The fire had largely died down, starved of oxygen, but the room remained hot, the hotel walls insulating the incipient blaze as efficiently as a barbecue pit. Opening the door admitted a large volume of fresh air and oxygen to the room, and barely had he had the chance to see the horror within when a phenomenon called flashover happened.
It was the next thing to an explosion. The room reignited in a blast of flame and a further intake of air, sufficiently strong that it nearly purled the clerk off his feet and into the room even as an outward blast of flame pushed him the other way—and saved his life. Slapping his hands to his flash-burned face, he fell to his knees and struggled to the manual-pull alarm on the wall next to the elevator—without pulling 307’s door back shut. That sounded alarm bells throughout the hotel and also reported to the nearest firehouse, three kilometers away. Screaming with pain, he walked, or fell, down the stairs to the lobby, where he first threw a glass of water on his burned face, then called the emergency number next to the phone to report the fire to the city fire department. By this time people were coming down the stairs. For them, getting past the third floor had been harrowing, and the clerk, burned as he “was, got an extinguisher to spray on them, but he was unable to climb back to use the fire hose in its little cabinet on the involved floor. It would not have mattered anyway.
The first fire truck arrived less than five minutes after the pull alarm had sounded. Hardly needing to be told—the fire was visible from outside, since the room’s windows had shattered from the heat of the renewed blaze—they forced their way past the escaping hotel guests. Within a minute after arriving, the first seventy-millimeter hose was spraying water into the room. It took less than five minutes to knock the fire down, and through the smoke and horrid smell, the firemen forced their way inside to find what they feared—a family of three, dead in their beds.
The fire lieutenant in command of the first responders cradled the dead child in his arms and ran down and out onto the street, but he could see it was a waste. The child had roasted like a piece of meat in an oven. Hosing her body down only exposed the ghastly effect a fire has on a human body, and there was nothing for him to do but say a prayer for her. The lieutenant was the brother of a priest and a devout Catholic in this Marxist country, and he prayed to his God for mercy for the little girl’s soul, not knowing that the very same thing had happened over four thousand miles away and ten days earlier.
THE RABBITS WERE out of the city in a matter of minutes. Hudson drove carefully, within the posted speed limits, lest there be a cop around, though there was virtually no traffic in evidence, merely the occasional truck, commercial ones with canvas sides, carrying who knew what to who knew where. Ryan was in the right-front seat, half turned to look in the back. Irina Zaitzev was a mask of tipsy confusion, not comprehending enough to be frightened. The child was asleep, as children invariably were at this time of night. The father was trying to be stoic, but the edge of fear was visible on his face, even in the darkness. Ryan tried to put himself in his place, but found it impossible to do so. To betray one’s country was too great a leap of imagination for him. He knew there were those who stabbed America in the back, mainly for money, but he didn’t pretend to understand their motivation. Sure, back in the ’30s and ’40s there had been those for whom communism looked like the leading wave of human history, but those thoughts were all as dead as V. I. Lenin was today. Communism was a dying idea, except in the minds of those who needed it to be the source of their personal power…And perhaps some still believed in it because they’d never been exposed to anything else, or because the idea had been too firmly planted in their distant youth, as a minister or priest believed in God. But the words of Lenin’s Collected Works were not Holy Writ to Ryan and never would be. As a new college graduate, he’d sworn his oath to the Constitution of the United States and promised to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” as a second lieutenant of the United States Marine Corps, and that was that.
“How long, Andy?”
“A little over an hour to Csurgo. Traffic ought not to be a problem,” Hudson answered.
And it wasn’t. In minutes, they were outside the boundaries of Hungary’s capital, and then the lights of houses and businesses just stopped as though someone had flipped the master switch for electricity to the region. The road was two-lane blacktop, and none too wide at that. Telephone poles, no guardrails. And this is a major commercial highway? Ryan wondered. They might as well have been driving across central Nevada. Perhaps one or two lights every kilometer, farmhouses where people liked to have one on to help find their way to the bathroom. Even the road signs looked decrepit and not very helpful—not the mint-green highway signs of home or the friendly blue ones of England. It didn’t help that the words on them were in Martian. Otherwise they were the European sort, showing the speed limit in black numbers on a white disc within a red circle.
Hudson was a competent driver, puffing away on his cigars and driving as though he were on his way to Covent Garden in London. Ryan thanked God that he’d made a trip to the head before walking to the hotel—otherwise he might lose control of his bladder. Well, probably his face didn’t show how nervous he was, Jack hoped. He kept telling himself that his own life wasn’t on the line, but those of the people in the back were, and they were now his responsibility, and something in him, probably something learned from his policeman father, made that a matter of supreme importance.
“What is your full name?” Oleg asked him, breaking the silence unexpectedly.
“Ryan, Jack Ryan.”
“What sort of name is Ryan?” the Rabbit pressed on.
“My ancestry is Irish. John corresponds to Ivan, I think, but people call me Jack, like Vanya, maybe.”
“And you are in CIA?”
“Yes, I am.”
“What is your job in CIA?”
“I am an analyst. Mostly I sit at a desk and write reports.”
“I also sit at desk in Centre.”
“You are a communications officer?”
A nod. “Da, that is my job in Centre.” Then Zaitzev remembered that his important information was not for the back of a car, and he shut back up.
Ryan saw that. He had things to say, but not here, and that was fair enough for the moment.
The trip went smoothly. Four cigars for Hudson, and six cigarettes for Ryan, until they approached the town of Csurgo.
Ryan had expected something more than this. Csurgo was barely a wide place in the road, with not even a gas station in evidence, and surely not an all-night 7-Eleven. Hudson turned off the main road onto a dirt track, and three minutes later there was the shape of a commercial truck. It was a big Volvo, he saw in a moment, with a black canvas cover on the back and two men standing next to it, both smoking. Hudson pulled around it, finding concealment behind some nondescript sort of shed a few yards from it, and stopped the Jaguar. He hopped out, and motioned to the rest to do the same.
Ryan followed the Brit spook to the two men. Hudson walked right up to the older of the two and shook his hand.
“Hello, Istvan. Good of you to wait for us.”
“Hello, Andy. It is a dull night. Who are your friends?”
“This is Mr. Ryan. These are the Somerset family. We’re going across the border,” Hudson explained.
“Okay,” Kovacs agreed. “This is Jani. He’s my driver for tonight. Andy, you can ride in front with us. The rest will be in the back. Come,” he said, leading the way.
The truck’s tailgate had ladder steps built in. Ryan climbed up first, and bent down to lift the little girl—Svetlana, he remembered, was her name—and watched her mother and father climb up. In the cargo area, he saw, were some large cardboard boxes, perhaps containers for the tape machine Hungarians made. Kovacs climbed up also.
“You all speak English?” he asked, and got nods. “It is a short way to the border, just five kilometer. You will hide in boxes here. Please make no noise. Is important. You understand? Make no noise.” He got more nods, noting that the man—definitely not an Englishman, he could see—translated to his wife. The man took the child, Kovacs saw also. With his cargo hidden away, he closed the tailgate and walked forward.