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by Frederick Forsyth

  The Rabbit had been born in a small and poor village west of Smolensk in 1936. It was not much of a place, but one like tens of thousands scattered across the land—a single rutted street, dusty in summer, a river of mud in autumn, and rock-hard with frost in winter. Thirty or so houses, some barns, and the former peasants now herded into a Stalinist collective farm. His father was a farm worker and they lived in a hovel just off the main road.

  Down the road, with a small shop and a flat above it, lived the village baker. His father told him he should not have anything to do with the baker, because he was “yevrey.” He did not know what that meant, but clearly it was not a good thing to be. But he noticed his mother bought her bread there, and very good bread it was.

  He was puzzled that he should not talk to the baker, for he was a jolly man who would sometimes stand in the doorway of his shop, wink at Leonid, and toss him a bulochka, a warm sticky bun fresh from the oven. Because of what his father said, he would run behind the cattle shed to eat the bun. The baker lived with his wife and two daughters, whom he could sometimes see peeping out from the shop, though they never seemed to come out and play.

  On a day in late July 1941 death came to the village. The little boy did not know it was death at the time. He heard the rumbling and growling and ran out of the barn. There were huge iron monsters coming from the main road up to the village. The first one came to a halt right in the middle of the houses. Leonid stood in the street to have a better look.

  It seemed enormous, as big as a house itself, but it rolled on tracks and had a long gun sticking out in front. At the very top, above the gun, a man was standing with his upper half in the open. He took off a thick padded helmet and laid it beside him. It was very hot that day. Then he turned and looked down at Leonid.

  The child saw that the man had almost white-blond hair and eyes of a blue so pale that it was as if the summer sky was shining straight through the skull from the back. There was no expression in the eyes, neither love nor hatred, just a sort of blank boredom. Quite slowly the man reached to his side and pulled a handgun from a pouch.

  Something told Leonid all was not well. He heard the whump of grenades thrown through windows, and screams. He was frightened, turned and ran. There was a crack and something fanned through his hair. He got behind the cattle shed, began to cry, and kept running. There was a steady chattering sound behind him and the smell of burning timber as the houses flamed. He saw the forest ahead of him and kept running.

  Inside the forest he did not know what to do. He was still crying and calling for his mommy and his daddy. But they never came. They never came again.

  He came upon a woman, screaming about her husband and her daughters, and recognized the baker’s wife, Mrs. Davidova. She seized him and hugged him to her bosom, and he could not understand why she should do that, and what would his father think, because she was yevrey!

  The village had ceased to exist and the SS-Panzer unit had turned and gone. There were a few other survivors in the forest. Later they met some partisans, hard, bearded men with guns who lived there. With a partisan guide a column of them set off, eastward, always eastward.

  When he became tired, Mrs. Davidova carried him, until at last weeks later they reached Moscow She seemed to know some people there, who gave them shelter food and warmth. They were nice to him and looked like Mr. Davidov with ringlets from their temples to their chins and broad-brimmed hats. Although he was not yevrey, Mrs. Davidova insisted she adopt him and she looked after him for years.

  After the war the authorities discovered he was not her real son and separated them, sending him to an orphanage. He cried very much when they parted and so did she but he never saw her again. At the orphanage they taught him that yevrey meant Jewish.

  The Rabbit sat on his bench and wondered about the document under his shirt. He did not fully comprehend the meaning of phrases like “total extermination” or “utter annihilation.” The words were too long for him, but he did not think they were good words. He could not understand why Mr. Komarov should want to do that to people like Mrs. Davidova.

  There was a hint of pink in the east. In a big mansion across the river on Sofiskaya Quay a Royal Marine took a flag and began to climb the stairs toward the roof.

  ¯

  THE skipper took his daiquiri, rose from the table, and wandered to the wood rail. He looked down at the water, then up across the darkening harbor.

  Forty-nine, he thought, forty-nine and still in hock to the company store. Jason Monk, you’re getting old and past it.

  He took a swig and felt the lime and rum hit the spot.

  What the hell, it’s been a pretty good life. Eventful, anyway.

  It had not started that way. It started in a humble timber-frame house in the tiny town of Crozet in south-central Virginia, just east of the Shenandoah, five miles off the highway from Waynesboro to Charlottesville.

  Albemarle County is farming country, steeped in memorials of the War Between the States, for eighty percent of that war was fought in Virginia and no Virginian ever forgets’ it. At the local county grade school most of his schoolmates had fathers who raised tobacco, soybeans, or hogs, or all three.

  Jason Monk’s father, by contrast, was a forest ranger working in the Shenandoah National Park. No one ever became a millionaire working for the Forestry Service, but it was a good life for a boy, even if dollars were short. Vacations were not for lazing around but for finding opportunities to do extra work to make some money and help out in the home.

  He recalled how his father would take him as a child up into the park that covered the Blue Ridge Mountains to show him the difference between spruce, birch, fir, oak, and loblolly pine. Sometimes they would meet the game wardens and he would listen round-eyed to their tales of black bear and deer, and their hunts for turkey, grouse, and wild pheasant.

  Later he learned to use a gun with unerring accuracy, to track and trail, make camp and hide all traces in the morning, and when he was big and strong enough he got vacation work in the logging camps.

  He attended the county grade school from age five until twelve, and just after his thirteenth birthday enrolled at County High in Charlottesville, rising every morning before dawn to commute from Crozet to the city. It was at the high school that something was to happen that would change his life.

  Back in 1944 a certain GI sergeant had, with thousands of others, hauled himself off Omaha Beach and struck into the hinterland of Normandy. Somewhere outside Saint-Lo, separated from his unit, he had come into the sights of a German sniper. He was lucky; the bullet grazed his upper arm. The twenty-three-year-old American crawled into a nearby farmhouse where the family tended his wound and gave him shelter. When the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house put the cold compress on his wound and he looked into her eyes, he knew he had been struck harder than any German bullet would ever do.

  A year later he returned from Berlin to Normandy, proposed, and married her in the orchard of her father’s farm with a U.S. Army chaplain officiating. Later, because the French do not marry in orchards, the local Catholic priest did the same in the village church. Then he brought his bride back to Virginia.

  Twenty years later he was deputy principal of Charlottesville County High, and his wife, with their children off their hands, suggested she might teach French there. Mrs. Josephine Brady was pretty and glamorous and French, so her classes quickly became very sought after.

  In the fall of 1965 there was a newcomer in her first-year class, a rather shy youth with an untidy shock of blond hair and a fetching grin, called Jason Monk. Within a year she could avow she had never heard a foreigner speak French like him. The talent had to be natural; it could not be inherited. But it was there, not just a mastery of the grammar and the syntax, but an ability to copy the accent to perfection.

  In his last year at County High, he would visit her house and they would read Mairaux, Proust, Gide, and Sartre (who was incredibly erotic for those days) but their mutual favorites were
the older romantic poets, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and De Vigny. It was not intended to happen but it did. Perhaps the poets were to blame, but despite the age gap, which worried neither of them, they had a brief affair.

  By the time he was eighteen Jason Monk could do two things unusual in teenagers of Southern Virginia; he could speak French and make love, each with considerable skill. At eighteen he joined the army.

  In 1968 the Vietnam War was very much in full flow. Many young Americans were trying to avoid serving there. Those who presented themselves as volunteers, signing on for three years, were welcomed with open arms.

  Monk did his basic training and somewhere along the line he filled in his résumé. Under the question “foreign languages” he filled in “French.” He was summoned to the office of the Camp Adjutant.

  “You really speak French?” asked the officer. Monk explained. The adjutant called Charlottesville High and spoke with the school secretary. She contacted Mrs. Brady. Then she rang back. This took a day. Monk was told to report again. This time there was a major from G2, Army Intelligence, present.

  Apart from speaking Vietnamese, most people of a certain age in this former French colony spoke French. Monk was flown to Saigon. He did two tours, with a gap in between back in the States.

  On the day of his release, the C.O. ordered him to report to his office. There were two civilians present. The colonel left.

  “Please, sergeant, take a seat,” said the older and more genial of the two men. He toyed with a briar pipe while the more earnest one broke into a torrent of French. Monk replied in like vein. This went on for ten minutes. Then the French speaker gave a grin and turned to his colleague.

  “He’s good, Carey, he’s damn good.” Then he too left.

  “So, what do you think of Vietnam?” asked the remaining man. He was then about forty, with a lined, amused face. It was 1971.

  “It’s a house of cards, sir,” said Monk. “And it’s falling down. Two more years and we’ll have to get out of there.”

  Carey seemed to agree. He nodded several times.

  “You’re right, but don’t tell the army. What are you going to do now?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind, sir.”

  “Well, I can’t make it up for you. But you have a gift. I don’t even have it myself. My friend out there is as American as you and me, but he was raised in France for twenty years. If he says you’re good, that’s enough for me. So why not continue?

  “You mean college, sir?”

  “I do. The G.I. Bill will pick up most of the tab. Uncle Sam feels you’ve earned it. Take advantage.”

  During his years in the army Monk had sent most of his spare cash home to his mother to help raise the other children.

  “Even the G.I. Bill requires a thousand dollars in cash,” he said.

  Carey shrugged. “I guess a thousand dollars can be raised. If you’ll major in Russian.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Then give me a call. The outfit I work for might be able to offer you something.”

  “It could take four years, sir.”

  “Oh, we’re patient folk where I work.”

  “How did you know about me, sir?”

  “Down in Vietnam, some of our people in the Phoenix Program spotted you and your work. You got some good tips on the VC. They liked that.”

  “It’s Langley, isn’t it, sir? You’re the CIA.”

  “Oh, not all of it. Just a small cog.”

  Carey Jordan was actually much more than a small cog. He would go on to become Deputy Director (Operations), that is, head of the whole espionage arm.

  Monk took the advice and enrolled at the University of Virginia, right back in Charlottesville. He drank tea with Mrs. Brady again, but just as friends. He studied Slavonic languages and majored in Russian at a level his senior adviser, himself a Russian, termed “bilingual.” He graduated at the age of twenty-five in 1975 and just after his next birthday was accepted into the CIA. After the usual basic training at Fort Peary, known in the agency simply as “the Farm,” he was assigned to Langley, then New York, and back to Langley.

  It would be five years, and many, many courses later, before he would get his first posting abroad, and then it was to Nairobi, Kenya.

  ¯

  CORPORAL Meadows of the Royal Marines did his duty that bright morning of July 16. He snap-locked the reinforced edge of the flag to the hoisting cord and ran the banner up the pole to the top. There it fluttered open in the dawn breeze to tell all the world who dwelt beneath it.

  The British government had actually bought the handsome old mansion on Sofia Quay from its previous owner, a sugar magnate, just before the revolution, turned it into the embassy, and had stayed there through thick and thin ever since.

  Josef Stalin, the last dictator to live in the State Apartments of the Kremlin, used to rise each morning, throw back his curtains, and see the British flag fluttering right across the river. It made him extremely angry. Repeated pressure was brought to persuade the British to move. They refused.

  Over the years the mansion became too small to house all the departments required by the mission to Moscow, so that subsections were scattered all over the city. But despite repeated offers to house all the sections in one compound, London politely replied that it would prefer to stay on Sofia Quay. As the building was sovereign British territory, there it stayed.

  Leonid Zaitsev sat across the river and watched the flag flutter open as the first rays of dawn tipped the hills to the east. The sight brought back a distant memory.

  At eighteen the Rabbit had been called up for the Red Army and after the usual minimal basic training he had been posted with the tanks to East Germany. He was a private, tagged by his instructors as not even corporal material.

  One day in 1955, on a routine march outside Potsdam, he had become separated from his company in dense forest. Lost and afraid, he blundered through the woods until he stumbled out on a sandy track. There he halted, rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. Ten yards away was an open jeep containing four soldiers. They had evidently paused for a break while on patrol.

  Two were still in the vehicle, two were standing beside it, smoking cigarettes. They had bottles of beer in their hands. He knew at once they were not Russians. They were foreigners, Westerners, from the Allied Mission at Potsdam, set up under the Four-Power Agreement of 1945, of which he knew nothing. He knew only, because he had been told, that they were the enemy, come to destroy Socialism and, if they could, to kill him.

  They stopped talking when they saw him and stared at him. One of them said: “ ‘Ello, ‘ello. What have we got ‘ere? A bleeding Russky. Allo, Ivan.”

  He did not understand a word. He had a tommy gun slung over his shoulder but they did not seem afraid of him. It was the other way around. Two of them wore black berets, with shining brass cap badges and behind the emblems a cluster of white-and-red feathers. He did not know it, but he was looking at the regimental hackle of the Royal Fusiliers.

  One of the soldiers next to the vehicle peeled himself away and sauntered toward him. He thought he was going to wet himself. The man was also young, with red hair and a freckled face. He grinned at Zaitsev and held out a bottle.

  “Come on, mate. ‘Ave a beer.”

  Leonid felt the chill of the cold glass in his hand. The foreign soldier nodded encouragingly. It would be poisoned of course. He put the neck of the bottle to his lips and tilted. The cold liquid hit the back of his throat. It was strong, better than Russian beer, and good, but it made him cough. Carrot-hair laughed.

  “Go on, then. ‘Ave a beer,” he said. To Zaitsev it was just a voice making sounds. To his amazement the foreign soldier turned his back and sauntered the few feet to his vehicle. The man was not even afraid of him. He was armed, he was the Red Army, and the foreigners were grinning and joking.

  He stood by the trees, drinking the cold beer and wondered what Colonel Nikolayev would think. The colonel commanded his squadron.
He was only about thirty, but he was a decorated war hero. Once he had stopped and asked Zaitsev about his background, where he came from. The private had told him: an orphanage. The colonel had patted him on the back and told him that now he had a home. He adored Colonel Nikolayev.

  He was too frightened to throw their beer back at them, and anyway it tasted very good, even if it was poisoned. So he drank it. After ten minutes the two soldiers on the ground climbed into the rear and pulled on their berets. The driver started up and they drove away. No hurry, no fear of him. The one with red hair turned and waved. They were the enemy, they were preparing to invade Russia, but they waved at him.

  When they had gone he threw the empty bottle as far into the woods as he could, and ran through the trees until eventually he saw a Russian truck, which brought him back to camp. The sergeant gave him a week’s kitchen duty for getting lost, but he never told anyone about the foreigners or the beer.

  Before the foreign vehicle drove off he noticed that it had some sort of regimental insignia on the front right wing and a wasp aerial high above the back. On the aerial was a flag, about a foot square. It had crosses: one upright in red and two diagonal, red and white. All on a blue background. A funny flag in red, white, and blue.

  Forty-four years later, there it was again, fluttering above a building across the river. The Rabbit had solved his problem. He knew he should not have stolen the file from Mr. Akopov, but he could not take it back now. Perhaps no one would notice it was missing. So he would give it to the people with the funny flag who gave him beer. They would know what to do with it.

  He rose from his bench and began to walk down the riverbank toward the Stone Bridge across the Moskva to the Sofia Quay.

  Nairobi, 1983

  WHEN the little boy developed a headache and a slight temperature his mother thought at first it was a summer chill. But by nightfall the five-year-old was screaming that his head hurt and he kept both parents awake all night. In the morning their neighbors in the Soviet diplomatic compound, who had not slept too well either because the walls were thin and the windows open in the heat, asked what was wrong.