Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (26 page)

No, he had only his vodka bottle, and though it helped him think, after a fashion, it wasn't much of a companion. Russian men were not averse to shedding tears, but they wouldn't have helped either. Irina might ask a question, and he wouldn't be able to answer to anyone's satisfaction. All he had was sleep. It would not help, he was sure, and in this he was right.

Another hour and two more slugs of the vodka at least drugged him into sleepiness. His wife was dozing in front of the TV—the Red Amy had won the Battle of Kursk, again, and the movie ended at the beginning of a long march that would lead to the Reichstag in Berlin, full of hope and enthusiasm for the bloody task. Zaitzev chuckled to himself. It was more than he had at the moment. He carried his empty glass to the kitchen, then roused his wife for the trip to the bedroom. He hoped that sleep would come quickly. The quarter-liter of alcohol in his belly should help. And so it did.

“YOU KNOW, ARTHUR, there are a lot of things we don't know about him,” Jim Greer said.

“Andropov, you mean?”

“We don't even know if the bastard's married,” the DDI continued.

“Well, Robert, that's your department,” the DCI observed, with a look at Bob Ritter.

“We think he is, but he's never brought his wife, if any, to an official function. That's usually how we find out,” the DDO had to admit. “They often hide their families, like Mafia dons. They're so anal about hiding everything over there. And, yeah, we're not all that good about digging the information up, because it's not operationally important.”

“How he treats his wife and kids, if any,” Greer pointed out, “can be useful in profiling the guy.”

“So you want me to task CARDINAL on something like that? He could do it, I'm sure, but why waste his time that way?”

“Is it a waste? If he's a wife-beater, it tells us something. If he's a doting father, it tells us something else,” the DDI persisted.

“He's a thug. You can look at his photo and see that. Look how his staff acts around him. They're stiff, like you'd have expected from Hitler's staff, ” Ritter responded. A few months before, a gaggle of American state governors had flown to Moscow for some sub-rosa diplomacy. The governor of Maryland, a liberal Democrat, had reported back that when Andropov had entered the reception room, he'd spotted him at once as a thug, then learned that it was Yuriy Vladimirovich, Chairman of the Committee for State Security. The Marylander had possessed a good eye for reading people, and that evaluation had gone into the Andropov file at Langley.

“Well, he wouldn't have been much of a judge,” Arthur Moore observed. He'd read the file, too. “At least not at the appeals level. Too interested in hanging the poor son of a bitch just to see if the rope breaks or not.” Not that Texas hadn't had a few judges like that, once upon a time, but it was much more civilized now. There were fewer horses that needed stealing than men who needed killing, after all. “Okay, Robert, what can we do to flesh him out a little? Looks like he's going to be their next General Secretary, after all. Strikes me as a good idea.”

“I can rattle some cages. Why not ask Sir Basil what he can do? They're better at the social stuff than we are, and it takes the heat off our people.”

“I like Bas, but I don't like having him hold that many markers for us,” Judge Moore answered.

“Well, James, your protege is over there. Have him ask the question. You get him an STU at home yet?”

“Ought to have gotten there today, yes.”

“So call your lad and have him ask, nice and casual-like.”

Greer's eyes went to the Judge. “Arthur?”

“Approved. Lowercase this, though. Tell Ryan that it's for his personal interest, not ours.”

The Admiral checked his watch. “Okay, I can do that before I head home.”

“Now, Bob, any progress on MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH?” the DCI asked with amusement, just to close down the afternoon meeting. It was a fun idea, but not a very serious one.

“Arthur, let's not discount it too much, shall we? They are vulnerable to the right sort of bullet, once we load it in the gun.”

“Don't talk that way in front of Congress. They might foul their panties,” Greer warned, with a laugh. “We're supposed to enjoy peaceful coexistence with them.”

“That didn't work very well with Hitler. Stalin and Chamberlain both tried to make nice with the son of a bitch. Where did it get them? They are our enemies, gentlemen, and the sad truth is that we can't have a real peace with them, like it or not. Their ideas and ours are too out of sync for that.” He held up his hands. “Yeah, I know, we're not supposed to think that way, but thank God the President does, and we still work for him.”

They didn't have to comment on that. All three had voted for the current President, despite the institutional joke that the two things one never found at Langley were communists and… Republicans. No, the new President had a little iron in his spine and a fox's instinct for opportunity. It especially appealed to Ritter, who was the cowboy of the three, if also the most abrasive.

“Okay. I have some budget work to do for that hearing with the Senate day after tomorrow,” Moore announced, breaking up the meeting.

RYAN WAS AT his computer, thinking over the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when the phone rang. It was the first time for it, with its oddly trilling ringer. He reached in his pocket for the plastic key, slid it into the appropriate slot, then lifted the receiver.

“STAND BY,” a mechanical voice said, “SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE; STAND BY, SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE; STAND BY, SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE——LINE is SECURE,” it said at last.

“Hello,” Ryan said, wondering who had an STU and would call him this late. It turned out to be the obvious answer.

“Hi, Jack,” a familiar voice greeted him. One nice thing about the STU: The digital technology made voices as clear as if the speaker were sitting in the room.

Ryan checked the desk clock. “Kinda late there, sir.”

“Not as late as in Jolly Old England. How's the family?”

“Mainly asleep at the moment. Cathy is probably reading a medical journal,” which was what she did instead of watching TV, anyway. “What can I do for you, Admiral?”

“I have a little job for you.”

“Okay,” Ryan responded.

“Ask around—casual-like—about Yuriy Andropov. There are a few things about him we don't know. Maybe Basil has the information we want.”

“What exactly, sir?” Jack asked.

“Is he married, and does he have any kids?”

“We don't know if he's married?” Ryan realized that he hadn't seen that information in the dossier, but he'd assumed it was elsewhere, and had taken no particular note of it.

“That's right. The Judge wants to see if Basil might know.”

“Okay, I can ask Simon. How important is this?”

“Like I said, casual-like, like it's your own interest. Then call me back from there, your home, I mean.”

“Will do, sir. We know his age, birthday, education, and stuff, but not if he's married or has any kids, eh?”

“That's how it works sometimes.”

“Yes, sir.” And that got Jack thinking. They knew everything about Brezhnev but his dick size. They did know his daughter's dress size—12—which someone had thought important enough to get from the Belgian milliner who'd sold the silken wedding dress to her doting father, through the ambassador. But they didn't know if the likely next General Secretary of the Soviet Union was married. Christ, the guy was pushing sixty, and they didn't know? What the hell? “Okay, I can ask. That ought not to be too hard.”

“Otherwise, how's London?”

“I like it here, and so does Cathy, but she's a little dubious about their state medical-care system.”

“Socialized medicine? I don't blame her. I still get everything done at Bethesda, but it helps a little that I have 'admiral' in front of my name. It's not quite as fast for a retired chief bosun's mate.”

“I bet.” In Ryan's case, it helped a whole lot that his wife was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. He didn't talk to anyone in a lab coat without “professor” on his nametag, and he'd learned that in the field of medicine, the really smart ones were the teachers, unlike the rest of society.

THE DREAMS CAME after midnight, though he had no way of knowing that. It was a clear Moscow summer day, and a man in white was walking across the Red Square. St. Basil's Cathedral was behind him, and he was walking against the traffic past Lenin's mausoleum. Some children were with him, and he was talking to them in a kindly way, as a favored uncle might… or perhaps a parish priest. Then Oleg knew that's what he was, a parish priest. But why in white? With gold brocade, even. The children, four or five each of boys and girls, were holding his hands and looking up at him with innocent smiles. Then Oleg turned his head. Up at the top of the tomb, where they stood for the May Day parades, were the Politburo members: Brezhnev, Suslov, Ustinov, and Andropov. Andropov was holding a rifle and pointing at the little procession. There were other people around—faceless people walking aimlessly, going about their business. Then Oleg was standing with Andropov, listening to his words. He was arguing for the right to shoot the man. Be careful of the children, Yuriy Vladimirovich, Suslov warned. Yes, be careful, Brezhnev agreed. Ustinov reached over to adjust the sights on the rifle. They all ignored Zaitzev, who moved among them, trying to get their attention.

 But why
? Zaitzev asked. Why are you doing this ?

 Who is this
? Brezhnev asked Andropov.

 Never mind him
, Suslov snarled. Just shoot the bastard !

 Very well,
Andropov said. He took his aim carefully, and Zaitzev was unable to intervene, despite being right there. Then the Chairman squeezed the trigger.

Zaitzev was back on the street now. The first bullet struck a child, a boy on the priest's right, who fell without a sound.

 Not
him, you idiot — the priest ! Mikhail Suslov screamed like a rabid dog.

Andropov shot again, this time hitting a little blonde girl standing at the priest's left. Her head exploded in red. Zaitzev bent down to help her, but she said it was all right, and so he left her and returned to the priest.

 Look out, why don't you?

 Look out for what, my young comrade
? The priest asked pleasantly, then he turned. Come, children, we're off to see God .

Andropov fired again. This time the bullet struck the priest square in the chest. There was a splash of blood, about the size and color of a rose. The priest grimaced, but kept going, with the smiling children in tow.

Another shot, another rose on the chest, to the left of the first. But still he kept going, walking slowly.

 Are you hurt
? Zaitzev asked.

 It is nothing
, the priest replied. But why didn't you stop him ?

 But I tried
! Zaitzev insisted.

The priest stopped walking, turning to look him square in the face. Did you ?

That's when the third bullet struck him right in the heart.

 Did you
? the priest asked again. Now the children were looking at him and not the priest.

Zaitzev found himself sitting up in the bed. It was just before four in the morning, the clock said. He was sweating profusely. There was only one thing to do. He rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom. There he urinated, then had himself a glass of water, and padded off to the kitchen. Sitting down by the sink, he lit a cigarette. Before he went back to sleep, he wanted to be fully awake. He didn't want to walk back into that dream.

Out the window, Moscow was quiet, the streets completely empty—not even a drunk staggering home. A good thing, too. No apartment house elevators would be working at this hour. There was not a car in view, which was a little odd, but not so much as in a Western city.

The cigarette achieved its goal. He was now awake enough to go back to sleep afresh. But even now he knew that the vision wouldn't leave him. Most dreams faded away, just like cigarette smoke, but this one would not. Zaitzev was sure of that.

BOLT FROM THE BLUE

HE HAD A LOT of thinking to do. It was as if the decision had made itself, as if some alien force had overtaken his mind and, through it, his body, and he had been transformed into a mere spectator. Like most Russians, he didn't shower, but washed his face and shaved with a blade razor, nicking himself three times in the process. Toilet paper took care of that—the symptoms, anyway, if not the cause. The images from the dream still paraded before his eyes like that war film on television. They continued to do so during breakfast, causing a distant look in his eyes that his wife noticed but decided not to comment on. Soon enough it was time to go to work. He went along the way like an automaton, taking the right path to the metro station by rote memory, his brain both quiescent and furiously active, as though he'd suddenly split into two separate but distantly connected people, moving along parallel paths to a destination he couldn't see and didn't understand. He was being carried there, though, like a chip of wood down mountain rapids, the rock walls passing so rapidly by his left and right that he couldn't even see them. It came almost as a surprise when he found himself aboard the metro carriage, traveling down the darkened tunnels dug by political prisoners of Stalin's under the direction of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, surrounded by the quiet, almost faceless bodies of other Soviet citizens also making their way to workplaces for which they had little love and little sense of duty. But they went to them because it was how they earned the money with which they bought food for their families, minuscule cogs in the gigantic machine that was the Soviet state, which they all purported to serve and which purported to serve them and their families…

But it was all a lie, wasn't it? Zaitzev asked himself. Was it? How did the murder of a priest serve the Soviet State? How did it serve all these people? How did it serve him and his wife and his little daughter? By feeding them? By giving him the ability to shop in the “closed” shops and buy things that the other workers could not even think about getting for themselves?

But he was better off than nearly everyone else on the subway car, Oleg Ivan'ch reminded himself. Ought he not be grateful for that? Didn't he eat better food, drink better coffee, watch a better TV set, sleep on better sheets? Didn't he have all the creature comforts that these people would like to have? Why am I suddenly so badly troubled? the communicator asked himself. The answer was so obvious that it took nearly a minute for him to grasp the answer. It was because his position, the one that gave him the comforts he enjoyed, also gave him knowledge, and in this case, for the first time in his life, knowledge was a curse. He knew the thoughts of the men who determined the course his country was taking, and in that knowledge he saw that the course was a false one… an evil one, and inside his mind was an agency that looked at the knowledge and judged it wrong. And in that judgment came the need to do something to change it. He could not object and expect to keep what passed for freedom in his country. There was no agency open to him through which he could make his judgment known to others, though others might well concur with his judgment, might ask the men who governed their country for a redress of their grievances. No, there was no way for him to act within such a system as it existed. To do that, you had to be so very senior that before you voiced doubts you had to think carefully, lest you lose your privilege, and so whatever consciences you had were tempered by the cowardice that came with having so much to lose. He'd never heard of any senior political figure in his country standing up that way, standing on a matter of principle and telling his peers that they were doing something wrong. No, the system precluded that by the sort of people it selected. Corrupted men only selected other corrupted men to be their peers, lest they have to question the things that gave them their own vast privileges. Just as the princes under the czars rarely if ever considered the effect their rule had on the serfs, so the new princes of Marxism never questioned the system that gave them their place in the world. Why? Because the world hadn't changed its shape—just its color, from czarist white to socialist red—and in keeping the shape, it kept its method of working, and in a red world, a little extra spilled blood was difficult to notice.