A Rabbit, he saw. He knew the terminology. Somebody wanted a ticket out of… Moscow… and CIA was providing it, with the help of SIS because Station Budapest was currently out of business…
“Tell Arthur that we will be pleased to assist, Randy. We will, I assume, get a chance to speak with him before you fly him off to London?”
“It’s only fair, Bas,” Silvestri confirmed. “How hard to pull this one off, you suppose?”
“Out of Budapest?” Charleston thought for a moment. “Not all that difficult, I should think. The Hungarians have a rather nasty secret-police organization, but the country as a whole is not devoutly Marxist—oh, this Rabbit says that KGB may have compromised your communications. That is what Langley is excited about.”
“Damned straight, Basil. If that’s a hole, we have to plug it up fast.”
“This guy’s in their MERCURY? Jesus Christ,” Ryan breathed.
“You got that one right, sonny,” Silvestri agreed.
“But what the hell am I going into the field for?” Jack demanded next. “I’m not a field officer.”
“We need one of ours to keep an eye on things.”
“I quite understand, Randy,” Charleston observed, his head still down in his briefing papers. “And you want someone whom the opposition doesn’t know?”
“So it seems.”
“But why me?” Ryan persisted.
“Jack,” Sir Basil soothed, “your only job will be to watch what happens. It’s just pro forma.”
“But what about my cover?”
“We’ll give you a new diplomatic passport,” C answered. “You will be quite safe. The Vienna Convention, you know.”
“But… but… it’ll be fake.”
“They won’t know that, dear boy.”
“What about my akzint?” It was painfully obvious that his accent was an American’s, not a Brit’s.
“In Hungary?” Silvestri asked with a smile.
“Jack, with their bloody language, I seriously doubt they will notice the difference, and in any case, with your new documents, your person is quite inviolable.”
“Relax, kid. It’s better than your little girl’s teddy bear. Trust me on that one, okay?” Silvestri assured him.
“And you’ll have a security officer with you at all times,” Charleston added.
Ryan had to sit back and take a breath. He couldn’t allow himself to appear to be a wuss, not in front of these guys and not before Admiral Greer. “Okay, excuse me. It’s just that I’ve never been in the field before. It’s all kinda new to me.” He hoped that was adequate backpedaling. “What exactly will I be doing, and how do I go about it?”
“We’ll fly you into Budapest out of Heathrow. Our chaps will pick you up at the airport and take you to the embassy. You will sit it out there—a couple of days, I expect—and then watch how Andy gets your Rabbit out of Redland. Randy, how long would you expect?”
“To get this moving? End of the week, maybe a day or two longer,” Silvestri thought. “The Rabbit will fly or take the train to Budapest, and your man will figure how to get him the hell out of Dodge City.”
“Two or three days for that,” Sir Basil estimated. “Mustn’t be too quick.”
“Okay, that keeps me away from home for four days. What’s my cover story?”
“For your wife?” Charleston asked. “Tell her that you have to go to—oh, to Bonn, shall we say, on NATO business. Be vague on the time factor,” he advised. He was inwardly amused to have to explain this to the Innocent American Abroad.
“Okay,” Ryan conceded the point. Not like I have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter, is there?
UPON GETTING BACK to the embassy, Foley walked to Mike Barnes’s office. Barnes was the Cultural Attaché, the official expert on artsy-fartsy stuff. That was a major assignment in Moscow. The USSR had a fairly rich cultural life. The fact that the best part of it dated back to the czars didn’t seem to matter to the current regime, probably, Foley thought, because all Great Russians wanted to appear kulturniy, and superior to Westerners, especially Americans, whose “culture” was far newer and far crasser than the country of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Barnes was a graduate of the Juilliard School and Cornell, and especially appreciated Russian music.
“Hey, Mike,” Foley said in greeting.
“How’s keeping the newsies happy?” Barnes asked.
“The usual. Hey, got a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Mary Pat and I are thinking about traveling some, maybe to Eastern Europe. Prague and like that. Any good music to be heard that way?”
“The Prague symphony hasn’t opened up yet. But Jozsef Rozsa is in Berlin right now, and then he’s going to Budapest.”
“Who’s he? I don’t know the name,” Foley said, as his heart nearly leapt out of his chest.
“Hungarian native, cousin of Miklos Rozsa, Hollywood composer—Ben Hur, and like that. Musical family, I guess. He’s supposed to be excellent. The Hungarian State Railroad has four orchestras, believe it or not, and Jozsef is going to conduct number one. You can go there by train or fly, depends on how much time you have.”
“Interesting,” Foley thought aloud. Fascinating, he thought inside.
“You know, the Moscow State Orchestra opens up beginning of next month. They have a new conductor, guy named Anatoliy Sheymov. Haven’t heard him yet, but he’s supposed to be pretty good. I can get you tickets easy. Ivan likes to show off to us foreigners, and they really are world-class.”
“Thanks, Mike, I’ll think about it. Later, man.” Foley took his leave.
And he smiled all the way back to his office.
“BLOODY HELL,” Sir Basil observed, reading over the newest cable from Moscow. “What bloody genius came up with this idea?” he asked the air. Oh, he saw. The American officer, Edward Foley. How the hell will he make this come about? the Director General wondered.
He’d been about to leave for lunch at Westminster Palace across the river, and he couldn’t break that one off. Well, it would be something to ruminate over with his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
“LUCKY ME,” Ryan observed, back in his office.
“Jack, it will be less dangerous than crossing the street”—which could be a lively exercise in London.
“I can take care of myself, Simon,” Ryan reminded his workmate. “But if I screw up, somebody else takes the fall.”
“You’ll not be responsible for any of that. You’ll just be there to observe. I don’t know Andy Hudson myself, but he has an excellent professional reputation.”
“Great,” Ryan commented. “Lunchtime, Simon, and I feel like a beer.”
“Duke of Clarence all right?”
“Isn’t that the guy who drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine?”
“Worse ways to go, Sir John,” Harding observed.
“What is malmsey anyway?”
“Strong and sweet, rather like a Madeira. It now comes from those islands, in fact.”
One more piece of trivia learned, Ryan thought, going to get his coat.
IN MOSCOW, Zaitzev checked his personnel file. He’d accrued twelve days of vacation time. He and his family hadn’t gotten a time slot at Sochi the previous summer—the KGB quota had been filled in July and August—and so they had gone without. It was easier to schedule a vacation with a preschool child, as in any other country—you got to run away from town whenever you wished. Svetlana was in state-provided day care, but missing a few days of blocks and crayons was a lot easier to arrange than a week or two of state primary school, which was frowned upon.
UPSTAIRS, Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was going over the latest message from Colonel Bubovoy in Sofia, just brought in by courier. So the Bulgarian premier had agreed to Moscow’s request with a decent lack of annoying questions. The Bulgars knew their place. The chief of state of a supposedly sovereign nation knew how to take his orders from a field-grade officer of Russia’s Committee for State Security. Which was just as it should be, the colonel thought. And now Colonel Strokov of the Dirzhavna Sugurnost would be out picking his shooter, undoubtedly a Turk, and Operation -666 could go forward. He would report this to Chairman Andropov later in the day.
“THREE HUMAN BODIES?” Alan Kingshot asked in considerable surprise. He was Sir Basil’s most senior field officer, a very experienced operator who’d worked the streets of every major European city, first as a “legal” officer and later as a headquarters troubleshooter, in his thirty-seven years of service to Queen and Country. “Some sort of switch, is it?”
“Yes. The chap who suggested it is a fan of MINCEMEAT, I imagine,” Basil responded.
Operation MINCEMEAT was a World War II legend. It had been designed to give Germany the impression that the next major Allied operation would not be the planned Operation HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily, and so it had been decided to suggest to German intelligence that Corsica was the intended invasion target. To do this, the Germans were given the body of a dead alcoholic who’d been transformed after a death of dissipation into a major of the Royal Marines, putatively a planning officer for the fictitious operation to seize Corsica. The body had been dropped in the water off the Spanish coast by the submarine HMS Seraph, from which it had washed to shore, been duly picked up, delivered to the local police, autopsied, and the document case handcuffed to the cadaver’s wrist handed over to the local Abwehr officer. He’d fired the papers off to Berlin, where they’d had the intended effect, moving several German divisions to an island with no more military significance than the fact that it was Napoleon’s birthplace. The story was called The Man Who Never Was, the subject of a book and a movie, and further proof of the wretched performance of German intelligence, which couldn’t tell the difference between the body of a dead drunk and that of a professional soldier.