Red Rabbit Part 25

"Fine, honey. I have to go back to the office this afternoon."

"What for?" she asked in the semiangry voice every husband in the world knows.

"Well, I have some paperwork from yesterday-"

"And you want to check the baseball scores," she huffed. "Ed, why can't we get satellite TV in our apartment block?"

"They're working on getting it for us, but the Russians are making a little trouble. They're afraid it might be a spy tool," he added in a disgusted voice.

"Yeah," she observed. "Sure. Give me a break." Just in case KGB had a very clever black-bag guy who prowled the parking lot at night. Maybe the FBI could pull that one off but, though they had to guard against the possibility, she doubted that the Russians had anybody that clever. Their radios were just too bulky. Even so, yes. They were paranoid, but were they paranoid enough?

CATHY TOOK SALLY and Little Jack outside. There was a park just a block and a half away, off Fristow Way, where there were a few swings that Sally liked and gra.s.s for the little guy to pull at and try to eat. He'd just figured out how to use his hands, badly and awkwardly, but whatever found its way into his little fist immediately thereafter found its way to his mouth, a fact known by every parent in the world. Still and all, it was a chance to get the kids some sun-the winter nights would be long and dark here-and it got the house quiet for Jack to get some work done on his Halsey book.

He'd already taken out one of Cathy's medical textbooks, Principles of Internal Medicine, to read up on s.h.i.+ngles, the skin disease that had tormented the American admiral at a very inconvenient time. Just from reading the subchapter on the ailment-related to chicken pox, it turned out-it must have been like medieval torture to the then elderly naval aviator. Even more so that his beloved carrier battle group, Enterprise and Yorktown, would have to sail into a major engagement without him. But he'd taken it like a man-the only way William Frederick Halsey, Jr., had ever taken anything-and recommended his friend Raymond Spruance to take his place. The two men could scarcely have been more different. Halsey the profane, hard-drinking, chain-smoking former football player. Spruance, the nonsmoking, teetotaling intellectual reputed never to have raised his voice in anger. But they'd become the closest of friends, and would later in the war switch off command of the Pacific Fleet, renaming it from Third Fleet to Fifth Fleet and back again when command was exchanged. That, Ryan thought, was the most obvious clue that Halsey had been the intellectual, too, and not the bl.u.s.tering h.e.l.l-for-leather aggressor that the contemporary newspapers had proclaimed him to be. Spruance the intellectual would not have befriended a knuckle-dragger. But their staffs had snarled at each other like tomcats fighting over a tabby in heat, probably the military equivalent of "my daddy can whip your daddy," engaged in by children up to the age of seven or so-and no more intellectually respectable.

He had Halsey's own words on the illness, though what he'd really said must have been muted by his editor and cowriter, since Bill Halsey really had spoken like a Chief Bosun's Mate with a few drinks under his belt-probably one of the reasons reporters had liked him so much. He'd made such good copy.

His notes and some source doc.u.ments were piled next to his Apple IIe computer. Jack used WordStar as his word-processing program. It was fairly complicated, but a d.a.m.ned sight better than using a typewriter. He wondered which publisher would be right for the book. The Naval Inst.i.tute Press was after him again, but he found himself wondering whether to switch over to a big-league publisher. But he had to finish the d.a.m.ned book first, didn't he? And so, back into Halsey's complex brain.

But he was hesitating today. That was unusual. His typing-three fingers and a thumb (two thumbs on a good day)-was the same, but his brain wasn't concentrating properly, as though it wanted to look at something else. This was an occasional curse of his CIA a.n.a.lysis work. Some problems just wouldn't go away, forcing his mind to go over the same material time and again until he stumbled upon the answer to a question that often enough made little sense in and of itself. The same thing had occasionally happened during his time at Merrill Lynch, when he'd investigated stock issues, looking for hidden worth or danger in the operations and finances of some publicly traded company. That had occasionally put him at odds with the big boys up in the New York office, but Ryan had never been one to do something just because a superior told him to. Even in the Marine Corps, an officer, however junior, was expected to think, and a stockbroker with clients was entrusted by them to safeguard their money as though it were his own. Mostly, he'd succeeded. After putting his own funds into Chicago and North Western Railroad, he'd been hammered by his supervisors, but he'd stood his ground, and those clients who'd listened to him had cashed in rather nicely-which had earned him a crowd of new clients. So Ryan had learned to listen to his instincts, to scratch the itches he couldn't quite see and could barely feel. This was one of those, and "this" was the Pope. The information he had did not form a complete picture, but he was used to that. In the stock-trading business, he'd learned how and when to bet his money on incomplete pictures, and nine times out of ten he'd been right.

He had nothing to bet on this one but his itch, however. Something was happening. He just didn't know what. All he'd seen was a copy of a warning letter sent to Warsaw, and certainly forwarded to Moscow, where a bunch of old men would look upon it as a threat.

That wasn't much to go on, was it? Ryan asked himself. He found himself wis.h.i.+ng for a cigarette. Such things helped his thinking process sometimes, but there'd be h.e.l.l to pay if Cathy smelled smoke in their house. But chewing gum, even bubble gum, just didn't cut it at times like this.

He needed Jim Greer. The Admiral often treated him like a surrogate son-his own son had been killed as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, Ryan had learned along the way-giving him the occasional chance to talk through a problem. But he wasn't that close to Sir Basil Charleston, and Simon was too near to him in age, if not quite in experience. And this was not a problem to be kicked around alone. He wished he could discuss it with his wife-doctors, he knew, were pretty smart-but that wasn't allowed, and, anyway, Cathy didn't really know the situation well enough to understand the threats. No, she'd grown up in a more privileged environment, daughter of a millionaire stock-and-bonds trader, living in a large Park Avenue apartment, all the best schools, her own new car for her sixteenth birthday, and all the hazards of life held off well beyond arm's length. Not Jack. His dad had been a cop, mostly a homicide investigator, and, while his father hadn't brought work home, Jack had asked enough questions to understand that the real world could be a place of unpredictable danger and that some people just didn't think like real people. They were called Bad Guys-and they could be pretty G.o.dd.a.m.ned bad. He'd never lived without a conscience. Whether he'd picked that up in distant childhood or Catholic schools, or it had been part of his genetic makeup, Jack didn't know. He did know that breaking the rules was rarely a good thing, but he also knew that the rules were a product of reason, and reason was paramount, and so the rules could be broken if you had a good-a very G.o.dd.a.m.ned good-reason for doing so. That was called judgment, and the Marines, oddly enough, had nurtured that particular flower. You made an estimate of the situation and thought through the options, and then you acted. Sometimes you had to do it in a very big hurry-and that was why officers were paid more than sergeants, though you were always well advised to listen to your gunny if you had the time.

But Ryan had none of those things now, and that was the bad news. There was no immediately identifiable threat in view, and that was the good news. But now he was in an environment in which the threats were not always readily visible, and it was his job to find them out by piecing the available information together. But there wasn't much of that now either. Just a possibility, which he had to apply to the minds of people he didn't know and would never meet, except as paper doc.u.ments written up by other people he didn't know. It was like being the navigator on a s.h.i.+p in Christopher Columbus's little fleet, thinking land might be out there, but not knowing where or when he might come upon it-and hoping to G.o.d it wouldn't be at night, in a storm, and that the land would not appear as a barrier reef to rip the bottom of his s.h.i.+p out. His own life was not in danger, but, as he'd been compelled by professional obligation to treat the money of his clients as his own, so he had to regard the life of a man in potential danger as having the importance of the life of his own child.

And that was where the itch came from. He could call Admiral Greer, Ryan thought, but it wasn't even seven in the morning in Was.h.i.+ngton yet, and he'd be doing his boss no favor by waking him up to the trilling sound of his home STU. Especially as he had nothing to tell, just a few things to ask. So he leaned back in his chair and stared at the green screen of his Apple monitor, looking for something that just wasn't there.

CHAPTER 17.

FLASH TRAFFIC.

ED FOLEY WROTE IN HIS OFFICE:.

PRIORITY: FLASH.

TO: DDO/CIA.

CC: DCI, DDI.

FROM: COS MOSCOW.

SUBJECT: RABBIT.

TEXT FOLLOWS:.

WE HAVE A RABBIT, A HIGHLY PLACED WALK-IN, CLAIMS TO BE COMMO OFFICER IN KGB CENTRE, WITH INFORMATION OF INTEREST TO USG. ESTIMATION: HE IS TRUTHFUL. 5/5.

URGENTLY REQUEST AUTHORIZATION FOR IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION FROM REDLAND. PACKAGE INCLUDES RABBIT WIFE AND DAUGHTER (3).

5/5 PRIORITY REQUESTED.

ENDS.

There, Foley thought, that's concise enough. The shorter the better with messages like this one-it provided less opportunity for the opposition to work on the text and crack the cipher, in the event they got their hands on it.

But the only hands that would touch this one were CIA. He was betting a lot on this op-dispatch. 5/5 meant that the estimated importance of the information available, as well as its presumed accuracy and the priority for his proposed action, was cla.s.s-5, the highest. He gave an identical evaluation for the accuracy of the subject. Four aces-not the sort of dispatch you sent out every day. It was the cla.s.sification he'd give to a message from Oleg Penkovskiy, or from Agent CARDINAL himself, and that was about as hot a potato as they came. He thought for a moment, wondering if he was guessing correctly, but, over his career, Ed Foley had learned to go with his instincts. He'd also measured his own thoughts against those of his wife, and her instincts were just as finely tuned. Their Rabbit-the CIA term of art for a person wanting a fast ticket out of whatever bad place he found himself in-claimed a lot, but he gave every sign of being what he claimed: the possessor of some very hot information. That made him a conscience defector, and thus pretty reliable. If he were a plant, a false-flag, he would have asked for money, because that's how KGB thought defectors thought-and CIA had never done anything to disabuse them of that notion.

So, it just felt right, though "feels right" isn't something you send by Diplomatic Courier to the Seventh Floor. They'd have to play along with this. They had to trust him. He was Chief of Station in Moscow, the CIA's top field posting, and with that came a truckload of credibility. They'd have to weigh it against whatever misgivings they were feeling. If a summit meeting were scheduled, then that might queer the deal, but the President had no such plans, nor did SecState. So there was nothing in the way of Langley approving some form of action-if they thought he was right....

Foley didn't even know why he was questioning himself. He was The Man in Moscow, and that, by G.o.d, was that. He lifted the phone and punched three b.u.t.tons.

"Russell," a voice said.

"Mike, this is Ed. I need you here."

"Right."

It took a minute and a half. The door opened.

"Yeah, Ed?"

"Something for the bag."

Russell checked his watch. "Not much margin, guy."

"It's short. I'll have to come down with you on this one."

"Well, let's get it on, then, bro." Russell walked out the door, with Foley in pursuit. Fortunately, the corridor was empty, and his office was not far.

Russell sat down in his swivel chair and lit up his cipher machine. Foley handed the sheet over. Russell clipped it to a fixture right over the keyboard. "Short enough," he said approvingly, and started typing. He was nearly as skillful as the Amba.s.sador's own secretary, and he finished the job in a minute, including some padding-sixteen surnames taken at random from the Prague telephone book. When the new page came out of the machine, Foley took it, folded it, tucked it in a manila envelope, and sealed it. Wax was dripped over the closure, and Foley handed the envelope back to Russell.

"Back in five, Ed," the communications officer said on his way out the door. He took the elevator down to the first floor. The diplomatic courier was there. His name was Tommy c.o.x, a former Army warrant officer/helicopter pilot who'd been shot down four times in the Central Highlands as part of the First Cavalry Division, and a man who had only the most negative feelings for his country's adversaries. The Diplomatic Bag was a canvas carry-ontype bag that would be handcuffed to his wrist during transit. He was already booked on a Pan Am 747 direct flight to New York's Kennedy International, a flight of eleven hours, during which he would neither drink nor sleep, though he did have three paperback mysteries to read along the way. He'd be leaving the emba.s.sy in an official car in ten minutes, and his diplomatic credentials meant he wouldn't be troubled with security or immigration procedures. The Russians were actually fairly cordial about that, though they probably drooled over the chance of seeing what was inside the canvas bag. For sure, it wasn't Russian perfume or pantyhose for a friend in New York or Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Good flight, Tommy."

c.o.x nodded. "Roger that, Mike."

Russell headed back to Foley's office topside. "Okay, it's in the bag. Flight leaves in an hour and ten minutes, man."

"Good."

"Is a Rabbit what I think it is?"

"Can't say, Mike," Foley pointed out.

"Yeah, I know, Ed. Excuse my question." Russell wasn't one to break the rules, though he had as much curiosity as the next man. And he knew what a Rabbit was, of course. He'd spent his entire life inside the black world in one capacity or another, and the jargon wasn't all that hard to pick up. But the black world had walls, and that was that.

Foley took his copy of the message, tucked it in his office safe, and set both the combination and the alarm. Then he headed down to the emba.s.sy cafeteria, where a TV was tuned in to ESPN. There he learned that his Yankees had lost another one-three straight, and in a pennant race! Is there no fairness in the world? he grumbled.

MARY PAT WAS doing housework, which was boring, but a good opportunity for her to put her brain in neutral while her imagination ran wild. Okay, she'd be meeting Oleg Ivanovich again. It would be up to her to figure a way to get the "package"-yet another CIA term of art, meaning the material or person(s) to be taken out of the country-to a safe place. There were many ways to do such a thing. They were all dangerous, but she and Ed and other CIA field spooks were trained to do dangerous things. Moscow was a city of millions, and in such an environment three people on the move were just part of the background noise, like one single leaf falling in an autumn forest, one more buffalo in the herd in Yellowstone National Park, one more car on the L.A. Freeway during rush hour. That wasn't hard, was it?

Well, actually, it was. In the Soviet Union, every aspect of personal life was subject to control. As applied to America, sure, the package was just one more car on the L.A. Freeway, but going to Las Vegas meant crossing a state line, and you had to have a reason for that. Nothing was easy here in the sense that everything was easy in America.

And there was something else....

It would be better, Mary Pat thought, that the Russians didn't know he was gone. After all, it was not a murder if there wasn't a corpse to let everyone know that somebody had died. And it wasn't a defection unless they knew that one of their citizens had turned up somewhere else-where he wasn't supposed to be. So, how much the better... was it possible . . . ? she wondered.

Wouldn't that be a kick in the a.s.s? But how to make it happen? It was something to speculate on while she vacuumed the living room rug. And, oh, by the way, vacuuming would invalidate whatever bugs the Russians had implanted in the walls.... And so she stopped at once. Why waste that chance? She and Ed could communicate with their hands, but the bandwidth was like maple syrup in January.

She wondered if Ed would go for this. He might, she thought. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd think up. Ed, for all his skills, wasn't a cowboy. Though he had his talents, and good ones they were, he was more a bomber pilot than a fighter pilot. But Mary Pat thought like Chuck Yeager in the X-1, like Pete Conrad in the lunar module. She was just better at thinking long-ball.

The idea also had strategic implications. If they could get their Rabbit out unknown to the opposition, then they could make indefinite use of whatever he knew, and that possibility, if you could figure out how to make it happen, was very enticing indeed. It wouldn't be easy, and it might be a needless complication-and if so, it could be discarded-but it was worth thinking about, if she could get Ed's brain into it. She'd need his planning talents and his reality-checking ability, but the basic idea set her head abuzz. It would come down to available a.s.sets.... And that would be the hard part. But "hard" didn't mean "impossible." And, for Mary Pat, "impossible" didn't mean "impossible" either, did it? she asked herself.

h.e.l.l, no.

THE PAN AM FLIGHT rolled off on time, lurching across the lumpy taxiways of Sheremetyevo Airport, which was famous in the world of aviation for its roller-coaster paving. But the runways were adequate, and the big JT-9D Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines pushed the airframe to rotation speed, and the aircraft took flight. Tommy c.o.x, in seat 3-A, noted with a smile the usual reaction when an American airliner departed Moscow: The pa.s.sengers all cheered and/or applauded. There was no rule, and the flight crew didn't encourage it. It just happened all on its own-that's how impressed Americans were with Soviet hospitality. It appealed to c.o.x, who had no love for the people who'd supplied the machine guns that had splashed his Huey four times and, by the way, earned him a total of three Purple Heart medals, a miniature ribbon of which decorated the lapels of all his suitcoats, along with the two repeat stars. He looked out the window, watching the ground fall away to his left and, when he heard the welcome ding, fished out a Winston to light with his Zippo. It was a pity he couldn't drink or sleep on these flights, but the movie was one he hadn't seen, remarkably enough. In this job you learned to appreciate the small things. Twelve hours to New York, but a direct flight was better than having to stop over in Frankfurt or Heathrow. Such places were just an opportunity for him to drag this f.u.c.king canvas bag around, sometimes without benefit of a cart or trolley. Well, he had a full pack of smokes, and the dinner menu didn't look too bad. And the government actually paid him to sit down for twelve hours, baby-sitting a piece of cheap luggage. It was better than flying his Huey around the Central Highlands. c.o.x was long past wondering what important information he transported in his bag. And if other people were that interested, that was their problem.

RYAN HAD GOTTEN a hot three pages done-not a very productive day, and he couldn't claim that the artistry of his prose demanded a slow writing pace. His language was literate-he'd learned his grammar from priests and nuns for the most part, and his word mechanics were serviceable-but not particularly elegant. In his first book, Doomed Eagles, every bit of artistic language he'd attempted to put into his ma.n.u.script had been edited out, to his quiet and submissive fury. And so the few critics who had read and commented on his historical epic had faintly praised the quality of his a.n.a.lysis, but then tersely noted that it might be a good textbook for academic students of history, but not something on which a casual reader might wish to waste his money. And so the book had netted 7,865 copies sold-not much to show for two and a half years' work, but that, Jack reminded himself, was just his first outing, and maybe a new publisher would get him an editor who was more an ally than an enemy. He could hope, after all.

But the d.a.m.ned thing would not get done until he did it, and three pages wasn't much to show for a full day in his den. He was time-sharing his brain with another problem, and that wasn't a useful productivity tool.

"How did it go?" Cathy asked, suddenly appearing at his shoulder.

"Not too bad," he lied.

"Where are you up to?"

"May. Halsey is fighting off his skin disease."

"Dermat.i.tis? That can be nasty, even today," Cathy noted. "It can drive the poor patients crazy."

"Since when are you a dermatologist?"

"M.D., Jack, remember? I may not know it all, but I know most of it."

"All that, and humble, too." He made a face.

"Well, when you get a cold, don't I take good care of you?"

"I suppose." She did, actually. "How are the kids?"

"Fine. Sally had a good time on the swings, and she made a new friend, Geoffrey Froggatt. His father's a solicitor."

"Great. Isn't there anything but lawyers around here?"

"Well, there's a doctor and a spook," Cathy pointed out. "Trouble is, I can't tell people what you do, can I?"

"So what do you tell them?" Jack asked.

"That you work for the emba.s.sy." Close enough.

"Another desk-sitting bureaucrat," he grumped.

"Well, you want to go back to Merrill Lynch?"

"Ugh. Not in this lifetime."

"Some people like making tons of money," she pointed out.

"Only as a hobby, babe." Were he to go back to trading, his father-in-law would gloat for a year. No, not in this lifetime. He'd served his time in h.e.l.l, like a good Marine. "I have more important things to do."

"Like what?"

"I can't tell you," he countered.

"I know that," his wife responded, with a playful smile. "Well, at least it isn't insider trading."

Actually, it was, Ryan couldn't say-the nastiest sort. Thousands of people working every day to find out things they weren't supposed to know, and then taking action they weren't supposed to take.

But both sides played that game-played it diligently-because it wasn't about money. It was about life and death, and those games were as nasty as they got. But Cathy didn't lose any sleep over the cancer tissue she consigned to the hospital incinerator and probably those cancer cells wanted to live, too, but that was just too d.a.m.ned bad, wasn't it?

COLONEL BUBOVOY HAD the dispatch on his desk and read it. His hands didn't shake, but he lit a cigarette to help his contemplation. So, the Politburo was willing to go forward with this. Leonid Ilyich himself had signed the letter to the Bulgarian Party chairman. He'd have the amba.s.sador call Monday morning to set up the meeting, which ought not to take too long. The Bulgarians were lapdogs of the Soviet Union, but occasionally useful lapdogs. The Soviets had a.s.sisted in the murder of Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge in London-KGB had supplied the weapon, if you could call it that, an umbrella to deliver the poison-filled metal miniball to transfer the ricin, and so silence the annoying defector who'd talked too much on BBC World Service. That had been a while, and such debts had no expiration date, did they? Not at this level of statecraft. So Moscow was calling in the debt. Besides that, there was the agreement from 1964, when it had been agreed that DS would handle KGB's wet work in the West. And Leonid Ilyich was promising to transfer a full battalion's worth of the new version of the T-72 main-battle tank, which was always the sort of thing to make a communist chief of state feel better about his political security. And it was cheaper than the MiG-29s the Bulgarians were asking for. As though a Bulgarian pilot could handle such an aircraft-the Russian joke was that they had to tuck their mustaches into the flight helmet before closing the visor, Bubovoy reminded himself. Mustaches or not, the Bulgarians were regarded as the children of Russia-an att.i.tude that went back to the czars. And, for the most part, they were obedient children, though like them they had little appreciation of right and wrong, so long as they weren't caught. So he'd show proper respect for this chief of state and be received cordially as the messenger of a greater power, and the Chairman would hem and haw a little bit and then agree. It would be as stylized as a performance of ballet dancer Aleksander Gudonov, and just as predicable in its conclusion.

And then he'd meet with Boris Strokov and get an idea how quickly the operation might proceed. Boris Andreyevich would find the prospect exciting. This would be the biggest mission of his life, like playing in the Olympics, not so much daunting as exhilarating, and there was a sure promotion to be had for its successful completion-perhaps a new car for Strokov and/or a nice dacha outside Sofia. Or even both. And for myself? the KGB officer wondered. A promotion, certainly. General's stars and a return to Moscow, a plush office at The Centre, a nice flat on Kutusovskiy Prospekt. Going back to Moscow appealed to the rezident, who'd spent a lot of years outside the borders of the Rodina. Enough, he thought. More than enough.

"WHERE'S THE COURIER?" Mary Pat asked, vacuuming the living room rug.

"Over Norway by now," her husband thought out loud.

"I have an idea," she said.

"Oh?" Ed asked with no small degree of trepidation.

"What if we can get the Rabbit out and they don't know?"

"How the h.e.l.l do we do that?" her husband asked, in surprise. What was she thinking about now? "Getting him and his family out in the first place won't exactly be easy."

She told him the idea she'd evolved in her tricky little head, and an original one it was.