“You can’t invoke a D-notice?”
“Theoretically, yes, but they can be difficult to enforce. Fleet Street has its own rules, you see.”
“So does The Washington Post, as Nixon found out. So I ought not to kill anyone.”
“I would try to avoid it,” Simon agreed, munching on his turkey sandwich.
BELGRADE—BEOGRAD TO its natives—also had a fine station. In the previous century, evidently, architects had worked hard to outdo each other, like the pious ones who’d built cathedrals in the Middle Ages. The train was several hours late, he saw with surprise. He couldn’t see why. The train hadn’t stopped for any length of time anywhere. Perhaps it wasn’t traveling as fast as it was supposed to. Leaving Belgrade, it snaked up some modest hills, and none too quickly at that. He imagined this country would be pretty in winter. Wasn’t there an upcoming Olympiad hereabouts? The winter probably came here about the same time it did in Moscow; It was a little late this year, but that usually meant it would be unusually harsh when it arrived. He wondered what winter would be like in America…
“READY, JACK?” Charleston asked in his office.
“I suppose.” Jack looked at his new passport. Since it was a diplomatic one, it was a little more ornate than the usual, and bound in red leather, with the Royal Coat of Arms on the front cover. He paged through it to see the stamps of all the places he had not visited. Thailand, the People’s Republic of China. Damn, Jack thought, I really do get around. “Why this visa?” he asked. The U.K. didn’t require them for anybody.
“Hungary controls movement in and out rather sternly. They require an entry and exit visa. You’ll not be needing the latter, I expect,” C observed. “Hudson will probably be taking you out in a southerly direction. He has good relations with the local smugglers.”
“Walking over any mountains?” Ryan asked.
Basil shook his head. “No, we don’t often do that. Car or truck, I should think. Ought not to be any problem at all, my boy.” He looked up. “It really is quite routine, Jack.”
“You say so, sir.” It damned sure isn’t for me,
Charleston stood. “Good luck, Jack. See you back in a few days.”
Ryan took his hand. “Roger that, Sir Basil.” Semper fi, pal.
There was a car waiting on the street. Jack hopped in the left-front seat, and the driver headed east. The ride took about fifty minutes with the light afternoon traffic, almost as fast as the train would have been.
On getting to Chatham, Ryan found his daughter napping, Little Jack playing with his feet—fascinating things they were—in the playpen, and Miss Margaret sitting with a magazine in the living room.
“Dr. Ryan, I didn’t expect—”
“That’s okay, I have to take a business trip.” He walked to the wall phone in the kitchen and tried calling Cathy, only to learn that she was giving her damned lecture on her laser toy. It was the one she used for welding blood vessels back shut, he thought. Something like that. Frowning, he went upstairs for his bag. He’d try to call her from the airport. But, just in case, he scribbled a note.
OFF TO BONN. TRIED TO CALL. WILL TRY AGAIN. LOVE, JACK. This one found its way to the refrigerator door. Ryan bent down to give Sally a kiss and then reached down to lift his son for a hug, a sloppy one, as it turned out. The little guy dribbled the way a car engine dripped oil. That necessitated a paper towel on the way out.
“Have a good trip, Dr. Ryan,” the nanny called.
“Thanks, Margaret. See ya.” As soon as the car pulled off, she called Century House to let people know Sir John was on the way to Heathrow. Then she went back to her magazine, this month’s Tattler.
THE TRAIN CAME to an unexpected halt in a yard right at the Hungarian frontier, near the town of Zombor. Zaitzev hadn’t known about this, and the surprise was soon compounded. There were cranes on their side of the train, and no sooner had the train stopped than a crowd of coveralled workmen appeared.
The Hungarian State Railway operated on standard gauge, the tracks 1,435 millimeters—4 feet, 814 inches—apart, which was the world’s standard, and which incongruously dated back to the two-horse chariots used by the Romans. But the Russian train gauge was five feet, or 1,524 millimeters—for some reason no one remembered. The solution to that here was to lift the train bodies off the Russian tracks—the wheel sets—and lower them onto a different set. That took about an hour, but it was efficiently done, for all that. It utterly fascinated Svedana, and it even impressed her father that the task was performed so routinely. An hour and twenty minutes later, they were moving almost due north on narrower tracks behind a new electric locomotive, crossing the rich agricultural soil of Hungary. Almost at once, Svetlana chirped at the sight of men in local dress riding horses, which struck both parents and child as quite exotic.
THE AIRCRAFT WAS a fairly new Boeing 737 and, for this trip, Ryan decided to take a friend. He bought a pack of cigarettes at the airport and lit one up at once on the concourse.
The good news was that he’d been give a first-class window seat, 1-A. The scenery up in the sky was the only good part of flying, with the additional bonus that nobody could see the fear in your face, except maybe the stewardess, because like doctors they could probably also smell fear. But up front the booze was free, and so Ryan tried to order whiskey, only to find that the selection was Scotch (which he didn’t like), vodka (which he didn’t like), or gin (which he could not stand in his presence). It was the wrong airline for Jack Daniel’s, but the wine list was okay, and, climbing to cruise altitude, the no-smoking light dinged off, and Ryan lit up another smoke. Not as good as a nice bourbon, but better than nothing at all. At least it enabled him to lean back and pretend to relax behind closed eyes, occasionally looking out to see if the stuff under the aircraft was green or blue. The flight was agreeably smooth, with only a few bumps to make him grab for the armrests, and three glasses of a decent French white helped smooth his anxiety out. About halfway there, over Belgium, he got back to thinking. How many people hated flying? Maybe a third, maybe half? How many of them detested it as much as he did? Half of those? So, probably, he wasn’t alone. Fearful people tried to hide it, and a look around showed faces much the same as his probably was. So at least he probably wasn’t the only wimp on the airplane. And the wine was nice and fruity.
And if the ULA hadn’t been able to punch his ticket with Uzis right in his home on the Chesapeake Bay, then random chance was probably on his side as well. So he might as well relax and enjoy the ride—he was stuck here one way or another, after all, and the Boeing cruised along at 500 knots or so.
There were a few bumps in the descent, but for Ryan this was the one part of the flight during which he felt safe—when the aircraft was returning to earth. Intellectually, he knew that this was actually the most dangerous part, but somehow his gut didn’t see it that way. He heard the whine of various servos, and then the whooshing sound that announced the open landing-gear doors, and then felt safe enough to see the ground rushing toward him. The landing was bumpy, but Jack welcomed it. He was back on the ground, where you could stand up and ambulate all by yourself at a reasonably safe speed. Good.
THEY WERE IN another train yard, packed with boxcars and cattle cars, and their train car jostled back and forth through switches and turns. Once more, zaichik had her nose against the glass, and finally they passed under a glass roof and the train jerked to a stop in Eastern Station. Semi-uniformed and rather scruffy-looking porters drew up by the baggage car. Zaichik practically leaped off the car to look around, almost outracing her mother, who fumbled after her with their carry-on bags. Oleg walked to the baggage car and oversaw the transfer of his bags to the two-wheel hand truck. They walked away from the train, through the old and rather seedy ticket room, and from there outside to the cabstand. There were a lot of cabs, all of them Russian-made Ladas—the Soviet version of an old Fiat—and all the same color, which might have been beige under the dirt. Zaitzev tipped the porter one Comecon ruble and supervised the loading of their bags into the car. The trunk of the diminutive taxicab was far too small. Three bags went to the front seat, and Svetlana would have to sit in her mother’s lap for the ride to the hotel. The cab pulled away, made a swift and legally dubious U-turn, and then raced at breakneck speed down what appeared to be a major shopping street.