Red Rabbit

  If he was burned, then so was his wife, and that would put the brakes on two very promising CIA careers. He and Mary Pat were Bob Ritter’s fair-haired pair, the varsity, the young all-pro team at Langley, and it was a reputation that had to be both protected carefully and also built upon. The President of the United States himself would read their “take” and maybe make decisions based on the information they brought in. Important decisions that could affect the policy of their country. The responsibility was not something to dwell on. It could drive you nuts, make you too cautious—so cautious that you never accomplished anything. No, the biggest problem in the intelligence business was in drawing the line between circumspection and effectiveness. If you leaned too far the one way, you never got anything useful done. If you went too far the other way, then you got yourself burned, and your agents, and over here that meant virtual certain death for people for whose lives you were responsible. It was a dilemma fit to drive a man to drink.

  The metro stopped at his station and he went out the door, then up the escalator. He was pretty sure that nobody had fished in his pocket. On the street level, he checked. Nothing. So whomever it was, either he only rode the afternoon train or the Chief of Station had been “made” by the opposition. It would give him something to worry about all day.

  “THIS ONE’S FOR YOU,” Dobrik said, handing it over. “From Sofia.”

  “Oh?” Zaitzev responded.

  “It’s in the book, your-eyes-only, Oleg Ivan’ch,” the night-duty officer said. “At least it’s short.”

  “Ah,” Zaitzev said, taking the message and seeing the header: 15-8-82- 666. So they figured that with a number instead of a name, the header didn’t need to be encrypted. He didn’t react or say anything further. It just wasn’t done. Surely, Kolya wondered about it—it was the office sport in Communications, wondering about the things one couldn’t read. This message had come in just forty minutes after his departure. “Well, something to start my watch with. Anything else, Nikolay Konstantinovich?”

  “No, aside from that, you have a clean desk.” Dobrik was an efficient worker, whatever faults he might have had. “And now I am properly relieved of duty. At home I have a fresh bottle of vodka.”

  “You should eat first, Kolya,” Zaitzev warned.

  “That’s what my mother says, Oleg. Perhaps I’ll have a sandwich with my breakfast,” he joked.

  “Sleep well, Comrade Major, I relieve you,” Zaitzev said, as he took his seat. Ten minutes later, he had the brief dispatch decrypted. The Sofia rezident acknowledged that Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was his point of contact for Operation 15-8-82-666. So that t was properly crossed. And 15-8-82- 666 was a full-fledged operation now. He tucked the decrypted message into a manila envelope, sealed it, and then dripped hot wax on the seal.

  They’re really going to do it, Oleg Ivanovich told himself with a frown. What do I do now?

  Work his usual day, and then look for a green tie on the metro home. And pray he saw it? Or pray he didn’t?

  Zaitzev shook the thought off and called for a messenger to hand-deliver the dispatch to the top floor. A moment later, a basketful of dispatches landed on his desk for processing.

  “OUCH,” Ed Foley said aloud at his desk. The message—a lengthy one—came from Ritter and Moore, speaking for the President. He’d have to rattle some serious bushes for this.

  Station Moscow didn’t have a written list of agents, even by code names, and even in Foley’s office safe, which in addition to a combination had a two-phase alarm built in, a keypad on the outside, and one on the inside with a different code, which Foley had set himself. The embassy’s Marines had orders to respond to either alarm with drawn weapons, since the contents of this safe were about the most sensitive documents in the whole building.

  But Foley had the names of every Russian citizen who worked for the Agency hard cut into his eyelids, along with their specialty areas. Twelve such agents were currently operating. They’d just lost one the week before he’d arrived in Moscow—burned. No one knew how, though Foley was concerned that the Russians might have a mole in Langley itself. It was heresy to think it, but as CIA tried to do it to KGB, so KGB tried to do it to CIA, and there was no referee on the playing field to let the players know what the score was. The lost agent, whose code name had been SOUSA, was a lieutenant colonel in the GRU and had helped identify some major leaks in the German defense ministry and other NATO sources, through which KGB had gotten political-military intelligence of a high order. But that guy was dead—still breathing, perhaps, but dead even so. Foley hoped they wouldn’t load the guy alive into a furnace, as had been done with another GRU source back in the 1950s. Rather a cruel method of execution, even for the Russians under Khrushchev, and something that had kept his case officer awake for a very long time, the COS was sure.

  So they’d have to get two, maybe three, of their agents working on this one. They had a good guy in KGB and another in the Party Central Committee. Maybe one of them might have heard about a possible operation against the Pope.

  Damn, Foley thought, are they that crazy? It required a considerable stretch of his imagination. An Irishman by ancestry, and Roman Catholic by education and religious affiliation, Ed Foley had to make a mental effort to set aside his personal thoughts. Such a plot was beyond the pale, perhaps, but he was dealing with people who didn’t recognize the concept of limits, certainly not from any outside agency. For them, God was politics, and a threat to their political world was like Lucifer himself challenging the order of heaven. Except that the simile only went so far. This was more like Michael the Archangel challenging the order of Hell. Mary Pat called it the belly of the beast, and this one was one nasty fuckin’ beast.

  “DADDY!” SALLY EXCLAIMED, waking up with her usual smile. He guided her to the bathroom and then downstairs, where her oatmeal was waiting. Sally still wore her bunny-rabbit sleepers, with feet and a long zipper. This one was yellow. And it was the largest size, and her feet were stretching it. She’d have to change to some other sleepwear soon, but that was Cathy’s department.

  The routine was set. Cathy fed Little Jack and, halfway through, her husband set down his paper and headed upstairs to shave. By the time he was dressed, she was finished with her duty, and went off to get cleaned up and dressed while Jack burped the little guy and got him into his socks to keep his feet warm, and also to give him something to pull off so that he could see if the feet tasted the same as they had the previous day, which was a newly acquired skill.

  Soon the doorbell rang, and it was Margaret van der Beek, soon followed by Ed Beaverton, which allowed the parents to escape off to work. At Victoria Station, Cathy kissed her husband good-bye and headed for the tube station for the ride to Moorefields, while Jack took a different train to Century House, and the day was about to start for real.

  “Good morning, Sir John.”

  “Hey, Bert.” Ryan paused. Bert Canderton had “army” written all over him, and it was time to ask. “What regiment were you?”

  “I was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Royal Green Jackets, sir.”

  “Infantry?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “I thought you guys wore red coats,” Ryan observed.

  “Well, that’s your fault—you Yanks, that is. In your revolutionary war, my regiment took so many casualties from your riflemen that the colonel of the regiment decided a green tunic might be safer. It’s been that way ever since.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “I’m waiting for an opening at the Tower to be a Yeoman Warder, sir. Should have a new red coat in a month or so, they tell me.”

  Canderton’s rent-a-cop blouse had some service ribbons on it, probably not for brushing and flossing his teeth, and a regimental sergeant major in the British army was somebody, like a master gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps.

  “I’ve been there, been to the club they have,” said Ryan. “Good bunch of troops.”

  “Indeed. I have a fr
iend there, Mick Truelove. He was in the Queen’s Regiment.”

  “Well, sar-major, keep the bad guys out,” Ryan said, as he worked his card into the electronic slot that controlled the entry gate.

  “I will do that, sir,” Canderton promised.

  Harding was at his desk when Ryan came in. Jack hung his jacket on the tree.

  “Come in early, Simon?”

  “Your Judge Moore sent a fax to Bas last night—just after midnight, as a matter of fact. Here.” He handed it across.

  Ryan scanned it. “The Pope, eh?”

  “Your President is interested, and so is the PM, as it happens,” Harding said, relighting his pipe. “Basil called us in early to go over what data we have.”

  “Okay, what do we have?”

  “Not much,” Harding admitted. “I can’t talk to you about our sources—”

  “Simon, I’m not dumb. You have somebody in close, either a confidante of a Politburo member or someone in the Party Secretariat. He’s not telling you anything?” Ryan had seen some very interesting “take” in here, and it had to have come from somebody inside the big red tent.

  “I can’t confirm your suspicion,” Harding cautioned, “but no, none of our sources have given us anything, not even that the Warsaw Letter has arrived in Moscow, though we know it must have.”

  “So, we don’t know jackshit?”

  Simon nodded soberly. “Correct.”

  “Amazing how often that happens.”

  “It’s just a part of the job, Jack.”

  “And the PM has her panties in a wad?”

  Harding hadn’t heard that Americanism before, and it caused him to blink twice. “So it would seem.”

  “So, what are we supposed to tell her? She damned sure doesn’t want to hear that we don’t know.”

  “No, our political leaders do not like to hear that sort of thing.”

  Neither do ours, Ryan admitted to himself. “So, how good is Basil at a song-and-dance number?”

  “Quite good, actually. In this case, he can say that your chaps do not have very much, either.”

  “Ask other NATO services?”

  Harding shook his head. “No. It might leak out to the opposition—first, that we’re interested, and second, that we don’t know enough.”

  “How good are our friends?”

  “Depends. The French SDECE occasionally turns good information, but they do not like to share. Neither do our Israeli friends. The Germans are thoroughly compromised. That Markus Wolf chap in East Germany is a bloody genius at this business—perhaps the best in the world, and under Soviet control. The Italians have some talented people, but they, too, have problems with penetration. You know, the best service on the continent might well be the Vatican itself. But if Ivan is doing anything at the moment, he’s covering it nicely. Ivan is quite good at that, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Ryan agreed. “When does Basil have to go to Downing Street?”

  “After lunch—three this afternoon, I understand.”

  “And what will we be able to give him?”

  “Not very much, I’m afraid—worse, Basil might want me with him.”

  Ryan grunted. “That ought to be fun. Met her before?”

  “No, but the PM has seen my analyses. Bas says she wants to meet me.” He shuddered. “It’d be much better if I had something substantive to tell her.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can come up with a threat analysis, okay?” Jack sat down. “What exactly do we know?”

  Harding handed a sheaf of documents across. Ryan leaned back in his chair to pick through them.

  “You got the Warsaw Letter from a Polish source, right?”

  Harding hesitated, but it was clear he had to answer this one: “That is correct.”

  “So nothing from Moscow itself?” Jack asked.

  He shook his head. “No. We know the letter was forwarded to Moscow, but that’s all.”

  “We’re really in the dark, then. You might want to have a beer before you go across the river.”

  Harding looked up from his notes. “Why, thank you, Jack. I really needed to hear that bit of encouragement.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “I work better on a computer,” Ryan said. “How hard is it to get one in here?”

  “Not easy. They have to be tempest-checked to make sure someone outside the building cannot read the keystrokes electronically. You can call administration about it.”

  But not today, Ryan didn’t say aloud. He’d learned that the bureaucracy at Century House was at least as bad as the one at Langley, and after a few years of working in the private sector, it could drive him to distraction. Okay, he’d try to come up with some ideas to save Simon from getting a new asshole installed in his guts. The Prime Minister was a lady, but in terms of demands, Father Tim at Georgetown had nothing on her.

  OLEG IVAN’CH got back from lunch at the KGB cafeteria and faced facts. Very soon, he would have to decide what to say to his American, and how to say it.

  If he was a regular embassy employee, he would have passed the first note along to the CIA chief in the embassy—there had to be one, he knew, an American rezident whose job it was to spy on the Soviet Union, just as Russians spied on everyone in the world. The big question was whether they were spying on him. Could he have been “doubled” by the Second Chief Directorate, whose reputation would frighten the devil in hell himself? Or could this ostensible American have been a Russian bearing a “false-flag”?

  So, first of all, Oleg had to make damned sure he was dealing with the real thing. How to do that . . . ?

  Then it came to him. Yes, he thought. That was something KGB could never bring off. That would ensure that he was dealing with someone able to do what he needed done. No one could fake that. In celebration, Zaitzev lit up another cigarette and went back into the morning dispatches from the Washington rezidentura.

  IT WAS HARD to like Tony Prince. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow was well-regarded by the Russians, and, as far as Ed Foley was concerned, that spoke to a weakness in his character.

  “So, how do you like the new job, Ed?” Prince asked.

  “Still settling in. Dealing with the Russian press is kind of interesting. They’re predictable, but unpredictably so.”

  “How can people be unpredictably predictable?” the Times correspondent inquired, with a crooked smile.

  “Well, Tony, you know what they’re going to say, just not how they’re going to ask it.” And half of them are spooks or at least stringers, anyway, in case you haven’t noticed.

  Prince affected a laugh. He felt himself to be the intellectual superior. Foley had failed as a general-beat reporter in New York, whereas Prince had parlayed his political savvy to one of the top jobs in American journalism. He had some good contacts in the Soviet government, and he cultivated them assiduously, frequently sympathizing with them over the boorish, nekulturniy behavior of the current regime in Washington, which he occasionally tried to explain to his Russian friends, often pointing out that he hadn’t voted for this damned actor, and neither had anyone in his New York office.

  “Have you met the new guy, Alexandrov, yet?”

  “No, but one of my contacts knows him, says he’s a reasonable sort, talks like he’s in favor of peaceful coexistence. More liberal than Suslov. I hear he’s pretty sick.”

  “I’ve heard that, too, but I’m not sure what’s wrong with him.”