“Tattoo, underside of the forearm, partially but not entirely burned off,” the mortician reported.
“Very well.” The pathologist lit the flame of a propane blowtorch and applied it to the arm, burning all evidence of the tattoo off the body. “Anything else, William?” he asked a couple minutes later.
“Nothing I can see. The upper body is well charred. Hair is mainly gone”—the smell of burned human hair is particularly vile—”and one ear nearly burned off. I presume this chap was dead before he burned.”
“Ought to have been,” the pathologist said. “The blood gasses had the CO well spiked into lethal range. I doubt this poor bugger felt a thing.” Then he burned off the fingerprints, lingering to sear both hands with the torch so that it would not appear to have been a deliberate mutilation of the body.
“There,” the pathologist said finally. “If there’s a way to identify this body, I do not know what it is.”
“Freeze it now?” the undertaker asked.
“No, I don’t think so. If we chill it down to, oh, two or three degrees Celsius, no noticeable decomposition ought to take place.”
“Dry ice, then.”
“Yes. The metal casket is well insulated and it seals hermetically. Dry ice doesn’t melt, you know. It goes directly from a solid to a gas. Now we need to get it dressed.” The doctor had brought the underclothing with him. None of it was British in origin, and all of it was badly damaged by fire. All in all, it was a distasteful job, but one that pathologists and morticians get used to very early in their professions. It was just a different way of thinking for a different kind of job. But this was unusually gruesome, even for these two. Both would have an extra drink before turning in that night. When they finished, the aluminum box was reloaded on the van and driven to Century House. There would be a note on Sir Basil’s desk in the morning to let him know that Rabbit A was ready for his last flight.
LATER THAT NIGHT and three thousand miles away, in Boston, Massachusetts, there was a gas explosion on the second floor of a two-story frame dwelling overlooking the harbor. Three people were there when it happened. The two adults were not married, but both were drunk, and the woman’s four-year-old daughter—not related to the male resident—was already in bed. The fire spread quickly, too quickly for the two adults to respond to it through their intoxication. The three deaths didn’t take long, all of them from smoke inhalation rather than incineration. The Boston Fire Department responded within ten minutes, and their search-and-rescue ladder men battled their way through the flames under cover of two hose streams, found the bodies, and dragged them out, but they knew that they’d been too late again. The captain of the responding company could tell almost instantly what had gone wrong. There had been a gas leak in the kitchen from the old stove that the landlord hadn’t wanted to replace, and so three people had died of his parsimony. (He’d gladly collect the insurance check, of course, and say how sorry he was about the tragic incident.) This was not the first such case. It wouldn’t be the last, either, and so he and his men would have some nightmares about the three bodies, especially the little girl’s. But that just went with the job.
The story was early enough to make the eleven o’clock news on the rule that “If it bleeds, it leads.” The Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Boston field division was up and watching, actually waiting for coverage of the baseball playoffs—he’d been at an official dinner and missed the live broadcast on NBC—and saw the story and instantly remembered the lunatic telex he’d gotten earlier in the day. That caused a curse to be muttered and a phone to be lifted.
“FBI,” said the young agent guarding the phones when he picked up.
“Get Johnny up,” the SAC ordered. “A family got burned up in a fire on Hester Street. He’ll know what to do. Have him call me at home if he has to.”
“Yes, sir.” And that was that, except for Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Tyler, who’d been reading a book in his bed—a native of South Carolina, he preferred college football to professional baseball—when the phone rang. He managed to grumble on the way to the bathroom, then collected his side arm and car keys for the ride south. He’d seen the telex from Washington, too, and wondered what sort of drugs Emil Jacobs was taking, but his was not to reason why.
NOT TOO LONG after that, but five time zones to the east, Jack Ryan rolled out of bed, got his paper, and switched on the TV CNN also carried the fire story from Boston—it was a slow news night at home—and he breathed a quiet prayer for the victims of the fire, followed by speculation about the gas pipe connection in his own stove. His house, though, was a lot newer than the standing lumberyard that defined a house in south Boston. When they went, they went big, and they went fast. Too fast for those people to get out, evidently. He remembered his father often saying how much he respected firemen, people who ran into burning buildings instead of away from them. The worst part of the job had to be what they found unmoving on the inside. He shook his head as he opened his morning paper and reached for his coffee, while his physician wife saw the tail end of the fire story and thought her own thoughts. She remembered treating burn victims in her third year of medical school and the horrid screams that went with debriding burned tissue off the underlying wounds, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it. But those people in Boston were dead now, and that was that. She didn’t like it, but she’d seen a lot of death, because sometimes the Bad Guy won, and that was just how things worked. It was not a pleasant thought for a parent, especially since the little girl in Boston had been Sally’s age and now would never get older. She sighed. At least she’d be doing some surgery that morning, something that really made a difference with somebody’s health.
SIR BASIL CHARLESTON lived in an expensive townhouse in London’s posh Belgravia district south of Knightsbridge. A widower whose grown children had long since moved away, he was accustomed to living alone, though he had a discreet security detail in attendance at all times. He also had a maid service which came in three times a week to straighten up, though he didn’t bother with a cook, preferring to dine out or even fix small meals for himself. He had, of course, the usual accoutrements of a king spook: three different sorts of secure phones, a secure telex, and a new secure fax machine. There was no live-in secretary, but when the office was busy and he wasn’t there, a courier service kept him apprised of the printed material circulating in Century House. Indeed, since he had to assume that the “opposition” kept an eye on his home, he deemed it smarter to remain at home in time of crisis, the better to project the image of calmness. It really didn’t matter. He was firmly tied to the SIS by an electronic umbilical cord.
And so it was this morning. Someone at Century House had decided to let him know that SIS had an adult male body to use in Operation BEATRIX: just the sort of thing he needed with breakfast, Basil noted, with a twisted expression. They needed three, though, one of them a female child, which was really not something to contemplate with his morning tea and Scottish oatmeal.
However, it was hard not to get excited about this BEATRIX operation. If their Rabbit was speaking the truth—not all of them did—this chap would have all manner of useful information in his head. The most useful of all, of course, would be if he could identify Soviet agents within Her Majesty’s government. That was properly the job of the Security Service—erroneously called MI-5—but the two agencies cooperated closely, more closely than CIA and FBI did in America, or so it appeared to Charleston. Sir Basil and his people had long suspected a high-level leak somewhere in the Foreign Office, but they’d been unable to close in on him or her. So, if they got their Rabbit out—it wasn’t done until it was done, he reminded himself—that was certainly one question his people would be asking in the safe house they used outside of Taunton in the rolling hills of Somerset.
“NOT GOING TO work today?” Irina asked her husband. He ought to have left for the office by now, surely.
“No, and I have a surprise for you,” Oleg announced.