Red Rabbit Part 26

Trust you to come up with something like that, he thought, with a neutral expression. But then he started thinking about it. "Complicated," the Chief of Station observed tersely.

"But doable," she countered.

"Honey, that's a big thought." But he was thinking about it, Mary Pat saw in his eyes.

"Yeah, but if we can pull it off, what a coup," she said, getting under the sofa. Eddie slid himself closer to the TV so that he could hear what the Transformer robots were saying. A good sign. If Eddie couldn't hear, then neither would the KGB microphones.

"It's worth thinking about," Ed conceded. "But doing it-d.a.m.n."

"Well, they pay us to be creative, don't they?"

"No way in h.e.l.l we could pull that one off here"-not without involving a whole lot of a.s.sets, some of whom might not be entirely reliable, which was, of course, their greatest fear, and one they couldn't easily defend against. That was one of the problems in the spook business. If the counterspies in KGB ID'd one of their a.s.sets, they were very often clever about how they handled it. They could, for example, have a little chat with the guy and tell him to keep operating, and then, maybe, he'd live to the end of the year. Their agents were trained to give a danger-wave-off signal, but who was to say that the agent would do it? It demanded a lot from the supposed dedication of their a.s.sets, more than some-most-of them would probably give.

"So, there are other places they can go. Eastern Europe, for example. Get them out that way," she suggested.

"I suppose it's possible," he conceded again. "But the mission here is to get them out, not score style points from the East German judge."

"I know, but think about it. If we can get him away from Moscow, that gives us a lot more flexibility in our options, doesn't it?"

"Yes, honey. It also means communications problems." And that meant the risk of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g everything up. The KISS principle-"keep it simple, stupid"-was as much a part of the CIA ethos as the trench coat and fedora hat that people used in bad movies. Too many cooks f.u.c.ked up the soup.

Yet what she'd suggested had real merit. Getting the Rabbit out in a way that made the Soviets think him dead would mean that they'd take no precautions. It would be like sending Captain Kirk into KGB headquarters by transporter-and invisible-and extracting him without anyone knowing he'd been there, along with tons of hot information. It would be as close to the perfect play as anything that had ever happened. h.e.l.l, Ed thought, as perfect a play as never happened in the real world. He reflected for a moment that he was blessed to have a wife as creative in her work as she was in bed.

And that was pretty d.a.m.ned good.

Mary Pat saw her husband's face, and she knew how to read his mind. He was a cautious player, but she'd pushed a very sensitive b.u.t.ton, and he was smart enough to see the merit in it. Her idea was a complication . . . but maybe not that great of one. Getting the package out of Moscow would be no day at the beach under the best of circ.u.mstances. The hard part would be in crossing the Finnish border-it was always Finland, and everyone knew it. There were ways to do it, and it mostly involved trick cars with hidden pa.s.senger accommodations. The Russians had trouble countering that tactic, because if the driver of the car had diplomatic credentials, then international convention limited their search options. Any diplomat who wanted to make fast money could make a small pile by smuggling drugs-and some did, she was sure, and few of them ever got caught. With a get-out-of-jail-free card, you could accomplish a lot. But even that was not an entirely free pa.s.s. If the Soviets knew this guy was missing, then rules might get broken because the data inside his head was so valuable. The other side of the diplomatic-rules violation was that it would result only in a protest, muddled up by the public disclosure that an accredited foreign diplomat was spying-and if some of their diplomats got roughed up in the process, well, the Soviets had been known to sacrifice large numbers of military forces for a political end and just think of it as a price of doing business. For the information the Rabbit had, they'd gladly shed blood-including some of their own. Mary Pat wondered how well this guy understood the danger he was in, and how formidable the forces were arrayed against him. What it came down to was whether or not the Sovs knew something was afoot. If not, their routine surveillance procedures, no matter how thorough, were predictable. If alerted, however, they could put the entire city of Moscow under lockdown.

But everything they did in the CIA's Clandestine Service was done carefully, and there were backup procedures for when things went wrong, as well as other measures, some desperate, that had proven to be effective when you put them in play. You just tried to avoid doing that.

"Finis.h.i.+ng up," she warned her husband.

"Okay, Mary Pat, you have me thinking." And with that his formidable mind started sifting through ideas. Sometimes he needs a little push, Mary Pat thought, but once you had him going in the right direction, he was like George Patton with the bit in his teeth. She wondered how much sleeping Ed would be doing tonight. Well, she'd be able to tell, wouldn't she?

"BASIL LIKES YOU," Murray said. The womenfolk were in the kitchen. Jack and Dan were out in the garden, pretending to inspect the roses.

"Really?"

"Yeah, a lot."

"d.a.m.ned if I know why," Ryan said. "I haven't turned much work out yet."

"Your roomie reports to him about you every day. Simon Harding is a corner, in case n.o.body told you. That's why he went with Bas to Number Ten."

"Dan, I thought you were Bureau, not Agency," Jack noted, wondering just how far the Legal Attache spread himself.

"Well, the guys down the hall are pals, and I interface with the local spooks some." The guys down the hall was Dan's way of saying CIA people. Yet again Jack wondered just which branch of the government Murray actually belonged to. But everything about him said "cop" to one who knew what to look for. Was this some elaborate kind of disguise, too? No, not possible. Dan had been the personal troubleshooter for Emil Jacobs, the quiet, competent FBI Director, and that was far too elaborate for a government cover. Besides, Murray didn't run agents in London, did he?

Did he? Nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Ryan hated that aspect of his CIA job, but he had to admit that it kept his mind fully awake. Even drinking a beer in his backyard.

"Well, nice to hear, I suppose."

"Basil's hard to impress, my boy. But he and Judge Moore like each other. Jim Greer, too. Basil just plain loves his a.n.a.lytical ability."

"He's pretty smart," Ryan agreed. "I've learned a lot from him."

"He's making you one of his stars."

"Really?" It didn't always seem that way to Ryan.

"Haven't you noticed how quick he's moving you up? Like you were a professor from Harvard or something, fella."

"Boston College and Georgetown, remember?"

"Yeah, well, us Jesuit products run the world-we're just humble about it. They don't teach 'humble' at Harvard."

For sure they don't encourage their graduates to do anything as plebeian as police work, Ryan thought. He remembered the Harvard kids in Boston, many of whom thought they owned the world-because daddy had bought it for them. Ryan preferred to make the purchase himself, doubtless because of his working-cla.s.s background. But Cathy wasn't like those upper-cla.s.s snots, and she had been born with a golden spoon in her mouth. Of course, n.o.body was ever disgraced to point to his son or daughter the doctor, and certainly not to a graduate of Johns Hopkins. Maybe Joe Muller wasn't so bad a guy after all, Ryan thought briefly. He'd helped raise a pretty good daughter. Too bad he was an overbearing a.s.shole to his son-in-law.

"So, you like it at Century House?"

"Better than Langley. Too much like a monastery out there. At least in London you live in a city. You can step out for a beer or do some shopping over lunch."

"Shame the building's coming apart. It's the same trouble they've had in some other buildings in London-the mortar or grout, whatever you call it, it's defective. So the faade's peeling off. Embarra.s.sing, but the contractor's gotta be long dead. Can't take a corpse to court."

"You never have?" Jack asked, lightheartedly.

Murray shook his head. "No, I've never popped a cap on anyone. Came close once, but stopped short. Good thing, too. Turned out the mutt wasn't armed. Would have been embarra.s.sing to explain that to the judge," he added, sipping his beer.

"So, how are the local cops doing?" It was Murray's job to interface with them after all.

"They're pretty good, really. Well organized, good investigators for the major stuff. Not much street crime for them to worry about."

"Not like New York or D.C."

"Not hardly. So, anything interesting shaking at Century House?" he asked.

"Not really. Mainly, I've been looking over old stuff, back-checking old a.n.a.lysis against newly developed data. Nothing worth writing home about-but I have to do that anyway. The Admiral is keeping me on a long leash, but it's still a leash."

"What do you think of our cousins?"

"Basil is pretty smart," Ryan observed. "But he's careful about what he shows me. That's fair, I suppose. He knows that I'm reporting back to Langley, and I really don't need to know much about sources.... But I can make some guesses. 'Six' has gotta have some good people in Moscow." Ryan paused. "d.a.m.ned if I'd ever play that game. Our prisons are pretty nasty. I don't even want to think about what the Russian ones are like."

"You wouldn't live long enough to find out, Jack. They're not the most forgiving people in the world, especially on espionage. You're a lot safer whacking a cop right in front of the precinct station than playing spy."

"And with us?"

"It's amazing-how patriotic convicts are, that is. Spies do very hard time in the Federal prisons. Them and child molesters. They get a lot of attention from Bubba and his armed-robber friends-you know, honest crooks."

"Yeah, my dad talked about that once in a while, how there's a hierarchy in prison, and you don't want to be on the bottom.

"Better to be a pitcher than a catcher." Murray laughed.

It was time for a real question: "So, Dan, just how tight are you with the spook shops?"

Murray surveyed the horizon. "Oh, we get along pretty nicely" was all he was willing to say.

"You know, Dan," Jack observed, "if there's anything I've learned to worry about over here, it's understatement."

Murray liked that one. "Well, then you're living in the wrong place, son. They all talk like that over here."

"Yeah, especially in the spook shops."

"Well, if we talked like everybody else, then the mystique would be gone, and people would understand how screwed up everything really is." Murray had a sip and grinned broadly. "We couldn't maintain the confidence of the people that way. I bet it's the same with doctors and stockbrokers," the FBI rep suggested.

"Every business has its own insiders language." The supposed reason was that it offered more speedy and efficient communications to those inside the fold-but the truth of the matter, of course, was that it denied knowledge and/or access to outsiders. But that was really okay if you were one of the people on the inside.

THE BAD NEWS happened in Budapest, and it resulted from pure bad luck. The agent wasn't even all that important. He provided information on the Hungarian Air Force, but that was an organization that no one took very seriously at best, along with the rest of the Hungarian military, which had rarely distinguished itself on the field of battle. Marxism-Leninism had never really taken firm root here anyway, but the state did have a hardworking, if not especially competent, intelligence/counterintelligence service, and not all of them were stupid. Some of them were even KGBTRAINED, and if there was anything the Soviets knew, it was intelligence and counterintelligence. This officer, Andreas Morrisay, was just sitting, drinking his morning coffee in a shop on Andra.s.sy Utca, when he saw someone make a mistake. He would not have caught it had he not been bored with his newspaper, but there it was. A Hungarian national-you could tell from his clothing-dropped something. It was about the size of a tin of pipe tobacco. He quickly bent down to pick it up, and then, remarkably enough, he stuck it to the underside of his table. And, Andreas saw, it didn't fall off. It must have some sort of adhesive on the side. And that sort of thing was not only unusual, but also one of the things he'd been shown in a training film at the KGB Academy outside Moscow. It was a very simple and obsolete form of dead-drop, something used by enemy spies to transfer information. It was, Andreas thought, like walking unexpectedly into the cinema and watching a spy film and knowing what was happening just on pure instinct. His immediate reaction was to walk off to the men's room, where there was a pay phone. There he dialed his office and spoke for less than thirty seconds. Next he made use of the men's room, because this might take a while, and he was suddenly excited. No harm was done. The head office of his agency was only a half-dozen blocks away, and two of his coworkers came in, took their seats, and ordered their coffee, talking with apparent animation about something or other. Andreas was relatively new in his job-just two years-and he'd yet to catch anyone doing anything. But this was his day, the officer knew. He was looking at a spy. A Hungarian national who was working for some foreign power, and even if he were giving information to the Soviet KGB, he was committing a crime for which he could be arrested-though in that case, it would be cleared up quickly by the KGB liaison officer. After another ten minutes, the Hungarian rose and walked out, with one of the two other officers in trail.

What followed was, well, nothing, for more than an hour. Andreas ordered some strudel-every bit as tasty here as it was in Vienna, three hundred kilometers away, and this despite the Marxist government in the country, because the Hungarians loved their food, and Hungary was a productive agricultural country, despite the command economy imposed on the farmers to the east. Andreas lit up a string of cigarettes, read his newspaper, and just waited for something to happen.

Presently, it did. A man dressed a little too well to be a Hungarian citizen took his seat at the table next to his, lit a cigarette of his own, and read his newspaper.

Here it worked for Andreas that he was badly nearsighted. His gla.s.ses were so thick that it took a few seconds for anyone to see where his eyes were pointed, and he remembered his training enough not to allow his eyes to linger on any one spot more than a few brief seconds. Mainly he appeared to be reading his paper, like half a dozen others in this elegant little shop, which had somehow survived the Second World War. He watched the American-Andreas had it fixed in his mind that this one had to be an American-sip his own coffee and read his own paper, until he set his coffee cup down in the saucer, then reached into his hip pocket for a handkerchief, which he used to wipe his nose, and then replaced in the pocket....

But first he retrieved the tobacco tin from under the table. It was a move so skillfully done that only a trained counterintelligence officer could have spotted it, but, Andreas told himself, that was exactly what he was. And it was his pride that generated his first and most costly mistake of the day.

The American finished his coffee and took his leave, with Andreas in close pursuit. The foreigner walked toward the underground station a block away and nearly made it. But not quite. He turned in surprise when he felt a hand on his upper arm.

"Could I see the tobacco tin that you took from the table?" Andreas said, politely, because this foreigner was probably, technically speaking, a diplomat.

"Excuse me?" the foreigner said, and his accent made him either British or American.

"The one in your pants pocket," Andreas clarified.

"I do not know what you are talking about, and I have business to do." The man started to walk away.

He didn't get far. Andreas pulled out his pistol. It was a Czech Agrozet Model 50 and it effectively ended the conversation. But not quite.

"What is this? Who are you?"

"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-s.h.i.+t handgun. So he reached into his coat pocket, very slowly and deliberately, lest he scare the idiot, and withdrew his pa.s.sport. It was a black one, the sort issued to diplomats, and instantly recognizable to lucky a.s.ses like this stupid, f.u.c.king 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 emba.s.sy 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 furnis.h.i.+ng second-rate information about a third-rate communist air force. G.o.dd.a.m.n 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. c.o.x put his books back in his carry-on and stood, managing to be the first pa.s.senger 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 ca.s.sette, 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.

"d.a.m.n," 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 s.h.i.+rt.

"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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 p.i.s.sed."

"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.