Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (20 page)

“I have had a few odd questions from their foreign ministry,” the Ambassador said. “But I just wrote it off to small talk.”

“Sir, we're investing a lot of money in the military, and that makes them nervous.”

“Whereas, when they buy ten thousand new tanks, it's normal?” General Dalton observed.

“Exactly,” Foley agreed. “A gun in my hand is a defensive weapon, but a gun in your hand is an offensive weapon. It's a matter of outlook, I suppose.”

“Have you seen this?” Fuller asked, handing across a fax from Foggy Bottom.

Foley scanned it. “Uh-oh.”

“I told Washington it would worry the Soviets a good deal. What do you think?”

“I concur, sir. In several ways. Most important will be the potential unrest in Poland, which could spread throughout their empire. That's the one area in which they think long-term. Political stability is their sine qua non. What are they saying in Washington?”

“The Agency just showed it to the President, and he handed it off to the Secretary of State, and he faxed it to me for comment. Can you rattle any bushes, see if they're talking about it in the Politburo?”

Foley thought for a moment and nodded. “I can try.” It made him slightly uncomfortable, but that was his job, wasn't it? It meant getting a message to one or more of his agents, but that was what they were for. The troubling part was that it meant exposing his wife. Mary Pat would not object—hell, she loved the spy game in the field—but it always bothered her husband to expose her to danger. He supposed it was chauvinism. “What's the priority on this?”

“Washington is very interested,” Fuller said. That made it important, but not quite an emergency tasking.

“Okay, I'll get on it, sir.”

“I don't know what assets you're running here in Moscow—and I don't want to know. It's dangerous to them?”

“They shoot traitors over here, sir.”

“This is rougher than the car business, Foley. I do understand that.”

“Hell, it wasn't this rough in the Central Highlands,” General Dalton noted. “Ivan plays pretty mean. You know, I've been asked about the President, too, usually over drinks by senior officers. They're really that worried about him, eh?”

“It sure looks that way,” Foley confirmed.

“Good. Never hurts to rattle the other guy's confidence a little, keep him looking over his shoulder some.”

“Just so it doesn't go too far,” Ambassador Fuller suggested. He was relatively new to diplomacy, but he had respect for the process. “Okay, anything that I need to know about?”

“Not from my end,” the COS replied. “Still getting used to things. Had a Russian reporter in today, maybe a KGB counterspook checking me out, guy named Kuritsyn.”

“I think he's a player,” General Dalton said at once.

“I caught a whiff of that. I expect he'll check me out through the Times correspondent.”

“You know him?”

“Anthony Prince.” Foley nodded. “And that pretty much sums him up. Groton and Yale. I bumped into him a few times in New York when I was at the paper. He's very smart, but not quite as smart as he thinks he is.”

“How's your Russian?”

“I can pass for a native—but my wife can pass for a poet. She's really good at it. Oh, one other thing. I have a neighbor in the compound, Haydock, husband Nigel, wife Penelope. I presume they're players, too.”

“Big-time,” General Dalton confirmed. “They're solid.”

Foley thought so, but it never hurt to be sure. He stood. “Okay, let me get some work done.”

“Welcome aboard, Ed,” the Ambassador said. “Duty here isn't too bad once you get used to it. We get all the theater and ballet tickets we want through their foreign ministry.”

“I prefer ice hockey.”

“That's easy, too,” General Dalton responded.

“Good seats?” the spook asked.

“First row.”

Foley smiled. “Dynamite.”

FOR HER PART, Mary Pat was out on the street with her son. Eddie was too big for a stroller, which was too bad. You could do a lot of interesting things with a stroller, and she figured the Russians would be hesitant to mess with an infant and a diaper bag—especially when they both came with a diplomatic passport. She was just taking a walk at the moment, getting used to the environment, the sights and smells. This was the belly of the beast, and here she was, like a virus—a deadly one, she hoped. She'd been born Mary Kaminsky, the granddaughter of an equerry to the House of Romanov. Grandfather Vanya had been a central figure of her youth. From him she'd learned Russian as a toddler, and not the base Russian of today, but the elegant, literary Russian of a bygone time. She could read the poetry of Pushkin and weep, and in this she was more Russian than American, for the Russians had venerated their poets for centuries, while in America they were mainly relegated to writing pop songs. There was much to admire and much to love about this country.

But not its government. She'd been twelve, looking forward to her teens with enthusiasm, when Grandfather Vanya had told her the story of Aleksey, the crown prince of Russia—a good child, so her grandfather said, but an unlucky one, stricken with hemophilia and for that reason a fragile child. Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, a minor nobleman in the Imperial Horse Guards, had taught the boy to ride a horse, because that was one physical skill a prince needed in that age. He'd had to be ever so careful—Aleksey often went about in the arms of a sailor in the Imperial navy, lest he trip and fall and bleed—but he'd accomplished the task, to the gratitude of Nikolay II and Czarina Alexandra, and along the way the two had become as close as, if not father and son, then uncle and nephew. Grandfather Vanya had gone to the front and fought against the Germans, but early in the war had been captured at the Battle of Tannenberg. It had been in a German prisoner-of-war camp that he'd learned of the revolution. He'd managed to come back to Mother Russia, and fought with the White Guards in the doomed counterrevolutionary effort—then learned that the czar and his entire family had been murdered by the usurpers at Ekaterinberg. He'd known then that the war was lost, and he'd managed to escape and make his way to America, where he'd begun a new life, but one in perpetual mourning for the dead.

Mary Pat remembered the tears in his eyes when he told the tale, and the tears had communicated to her his visceral hatred for the Bolsheviks. It had muted somewhat. She wasn't a fanatic, but when she saw a Russian in a uniform, or in a speeding ZIL, headed for a Party meeting, she saw the face of the enemy, an enemy that needed defeating. That communism was her country's adversary was merely sauce for the goose. If she could find a button that would bring down this odious political system, she'd push it without a blink of hesitation.

And so the appointment to Moscow had been the best of all dream assignments. Just as Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky had told her his ancient and sad story, so he had given her a mission for her life, and a passion for its achievement. Her choice to join CIA had been as natural as brushing out her honey-blond hair.

And now, walking about, for the first time in her life she really understood her grandfather's passionate love for things past. Everything was different from what she knew in America, from the pitch of the building roofs to the color of the asphalt in the streets to the blank expressions on the faces of the people. They looked at her as they passed, for in her American clothes she stood out like a peacock among crows. Some even managed a smile for little Eddie, because dour as the Russians were, they were unfailingly kind to children. For the fun of it, she asked for directions from a militiaman, as the local police were called, and he was polite to her, helping with her poor pronunciation of his language and giving directions. So that was one good thing. She had a tail, she noted, a KGB officer, about thirty-five, following behind by about fifty yards, doing his best to remain invisible. His mistake was in looking away when she turned. That's probably how he had been trained, so that his face would not become too familiar to his surveillance target.

The streets and sidewalks were wide here, but not overly crowded with people. Most Russians were at work, and there was no population of free women here, out shopping or heading to social affairs or golf outings—maybe the wives of the really important party members, that was all.

Kind of like the idle rich at home, Mary Pat reflected, if there were still such people. Her mom had always worked, at least in her memory—still did, in fact. But here working women used shovels while the men drove dump trucks. They were always fixing potholes in the streets, but never quite fixing them well enough. Just like in Washington and New York, she thought.

There were street vendors here, though, selling ice cream, and she bought one for little Eddie, whose eyes were taking it all in. It troubled her conscience to inflict this place and this mission on her son, but he was only four and it would be a good learning experience for him. At least he'd grow up bilingual. He'd also learn to appreciate his country more than most American kids, and that, she thought, was a good thing. So, she had a tail. How good was he? Perhaps it was time to find out. She reached into her purse and surreptitiously removed a length of paper tape. It was red in color, a bright red. Turning a corner, she stuck it to a lamppost in a gesture so casual as to be invisible and kept going. Then, fifty yards down the new block, she turned to look back as though lost… and she saw him walk right past that lamppost. So he hadn't seen her leave the flag signal. Had he seen her, he would at least have looked… and he was the only one following her; her route had been so randomly chosen that there wouldn't be anyone else assigned to her, unless there was a really major surveillance effort applied to her, and that didn't seem likely. She'd never been blown on any of her field assignments. She remembered every single moment of her training at The Farm in Tidewater, Virginia. She'd been at the top of her class, and she knew she was good—and better still, she knew that you were never so good that you could forget to be careful. But as long as you were careful, you could ride any horse. Grandfather Vanya had taught her to ride, too.

She and little Eddie would have many adventures in this city, Mary Pat thought. She'd let it wait until the KGB got tired of hanging a shadow on her, and then she could really cut loose. She wondered whom she might recruit to work for CIA, in addition to running the established agents-in-place. Yeah, she was in the belly of the beast, all right, and her job was to give the son of a bitch a bleeding ulcer.

“VERY WELL, Aleksey Nikolay'ch, you know the man,” Andropov said. “What do I tell him now?”

It was a sign of the Chairman's intelligence that he didn't lash out with a scorching reply, to put the Rome rezident back in his place. Only a fool stomped on his senior subordinates.

“He asks for guidance—the scope of the operation and so forth. We should give it to him. This brings into question exactly what you are contemplating, Comrade Chairman. Have you thought it through to that point?”

“Very well, Colonel, what do you think we should do?”

“Comrade Chairman, there is an expression the Americans use which I have learned to respect: That is above my pay grade.”

“Are you telling me that you do not play Chairman yourself—in your own mind?” Yuriy Vladimirovich asked, rather pointedly.

“Honestly, no, I limit my thinking to that which I understand—operational questions. I am not competent to trespass into high political confines, comrade.”

 A clever answer, if not a truthful one,
Andropov noted. But Rozhdestvenskiy would be unable to discuss whatever high-level thoughts he might have, because no one else at KGB was cleared to discuss such things. Now, he might be interviewed by some very senior member of the Party's Central Committee, on orders from the Politburo, but such an order would almost have to come from Brezhnev himself. And that, Yuriy Vladimirovich thought, was not likely at this time. So, yes, the colonel would think about it in the privacy of his own mind, as all subordinates did, but as a professional KGB officer, rather than a Party flack, he would leave such thoughts right there.

“Very well, we will dispense with the political considerations entirely. Consider this a theoretical question: How would one kill this priest?”

Rozhdestvenskiy looked uneasy.

“Sit,” the Chairman told his subordinate. “You have planned complex operations before. Take your time to walk through this one.”

Rozhdestvenskiy took his seat before speaking. “First of all, I would ask for assistance from someone better-versed in such things. We have several such officers here in The Centre. But… since you ask me to think about it in theoretical terms…” The colonel's voice trailed off and his eyes went up and to the left. When he started speaking again, his words came slowly.

“First of all, we would use Goderenko's station only for information—reconnaissance of the target, that sort of thing. We would not want to use Station Rome's people in any active way… In fact, I would advise against using Soviet personnel at all for the active parts of the operation.”

“Why?” Andropov asked.

“The Italian police are professionally trained, and for an investigation of this magnitude, they would throw people into it, assign their very best men. At any event like this, there will be witnesses. Everyone on earth has two eyes and a memory. Some have intelligence. That sort of thing cannot be predicted. While on the one hand, this militates in favor of, let us say, a sniper and a long-range shot, such a methodology would point to a state-level operation. Such a sniper would have to be well-trained and properly equipped. That would mean a soldier. A soldier means an army. An army means a nation-state—and which nation-state would wish to kill the Pope?” Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy asked. “A truly black operation cannot be traced back to its point of origin.”

Andropov lit a cigarette and nodded. He'd chosen well. This colonel was no man's fool. “Go on.”

“Ideally, the shooter would have no ties whatsoever to the Soviet Union. We must be sure of that because we cannot ignore the possibility that he will be arrested. If he is arrested, he will be questioned. Most men talk under questioning, either for psychological or physical reasons.” Rozhdestvenskiy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own cigarette. “I remember reading about a Mafia killing in America…” Again, the voice tailed off and his eyes fixed on the far wall while examining something in the past.