Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“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 underside 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.

“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.