“No complaints. What the hell, only one hour’s worth of time difference. Is there a way for me to call London? I didn’t get a chance to talk to my wife before I left yesterday. Don’t want her to worry,” Jack explained.
“Not a problem, Sir John,” Hudson told him. “You can do that from my office.”
“She thinks I’m in Bonn on NATO business.”
“Really?”
“Cathy knows I’m Agency, but she doesn’t know much about what I do—and besides, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here anyway. Analyst,” Ryan explained, “not an operations guy.”
“So the signal about you said. Bollocks,” the field officer observed tersely. “Think of this as a new experience for your collection.”
“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 Vaci 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 Vaci 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.
Vaci 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 Vaci 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 the 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.”