Red Rabbit

  With that done, Zaitzev headed back for his desk, where the work pile was already quite high enough, and only marginally less mind-numbing than that of the robots in the next room. Perhaps that was why something started whispering at the back of his head: physically close to the Pope . . . why?

  THE ALARM WENT OFF at a quarter of six. That was an uncivilized hour. At home, Ryan told himself, it was quarter of one, but that thought did not bear reflection. He flipped the covers clear off the bed and rose, staggering to the bathroom. There was still a lot to get used to here. The toilets flushed pretty much the same, but the sink . . . Why the hell, Ryan wondered, did you need two spouts to put water in the sink, one for hot and one for cold? At home you just held your hand under the damned spout, but here the water had to mix up in the sink first, and that slowed you down. The first morning look in the mirror was difficult. Do I really look like that? he always wondered on the way back into the bedroom to pat his wife on the rump.

  “It’s time, honey.”

  An oddly feminine grumble. “Yeah. I know.”

  “Want me to get Little Jack?”

  “Let him sleep,” Cathy advised. The little guy hadn’t felt like sleeping the previous evening. So now, of course, he wouldn’t feel like waking up.

  “ ’Kay.” Jack headed to the kitchen. The coffee machine only needed its button punched, and Ryan was able to handle that task. Just before flying over, he’d seen a new American company IPO. It sold premium coffee, and since Jack had always been something of a coffee snob, he’d invested $100,000 and gotten himself some of their product—as fine a country as England might be, it was not a place you visited for the coffee. At least he could get Maxwell House from the Air Force, and perhaps he’d get this new Starbucks outfit to ship him some of their brew. One more mental note to make. Next he wondered what Cathy might make for breakfast. Surgeon or not, she regarded the kitchen as her domain. Her husband was allowed to make sandwiches and fix drinks, but that was about it. That suited Jack, for whom a stove was terra incognita. The stove here was gas, like his mom had used, but with a different trademark. He stumbled to the front door, hoping to find a newspaper.

  It was there. Ryan had signed up for the Times, to go with the International Herald Tribune he picked up at the train station in London. Finally, he switched on the TV. Remarkably, there was a start-up version of cable TV in this subdivision, and, mirabile dictu, it had the new American CNN news service—just in time for baseball scores. So England was civilized after all. The Orioles had knocked off Cleveland the previous night, 5-4, in eleven innings. The ballplayers were doubtless in bed right now, sleeping off the postgame beers they’d quaffed at their hotel bar. What a pleasant thought that was. They had a good eight hours of sack time ahead of them. At the turn of the hour, the CNN night crew in Atlanta summarized the previous day’s events. Nothing overly remarkable. The economy was still a little fluky. The Dow Jones had snapped back nicely, but the unemployment rate always lagged behind, and so did working-class voters. Well, that was democracy for you. Ryan had to remind himself that his view of the economy was probably different from that of the guys who made the steel and assembled the Chevys. His dad had been a union member, albeit a police lieutenant and part of management rather than labor, and his dad had voted Democrat most of the time. Ryan hadn’t registered in either party, opting instead to be an independent. It limited the junk mail you got, and who cared about primaries, anyway?

  “Morning, Jack,” Cathy said, entering the kitchen in her pink housecoat. It was shabby, which was surprising, since his wife was always a fastidious dresser. He hadn’t asked, but supposed it had sentimental significance.

  “Hey, babe.” Jack rose to give his wife the first kiss of the day, accompanied by a rather limp hug. “Paper?”

  “No. I’ll save it for the train.” She pulled open the refrigerator door and pulled some things out. Jack didn’t look.

  “Having coffee this morning?”

  “Sure. I don’t have any procedures scheduled.” If she had a surgery scheduled, Cathy kept off the coffee, lest the caffeine give her hands a minor tremor. You couldn’t have that when you were screwing an eyeball back together. No, today was get-acquainted day with Professor Byrd. Bernie Katz knew him and called him a friend, which boded well, and besides, Cathy was about as good as eye surgeons got, and there was no reason for her to be the least bit concerned about a new hospital and a new boss. Still, such concerns were human, though Cathy was too macho to let it show. “How does bacon and eggs grab you?” she asked.

  “I’m allowed to have some cholesterol?” her husband asked in surprise.

  “Once a week,” Mrs. Dr. Ryan replied, imperiously. Tomorrow she’d serve him oatmeal.

  “Sounds good to me, babe,” Ryan said, with some pleasure.

  “I know you’ll get something bad for you at the office anyway.”

  “Moi?”

  “Yeah, croissant and butter, probably. They’re made entirely out of butter anyway, you know.”

  “Bread without butter is like a shower without soap.”

  “Tell me that when you get your first heart attack.”

  “My last physical, my cholesterol was . . . what?”

  “One fifty-two,” Cathy answered, with an annoyed yawn.

  “And that’s pretty good?” her husband persisted.

  “It’s acceptable,” she admitted. But hers had been one forty-six.

  “Thank you, honey,” Ryan acknowledged, turning to the op-ed page of the Times. The letters to the editor here were a positive hoot, and the quality of the writing throughout the papers was superior to anything he found in the American print media. Well, they had invented the language over here, Ryan figured, and fair was fair. The turn of phrase here was often as elegant as poetry, and occasionally too subtle for his American eye to appreciate. He’d pick it up, he figured.

  The familiar sound and pleasant smell of frying bacon soon permeated the room. The coffee—tempered with milk instead of cream—was agreeable, and the news wasn’t of the sort to ruin breakfast. Except for the ungodly time, things were not all that bad, and besides, the worst part of waking up was already behind him.

  “Cathy?”

  “Yeah, Jack?”

  “Have I told you yet that I love you?”

  She ostentatiously checked her watch. “You’re a little late, but I’ll write that off to the early hour.”

  “What’s your day look like, honey?”

  “Oh, meet the people, look around at how things are laid out. Meet my nurses especially. I hope I get good ones.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Nothing screws surgery up worse than a clumsy scrub nurse. But the people at Hammersmith are supposed to be pretty good, and Bernie says that Professor Byrd is about the best guy they have over here. He teaches at Hammersmith and Moorefields. He and Bernie go back about twenty years. He’s been to Hopkins a lot, but somehow I’ve never bumped into him. Over easy?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  Then came the sound of cracking eggs. Like Jack, Cathy believed in a proper cast-iron skillet. Harder to clean, perhaps, but the eggs tasted a lot better that way. Finally came the sound of the toaster lever being depressed.

  The sports page—it was called “sport” (singular) over here—told Jack everything he’d ever need to know about soccer, which wasn’t much.

  “How’d the Yankees do last night?” Cathy asked.

  “Who cares?” her husband countered. He’d grown up with Brooks Robinson and Milt Pappas and the Orioles. His wife was a Yankees fan. It was hard on the marriage. Sure, Mickey Mantle had been a good ballplayer—probably loved his mother, too—but he’d played in pinstripes. And that was that. Ryan rose and fixed the coffee for his wife, handing it to her with a kiss.

  “Thanks, honey.” Cathy handed Jack his breakfast.

  The eggs looked a little different, as though the chickens had eaten orange corn to make the yellows come out so bright. But they ta
sted just fine. Five satisfying minutes after that, Ryan headed for the shower to make room for his wife.

  Ten minutes later, he was picking out a shirt—white cotton, button-down—striped tie, and his Marine Corps tie pin. At 6:40, there was a knock at the door.

  “Good morning.” It was Margaret van der Beek, the nanny/governess. She lived just a mile away and drove herself. Recommended from an agency vetted by the SIS, she was a South Africa native, the daughter of a minister, thin, pretty, and seemingly very nice. She carried a huge purse. Her hair was napalm-red, which hinted at Irish ancestry, but it was apparently strictly South African-Dutch. Her accent was different from those of most locals, but nonetheless pleasant to Jack’s ear.

  “Good morning, Miss Margaret.” Ryan waved her into the house. “The kids are still asleep, but I expect them up at any moment.”

  “Little Jack sleeps well for five months.”

  “Maybe it’s the jet lag,” Ryan thought out loud, though Cathy had said that infants didn’t suffer from it. Jack had trouble swallowing that. In any case, the little bastard—Cathy snarled at Jack whenever he said that—hadn’t gone to sleep until half past ten the previous night. That was harder on Cathy than on Jack. He could sleep through the noise. She couldn’t.

  “Almost time, honey,” Jack called.

  “I know, Jack,” came the retort. The she appeared, carrying their son, with Sally following in her yellow bunny-rabbit sleeper.

  “Hey, little girl.” Ryan went over to lift his daughter for a hug and kiss.

  Sally smiled back and rewarded her daddy with a ferocious hug. How children could wake up in such a good humor was a perverse mystery to him. Maybe it was some important bonding instinct, to make sure their parents looked after them, like when they smiled at mommy and daddy practically from their first moment. Clever little critters, babies.

  “Jack, put a bottle on,” Cathy said, heading with the little guy to the changing table.

  “Roger that, doc,” the intelligence analyst responded dutifully, doubling back into the kitchen for a bottle of the junk he’d mixed up the previous night—that was man’s work, Cathy had made clear to him during Sally’s infancy. Like moving furniture and taking out the garbage, the household tasks for which men were genetically prepared.

  It was like cleaning a rifle to a soldier: unscrew the top, reverse the nipple, place bottle in pot with four to five inches of water, turn on stove, and wait a few minutes.

  That would be Miss Margaret’s task, however. Jack saw the taxi outside the window, just pulling onto the parking pad.

  “Car’s here, babe.”

  “Okay,” was the resigned response. Cathy didn’t like leaving her kids for work. Well, probably no mother did. Jack watched her head into the half-bath to wash her hands, then emerge to put on the suit coat that went with her gray outfit—even gray cloth-covered flat shoes. She wanted to make a good first impression. A kiss for Sally, and one for the little guy, and she headed for the door, which Jack held open for her.

  The taxi was an ordinary Land Rover saloon car—only London required the classic English taxi for public livery, though some of the older ones found their way into the hinterland. Ryan had arranged the morning pickup the previous day. The driver was one Edward Beaverton, and he seemed awfully chipper for a man who had to work before 7:00 A.M.

  “Howdy,” Jack said. “Ed, this is my wife. She’s the good-looking Dr. Ryan.”

  “Good morning, mum,” the driver said. “You’re a surgeon, I understand.”

  “That’s right, ophthalmic—”

  Her husband cut her off: “She cuts up eyeballs and sews them back together. You should watch, Eddie, it’s fascinating to see how she does it.”

  The driver shuddered. “Thank you, sir, but, no, thank you.”

  “Jack just says that to make people throw up,” Cathy told the driver. “Besides, he’s too much of a wuss to come watch any real surgery.”

  “And properly so, mum. Much better to cause surgery than to attend it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re a former Marine?”

  “That’s right. And you?”

  “I was in the Parachute Regiment. That’s what they taught us: Better to inflict harm on the other bloke than to suffer it yourself.”

  “Most Marines would agree with that one, pal,” Ryan agreed with a chuckle.

  “That’s not what they taught us at Hopkins,” Cathy sniffed.

  IT WAS AN hour later in Rome. Colonel Goderenko, titularly the Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, had about two hours per day of diplomatic duties, but most of his time was taken up by his job as rezident, or Chief of Station for the KGB. It was a busy posting. Rome was a major information nexus for NATO, a city in which one could obtain all manner of political and military intelligence, and that was his main professional concern. He and his six full- and part-time officers ran a total of twenty-three agents—Italian (and one German) nationals who fed information to the Soviet Union for political or pecuniary reasons. It would have been better for him if their motivation was mainly ideological, but that was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The rezidentura in Bonn had a better atmosphere in which to work. Germans were Germans, and many of them could be persuaded that helping out their co-linguists in the DDR was preferable to working with the Americans, British, and French who called themselves allies of the Fatherland. For Goderenko and his fellow Russians, Germans would never be allies, whatever politics they might claim to have, though the fig leaf of Marxism-Leninism could sometimes be a useful disguise.

  In Italy, things were different. The lingering memory of Benito Mussolini was pretty well faded now, and the local true-believer communists were more interested in wine and pasta than revolutionary Marxism, except for the bandits of the Red Brigade—and they were dangerous hooligans rather than politically reliable operatives. Vicious dilettantes more than anything else, though not without their uses. He occasionally saw to their trips to Russia, where they studied political theory and, more to the point, learned proper fieldcraft skills that at least had some tactical use.

  On his desk was a pile of overnight dispatches, topmost of which was a message flimsy from Moscow Centre. The header told him it was important, and the cipher book: 115890. This was in his office safe, in the credenza behind his desk. He had to turn in his swivel chair and half-kneel to dial in the combination to open the door, after first deactivating the electronic alarm that was wired to the dial. That took a few seconds. Atop the book was his cipher wheel. Goderenko cordially hated using one-time pads, but they were as much a part of his life as using the toilet. Distasteful, but necessary. Decryption of the dispatch took him ten minutes. Only when it was done did he grasp the actual message. From the Chairman himself? he thought. As with any mid-level government official across the world, it was like being called to the principal’s office.

  The Pope? Why the hell does Yuriy Vladimirovich care a rat’s ass about getting close to the Pope? Then he thought for a second. Oh, of course. It’s not about the head of the Catholic Church. It’s about Poland. You can take the Polack out of Poland, but you can’t take Poland out of the Polack. It’s political. That made it important.

  But it did not please Goderenko.

  “ASCERTAIN AND REPORT MEANS OF GETTING PHYSICALLY CLOSE TO THE POPE,” he read again. In the professional language of the KGB, that could only mean one thing.

  Kill the Pope? Goderenko thought. That would be a political disaster. As Catholic as Italy was, the Italians were not a conspicuously religious people. La dolce vita, the sweet life—that was the religion of this country. The Italians were the most profoundly disorganized people in the world. How they had ever been allies to the Hitlerites boggled the imagination. For the Germans, everything was supposed to be in Ordnung, properly arranged, clean and ready for use at all times. About the only things the Italians kept in proper order were their kitchens and perhaps their wine cellars. Aside from that, everything was so casual here. To
a Russian, coming to Rome was a culture shock, akin to being bayoneted in the chest. The Italians had no sense of discipline. You only had to observe their traffic to see that, and driving in it was what flying a fighter plane must be like.

  But the Italians were all born with a sense of style and propriety. There were some things one could not do here. Italians had a collective sense of beauty that was difficult for any man to fault, and to violate that code could have the most serious of consequences. For one thing, it could compromise his intelligence sources. Mercenaries or not . . . Even mercenaries would not work against their very religion, would they? Every man had some scruples, even—no, he corrected himself, especially—here. So the political consequences of something like this potential mission could adversely affect the productivity of his rezidentura and would seriously impact recruitment.

  So, what in hell do I do now? he asked himself. A senior colonel in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and a highly successful rezident, he had a certain degree of flexibility in his actions. He was also a member of a huge bureaucracy, and the easiest thing for him to do was what all bureaucrats did. He would delay, obfuscate, and obstruct.

  There was some degree of skill required for this, but Ruslan Borissovich Goderenko knew all he needed to know about that.

  CHAPTER 6

  BUT NOT TOO CLOSE

  NEW THINGS ARE ALWAYS INTERESTING, and that was true for surgeons, too. While Ryan read his paper, Cathy looked out the train window. It was another bright day, with a sky as blue as his wife’s pretty eyes. For his part, Jack had the route pretty well memorized, and boredom invariably made him sleepy. He slumped in the corner of the seat and found his eyelids getting heavy.

  “Jack, are you going to sleep? What if you miss the stop?”

  “It’s a terminal,” her husband explained. “The train doesn’t just stop there; it ends there. Besides, never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”