamned intelligence business, looking at secret stuff and making equally secret observations on it that went to other people who might or might not read it and think about it. She, at least, was in an honest line of work, making sick people well, or at least helping them to see better. But not Jack.

  It wasn’t that he did useless things. He’d explained it to her earlier in the year. There were bad people out there, and somebody had to fight against them. Fortunately, he didn’t do that with a loaded gun—Cathy hated guns, even the ones that had prevented her kidnapping and murder at their home in Maryland on the night that had ended blessedly with Little Jack’s birth. She’d treated her share of gunshot wounds in the emergency room during her internship, enough to see the harm they inflicted, though not the harm they might have prevented in other places. Her world was somewhat circumscribed in that respect, a fact she appreciated, which was why she allowed Jack to keep a few of the damned things close by, where the kids could not reach them, even standing on a chair. He’d once tried to teach her how to use them, but she’d refused even to touch the things. Part of her thought that she was overreacting, but she was a woman, and that was that. . . . And Jack didn’t seem to mind that very much.

  But why isn’t he here? Cathy asked herself in the darkness. What could be so damned important as to take her husband away from his wife and children?

  He couldn’t tell her. And that really made her angry. But there was no fighting it, and it wasn’t as if she were dealing with a terminal cancer patient. And it wasn’t as if he were boffing some German chippie on the side. But . . . damn. She just wanted her husband back.

  EIGHT HUNDRED MILES AWAY, Ryan was already awake, out of the shower, shaved, brushed, and ready to face the day. Something about travel made it easy for him to wake up in the morning. But now he had nothing to do until the embassy canteen opened. He looked at the phone by his bed and thought about calling home, but he didn’t know how to dial out on this phone system, and he probably needed Hudson’s permission—and assistance—to accomplish the mission. Damn. He’d awakened at three in the morning, thinking to roll over and give Cathy a kiss on the cheek—it was something Jack liked to do, even though she never had any memory of it. The good news was that she always kissed back. She really did love him. Otherwise, the return kiss would not have come. People can’t dissimulate while asleep. It was an important fact in Ryan’s personal universe.

  There was no use turning on the bedside radio. Hungarian—actually Magyar—was a language probably found on the planet Mars. For damned sure, it didn’t belong on Planet Earth. He’d not heard one, not even one, word that he recognized from English, German, or Latin, the three languages he’d studied at one time or another in his life. The locals also spoke as quickly as a machine gun, adding to the difficulty on his part. Had Hudson dropped him off anywhere in this city, he would have been unable to find his way back to the British Embassy, and that was a feeling of vulnerability he hadn’t had since he was four years old. He might as well have been on an alien planet, and having a diplomatic passport wouldn’t help, since he was accredited by the wrong country to this alien world. Somehow he’d not fully considered that on the way in. Like most Americans, he figured that with a passport and an American Express card he could safely travel the entire world in his shorts, but that world was only the capitalist world, where somebody would speak enough English to point him to a building with the American flag on the roof and U.S. Marines in the lobby. Not in this alien city. He didn’t know enough to find the men’s room—well, he’d found one in a bar the previous day, Ryan admitted to himself. The feeling of helplessness was hovering at the border of his consciousness like the proverbial monster under the bed, but he was a grown-up American male citizen, over thirty, formerly a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. It wasn’t the way he usually felt about things. And so he watched the numbers change on his digital clock radio, bringing him closer to his personal date with destiny, whatever the hell that was going to be, one red-lit number at a time.

  ANDY HUDSON WAS already up and about. Istvan Kovacs was preparing for one of his normal smuggling runs, this time bringing Reebok running shoes into Budapest from Yugoslavia. His hard cash was in a steel box under his bed, and he was drinking his morning coffee and listening to music on the radio when a knock on the door made him look up. He walked to answer it in his underwear.

  “Andy!” he said in surprise.

  “Did I wake you, Istvan?”

  Kovacs waved him inside. “No, I’ve been up for half an hour. What brings you here?”

  “We need to move our package tonight,” Hudson replied.

  “When, exactly?”

  “Oh, about two in the morning.”

  Hudson reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of banknotes. “Here is half of the agreed sum.” There was no point in paying this Hungarian what they were really worth. It would alter the whole equation.

  “Excellent. Can I get you some coffee, Andy?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Kovacs waved him to the kitchen table and poured a cup. “How do you want to go about it?”

  “I will drive our package to near the border, and you will take them across. I presume you know the border guards at the crossing point.”

  “Yes, it will be Captain Budai Laszlo. I’ve done business with him for years. And Sergeant Kerekes Mihály, good lad, wants to go to university and be an engineer. They do twelve-hour shifts at the crossing point, midnight to noon. They will already be bored, Andy, and open to negotiation.” He held up his hand and rubbed a thumb over his forefinger.

  “What is the usual rate?”

  “For four people?”

  “Do they need to know our package is people?” Hudson asked in return.

  Kovacs shrugged. “No, I suppose not. Then some pairs of shoes. The Reeboks are very popular, you know, and some Western movie tapes. They already have all the tape-player machines they need,” Kovacs explained.

  “Be generous,” Hudson suggested, “but not too generous.” Mustn’t make them suspicious, he didn’t have to add. “If they are married, perhaps something for their wives and children. . . .”

  “I know Budai’s family well, Andy. That will not be a problem.” Budai had a young daughter, and giving something for little Zsóka would cause no problems for the smuggler.

  Hudson made a calculation for distance. Two and a half hours to the Yugoslav border should be about right at that time of night. They’d be using a small truck for the first part of the journey. Istvan would handle the rest in his larger truck. And if anything went wrong, Istvan would expect to be shot by the British Secret Service officer. That was one benefit of the world-famous James Bond movies. But, more to the point, five thousand d-mark went a very long way in Hungary.

  “I will be driving to what destination?”

  “I will tell you tonight,” Hudson answered.

  “Very well. I shall meet you at Csurgo at two tomorrow morning without fail.”

  “That is very good, Istvan.” Hudson finished his coffee and stood. “It is good to have such a reliable friend.”

  “You pay me well,” Kovacs observed, defining their relationship.

  Hudson was tempted to say how much he trusted his agent, but that wasn’t strictly true. Like most field spooks, he didn’t trust anybody—not until after the job was completed. Might Istvan be in the pay of the AVH? Probably not. No way they could afford five thousand West German marks on anything approaching a regular basis, and Kovacs liked the good life too much. If the communist government of this country ever fell, he’d be among the first to become a millionaire, with a nice house in the hills of Pest on the other side of the Danube, overlooking Buda.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Hudson found Ryan at the front of the line in the embassy canteen.

  “Like your eggs, I see,” the COS observed.

  “Local, or do you truck it
in from Austria?”

  “The eggs are local. The farm products here are actually quite good. But we like our English bacon.”

  “Developed a taste for it myself,” Jack reported. “What’s happening?” he asked. Andy’s eyes had a certain excitement in them.

  “It’s tonight. First we go to the concert hall, and then we make our pickup.”

  “Giving him a heads-up?”

  Hudson shook his head. “No. He might act differently. I prefer to avoid that complication.”

  “What if he’s not ready? What if he has second thoughts?” Jack worried.

  “In that case, it’s a blown mission. And we disappear into the mists of Budapest, and come tomorrow morning many faces will be red in London, Washington, and Moscow.”

  “You’re pretty cool about this, buddy.”

  “In this job, you take things as they come. Getting excited about them doesn’t help at all.” He managed a smile. “So long as I take the Queen’s shilling and eat the Queen’s biscuit, I shall do the Queen’s work.”

  “Semper fi, man,” Jack observed. He added cream to his coffee and took a sip. Not great, but good enough for the moment.

  SO WAS THE food in the state-run cafeteria next door to the Hotel Astoria. Svetlana had chosen and positively inhaled a cherry Danish pastry, along with a glass of whole milk.

  “The concert is tonight,” Oleg told his wife. “Excited?”

  “You know how long it has been since I’ve been to a proper concert?” she retorted. “Oleg, I shall never forget this kindness on your part.” She was surprised by the look on his face, but made no comment on it.

  “Well, my dear, today we have more shopping to do. Ladies’ things. You will have to handle that for me.”

  “Anything for myself?”

  “To that end, we have eight hundred and fifty Comecon rubles, just for you to spend,” Oleg Ivan’ch told her, with a beaming smile, wondering if anything she bought would be in use by the end of the week.

  “YOUR HUSBAND STILL off on business?” Beaverton asked.

  “Unfortunately,” Cathy confirmed.

  Too bad, the former Para didn’t say. He’d become a good student of human behavior over the years, and her unhappiness with the current situation was plain. Well, Sir John was doubtless off doing something interesting. He’d taken the time to do a little research on the Ryans. She, the papers said, was a surgeon, just as she’d told him weeks before. Her husband, on the other hand, despite his claim to be a junior official at the American Embassy, was probably CIA. It had been hinted at by the London papers back when he’d had that run-in with the ULS terrorists, but that supposition had never been repeated. Probably because someone had asked Fleet Street—politely—not to say such a thing ever again. That told Eddie Beaverton everything he needed to know. The papers had also said he was, if not rich, certainly comfortably set, and that was confirmed by the expensive Jaguar in their driveway. So, Sir John was away on secret business of some sort or other. There was no sense in wondering what, the cabdriver thought, pulling up to the miniature Chatham train station. “Have a good day, mum,” he told her when she got out.

  “Thanks, Eddie.” The usual tip. It was good to have such a generous steady customer.

  For Cathy it was the usual train ride into London, with the company of a medical journal, but without the comfort of having her husband close by, reading his Daily Telegraph or dozing. It was funny how you could miss even a sleeping man next to you.

  “THAT’S THE CONCERT HALL.”

  Like Ryan’s old Volkswagen Rabbit, the Budapest Concert Hall was well made in every detail, but little, hardly filling the city block it sat upon, its architecture hinting at the Imperial style found in better and larger form in Vienna, two hundred miles away. Andy and Ryan went inside to collect the tickets arranged by the embassy through the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. The foyer was disappointingly small. Hudson asked for permission to see where the box was, and, by virtue of his diplomatic status, an usher took them upstairs and down the side corridor to the box.

  Inside, it struck Ryan as similar to a Broadway theater—the Majestic, for example—not large, but elegant, with its red-velvet seating and gilt plaster, a place for the king to come when he deigned to visit the subject city far from his imperial palace up the river in Vienna. A place for the local big shots to greet their king and pretend they were in the big leagues, when they and their sovereign knew differently. But for all that, it was an earnest effort, and a good orchestra would cover for the shortcomings. The acoustics were probably excellent, and that was what really mattered. Ryan had never been to Carnegie Hall in New York, but this would be the local equivalent, just smaller and humbler—though grudgingly so.

  Ryan looked around. The box was admirably suited for that. You could scan just about every seat in the theater.

  “Our friends’ seats—where are they?” he asked quietly.

  “Not sure. Tom will follow them in and see where they sit before he joins us.”

  “Then what?” Jack asked next.

  But Hudson cut him off with a single word: “Later.”

  BACK AT THE EMBASSY, Tom Trent had his own work to do. First of all, he got two gallons of pure grain alcohol, 190 proof, or 95 percent pure. It was technically drinkable, but only for one who wanted a very fast and deep drunk. He sampled it, just a taste to make sure it was what the label said. This was not a time to take chances. One millimetric taste was enough for that. This was as pure as alcohol ever got, with no discernible smell, and only enough taste to let you know that it wasn’t distilled water. Trent had heard that some people used this stuff to spike the punch at weddings and other formal functions to . . . liven things up a bit. Surely this would accomplish that task to a fare-thee-well.

  The next part was rather more distasteful. It was time to inspect the boxes. The embassy basement was now off-limits to everyone. Trent cut loose the sealing tape and lifted off the cardboard to reveal . . .

  The bodies were in translucent plastic bags, the sort with handles, used by morticians to transport bodies. The bags even came in more than one size, he saw, probably to accommodate the bodies of children and adults of various dimensions. The first body he uncovered was that of a little girl. Blessedly, the plastic obscured the face, or what had once been a face. All he could really see was a blackened smudge, and for the moment, that was good. He didn’t need to open the bag, and that, too, was good.

  The next boxes were heavier but somehow easier. At least these bodies were adults. He manhandled them onto the concrete floor of the cellar and left them there, then moved the dry ice to the opposite corner, where the frozen CO2 would evaporate on its own without causing harm or distraction to anyone. The bodies would have about fourteen hours to thaw out, and that, he hoped, would be enough. Trent left the basement, being careful to lock the door.

  Then he went to the embassy’s security office. The British legation had its own security detail of three men, all of them former enlisted servicemen. He’d need two of them tonight. Both were former sergeants in the British army, Rodney Truelove and Bob Small, and both were physically fit.

  “Lads, I need your help tonight with something.”

  “What’s that, Tom?” Truelove asked.

  “We’ll just need to move some objects, and do it rather covertly,” Trent semi-explained. He didn’t bother telling them it would be something of great importance. These were men for whom everything was treated as a matter of some importance.

  “Sneak in and sneak out?” Small asked.

  “Correct,” Trent confirmed to the former color sergeant in the Royal Engineers. Small was from the Royal Regiment of Wales, the men of Harlech.

  “What time?” Truelove inquired next.

  “We’ll leave here about oh-two-hundred. Ought not to take more than an hour overall.”

  “Dress?” This was Bob Small.

  And that was a good question. To wear coats and ties didn’t feel right, but to wear coveralls would
be something a casual observer might notice. They’d have to dress in such a way as to be invisible.

  “Casual,” Trent decided. “Jackets but no coats. Like a local. Shirts and pants, that should be sufficient. Gloves, too.” Yeah, they’ll surely want to wear gloves, the spook thought.

  “No problem with us,” Truelove concluded. As soldiers, they were accustomed to doing things that made no sense and taking life as it came. Trent hoped they’d feel that way the following morning.

  FOGAL PANTYHOSE WERE French in origin. The packaging proclaimed that. Irina nearly fainted, holding the package in her hand. The contents were real but seemed not to be, so sheer as to be a manufactured shadow and no more substantial than that. She’d heard about these things, but she’d never held them in her hand, much less worn any. And to think that any woman in the West could own as many as she needed. The wives of Oleg’s Russian colleagues would swoon wearing them, and how envious her own friends at GUM would be! And how careful they’d be putting them on, afraid to create a run, careful not to blunder into things with their legs, like children who bruised every single day. These hose were far too precious to endanger. She had to get the right size for the women on Oleg’s list . . . plus six pairs for herself.

  But what size? To buy any article of clothing that was too large was a deadly insult to a woman in any culture, even Russia, where women tended more to the Rubenesque than to a starving waif in the Third World . . . or Hollywood. The sizes shown on the packages were A, B, C, and D. This was an additional complication, since in Cyrillic, “B” corresponded to the Roman “V” and “C” to “S,” but she took a deep breath and bought a total of twenty pairs of size C, including the six for herself. They were hideously expensive, but the Comecon rubles in her purse were not all hers, and so with another deep breath she paid cash for the collection, to the smile of the female salesclerk, who could guess what was going on. Walking out of the store with such luxuries made her feel like a czarist princess, a good sensation for any female in the world. She now had 489 rubles left to spend on herself, and that almost produced a panic. So many nice things. So little money. So little closet space at home.