Red Rabbit

“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 Attache 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,” Harding 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.