“Oh, took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, did he?”
“You know, there was something of the aesthete about him, like he really was a priest of a sort,” Prince said, after a moment’s reflection.
“Think so?”
“Yeah, something otherworldly about the guy, like he could see things the rest of us couldn’t, like a priest or something. He sure enough believed in communism. Didn’t apologize for it, either.”
“Stalinist?” Foley asked.
“No, but thirty years ago he would have been. I can see him signing the order to kill somebody. Wouldn’t lose any sleep over it—not our Mishka.”
“Who’s going to replace him?”
“Not sure,” Prince admitted. “My contacts say they don’t know.”
“I thought he was tight with another Mike, that Alexandrov guy,” Foley offered, wondering if Prince’s contacts were as good as he thought they were. Fucking with Western reporters was a game for the Soviet leadership. It was different in Washington, where a reporter had power to use over politicians. That didn’t apply here. The Politburo members didn’t fear reporters at all—much the reverse, actually.
Prince’s contacts weren’t all that great: “Maybe, but I’m not sure. What’s the talk here?”
“Haven’t been to the lunch room yet, Tony. Haven’t heard the gossip yet,” Foley parried. You don’t really expect a tip from me, do you?
“Well, we’ll know by tomorrow or day after.”
But it would look good for you if you were the first reporter to make the prediction, and you want me to help you, right? Not is this lifetime, Foley thought, but then he had to reconsider. Prince would not be a particularly valuable friend, but perhaps a usable one, and it never made sense to make enemies for the fun of it. On the other hand, to be too helpful to the guy might suggest either that Foley was a spook or knew who the spooks were, and Tony Prince was one of those guys who liked to talk and tell people how smart he is… No, it’s better for Prince to think I’m dumb, because he’ll tell everyone he knows how smart he is and how dumb I am.
The best cover of them all, he’d learned at The Farm, was to be thought a dullard, and while it was a little hurtful to his ego to play that game, it was helpful to the mission, and Ed Foley was a mission-oriented guy. So . . .fuck Prince and what he thinks. I’m the guy in this city who makes a difference.
“Tell you what, I’ll ask around—see what people think.”
“Fair enough.” Not that I expected anything useful from you, Prince thought a little too loudly.
He was less skillful than he thought at concealing his feelings. He would never be a good poker player, the Chief of Station thought, seeing him out the door. He checked his watch. Lunchtime.
LIKE MOST EUROPEAN stations, Kiev’s was a pale yellow—just like a lot of old royal palaces, in fact, as if in the early nineteenth century there had been a continent-wide surplus of mustard, and some king or other had liked the color, and so everyone had painted his palace that way. It never happened in Britain, thank God, Haydock thought. The ceiling was glass set in iron frames to let the light in but, as in London, the glass was rarely, if ever, cleaned, and was instead coated with soot from long-gone steam engines and their coal-fired boiler fires.
But Russians were still Russians. They came to the platform carrying their cheap suitcases, and they were almost never alone, mostly in family groups, even if only one of them was leaving, so that proper goodbyes could be experienced, with passionate kisses, male-to-female, and male-to-male, which always struck the Englishman as peculiar. But it was a local custom, and all local customs were peculiar to visitors. The train to Kiev, Belgrade, and Budapest was scheduled to leave at 1:00 P.M. on the dot, and the Russian railroads, like the Moscow Metro, kept to a fairly precise schedule.
Just a few feet away, Paul Matthews was conversing with a representative of the Soviet state railway, talking about the motive power—it was all electric, since Comrade Lenin had decided to bring electricity and eliminate lice all across the USSR. The former, strangely, had proved easier than the latter.
The big VL80T locomotive, two hundred tons of steel, sat at the head of the train on Track Three, with three-day coaches, a dining car, and six international class sleepers, plus three mail cars just behind the engine. On the platform were the various conductors and stewards, looking rather surly, as Russians in service-related jobs tended to do.
Haydock was looking around, the photos of the Rabbit and the Bunny seared into his memory. The station clock said it was 12:15, and that tallied with his wristwatch. Would the Rabbit show? Haydock usually preferred to be early for a flight or a train, perhaps from a fear of being late left over from his childhood. Whatever the reason, he’d have been here by now for a one o’clock train. But not everyone thought that way, Nigel reminded himself—his wife, for example. He was slightly afraid that she’d deliver the baby in their car on the way to the hospital. It would make a hell of a mess, the spook was sure, while Paul Matthews asked his questions, and the photographer shot his Kodak film. Finally…
Yes, that was the Rabbit, along with Mrs. Rabbit and the little Bunny. Nigel tapped the shoulder of the photographer.
“This family approaching now. Lovely little girl,” he observed, for anyone close enough to listen. The photographer fired off ten frames at once, then switched to another Nikon and fired off ten more. Excellent, Haydock thought. He’d have them printed up before the embassy closed down for the night, get several printed off to—no, he’d personally hand them to Ed Foley, and make sure the others went by Queen’s Messenger—the Brits’ rather more dignified term for a diplomatic courier—so they’d be sure to be in Sir Basil’s hands before he turned in. He wondered how they would arrange for hiding the fact of the Rabbit’s defection—it certainly meant getting cadavers. Distasteful, but possible. He was glad he didn’t have to figure out all the details.
As it turned out, the Rabbit family walked within ten feet of him and his reporter friend. No words were exchanged, though the little girl, like little girls everywhere, turned to look at him as she passed. He gave her a wink and got a little smile in return. And then they passed by, walked up to the attendant, and showed their paper ticket forms.
Matthews kept on asking his questions and got very polite answers from the smiling Russian trainman.
At 12:59:30, the conductor—or at least so Haydock assumed, from the shabby uniform—walked up and down the side of the train and made sure all the doors but one were secure. He blew a whistle and waved a paddle-like wand to let the engineer know it was time to move off, and at 1:00 on the dot, the horn sounded, and the train started inching away from the platform, gaining speed slowly as it headed west into the capacious railyard, heading for Kiev, Belgrade, and Budapest.
CHAPTER 24:
ROLLING HILLS
IT WAS AN ADVENTURE for Svetlana most of all, but actually for all of them, since none of the Zaitzev family had ever taken an intercity train. The railyards on the way out were like any railyards: miles of parallel and converging and diverging track packed with box- and flatcars carrying who-knew-what to who-knew-where. The roughness of the tracks only seemed to increase the apparent speed. Oleg and Irina both lit cigarettes and looked with casual interest out the large but grubby windows. The seats were not unreasonable, and Oleg could see how the beds folded down from the overhead.
They had two compartments, in fact, with a connecting door. The paneling was wood—birch, by the look of it—and each compartment, remarkably, had its own lavatory, and so zaichik would have her very own, for the first time in her life, a fact she had yet to appreciate.
Five minutes after leaving the station, the conductor came by for their tickets, which Zaitzev handed over.
“You are State Security?” the conductor asked politely. So the KGB travel office called ahead for me, Zaitzev thought. Good of them. That desk-sitter probably really wanted the pantyhose for his wife.
“I am not permitted to discuss that, comrade,” Oleg Ivan’ch answered, with a hard look, making sure that the trainman appreciated his importance. That was one way to ensure proper service. A KGB officer wasn’t quite as good as a Politburo member, but it beat the hell out of being a mere factory manager. It wasn’t so much that people dreaded KGB, but that they just didn’t want to go out of their way to come to the agency’s adverse notice.