RYAN AWOKE EARLIER than usual. He slipped out of bed without disturbing his wife, dressed casually, and went outside. The milkman was driving into the cul-de-sac at the end of Grizedale Close. He stopped his truck and got out with the half-gallon of whole milk his kids drank like a Pratt & Whitney engine guzzled jet fuel, and a loaf of bread. He was halfway to the house before he noticed his customer.
“Anything amiss, sir?” the milkman asked, thinking perhaps a child was ill, the usual reason for the parents of young children to be up and about at this time of day.
“No, just woke up a little early,” Ryan replied with a yawn.
“Anything special you might need?”
“Just a cigarette,” Ryan replied, without thinking. Under Cathy’s iron rule, he hadn’t had one since arriving in England.
“Well, here, sir.” The man extended a pack with one shaken loose.
It surprised the hell out of Ryan. “Thanks, buddy.” But he took it anyway, along with the light from a butane lighter. He coughed with the first drag, but got over it pretty fast. It was a remarkably friendly feeling in the still, predawn air, and the wonderful thing about bad habits was how quickly one picked them back up. It was a strong cigarette, like the Marlboros he’d smoked in his senior year of high school, part of the ascension to manhood back in the late 1960s. The milkman ought to quit, Jack thought, but he probably wasn’t married to a Hopkins surgeon.
He didn’t often get to talk to his customers, either. “You like living here, sir?”
“Yes, I do. The people here are very friendly.”
“We try to be, sir. Have a good day, then.”
“Thanks, buddy. You, too,” Ryan said, as the man walked back to his truck. Milkmen had mostly gone extinct in America, victims of supermarkets and 7-Eleven stores. A pity, Jack thought. He remembered Peter Wheat bread and honey-dipped donuts when he’d been a little kid. Somehow it had all gone away without his noticing it around the seventh grade or so. But the smoke and the quiet air wasn’t at all a bad way to wake up. There was no sound at all. Even the birds were still asleep. He looked up to see the lights of aircraft high in the sky. People traveling to Europe, probably Scandinavia, by the apparent courses they were flying—out of Heathrow, probably. What poor bastard has to get up this early to make a meeting? he wondered. Well… he finished the cigarette and flicked it out on the lawn, wondering if Cathy might spot it. Well, he could always blame it on somebody else. A pity the paperboy hadn’t come yet. So Jack went inside and turned on the kitchen TV to get CNN. He caught the sports. The Orioles had won again and would be going to the World Series against the Phillies. That was good news, or nearly so. Had he been home, he would have gotten tickets to catch a game or two at Memorial Stadium and seen the rest on TV. Not this year. His cable system didn’t have a single channel to catch baseball games, though the Brits were starting to watch
NFL football. They didn’t really get it, but for some reason they enjoyed watching it. Better than their regular TV, Ryan thought with a snort. Cathy liked their comedy, but for some reason it just didn’t click with him. But their news programming was pretty good. It was just taste, he assumed. Non est disputandum, as the Romans had said. Then he saw dawn coming, the first hint of light on the eastern horizon. It’d be more than an hour before morning actually began, but coming it was, and even the desire for more sleep would not hold it back.
Jack decided to get the coffee going—just a matter of flipping the switch on the drip machine he’d gotten Cathy for her birthday. Then he heard the flop of the paper on the front step, and he went to get it.
“Up early?” Cathy said, when he got back.
“Yeah. Didn’t see any sense in rolling back over.” Jack kissed his wife. She got a funny look on her face after the kiss but shook it off. Her tobacco-sniffing nose had delivered a faint message, but her intellect had erroneously dismissed it as too unlikely.
“Got the coffee going?”
“Flipped the button,” Jack confirmed. “I’ll let you do the rest.”
“What do you want for breakfast?”
“I get a choice?” Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously. She was on another health kick of late. No donuts.
“GOOD MORNING,ZAICHIK!” Oleg said to his daughter.
“Papa!” She reached both her arms out with that smile kids have when they awaken. It was something they lost long before adulthood, and something universally astonishing to parents while it lasted. Oleg lifted her from the bed and gave her a hug. Her little bare feet went down on the carpeted floor, and then she took two steps to her private toilet. Irina came in to lay her clothes out, and both withdrew to the adult side of the accommodations. Within ten minutes, they were on their way to the dining car. Oleg looked over his shoulder to see the attendant hustling forward to make up their compartments first. Yes, there were advantages to being KGB, even if it was just for another day.
Somewhere during the night, the train had stopped at a state farm and taken on fresh milk, which Svetlana loved for her morning meal. The adults in the party had mediocre (at best) coffee and buttered bread. (The kitchen was out of eggs.) At least the bread and butter were fresh and tasty. There was a stack of newspapers at the back end of the car. Oleg picked up a Pravda and sat down to read it—the usual lies. One other thing about being KGB was that you knew better than to believe what was in the papers. Izvestia at least had stories about real people, some of which were even true, he thought. But a Soviet train would, of course, carry only the most politically correct newspapers, and “Truth” was it, Zaitzev snorted.
RYAN MAINTAINED TWO complete sets of shaving and grooming things for the occasional exigencies of travel. His Bean bag was hanging by its large brass hook in his closet, ready for whenever Sir Basil dispatched him to Budapest. He looked at it while knotting his tie, wondering when he’d be going. Then Cathy reentered the bedroom and got herself dressed. Her white lab coat doubtless hung on a hook on her office door—both of them, probably, Hammersmith and Moorefields, with the appropriate name tags.
“Cath?”
“Yeah?”
“Your office coat—did you keep your Hopkins name tag, or did you get new ones?” He’d never bothered to ask.
“Local ones. Too hard to explain it to every new patient who might notice.” But some asked about her accent anyway, or would ask why the name tag proclaimed her to be Lady Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS. The “Lady” part appealed to her woman’s vanity. Jack watched her brush her hair out, something that always gave him pleasure. She would have been an absolute knockout with somewhat longer hair, but she never let it grow, saying that the surgical caps ruined whatever set she might have gotten. That would change the next time they got invited to a formal dinner. They were due for one. The Queen liked both of them, and so did the Prince of Wales, and they were on the local version of the A-list. You had to accept such invitations, though Cathy had an excuse if she was doing surgery the next day. Spooks, on the other hand, were expected to be delighted at the honor, even if it meant three short hours of sleep before the next day at work.
“What’s on the agenda for today?”
“Giving a lecture on the xenon-arc laser. They’re going to be buying one soon, and I’m the only person in London who knows how to use it right.”
“My wife, the laser jockey.”
“Well, at least I can talk about what I do,” she responded, “secret-agent man.”
“Yes, dear,” Ryan sighed. Maybe I should pack my Browning today just to piss her off. But if anyone on the train noticed, he’d at best be regarded as unclean, and at worst would be asked by a police constable what he was doing with such a thing on his person. And even his diplomatic status would not entirely protect him from the resulting hassle.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Jack and Cathy were in their compartment, heading northwest to London, she again reading her medical journals, and he going through the Telegraph. John Keegan had a column on the inside and he was a historian for whom Ryan had considerable respect as an analyst of complex information. Why Basil hadn’t recruited him for Century House was a mystery to Jack. Maybe Keegan was just doing too well as an historian, able to spread his ideas to the masses—well, at least the smart civilians out there. That made sense. Nobody ever got rich as a British civil servant, and the anonymity—well, it was nice once in a while to get a pat on the head for doing something especially well. Bureaucrats were denied that all over the world.