Red Rabbit

  Strokov is a pro, Jack reminded himself. And so he’ll act like a pro. He’ll plan every detail, especially the getaway.

  “You must be Ryan,” a British voice said quietly. Jack turned to see a pale man with red hair.

  “Who are you?”

  “Mick King,” the man replied. “Sir Basil sent the four of us down. Sussing the area out?”

  “How obvious am I?” Ryan worried suddenly.

  “You could well be an architecture student.” King blew it off. “What do you think?”

  “I think the shooter would stand right about here, and try to boogie on out that way,” Jack said, pointing. King looked around before speaking.

  “It’s a dicey proposition, however one plans it, with all the people sure to be here, but, yes, that does look the most promising option,” the spook agreed.

  “If I were planning to do it myself, I’d want to use a rifle from up there. We’ll need to have somebody topside to handle that possibility.”

  “Agreed. I’ll have John Sparrow go up there. The chap with short hair over there. He brought a ton of cameras with him.”

  “One more man to camp out in the street that way. Our bird will probably have a car to skip town with, and that’s where I’d park it.”

  “A little too convenient, don’t you think?”

  “Hey, I’m an ex-Marine, not a chess master,” Ryan replied. But it was good to have somebody second-guessing him. There were a lot of tactical possibilities here, and everybody read a map a little differently, and Bulgarians might well study out of a different playbook altogether.

  “It’s a pig of a mission they’ve given us. Best hope is that this Strokov fellow doesn’t show up. Oh, here he is,” King said, handing Ryan an envelope.

  It was full of eight-by-ten prints, actually of pretty good quality.

  “Nick Thompson told me he has lifeless eyes,” Ryan said, looking at one of them.

  “Does seem rather a cold chap, doesn’t he?”

  “When we come here Wednesday, we going to be carrying?”

  “I certainly shall be,” King said positively. “Nine-millimeter Browning. There ought to be a few more at the embassy. I know you can shoot accurately under pressure, Sir John,” he added, with casual respect.

  “It doesn’t mean I like to, pal.” And the best engagement range for any pistol was contact range, holding the gun right against the other bastard. Kinda hard to miss that way. It would even cut the noise down, too. Plus, it was a hell of a good way to tell someone not to do anything untoward.

  For the next two hours, the five men walked the piazza, but they kept coming back to the same place.

  “We can’t cover it all, not without a hundred men,” Mick King finally said. “And if you can’t be strong everywhere, you might as well pick one place and be strong there.”

  Jack nodded, remembering how Napoleon had ordered his generals to come up with a plan for protecting France from invasion, and when a senior officer had spread his troops evenly along the borders, he’d heartlessly inquired if the guy was trying to protect against smuggling. So, yeah, if you couldn’t be strong everywhere, then you planned to be strong somewhere, and prayed that you’d picked the right spot. The key, as always, was to put yourself into the other guy’s head, just as they’d taught him to do as an intelligence analyst. Think the way your adversary thinks, and stop him that way. It sounded so good and so easy theoretically. It was rather different in the field, however.

  They caught Tom Sharp walking into the basilica, and together they went off to a restaurant for lunch and a talk.

  “Sir John is right,” King said. “The best spot is over on the left side. We have photos of the bugger. We put you, John”—he said to Sparrow—“atop the colonnade with your cameras. Your job will be to sweep the crowd and try to spot the bastard, and radio your information to us.”

  Sparrow nodded, but his face showed what he thought of the job as the beers arrived.

  “Mick, you had it right from the beginning,” Sparrow said. “It’s a pig of a job. We ought to have the whole bloody SAS regiment here, and even that would not be enough.” The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was actually just a company or two in size, brilliant troopers that they were.

  “Ours is not to reason why, lad,” Sharp told them all. “So good to know that Basil knows his Tennyson.” The resulting snorts around the lunch table told the tale.

  “What about radios?” Jack asked.

  “On the way by courier,” Sharp answered. “Small ones, they’ll fit in a pocket, and they have ear pieces, but not small microphones, unfortunately.”

  “Shit,” Ryan observed. The Secret Service would have exactly what they needed for this mission, but you couldn’t just call them up and have them delivered. “What about the Queen’s protective detail? Who does that?”

  “The Metropolitan Police, I believe. Why—”

  “Lapel mikes,” Ryan answered. “It’s what the Secret Service uses at home.”

  “I can ask,” Sharp responded. “Good idea, Jack. They might well have what we need.”

  “They ought to cooperate with us,” Mick King thought aloud.

  “I’ll see to it this afternoon,” Sharp promised.

  Yeah, Ryan thought, we’ll be the best-equipped guys ever to blow a mission.

  “They call this beer?” Sparrow asked after his first sip.

  “Better than American canned piss,” another of the new arrivals thought aloud.

  Jack didn’t rise to the bait. Besides, you went to Italy for the wine, not the beer.

  “What do we know about Strokov?” Ryan asked.

  “They faxed me the police file on him,” Sharp reported. “Read it this morning. He’s five-eleven, about fifteen stone. Evidently, he likes to eat too much. So, not an athlete—certainly not a sprinter. Brown hair, fairly thick. Good language skills. Speaks accented English, but reportedly speaks French and Italian like a native. Thought to be an expert with small arms. He’s been in the business twenty years—age forty-three or so. Selected for the special DS assassination unit about fifteen years ago, with eight kills attributed to him, possibly more—we don’t have good information on that.”

  “Delightful chap, sounds like,” Sparrow thought aloud. He reached for one of the photos. “Ought not to be difficult to spot. Better to get some of these prints reduced to pocket size, so that we can all carry them with us.”

  “Done,” Sharp promised. The embassy had its own little photo lab, mainly for his use.

  Ryan looked around the table. At least it was good to be surrounded by professionals. Given the chance to perform, they probably wouldn’t blow it—like a good bunch of Marines. It was not all that much, but it was something.

  “What about side arms?” Ryan asked next.

  “All the nine-millimeter Brownings we need,” Tom Sharp assured him.

  Ryan wanted to ask if they had hollow-point ammunition, but they probably just had military-issue hardball. That Geneva Convention bullshit. The nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge was thought by Europeans to be powerful, but it was hardly a BB compared to the .45 Colt with which he’d been trained. So, then, why did he own a Browning Hi-Power? Jack asked himself. But the one he had at home was loaded with Federal 147-grain hollow-points, regarded by the American FBI as the only useful bullet to shoot out of the thing, good both for penetration and for expanding to the diameter of a dime inside the target’s body, to make him bleed out in a hurry.

  “He’d better be bloody close,” Mick King announced. “I haven’t fired one of the things in years.” Which reminded Jack that England did not have the gun culture America has, even in their security services. James Bond was someone from the movies, Ryan had to remember. Ryan himself was probably the best pistol shot in the room, and he was a long way from being an expert. The pistols Sharp would hand out would be military-issue, the ones with invisible sights and crummy grips. The one Ryan owned had Pachmayr grips that fit his hand so nicely that it might
have been a custom-made glove. Damn, nothing about this job was going to be easy.

  “Okay. John, you’ll be atop the colonnade. Find out how you get there, and arrange to get up there Wednesday morning early.”

  “Right.” He had press credentials to make that easy. “I’ll recheck the timing for everything as well.”

  “Good,” Sharp replied. “We’ll spend the afternoon going over the ground more. Look for things we may have overlooked. I’m thinking we put one man over on the side street to try and spot our friend Strokov coming in. If we spot him, we shadow him all the way in.”

  “Not stop him out there?” Ryan asked.

  “Better to get him in closer,” Sharp thought out loud. “More of us, less chance for him to bolt. If we’re onto him, Jack, he won’t be doing anything untoward, will he? We’ll see to that.”

  “Will he be that predictable?” Jack worried.

  “He’s doubtless been here already. Indeed, we could just spot him today or tomorrow, couldn’t we?”

  “I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it,” Jack shot back.

  “We play the card we are dealt, Sir John,” King said. “And hope for luck.”

  There was no arguing with that, Ryan realized.

  “If I were planning this operation, I’d be trying very hard to keep it simple. The most important preparation he’ll be making is up here.” Sharp tapped the side of his head. “He, too, will be somewhat tense, no matter how experienced he is in this business. Yes, he’s a clever bugger, but he is not bloody Superman. The key to his success is surprise. Well, he doesn’t really have that, does he? And blown surprise is the worst nightmare of a field officer. Lose that and everything comes apart like a wrecked watch. Remember, if he sees one thing that he doesn’t like, he will probably just walk away and plan to come back again. There is no clock on this mission from his point of view.”

  “Think so?” Ryan wasn’t the least bit sure of that.

  “Yes, I do. If there were, from an operational standpoint, they would well have executed the mission already, and the Pope would already be chatting directly with God. According to what I’ve heard from London, this mission has been in planning for more than six weeks. So, clearly he’s taking his time. I’ll be very surprised if it happens day after tomorrow, but we must act as though it will.”

  “I wish I had your confidence, man.”

  “Sir John, field officers think and act like field officers, whatever their nationality,” Sharp said with confidence. “Our mission is a difficult one, yes, but we speak his language, as it were. If this were a balls-out mission, it would have been done already. Agreed, gentlemen?” he asked, and got nods from around the table, except from the American.

  “What if we’re missing something?” Ryan wondered.

  “That is a possibility,” Sharp admitted, “but it’s a possibility we have to both live with and discount. We have only the information we have, and we must design our plan around that.”

  “Not much choice for us, is it, Sir John?” Sparrow asked. “We have only what we have.”

  “True,” Ryan admitted, rather miserably. There had come the sudden thought that other things might be happening as well. What if there were a diversion? What if somebody tossed firecrackers—to draw eyes toward the noise and away from the real action? That, he suddenly thought, was a real possibility.

  Damn.

  “WHAT’S THIS ABOUT RYAN?” Ritter asked, storming into Judge Moore’s office.

  “Basil thought that since BEATRIX was a CIA operation from the get-go, why not send one of our officers down there to take a look at things? I don’t see that it can hurt anything,” Moore told his DDO.

  “Who the hell does Ryan think he’s working for?”

  “Bob, why don’t you just settle down? What the hell can he do to hurt things?”

  “Damn it, Arthur—”

  “Settle down, Robert,” Moore shot back in the voice of a judge used to having his own way on everything from the weather on down.

  “Arthur,” Ritter said, calming down a whisker, “it’s not a place for him.”

  “I see no reason to object, Bob. None of us think anything’s going to happen anyway, do we?”

  “Well . . . no, I suppose not,” the DDO admitted.

  “So he’s just broadening his horizons, and from what he learns, he’ll be a better analyst, won’t he?”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t like having some desk-sitter playing field spook. He isn’t trained for this.”

  “Bob, he used to be a Marine,” Moore reminded him. And the U.S. Marine Corps had its own cachet, independent of the CIA. “He’s not going to wet his pants on us, is he?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And all he’s going to do is look around at nothing happening, and the exposure to some field officers will not do his education any harm, will it?”

  “They’re Brits, not our guys,” Ritter objected weakly.

  “The same guys who brought the Rabbit out for us.”

  “Okay, Arthur, I’ll give you this one.”

  “Bob, you throw a hell of a conniption fit, but why not use them for something important?”

  “Yes, Judge, but the DO is my shop to run. You want me to get Rick Nolfi into this?”

  “You think it’s necessary?”

  Ritter shook his head. “No, I expect not.”

  “Then we let the Brits run this mini-op and keep it cool here at Langley until we can interview the Rabbit and quantify the threat to the Pope, all right?”

  “Yes, Arthur.” And the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency headed back to his office.

  DINNER WENT WELL. The Brits made good company, especially when the talk turned to non-mission-related things. All were married. Three had kids, with one expecting his first shortly.

  “You have two, as I recall?” Mick King asked Jack.

  “Yeah, and number two arrived on a busy night.”

  “Too bloody right!” Ray Stones, one of the new arrivals, agreed with a laugh. “How did the missus take it?”

  “Not too bad after Little Jack arrived, but the rest of the evening was subpar.”

  “I believe it,” King observed.

  “So, who told us that the Bulgarians want to kill the Pope?” Sparrow asked.

  “It’s KGB that wants his ass,” Jack replied. “We just got a defector out. He’s in a safe house, and he’s singing like the girl in Aida. This is the most important thing so far.”

  “Reliable information?” King inquired.

  “We think it’s gold-plated and copper-bottomed, yeah. Sir Basil has bought into it. That’s why he flew you guys down,” Jack let them know, in case they hadn’t already figured that one out. “I’ve met the Rabbit myself, and I think he’s the real deal.”

  “CIA operation?” This was Sharp.

  Jack nodded. “Correct. We had an operational problem, and you guys were kind enough to help us out. I’m not cleared to say much more, sorry.”

  They all understood. They didn’t want their asses exposed by loose talk about a black operation.

  “This must go to Andropov himself—the Pope’s giving them trouble in Poland, is it?”

  “It would seem so. Maybe he has command of more divisions than they appreciate.”

  “Even so, this seems a little extreme—how will the world see the assassination of His Holiness?” King wondered aloud.

  “Evidently, they fear that less than a total political collapse in Poland, Mick,” Stones thought out loud. “And they’re afraid that he might be able to bring that about. The sword and the spirit, as Napoleon said, Mick. The spirit always wins in the end.”

  “Yes, I reckon so, and here we are at the epicenter of the world of the spirit.”

  “My first time here,” Stones said. “It is bloody impressive. I must bring the family down here sometime.”

  “They do know their food and wine,” Sparrow observed, going through his veal. “What about the local police
?”

  “Rather good, actually,” Sharp told him. “Pity we can’t enlist their assistance. They know the territory—it is their patch, after all.”

  But these guys are the pros from Dover, Ryan thought, with some degree of hope. Just that there weren’t enough of them. “Tom, you talk to London about the radios?”

  “Ah, yes, Jack. They’re sending us ten. Earpieces and lapel microphones to speak into. Sideband, rather like what the army use. I don’t know if they’re encrypted, but fairly secure in any case, and we’ll use proper radio discipline. So at least we’ll be able to communicate clearly. We’ll practice with them tomorrow afternoon.”

  “And Wednesday?”

  “We’ll arrive about nine in the morning, pick our individual surveillance areas, and mill about while the crowd arrives.”

  “This isn’t what they trained me for in the Corps,” Ryan thought aloud.

  “Sir John,” Mick King responded, “this isn’t what they trained any of us for. Yes, we are all experienced intelligence officers, but this really is a job for someone in the protective services, like the police constables who guard Her Majesty and the PM or your Secret Service chaps. Hell of a way to earn a living, this is.”

  “Yes, Mick, I expect we’ll all appreciate them a little more after this lot,” Ray Stones observed, to general agreement around the table.

  “John.” Ryan turned to Sparrow. “You’ve got the most important job, spotting this motherfucker for the rest of us.”

  “Lovely,” Sparrow replied. “All I have to do is examine five-thousand-plus faces for the one that might or might not be there. Lovely,” the spook repeated.

  “What will you be using?”

  “I have three Nikon cameras and a good assortment of lenses. I think tomorrow I might buy some seven-by-fifty binoculars also. I just hope I can find a good perch to scan from. The height of the parapet worries me. There’s a dead space extending out from the base of the columns about thirty yards or so that I can’t see at all. That limits what I can do, lads.”