The train stopped, and Zaitzev shuffled aboard. As usual, there were no seats available. He grasped the overhead handrail and kept thinking.
Are the others on the train thinking as well? If so, about what? Jobs? Children? Wives? Lovers? Food? You couldn’t tell. Even Zaitzev couldn’t tell, and he’d seen these people—these same people—on the metro for years. He knew only a few names, mainly given names overheard in conversations. No, he knew them only by their favorite sports teams. . . .
It struck him suddenly and hard how alone he was in his society. How many real friends do I have? Zaitzev asked himself. The answer was shockingly few. Oh, sure, there were people at work he chatted with. He knew the most intimate details about their wives and children—but friends in whom he could confide, with whom he could talk over some troubling development, to whom he could go for guidance in a troubling situation . . . No, he didn’t have any of those. That made him unusual in Moscow. Russians often made deep and close friendships, and consecrated them often enough with the deepest and sometimes the darkest of secrets, as though daring one of their intimates to be a KGB informer, as though courting a trip to the Gulag. But his job denied him that. He’d never dare to discuss the things he did at work, not even to his coworkers.
No, whatever problems he had with this 666 series of messages were ones he had to work out for himself. Even his Irina couldn’t know. She might talk with her friends at GUM, and that would surely be death for him. Zaitzev let out a breath and looked around. . . .
There he was again, that American embassy official, reading Sovietskiy Sport and minding his own business. He was wearing a raincoat—rain had been forecast, but had not materialized—but not a hat. The coat was open, not buttoned or belted. He was less than two meters away. . . .
On an impulse, Zaitzev shifted his position from one side of the car to the other, switching hands on the overhead rail as though to stretch a stiff muscle. That move put him next to the American. And, on further impulse, Zaitzev slid his hand into the raincoat pocket. There was nothing in there, no keys or pocket change, just empty cloth. But he had established that he could reach into this American’s pocket and remove his hand without notice. He backed away, sweeping his eyes around the subway car to see if anyone had noticed or had even been looking his way. But . . . no, almost certainly not. His maneuver had gone undetected, even by the American.
FOLEY DIDN’T EVEN let his eyes move as he read to the bottom of the hockey article. Had he been in New York or any other Western city, he would have thought that someone had just attempted to pick his pocket. Strangely, he didn’t expect that here. Soviet citizens were not allowed to have Western currency, and so there was nothing but trouble to be gained in robbing an American on the street, much less picking his pocket. And KGB, which was probably still shadowing him, was most unlikely to do anything like that. If they wanted to lift his wallet, they’d use a two-man team, as professional American pickpockets did, one to delay and distract, and the other to make the lift. You could get almost anyone that way, unless the target was alerted, and staying alert for so long was a lot to ask, even of an expert professional spook. So you employed passive defenses, like wrapping a rubber band or two around the wallet—simple, but very effective, and one of the things they taught you at The Farm, the sort of basic tradecraft that didn’t announce “spy!” to everyone. The NYPD advised people to do the same thing on the streets of Manhattan, and he was supposed to look like an American. Since he had a diplomatic passport and “legal” cover, theoretically, his person was inviolable. Not necessarily from a street thug, of course, and both the KGB and the FBI were not above having a highly trained street thug rough someone up, albeit within carefully thought-through parameters, lest things get out of control. The entire state of affairs made the Imperial Court of Byzantium look simple by comparison, but Ed Foley didn’t make the rules.
Those rules now did not allow him to check his pocket or make the least sign that he knew that someone’s hand had been in there. Maybe someone had dropped him a note—a notice of desire to defect, even. But why him? His cover was supposed to be as solid as a T-bill, unless someone in the embassy had made a very shrewd guess and then ratted him out. . . . But no, even then, KGB wouldn’t tip their hand this quickly. They’d watch him for a few weeks at least, just to see what else he might lead them to. KGB played the game too skillfully for that sort of play, so, no, there wasn’t much chance that whoever had searched his pocket was a Second Chief Directorate guy. And probably not a pickpocket, either. Then what? Foley wondered. He’d have to be patient to find out, but Foley knew a lot about patience. He kept on reading his newspaper. If it were someone who wanted to do a little business, why scare him off? At the very least, he’d let him feel clever. It was always useful to help other people feel smart. That way, they could continue their mistakes.
Three more stops before he got off the subway. Foley had known up front that it would be a lot more productive to ride it than to drive the car. That Mercedes was just too standout-ish for this place. It would make Mary Pat stand out, too, but to her way of thinking, that worked for her rather than against. His wife had brilliant field instincts, better than his, but she often scared him in her daring. It wasn’t so much that Mary Pat was a risk-taker. Every member of the DO took risks. It was her relish for doing so that occasionally worried him. For him, playing with the Russians was part of the job. It was business, as Don Vito Corleone would have put it, not personal. But for Mary Patricia, it was as personal as hell, because of her grandfather.
She’d lusted to be part of CIA before they’d met in the Student Union at Fordham, and then again at the CIA recruiter’s desk, and they’d hit it off soon after that. She’d already had her Russian-language skills. She could pass for a native. She could alter her accent for any region of the country. She could feign being an instructor in poetry at Moscow State University, and she was pretty, and pretty women had an advantage over everyone else. It was the oldest of prejudices, that the attractive among us had to be good people, that the bad people had to be ugly because they did ugly things. Men were especially deferential to pretty women, other women were less so, because they envied their looks, but even they were nice by instinct. So Mary Pat could skate on a lot of things, because she was just that pretty American girl, that ditsy blonde, because blondes were universally thought to be dumb, even here in Russia, where they were not all that uncommon. The ones here were probably natural blondes, too, because the local cosmetics industry was about as advanced as it must have been in twelfth-century Hungary, and there wasn’t much Clairol Blond #100G in the local drugstores. No, the Soviet Union paid scant attention to the needs of its womenfolk, which led his mind to another question—why had the Russians stopped at only one revolution? In America there would have been hell to pay for the lack of choices in clothes and cosmetics the women had here. . . .
The train stopped at his station. Foley made his way to the door and walked to the escalator. Halfway up, his curiosity got the better of him. He rubbed his nose as though with a case of the sniffles, and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. He rubbed his nose with it and then shoved it in his coat pocket, which, he discovered, was empty. So what had that been all about? There was no telling. Just one more random event in a life filled with them?
But Edward Foley hadn’t been trained to think in terms of random events. He’d continue this regular schedule, and be sure to catch this same subway train every day for a week or so, just to see if there might be a repeat.
ALBERT BYRD SEEMED a competent eye cutter. He was shorter and older than Jack. He had a beard, black and showing hints of gray—like a lot of beards in England, she’d noted. And tattoos. More than she’d ever encountered before. Professor Byrd was a skilled clinician, good with his patients, and a very adept surgeon, liked and trusted by his nursing team—always the sign of a good doc, Cathy knew. He seemed to be a good teacher, but Cathy already knew most of what he had to teach, and knew more about lase
rs than he did. The argon laser here was new, but not as new as the one at Hopkins, and it would be two weeks before they even had a xenon-arc laser, for which she was Wilmer Eye Institute’s best jockey at Hopkins.
The bad news was in the physical facilities. Health care in Britain was effectively a government monopoly. Everything was free—and, like everywhere in the world, you got what you paid for. The waiting rooms were far shabbier than Cathy was used to, and she remarked on it.
“I know,” Professor Byrd said tiredly. “It’s not a priority.”
“The third case I saw this morning, Mrs. Dover, she’d been on the waiting list for eleven months—for a cataract evaluation that took me twenty minutes. My God, Albert, at home her family physician just calls my secretary and I see her in three or four days. I work hard at Hopkins, but not that hard.”
“What would you charge?”
“For that? Oh . . . two hundred dollars. Since I’m an assistant professor at Wilmer, I come a little higher than a new resident.” But, she didn’t add, she was a damned sight smarter than the average resident, more experienced, and a faster worker. “Mrs. Dover is going to need surgery to correct it,” she added. “Want me to do it?”
“Complicated?” Byrd asked.
She shook her head. “Routine procedure. About ninety minutes’ work because of her age, but it doesn’t look as though there should be any complications.”
“Well, Mrs. Dover will go on the list.”
“How long?”
“It’s not an emergency procedure . . . nine to ten months,” Byrd figured.
“You’re kidding,” Cathy objected. “That long?”
“That’s about normal.”
“But that’s nine or ten months during which she can’t see well enough to drive a car!”
“She won’t ever see a bill,” Byrd pointed out.
“Fine. She can’t read the newspapers for the best part of a year. Albert, that’s awful!”
“It’s our national health-care system,” Byrd explained.
“I see,” Cathy said. But she didn’t really. The surgeons here were proficient enough, but they did only a bit more than half the procedures she and her colleagues did at Hopkins—and she’d never felt overworked in the Maumenee Building. Sure, you worked hard. But people needed you, and her job was to restore and improve the sight of people who required expert medical care—and to Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, that was a religious calling. It wasn’t that the local docs were lazy, it was just that the system allowed—nay, encouraged—them to take a very laissez-faire attitude toward their work. She’d arrived in a very new medical world, and it wasn’t all that brave.
Neither had she seen a CAT scanner. They’d essentially been invented in Britain by EMI, but some bean counter in the British government—the Home Office, they’d told her—had decided that the country only needed a few of them, and so most hospitals lost the lottery. The CAT scan had just come into being a few years before she’d entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, but in the ensuing decade they’d become as much a part of medicine as the stethoscope. Practically every hospital in America had one. They cost a million dollars apiece, but the patient paid for the use of the things, and they paid themselves off quickly enough. She only rarely needed one—to examine tumors around the eye, for example—but when you did, you damned well needed it right now!
And at Johns Hopkins, the floors were mopped every day.
But the people had the same needs, and she was a doc, and that, Cathy decided, was that. One of her medical school colleagues had gone to Pakistan and come back with the kind of experience in eye pathologies that you couldn’t get in a lifetime in American hospitals. Of course, he’d also come back with amoebic dysentery, which was guaranteed to lessen anyone’s enthusiasm for foreign travel. At least that wouldn’t happen here, she told herself. Unless she caught it in a doctor’s waiting room.
CHAPTER 9
SPIRITS
THUS FAR, Ryan had not managed to catch the same train home as his wife, always managing to get home later than she did. By the time he got home, he’d be able to think about doing some work on his Halsey book. It was about 70 percent done, with all the serious research behind him. He just had to finish the writing. What people never seemed to understand was that this was the hard part; researching was just locating and recording facts. Making the facts seem to come together in a coherent story was the difficult part, because human lives were never coherent, especially a hard-drinking warrior like William Frederick Halsey, Jr. Writing a biography was more than anything else an exercise in amateur psychiatry. You seized incidents that happened in his life at randomly selected ages and education levels, but you could never know the little key memories that formed a life—the third-grade schoolyard fight, or the admonishment from his maiden aunt Helen that resonated in his mind for his entire life, because men rarely revealed such things to others. Ryan had such memories, and some of them appeared and disappeared in his consciousness at seemingly random intervals, when the message from Sister Frances Mary in Second Grade at St. Matthew’s School leaped into his memory as though he were seven years old again. A skilled biographer seemed to have the ability to simulate such things, but it sometimes came down to making things up, to applying your own personal experiences to the life of another person and that was . . . fiction, and history wasn’t supposed to be fiction. Neither was an article in a newspaper, but Ryan knew from his own experience that much purported “news” was made up from whole cloth. But nobody ever said that writing a biography was easy. His first book, Doomed Eagles, had been in retrospect a much easier project. Bill Halsey, Fleet Admiral, USN, had fascinated him since reading the man’s own autobiography as a boy. He’d commanded naval forces in battle, and while that had seemed exciting to a boy of ten years, it was positively frightening to a man of thirty-two, because now he understood the things that Halsey didn’t discuss in full—the unknowns, having to trust intelligence information without really knowing where it came from, how it was gathered, how it was analyzed and processed, how it was transmitted to him, and whether or not the enemy was listening in. Ryan was now in that loop, and having to wager his life on the work that he did himself was frightening as hell—rather more so, actually, to be wagering the lives of others whom he might or, more likely, might not know.
There was a joke he remembered from his time in the Marine Corps, Ryan thought, as the green English countryside slid past his window: The motto of the intelligence services was “We bet your life.” That was now his business. He had to wager the lives of others. Theoretically, he might even come up with an intelligence estimate that risked the fate of his country. You had to be so damned sure of yourself and your data. . . .
But you couldn’t always be sure, could you? He’d scoffed at many official CIA estimates to which he’d been exposed back at Langley, but it was a damned sight easier to spit on the work of others than it was to produce something better yourself. His Halsey book, tentatively titled Fighting Sailor, would upset a few conventional-wisdom apple carts, and deliberately so. Ryan thought that the conventional thinking in some areas was not merely incorrect, but stuff that could not possibly be true. Halsey had acted rightly in some cases where the all-seeing eye of hindsight had castigated him for being wrong. And that was unfair. Halsey could only be judged responsible for the information that was available to him. To say otherwise was like castigating doctors for not being able to cure cancer. They were smart people doing their best, but there were some things they didn’t know yet—they were working like hell to find them out, but the process of discovery took time then, and it was still taking time now, Ryan thought. Was it ever. And Bill Halsey could only know what he was given, or what a reasonably intelligent man might deduce from that information, given a lifetime of experience and what he knew of the psychology of his enemy. And even then the enemy did not willingly cooperate in his own destruction, did he?
That’s my job, all right, Ryan thought beh
ind blank eyes. It was a quest for Truth, but it was more than that. He had to replicate for his own masters the thinking processes of others, to explain them to his own superiors, so that they, Ryan’s bosses, could better understand their adversaries. He was playing pshrink without a diploma. In a way, that was amusing. It was less so when you considered the magnitude of the task and the potential consequences of failure. It came down to two words: dead people. In the Basic School at Quantico Marine Base, they’d hammered the same lesson home often enough. Screw up leading your platoon, and some of your Marines don’t go home to their mothers and wives, and that would be a heavy burden to carry on your conscience for the rest of your life. The profession of arms attached a large price tag to mistakes. Ryan hadn’t served long enough to learn that lesson for himself, but it had frightened him on quiet nights, feeling the roll of the ship on her way across the Atlantic. He’d talked it over with Gunny Tate, but the sergeant—then an “elderly” man of thirty-four—had just told him to remember his training, trust his instincts, and to think before acting if he had the time, and then warned that you didn’t always have the luxury of time. And he’d told his young boss not to worry, because he seemed pretty smart for a second lieutenant. Ryan would never forget that. The respect of a Marine gunnery sergeant didn’t come cheaply.
So he had the brains to make good intelligence estimates and the guts to put his name behind them, but he had to be damned sure they were good stuff before he put them out. Because he was betting the lives of other people, wasn’t he?