Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Just a matter of moving them to a different hutch.”

“You say so, man,” Ryan responded dubiously. This guy just lived a different sort of life from his own. Cathy cut up people’s eyeballs for a living, and that would have made Jack faint dead away like a broad confronting a rattlesnake in the bathtub. Just a different way of earning a living. It sure as hell wasn’t his.

TOM TRENT WATCHED them take the long walk from the hotel to the local zoo, which was always a good place for children. The male lion and tiger were both quite magnificent, and the elephant house-built in a drunken Arabian pastel style-housed several adequate pachyderms. With an ice cream cone bought for the little girl, the tourist part of the day came to its end. The Rabbit family walked back to the hotel, with the father carrying the sleeping child for the last half kilometer or so. This was the hardest part for Trent, for whom staying invisible on a square mile of cobblestone landing field taxed even his professional skills, but the Rabbit family was not all that attentive, and on getting back to the Astoria, he ducked into a men’s room to switch his reversible coat to change at least his outward colors. Half an hour later, the Zaitzevs walked out again, but turned immediately to enter the people’s restaurant just next door. The food there was wholesome if not especially exciting and, more to the point, quite inexpensive. As he watched, they piled their plates high with the local cuisine and sat down to devour it. They all saved room for apple strudel, which in Budapest was just as fine as a man could eat in Vienna, but for about a tenth of the price. Another forty minutes, and they looked thoroughly tired and well stuffed, not even taking a postprandial walk around the block to settle their stomachs before riding the elevator back to the third floor and, presumably, their night’s sleep. Trent took half an hour to make sure, then caught a cab for Red Marty Park. He’d had a long day and now needed to write up his report for Hudson.

THE COS AND RYAN were drinking beer in the canteen when he arrived back at the embassy. Introductions were made, and another pint of beer secured for Trent.

“Well, what do you think, Tom?”

“It certainly appears that they are just what we’ve been told to expect. The little girl-the father calls her zaichik; means ‘bunny,’ doesn’t it? — seems a very sweet child. Other than that, an ordinary family doing ordinary things. He purchased three TV tape machines over on Váci Street. The store delivered them to the hotel. Then they went on a bimble.”

“A what?”

“A walkabout, just wandering around as tourists do,” Trent explained. “To the zoo. The little girl was properly impressed by the animals, but most of all by a new red coat with a black collar they bought this morning. All in all, they seem rather a pleasant little family,” the spook concluded.

“Nothing out of the ordinary?” Hudson asked.

“Not a thing, Andy, and if there is any coverage on them, I failed to see it. The only surprise of the day was in the morning when they walked right past the embassy here on the way to shopping. That was rather a tender moment, but it seems to have been entirely coincidental. Váci Utca is the best shopping area for Easterners and Westerners. I expect the desk clerk told them to take the underground here.”

“Pure vanilla, eh?” Jack asked, finishing his beer.

“So it would appear,” Trent replied.

“Okay, when do we make our move?” the American asked next.

“Well, that Rozsa chap opens his concert series tomorrow night. Day after, then? We give Mrs. Rabbit a chance to hear her music. Can we get tickets for ourselves?” Hudson asked.

“Done,” Trent answered. “Box six, right side of the theater, fine view of the entire building. Helps to be a diplomat, doesn’t it?”

“The program is. .?”

“J. S. Bach, the first three Brandenberg concerti, then some other opuses of his.”

“Ought to be pleasant enough,” Ryan observed.

“The local orchestras are actually quite good, Sir John.”

“Andy, enough of that knighthood shit, okay? My name is Jack. John Patrick, to be precise, but I’ve gone by ‘Jack’ since I was three years old.”

“It is an honor, you know.”

“Fine, and I thanked Her Majesty for it, but we don’t do that sort of thing where I live, okay?”

“Well, wearing a sword can be inconvenient when you try to sit down,” Trent sympathized.

“And caring for the horse can be such a bother.” Hudson had himself a good laugh. “Not to mention the expense of jousting.”

“Okay, maybe I had that coming,” Ryan admitted. “I just want to get the Rabbit the hell out of Dodge.”

“Which we shall do, Jack,” Hudson assured him. “And you will be there to see it.”

“EVERYBODY’S IN BUDAPEST,” Bostock reported. “The Rabbit and his family are staying in a no-tell motel called the Astoria.”

“Isn’t there a part of New York by that name?” the DCI asked.

“Queens,” Greer confirmed. “What about the hotel?”

“Evidently, it suits our purposes,” the Deputy DDO informed them. “Basil says the operation is nominal to this point. No surveillance on our subjects has been spotted. Everything looks entirely routine. I guess our cousins have a competent Station Chief in Budapest. The three bodies arrived there today. Just a matter of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”

“Confidence level?” the DDI asked.

“Oh, say, seventy-five percent, Admiral,” Bostock estimated. “Maybe better.”

“What about Ryan?” Greer asked next.

“No beefs from London on how he’s doing. I guess your boy is handling himself.”

“He’s a good kid. He ought to.”

“I wonder how unhappy he is,” Judge Moore wondered.

The other two each had a smile and a head shake at that. Bostock spoke first. Like all DO people, he had his doubts about members of the far more numerous DI.

“Probably not as comfortable as he is at his desk with his comfy swivel chair.”

“He’ll do fine, gentlemen,” Greer assured them, hoping he was right.

“I wonder what this fellow has for us. .?” Moore breathed.

“We’ll know in a week,” Bostock assured them. He was always the optimist. And three out of four constituted betting odds, so long as your own ass wasn’t on the line.

Judge Moore looked at his desk clock and added six hours. People would be asleep in Budapest now, and almost there in London. He remembered his own adventures in the field, mostly composed of waiting for people to show up for meets or filling out contact reports for the at-home bureaucrats who still ran things at CIA. You just couldn’t get free of the fact that the Agency was a government operation, subject to all of the same restrictions and inefficiencies that attended that sad reality. But this time, for this BEATRIX operation, they were making things happen speedily for once. . only because this Rabbit person said that government communications were compromised. Not because he’d said he had information about an innocent life that might be lost. The government had its priorities, and they did not always correspond to the needs of a rational world. He was Director of Central Intelligence, supposedly-and by federal law-in command of the entire intelligence-gathering and — analysis operations of the government of the United States of America. But getting this bureaucracy to operate efficiently was the functional equivalent of beaching a whale and commanding it to fly. You could scream all you wanted, but you couldn’t fight gravity. Government was a thing made by men, and so it ought to be possible for men to change it, but in practice that just didn’t happen. So, three chances out of four, they’d get their Russian out and get to debrief him in a comfortable safe house in the Virginia hills, pick his brain clean, and maybe they’d find out some important and useful things, but the game wouldn’t change and neither, probably, would CIA.