“What would happen if you did that at home?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Cathy said. “You’d probably lose your license to practice medicine—after Bernie amputated your fucking hands with a chain saw!”
That got Jack’s attention. Cathy didn’t talk like that.
“No shit?”
“I had a bacon, lettuce, and tom-AH-to sandwich with chips—that’s french fries for us dumb colonials. I had a Coke, by the way.”
“Glad to hear it, doctor.” Ryan walked over to give his wife a kiss. She appeared to need it.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she went on. “Oh, maybe out in Bumfuck, Montana, they do stuff like that, but not in a real hospital.”
“Cathy, settle down. You’re talking like a stevedore.”
“Or maybe a foulmouthed ex-Marine.” She finally managed a smile. “Jack, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Those two eye cutters are technically senior to me, but if they ever tried that sort of shit at home, they’d be finished. They wouldn’t even let them work on dogs.”
“Is the patient okay?”
“Oh, yeah. The frozen section came back cold as ice—totally benign, not malignant—and we took out the growth and closed him back up. He’ll be just fine—four or five days for recovery. No impairment to his sight, no more headaches, but those two bozos operated on him with booze in their systems!”
“No harm, no foul, babe,” he suggested, lamely.
“Jack, it isn’t supposed to be that way.”
“So report them to your friend Byrd.”
“I ought to. I really ought to.”
“And what would happen?”
That lit her up again: “I don’t know!”
“It’s a big deal to take the bread off somebody’s table, and you’d be branded as a troublemaker,” Jack warned.
“Jack, at Hopkins, I’d’ve called them on it right then and there, and there would have been hell to pay, but over here—over here I’m just a guest.”
“And the customs are different.”
“Not that different. Jack, it’s grossly unprofessional. It’s potentially harmful to the patient, and that’s a line you never cross. At Hopkins, if you have a patient in recovery, or you have surgery the next day, you don’t even have a glass of wine with dinner, okay? That’s because the good of the patient comes before everything else. Okay, sure, if you’re driving home from a party and you see a hurt person on the side of the road, and you’re the only one around, you do what you can, and get him to a doc who’s got it all together, and you probably tell that doc that you had a couple before you saw the emergency. I mean, sure, during internship, they work you through impossible hours so you can train yourself to make good decisions when you’re not fully functional, but there’s always somebody to back you up if you’re not capable, and you’re supposed to be able to tell when you’re in over your head. Okay? I had that happen to me once on pediatric rotation, and it scared the hell out of me when that little kid stopped breathing, but I had a good nurse backing me up and we got the senior resident down in one big fucking hurry, and we got him going again with no permanent damage, thank God. But, Jack, you don’t go creating a suboptimal situation. You don’t go looking for them. You deal with them when they happen, but you don’t voluntarily jump into the soup, okay?”
“Okay, Cath, so, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. At home, I’d go right to Bernie, but I’m not at home. . . .”
“And you want my advice?”
Her blue eyes fixed on her husband’s. “Well, yes. What do you think?”
What he thought didn’t really matter, Jack knew. It was just a question of guiding her to her own decision. “If you do nothing, how will you feel next week?”
“Terrible. Jack, I saw something that—”
“Cathy.” He hugged her. “You don’t need me. Go ahead and do what you think is right. Otherwise, well, it’ll just eat you up. You’re never sorry for doing the right thing, no matter what the adverse consequences are. Right is right, my lady.”
“They said that, too. I’m not comfortable with—”
“Yeah, babe. Every so often at work, they call me Sir John. You roll with the punch. It’s not like it’s an insult.”
“Over here, they call a surgeon Mr. Jones or Mrs. Jones, not Doctor Jones. What the hell is that all about?”
“Local custom. It goes back to the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century. A ship’s doctor was usually a youngish lieutenant, and aboard ship that rank is called mister rather than leftenant. Somehow or other it carried over to civilian life, too.”
“How do you know that?” Cathy demanded.
“Cathy you are a doctor of medicine. I am a doctor of history, remember? I know a lot of things, like putting a Band-Aid on a cut, after that painful Merthiolate crap. But that’s as far as my knowledge of medicine goes—well, they taught us a little at the Basic School, but I don’t expect to patch up a bullet wound any time soon. I’ll leave that to you. Do you know how?”
“I patched you up last winter,” she reminded him.
“Did I ever thank you for that?” he asked. Then he kissed her. “Thanks, babe.”
“I have to talk to Professor Byrd about it.”
“Honey, when in doubt, do what you think is right. That’s why we have a conscience, to remind us what the right thing is.”
“They won’t like me for it.”
“So? Cathy, you have to like you. Nobody else. Well, me, of course,” Jack added.
“Do you?”
A very supportive smile: “Lady Ryan, I worship your dirty drawers.”
And finally she relaxed. “Why, thank you, Sir John.”
“Let me go upstairs and change.” He stopped in the doorway. “Should I wear my formal sword for dinner?”
“No, just the regular one.” And now she could smile, too. “So, what’s happening in your office?”
“A lot of learning the things we don’t know.”
“You mean finding out new stuff?”
“No, I mean realizing all the stuff we don’t know that we should know. It never stops.”
“Don’t feel bad. Same in my business.”
And Jack realized that the similarity between both businesses was that if you screwed up, people might die. And that was no fun at all.
He reappeared in the kitchen. By now Cathy was feeding Little Jack. Sally was watching TV, that great child pacifier, this time some local show instead of a Roadrunner-Coyote tape. Dinner was cooking. Why an assistant professor of ophthalmology insisted on cooking dinner herself like a truck driver’s wife baffled her husband, but he didn’t object—she was good at it. Had they had cooking lessons at Bennington? He picked a kitchen chair and poured himself a glass of white wine.
“I hope this is okay with the professor.”
“Not doing surgery tomorrow, right?”
“Nothing scheduled, Lady Ryan.”
“Then it’s okay.” The little guy went to her shoulder for a burp, which he delivered with great gusto.
“Damn, Junior. Your father is impressed.”
“Yeah.” She took the edge of the cloth diaper on her shoulder to wipe his mouth. “Okay, how about a little more?”
John Patrick Ryan, Jr. did not object to the offer.
“What things don’t you know? Still worried about that guy’s wife?” Cathy asked, cooled down somewhat.
“No news on that front,” Jack admitted. “We’re worried what they might do on something.”
“Can’t say what it is?” she asked.
“Can’t say what it is,” he confirmed. “The Russians, as my buddy Simon says, are a rum bunch.”
“So are the Brits,” Cathy observed.
“Dear God, I married Carrie Nation.” Jack took a sip. It was Pinot Grigio, a particularly good Italian white that the local liquor stores carried.
“Only when I cut somebody open with a knife.” She liked saying it tha
t way, because it always gave her husband chills.
He held up his glass. “Want one?”
“When I’m finished, maybe.” She paused. “Nothing you can talk about?”
“Sorry, babe. It’s the rules.”
“And you never break them?”
“Bad habit to get into. Better not to start.”
“What about when some Russian decides to work for us?”
“That’s different. Then he’s working for the forces of Truth and Beauty in the world. We,” Ryan emphasized, “are the Good Guys.”
“What do they think?”
“They think they are. But so did a guy named Adolf,” he reminded her. “And he wouldn’t have liked Bernie very much.”
“But he’s long dead.”
“Not everybody like him is, babe. Trust me on that one.”
“You’re worried about something, Jack. I can see it. Can’t say, eh?”
“Yes. And no, I can’t.”
“Okay.” She nodded. Intelligence information didn’t interest her beyond her abstract desire to learn what was going on in the world. But as a physician there were many things she really wanted to know—like the cure for cancer—but didn’t, and, reluctantly, she’d come to accept that. But medicine didn’t allow much in the way of secrets. When you found something that helped patients, you published your discovery in your favorite medical journal so the whole world could know about it right away. Damned sure CIA didn’t do that very often, and part of that offended her. Another tack, then. “Okay, when you do find out something important, what happens then?”
“We kick it upstairs. Here, it goes right to Sir Basil, and I call it in to Admiral Greer. Usually a phone call over the secure phone.”
“Like the one upstairs?”
“Yep. Then we send it over by secure fax or, if it’s really hot, it goes by diplomatic courier out of the embassy, when we don’t want to trust the encryption systems.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Not since I’ve been here, but I don’t make those decisions. What the hell, the diplomatic bag goes over in eight or nine hours. Damned sight faster than it used to happen.”
“I thought that phone thingee upstairs was unbreakable?”
“Well, some things you do are nearly perfect, too, but you still take extra care with them, right? Same with us.”
“What would that be for? Theoretically speaking, that is.” She smiled at her cleverness.
“Babe, you know how to phrase a question. Let’s say we got something, oh, on their nuclear arsenal, something from an agent way the hell inside, and it’s really good stuff, but losing it might ID the agent for the opposition. That is what you send via the bag. The name of the game is protecting the source.”
“Because if they ID the guy—”
“He’s dead, maybe in a very unpleasant way. There’s a story that once they loaded a guy into a crematorium alive and then turned on the gas—and they made a film of it, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it.”
“Nobody does that anymore!” Cathy objected immediately.
“There’s a guy at Langley who claims to have seen the film. The poor bastard’s name was Popov, a GRU officer who worked for us. His bosses were very displeased with him.”
“You’re serious?” Cathy persisted.
“As a heart attack. Supposedly, they used to show the film to people in the GRU Academy as a warning about not crossing the line—it strikes me as bad psychology but, like I said, I’ve met a guy who says he saw the film. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons we try to protect our sources.”
“That’s a little hard to believe.”
“Oh, really? You mean, like a surgeon breaking for lunch and having a beer?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“It’s an imperfect world we live in, babe.” He’d let things go. She’d have all weekend to think things over, and he’d get some work done on his Halsey book.
BACK IN MOSCOW, fingers were flying. How u gonna tell Lan[gley], she asked.
N[ot] sure, he replied.
Cour[ier], she suggested. This could be re[ally] hot.
Ed nodded agreement. Rit[ter] will be exci[ted].
D[amn] st[raight], she agreed. Want m[e] 2 han[dle] the me[et]? she asked.
Y[our] Ru[ssian] is pre[etty] g[ood], he agreed.
This time she nodded. She spoke an elegant literary Russian reserved to the well-educated over here, Ed knew. The average Soviet couldn’t believe that a foreigner spoke his language that well. When walking the street or conversing with a shop clerk, she never let that skill slip, instead stumbling over complex phrases. To do otherwise would have been noticed at once, and so avoiding it was an important part of her cover, even more than her blond hair and American mannerisms. It would finger her immediately to their new agent.
When? she asked next.
Iv[an] sez tom[orrow]. Up 4 it? he responded.
She patted his hip and gave a cute, playful smile, which translated to bet your ass.
Foley loved his wife as fully as a man could, and part of that was his respect for her love of the game they both played. Paramount Central Casting could not have given him a better wife. They’d be making love tonight. The rule in boxing might be no sex before a fight, but for Mary Pat the rule was the reverse, and if the microphones in the walls noticed, well, fuck ’em, the Chief of Station Moscow thought, with a sly smile of his own.
“WHEN DO YOU leave, Bob?” Greer asked the DDO.
“Sunday. ANA to Tokyo, and from there on to Seoul.”
“Better you than me. I hate those long flights,” the DDI observed.
“Well, you try to sleep about half the way,” and Ritter was good at that. He had a conference scheduled with the KCIA, to go over things on both North Korea and the Chinese, both of which he was worried about—as were the Koreans. “Nothing much happening in my shop at the moment, anyway.”
“Smart of you to skip town while we have the President chewing my backside about the Pope,” Judge Moore thought aloud.
“Well, I’m sorry about that, Arthur,” Ritter retorted, with an ironic smile. “Mike Bostock will be handling things in my absence.” Both senior executives knew and liked Bostock, a career field spook and an expert on the Soviets and the Central Europeans. He was a little too much of a cowboy to be trusted on The Hill, though, which everyone thought was a pity. Cowboys had their uses—like Mary Pat Foley, for example.
“Still nothing out of the Politburo meeting?”
“Not yet, Arthur. Maybe they just talked about routine stuff. You know, they don’t always sit there and plan the next nuclear war.”
“No.” Greer chuckled. “They think we’re always doing that. Jesus, they’re a paranoid bunch.”
“Remember what Henry said: ‘Even paranoids have enemies.’ And that is our job,” Ritter reminded them.
“Still ruminating over your MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH plan, Robert?”
“Nothing specific yet. The in-house people I’ve talked to about it—damn it, Arthur, you tell our people to think outside of the box, and what do they do? They build a better box!”
“We don’t have many entrepreneur types here, remember. Government agency. Pay caps. Tends to militate against creative thinking. That’s what we’re for,” Judge Moore pointed out. “How do we change that?”
“We have a few people from the real world. Hell, I’ve got one on my team—he doesn’t know how to think inside the box.”
“Ryan?” Ritter asked.
“That’s one of them,” Jim Greer confirmed with a nod.
“He’s not one of us,” the DDO observed at once.
“Bob, you can’t have it both ways,” the DDI shot back. “Either you want a guy who thinks like one of our bureaucrats, or a guy who thinks creatively. Ryan knows the rules, he’s an ex-Marine who even knows how to think on his feet, and pretty soon he’s going to be a star analyst.” Greer paused. “He’s about the best young officer I’ve seen in a
few years, and what your beef with him is, Robert, I do not understand.”
“Basil likes him,” Moore added to the conversation, “and Basil’s a hard man to fool.”
“Next time I see Jack, I’d like to let him know about RED DEATH.”
“Really?” Moore asked. “It’s way over his pay grade.”
“Arthur, he knows economics better than anyone I have in the DI. I didn’t put him in my economics section only because he’s too smart to be limited that way. Bob, if you want to wreck the Soviet Union—without a war—the only way to do it is to cripple their economy. Ryan made himself a pile of money because he knows all that stuff. I’m telling you, he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe he can figure a way to burn down a wheat field. Anyway, what does it hurt? Your project is entirely theoretical, isn’t it?”
“Well?” the DCI turned to Ritter. Greer was right, after all.
“Oh, what the hell, okay,” the DDO conceded the point. “Just so he doesn’t talk about this to The Washington Post. We don’t need that idea out in the open. Congress and the press would have a meltdown.”
“Jack, talk to the press?” Greer asked. “Not likely. He doesn’t curry favor with people, including us. He’s one guy I think we can trust. The whole Russian KGB doesn’t have enough hard currency to buy him off. That’s more than I can say for myself,” he joked.
“I’ll remember you said that, James,” Ritter promised, with a thin smile of his own. Such jokes were usually limited to the Seventh Floor at Langley.
A DEPARTMENT STORE was a department store anywhere in the world, and GUM was supposedly Moscow’s counterpart to Macy’s in New York. Theoretically, Ed Foley thought, walking in the main entrance. Just like the Soviet Union was theoretically a voluntary union of republics, and Russia theoretically had a constitution that existed over and above the will of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And there was theoretically an Easter Bunny, too, he thought, looking around.
They took the escalator to the second floor—the escalator was of the old sort, with thick wooden runners instead of the metal type which had long since taken over in the West. The fur department was over on the right, toward the back, and, on initial visual inspection, the selection there wasn’t all that shabby.