“Excellent. Thank you very much for your help.” Zaitzev thought for a moment. “Is there anything I might purchase for you in Budapest?”
“Why, thank you, comrade.” His voice just lit up. “Yes, perhaps some pantyhose for my wife,” the functionary said in a furtive voice.
“What size?”
“My wife is a real Russian,” he replied, meaning decidedly not anorexic.
“Very good. I will find something—or my wife will assist me.”
“Excellent. Have a grand trip.”
“Yes, I shall,” Zaitzev promised him. With that settled, Oleg Ivan’ch left his desk and went to his watch supervisor to announce his plans for the coming two weeks.
“Isn’t there some upstairs project that only you are cleared for?” the lieutenant colonel asked.
“Yes, but I asked Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, and he said not to be concerned about it. Feel free to call him to confirm that, comrade,” Zaitzev told him.
And he did, in Zaitzev’s presence. The brief call ended with a “thank you, comrade,” and then he looked up at his subordinate. “Very well, Oleg Ivan’ch, you are relieved of your duties beginning this evening. Say, while you are in Budapest…”
“Certainly, Andrey Vasili’yevich. You may pay me for them when I get back.” Andrey was a decent boss, who never screamed, and helped his people when asked. A pity he worked for an agency that murdered innocent people.
And then it was just a matter of cleaning up his desk, which wasn’t difficult. KGB regulations dictated that every desk be set up exactly the same way, so that a worker could switch desks without confusion, and Zaitzev’s desk was arranged exactly according to office specifications. With his pencils properly sharpened and lined up, his message log up to the moment, and all his books properly in place, he dumped his trash and walked to the men’s room. There he selected a stall, removed his brown tie, and replaced it with his striped one. He checked his watch. He was actually a little early. So Zaitzev took his time on the way out, smoked two cigarettes instead of one, and took a moment to enjoy the clear afternoon, stopping off to get a paper along the way, and, to pamper himself, six packs of Krasno-presnensky, the premium cigarette smoked by Leonid Brezhnev himself, for two rubles forty. Something nice to smoke on the train. Might as well spend his rubles now, he decided. They’d be valueless where he was going. Then he walked down to the metro station and checked the clock. The train, of course, came right on time.
FOLEY WAS IN the same place, doing the same thing in exactly the same way, his mind racing as the train slowed to a stop at this station. He felt the tiny vibration from the boarding passengers and the grunts of people bumping into one another. He straightened up to turn the page. Then the train lurched off. The engineers—or motormen, whatever the hell you called them—were always a little heavy on the throttle. A moment later, there was a presence to his left. Foley didn’t see it, but he could feel it. Two minutes later, the subway train slowed for another station. It lurched to a stop, and someone bumped into him. Foley turned slightly to see who it was.
“Excuse me, comrade,” the Rabbit said. He was wearing a blue tie with red stripes.
“No problem,” Foley responded dismissively, as his heart leapt inside his chest.
Okay, two days from now, Kiev Station. The train to Budapest. The Rabbit moved a step or two away, and that was that. The signal had been passed.
Skyrockets in flight. Foley folded his paper, and made his way to the sliding doors. The usual walk to his apartment. Mary Pat was fixing dinner.
“Like my tie? You didn’t tell me this morning.”
MP’s eyes lit up. Day after tomorrow, she realized. They’d have to get the word out, but that was just a procedural thing. She hoped Langley was ready. BEATRIX was going a little fast, but why dawdle?
“So, what’s for dinner?”
“Well, I wanted to get a steak, but I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for fried chicken today.”
“That’s okay, honey. Steak for day after tomorrow, maybe?” she asked.
“Sounds good to me. Honey, where’s Eddie?”
“Watching Transformers, of course.” She pointed to the living room.
“That’s my boy,” Ed observed, with a smile. “He knows the important stuff.” Foley kissed his wife tenderly.
“Later, tiger,” Mary Pat breathed back. But a successful operation merited a discreet celebration. Not that this one was successful yet, but it was certainly headed that way, and it was their first in Moscow. “Got the pictures?” she whispered.
He pulled them out of his jacket pocket. They were not exactly magazine-cover quality, but they did give good representations of the Rabbit and his little bunny. They didn’t know what Mrs. Rabbit looked like, but this would have to do. They’d get the shots to Nigel and Penny. One of them would cover the train station to make sure the Rabbit family got going on time.
“Ed, there’s a problem with the shower,” Mary Pat said. “The spray thingee isn’t right.”
“I’ll see if Nigel has the right tools.” Foley walked out the door and down the hall. In a few minutes, they were back, Nigel carrying his toolbox.
“Hello, Mary.” Nigel waved on his way to the bathroom. Once there, he made a fuss about opening his toolbox, then turning on the water, and now any bug the KGB might have here was jammed.
“Okay, Ed, what is it?”
Ed handed over the photos. “The Rabbit and the Bunny. We have nothing on Mrs. Rabbit yet. They’ll all be taking the one P.M. train to Budapest, day after tomorrow.”
“Kiev Station,” Haydock said, with a nod. “You’ll want me to get a picture of Mrs. Rabbit.”
“Correct.”
“Very well. I can do that.” The wheels started turning at once. As Commercial Attaché, he could come up with a cock-and-bull story to cover it, Haydock reasoned. He’d get a tame reporter to accompany him and make it look like a news story—something about tourism, perhaps. Paul Matthews of the Times would play along. Easily done. He’d have Matthews bring a photographer and take professional photos of the whole Rabbit family for London and Langley to use. And Ivan shouldn’t suspect a thing. However important the Rabbit’s information might be, the Rabbit himself was just a cipher, one of many thousands of KGB employees not important enough to be taken any note of. So tomorrow morning Haydock would call the Soviet state railroad and say that the Soviets’ sister service in Britain—which was also state-owned—was interested in how the Russians ran theirs, and so… yes, that would work. There was nothing the Soviets liked better than others wanting to learn from their glorious system. Good for their egos. Nigel reached over to turn off the water.
“There, I think that has it fixed, Edward.”
“Thanks, pal. Any good places in Moscow to buy tools?”
“I don’t know, Ed. I’ve had these since I was a lad. Belonged to my father, you see.”
Then Foley remembered what had happened to Nigel’s father. Yeah, he wanted BEATRIX to succeed. He wanted to take every opportunity to shove a big one up the Bear’s hairy ass. “How’s Penny?”
“The baby hasn’t dropped yet. So at least another week, probably more. Strictly speaking, she isn’t due for another three weeks, but—”
“But the docs never get that one right, buddy. Never,” Foley told his friend. “Best advice, stay close. When you planning to fly home?”
“Ten days should be about right, the embassy physician tells us. It’s only a two-hour flight, after all.”
“Your doc is an optimist, pal. These things never go according to plan. I don’t suppose you want a little Englishman to be born in Moscow’, eh?”
“No, Edward, we don’t.”
“Well, keep Penny off the trampoline,” Foley suggested with a wink.
“Yes, I will do that, Ed.” American humor could be rather crass, he thought.
This could be interesting, Foley thought, walking his friend to the door. He’d always thought Brit children were born at the age of five and sent immediately off to boarding school. Did they raise them the same way Americans did? He’d have to see.
THE BODY OF Owen Williams was never collected—it turned out he had no immediate family, and his ex-wife had no interest in him at all, especially dead. The local police, on receipt of a telex from Chief Superintendent Patrick Nolan of London’s Metropolitan Police, transferred the body to an aluminum casket, which was loaded in a police van and driven south toward London. But not quite. The van stopped at a preselected location, and the aluminum box was transferred to another, unmarked, van for the drive into the city. It ended up in a mortuary in the Swiss Cottage district of north London.
The body was not in very good shape, and, since it had not yet seen a mortician, it had also not been treated in any way. The unburned under side was a blue-crimson shade of postmortem lividity. Once the heart stops, the blood is pulled by gravity to the lower regions of the body—in this case, the back—where, lacking oxygen, it tends to turn the Caucasian body a pale bluish color, leaving the upper side with a disagreeable ivory pallor. The mortician here was a civilian who occasionally contracted specialty work to the Secret Intelligence Service. Along with a forensic pathologist, he examined the body for anything unusual. The worst thing was the smell of roasted human meat, but their noses were covered with surgical masks to attenuate the odor.