Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (44 page)

“Papers.” Andreas held out his hand, keeping his pistol in close. “We already have your contact. You are,” he added, “under arrest.”

In the movies, the American would have drawn his own side arm and tried to make his escape down the twenty-eight steps into the ancient metro. But the American's fear was that this guy had seen too many movies himself, and it might make him nervous enough to pull the trigger on his Czech piece-of-shit handgun. So he reached into his coat pocket, very slowly and deliberately, lest he scare the idiot, and withdrew his passport. It was a black one, the sort issued to diplomats, and instantly recognizable to lucky asses like this stupid, fucking Hunky. The American's name was James Szell, and he was by ancestry Hungarian, one of the many minorities welcomed to the America of the previous century.

“I am an American diplomat, properly accredited to your government. You will take me to my embassy immediately.” Inwardly, Szell was seething. His face didn't show it, of course, but his five years in the field had just come to a screeching halt. All this over a rookie second-rate agent furnishing second-rate information about a third-rate communist air force. Goddamn it!

“First you will come with me,” Andreas told him. He motioned with his pistol. “This way.”

THE PAN AM 747 LANDED at Kennedy half an hour early due to favorable winds. Cox put his books back in his carry-on and stood, managing to be the first passenger off, with a little help from the stewardess. From there, it was a quick walk through customs—his canvas bag told everyone who and what he was—and from there to the next shuttle to Washington National. A total of ninety minutes later, he was in the back of a cab to the State Department at Foggy Bottom. Inside that capacious building, he opened the Diplomatic Bag and parceled out the various contents. The envelope from Foley was handed to a courier, who drove up the George Washington Parkway to Langley, where things also move fairly fast.

The message was hand-carried to MERCURY, the CIA's message center, and, once decrypted and printed up, hand-delivered to the Seventh Floor. The original was put in the burn bag, and no hard copies were kept, though an electronic one was transferred to a VHS cassette, which ended up in a slot in Sneezy.

Mike Bostock was in his office, and when he saw the envelope from Moscow, he decided that everything else could wait. It surely could, he saw at once, but when he checked his watch he knew that Bob Ritter was over eastern Ohio and heading west on an All Nippon Airlines 747. So he called Judge Moore at home, and requested that he come in to the office. Grumbling, the DCI agreed to do so, at once, also telling Bostock to call Jim Greer as well. Both lived agreeably close to CIA headquarters, and they came out of the executive elevator just eight minutes apart.

“What is it, Mike?” Moore asked on his arrival.

“From Foley. Looks like he has something interesting.” Cowboy or not, Bostock was one to understate things.

“Damn,” the DCI breathed. “And Bob's already gone?”

“Yes, sir, just an hour ago.”

“What is it, Arthur?” Admiral Greer asked, wearing a cheap golf shirt.

“We got us a Rabbit.” Moore handed the message over.

Greer took his time going over it. “This could be very interesting,” he thought, after a moment's reflection.

“Yes, it could.” Moore turned to the deputy of the Operations Directorate. “Mike, talk to me.”

“Foley thinks it's hot. Ed's as good a field officer as anybody we have, and so's his wife. He wants to exfiltrate this guy and his family soonest. We pretty much have to go with his instincts on this one, Judge.”

“Problems?”

“The question is: How do we accomplish the mission? Ordinarily, we leave that to the people in the field, unless they try to pull something crazy, but Ed and Mary are too smart for that.” Bostock took a breath and looked out the floor-length windows to the Potomac Valley, out beyond the VIP parking lot. “Judge, Ed seems to think this guy has some very hot information. We can't question him on that. The obvious supposition is that the Rabbit's pretty far inside, and he wants to get the hell out of Dodge City. Adding the wife and daughter to the package is a serious complication. Again, we pretty much have to go with the instincts of our field personnel. It would be nice if we could run the guy as an agent, have him deliver information on a continuing basis, but for some reason either that isn't feasible, or Ed thinks he has what we need and want already.”

“Why couldn't he tell us more?” Greer observed, still holding the dispatch.

“Well, it's possible that he was time-limited on getting this to the bagman, or he didn't trust the courier system with stuff that could ID the guy to the opposition. Whatever this guy has, Ed didn't want to trust normal communications channels, and that, gentlemen, is a message in and of itself.”

“So, you say approve the request?” Moore asked.

“Not a hell of a lot else we can do,” Bostock pointed out rather obviously.

“Okay—approved,” the DCI said officially. “Get it off to him, right now.”

“Yes, sir.” And Bostock left the room.

Greer had himself a chuckle. “Bob's going to be pissed.”

“What can be so important that Foley would want to short-circuit procedures this abruptly?” Moore wondered aloud. “We're just going to have to wait to find out.”

“I suppose, but you know, patience has never been my long suit.”

“Well, think of this as a chance to acquire a virtue, Arthur.”

“Great.” Moore stood. He could go home now and grumble all day, like a kid on Christmas Eve, wondering what was going to be under the tree—if Christmas was really going to happen this year.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

THE BOUNCE-BACK SIGNAL arrived after midnight in Moscow, where it was printed up and walked to Mike Russell's desk by the night communications officer and promptly forgotten. Due to the eight-hour time difference from Washington, this was often the busiest time for inbound signals, and that one was just another piece of paper with gibberish on it, one which he was not allowed to decrypt.

AS MARY PAT had expected, Ed hadn't gotten any sleep to speak of, but had done his best not to roll around too much, lest he disturb his wife. Doubts were also part of the espionage game. Was Oleg Ivan'ch a false-flag, some random attempt from the: KGB on which he'd bitten down a little too fast and a little too hard? Had the Soviets just gone fishing at random and landed a big blue marlin on the first try? Did KGB play such games? Not according to his lengthy mission briefing at Langley. They'd played similar games in the past, but those had been targeted deliberately toward people whom they knew to be players, from whom they could get a line on other agents just by following them around to check out drop sites——

But you didn't play it this way. You didn't ask for a ticket out on the first go-round unless you really wanted something specific, like the neutralization of a particular target—and that couldn't be it. He and Mary Pat hadn't done much of anything yet. Hell, only a handful of people at the embassy knew who and what he was. He hadn't recruited new agents yet, nor worked any existing ones. That wasn't, strictly speaking, his job. The Chief of Station wasn't supposed to work the field. He was supposed to direct and supervise those who did, like Dom Corso and Mary Pat and the rest of his small but expert crew.

And if Ivan knew who he was, why tip its hand so quickly—it would only tell CIA more than it knew now, or could easily learn. You didn't play the spy game that way.

Okay, what if the Rabbit was a throwaway, whose job it was to ID Foley and then give over useless or false information—what if the whole job had as its objective nothing more than to ID the COS Moscow? But they couldn't have targeted him without knowing who he .was, could they? Even KGB didn't have the assets to shotgun such a mission and ping on every embassy staffer—it was way too clumsy and was certain to alert embassy personnel to something very strange under way.

No, KGB was too professional for that.

So they couldn't target him without knowing, and if they knew, they'd want to hide that information, lest they alert CIA to a source or method that they'd be far better advised to conceal.

So Oleg Ivanovich couldn't be a false-flag, and that was that.

So, he had to be the real thing. Didn't he?

For all his intelligence and experience, Foley could not come up with a construct that made the Rabbit anything but the genuine item. The problem was that it made little sense.

But what in espionage ever made sense?

What did make sense was the necessity of getting this guy out. They had a Rabbit, and the Rabbit needed to run away from the Bear.

“YOU CAN'T SAY what's bothering you?” Cathy asked. “Nope.”

“But it's important?”

“Yep.” He nodded. “Yeah, it sure is, but the problem is that we don't know how serious.”

“Something for me to worry about?”

“Well, no. It's not World War Three or anything like that. But I really can't talk about it.”

“Why?”

“You know why—it's classified. You don't tell me about your patients, do you? That's because you have rules of ethics, and I have rules of classification.” Smart as Cathy was, she still hadn't fully grasped that one yet.

“Isn't there any way I can help?”

“Cathy, if you were cleared for this, maybe you could offer insights. But maybe not. You're not a pshrink, and that's the medical field that applies to this—how people respond to threats, what their motivations are, how they perceive reality, and how those perceptions determine their actions. I've been trying to get inside the heads of people I haven't met to figure out what they're going to do about something. I've been studying how they think for quite a while, even before I joined the Agency, but you know—”

“Yeah, it's hard to look inside somebody's brain. And you know what?”

“What's that?”

“It's harder with the sane ones than the crazy ones. People can think rationally and still do crazy things.”

“Because of their perceptions?”

She nodded. “Partially that, but partially because they've chosen to believe totally false things—for entirely rational reasons, but the things they believe in are still false.”

This struck Ryan as worth pursuing. “Okay. Tell me about… Josef Stalin, for instance. He killed a lot of people. Why?”

“Part of it was rational, and part of it was wild paranoia. When he saw a threat, he dealt with it decisively. But he tended to see threats that weren't there or weren't serious enough to merit deadly force. Stalin lived on the borderline between madness and normality, and he crossed back and forth like a guy on a bridge who couldn't make up his mind about where he lived. In international affairs, he was supposed to be just as rational as everybody else, but he had a ruthless streak and nobody ever said 'no' to him. One of the docs at Hopkins wrote a book on the guy. I read it when I was in med school.”

“What did it say?”

Mrs. Dr. Ryan shrugged. “It wasn't all that satisfactory. The current thinking is that it's chemical imbalances in the brain that cause mental illness, not whether your dad slapped you around too much or you saw your mom in bed with a goat. But we can't test Stalin's blood chemistry now, can we?”

“Not hardly. I think they finally burned him up and put him in—where? I don't remember,” Jack admitted. It wasn't the Kremlin wall, was it? Or maybe they just buried the pine box instead of burning it all up. It wasn't worth finding out, was it?

“It's funny. A lot of historical figures did the stuff they did because they were mentally unstable. Today, we could fix them with lithium or other stuff we've learned about—mainly in the last thirty years or so—but back then, all they had was alcohol and iodine. Or maybe an exorcism,” she added, wondering if those were real.

“And Rasputin had a bad chemical imbalance, too?” Jack wondered aloud.

“Maybe. I don't know much about that, except he was supposed to be a crazy kinda priest, wasn't he?”

“Not a priest, some kinda mystic civilian. I suppose today he'd be a TV evangelist, right? Whatever he was, he brought down the House of Romanov—but they were pretty useless anyway.”

“And then Stalin took over?”

“Lenin first, then Stalin. Vladimir Ilyich checked out from strokes.”

“Hypertensive, maybe, or just cholesterol buildup and he clotted in the brain and that did him. And Stalin was worse, right?”

“Lenin was no day at the beach, but Stalin was pretty amazing—Tamerlane come back to the twentieth century, or maybe one of the Caesars. When the Romans reconquered a rebellious city, they killed everything there was, right down to the dogs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but the Brits always spared the dogs. Too sentimental about them,” Jack added.

“Sally misses Ernie,” Cathy reminded him in female fashion—almost, but not totally irrelevant to the conversation. Ernie was their dog back home.

“So do I, but he's going to have a lot of fun this fall—duck season soon. He'll get to retrieve all the dead birds out of the water.”

Cathy shivered. She'd never hunted anything more alive than the hamburger at the local supermarket—but she carved up human beings with knives. Like that makes any sense, Ryan thought with a wry smile. But the world had no rule that required logic on its surface—not the last time he'd checked.

“Don't worry, babe. Ernie will like it. Trust me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“He loves to go swimming,” Jack pointed out, extending the needle. “So, what interesting eyeball problems at the hospital next week?”

“Just routine stuff—checking eyes and prescribing glasses all week.”

“No fun stuff, like cutting some poor bastard's left eye in half and then sewing it back together?”

“That's not a procedure,” she pointed out.

“Babe, I could never cut into a person's eyeball with a knife without tossing my cookies—or maybe fainting.” The very thought of it made him shiver.

“Wimp” was all she had to say about that admission. She didn't understand that this was a skill not covered in the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico, Virginia.