Red Rabbit Part 27

CHAPTER 18.

CLa.s.sICAL 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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. h.e.l.l, only a handful of people at the emba.s.sy 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 a.s.sets to shotgun such a mission and ping on every emba.s.sy staffer-it was way too clumsy and was certain to alert emba.s.sy 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 cla.s.sified. You don't tell me about your patients, do you? That's because you have rules of ethics, and I have rules of cla.s.sification." 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 n.o.body 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 fas.h.i.+on-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 s.h.i.+vered. 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 gla.s.ses all week."

"No fun stuff, like cutting some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d'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 s.h.i.+ver.

"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.

MARY PAT COULD feel that her husband was still awake, but it wasn't a time to talk, even with their personal hand-jive technique. Instead she was thinking about operations-how to get the package out. Moscow would be too hard. Other parts of the Soviet Union were no easier, because Moscow Station didn't have all that many a.s.sets it could use elsewhere in this vast country-intelligence operations tended to be centered in national capitals because that was where you could place "diplomats" who were truly wolves in sheep's clothing. The obvious counter for that was to use your government capital just for strictly government-related administrative services, distanced from military and other sensitive affairs, but n.o.body would do that, for the simple reason that government big shots wanted all their functionaries within arm's length so that they-the big shots-could enjoy their exercise of power. And that was what they all lived for, whether it was in Moscow, Hitler's Berlin, or Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

So, if not out of Moscow, then where? There were only so many places the Rabbit was free to go. Nowhere west of the wire, as she thought of the Iron Curtain that had fallen across Europe in 1945. And there were few places where a man like him could plausibly want to go that were convenient to CIA. The beaches at Sochi, perhaps. Theoretically, the Navy could get a submarine there and make the s.n.a.t.c.h, but you couldn't just whistle up a submarine, and the Navy would have a cow over that, just for having it asked of them.

That left the fraternal socialist states of Eastern Europe, which were about as exciting as tourist spots as central Mississippi in the summer: a good place to go if you got off on cotton plantations and blazing heat, but otherwise why bother? Poland was out. Warsaw had been rebuilt after the Wehrmacht's harsh version of urban renewal, but Poland right now was a very tight place due to its internal political troubles, and the easiest exit point, Gdansk, was now as tightly guarded as the Russian-Polish border. It hadn't helped that the Brits had arranged for the purloining of a new Russian T-72 main battle tank there. Mary Pat hoped the stolen tank was useful to somebody, but some idiot in London had bragged about it to the newspapers and the story had broken, ending Gdansk's utility as a port of exit for the next few years. The DDR, perhaps? But few Russians cared a rat's a.s.s about Germany, and there was little there for them to want to see. Czechoslovakia? An interesting city supposedly, landmarked with imperial architecture, and a good cultural life. Their symphonies and ballet were almost on a cla.s.s with the Russians' own, and the art galleries were supposedly excellent. But the Czech-Austrian border was also very tightly guarded.

That left . . . Hungary.

Hungary, she thought. Budapest was also an old imperial city, once ruled sternly by the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty, conquered by the Russians in 1945 after a nasty, prolonged battle with the German SS, probably rebuilt to whatever former glory it had enjoyed a hundred years before. It was not enthusiastically communist, as they'd demonstrated in 1956, before being harshly put down by the Russians, at Khrushchev's personal orders, and then under Andropov's stewards.h.i.+p as USSR Amba.s.ssador reestablished as a happy socialist brotherhood, though one more loosely governed after the brief and b.l.o.o.d.y rebellion. The head rebels had all been hanged, shot, or otherwise disposed of. Forgiveness had never been a Marxist-Leninist virtue.

But a lot of Russians took the train to Budapest. It was the neighbor of Yugoslavia, the communist San Francisco, a place where Russians could not go without permission, but Hungary traded freely with Yugoslavia, and so Soviet citizens could purchase VCRs, Reebok running shoes, and Fogal pantyhose there. Typically, Russians went there with one suitcase full and two or three empty, and a shopping list for all their friends.

Soviets could travel there with reasonable freedom, because they had Comecon rubles, which all socialist countries were required to honor by the socialist Big Brother in Moscow. Budapest was, in fact, the boutique of the Eastern Bloc. You could even get X-rated tapes for the tape machines that were manufactured there-rip-offs of j.a.panese designs, reverse-engineered and made in their own fraternal socialist factories. The tapes were smuggled in from Yugoslavia and copied-everywhere, everything from The Sound of Music to Debbie Does Dallas. Budapest had decent art galleries and historical sites, good orchestras, and the food was supposed to be pretty good. An entirely plausible place for the Rabbit to go, with every ostensible intention of going back to his beloved Rodina.

That's the beginning of a plan, Mary Pat thought. That was also enough lost sleep for one night.

"SO, WHAT HAPPENED?" the Amba.s.sador asked.

"An AVH spook was having coffee one table away from where my agent made a drop," Szell explained in the Amba.s.sador's private office. It was located on the top floor, in the corner-in fact, in the quarters once occupied by Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his lengthy residency at the U.S. Emba.s.sy. A beloved figure both in the eyes of the American staffers and the Hungarian people, he'd been imprisoned by the n.a.z.is, released by the arriving Red Army, and promptly returned to prison for not being enthusiastic enough over the advent of the New Faith of Russia, though, technically, he'd been imprisoned on the far-fetched charges of being a raging royalist who wished to return the House of Hapsburg to imperial rule. The local communists hadn't been overly strong on creative writing. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, the Hapsburgs had been about as popular in Budapest as a bargeload of plague rats.

"Why were you doing it, Jim?" Amba.s.sador Peter "Spike" Ericsson asked. He'd have to reply to the venomous, but entirely predictable, communique that had arrived with the Station Chief, which was now sitting in the center of his desk.

"Bob Taylor's wife-she's pregnant, remember?-had some plumbing problems, and they flew 'em both off to Second Army General Hospital up at Kaiserslauten to get checked out."

Ericsson grunted. "Yeah, I forgot."

"Anyway, the short version is, I blew it," Szell had to admit. It just wasn't his way to cover things up. It would cause a major hiccup in his CIA career, but that couldn't be helped. d.a.m.ned sure it was a lot rougher right now for that poor clumsy b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd screwed up the transfer. The Hungarian State Security Authority-Allavedelmi Hatosag, or AVH-officers who'd interrogated him evidently hadn't had a good gloat in some time, and had made a point of telling him how easily he'd been bagged. f.u.c.king amateurs, Szell raged. But the end of the game was that he was now PNG'd, declared persona non grata by the Hungarian government, and requested to leave the country in forty-eight hours-preferably, with his tail tucked firmly between his legs.

"Sorry to lose you, Bob, but there's nothing much I can do."

"And I'm pretty useless to the team now anyway. I know." Szell let out a long and frustrated breath. He'd been here long enough to set up a pretty good little spy shop, providing fairly good political and military information-none of it overly important, because Hungary was not an overly important country, but you just never knew when something of interest would happen, even in Lesotho-which might well be his next posting, Szell reflected. He'd have to buy some sunblock and a nice bush jacket.... At least he'd get to catch the World Series back at home.

But for now, Station Budapest was out of business. Not that Langley would really miss it, Szell consoled himself.

The signal about this would go to Foggy Bottom via emba.s.sy telex-encrypted, of course. Amba.s.sador Ericsson drafted his reply to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, rejecting out of hand the absurd allegation that James Szell, Second Secretary to the Emba.s.sy of the United States of America, had done anything inconsistent with his diplomatic status, and lodging an official protest in the name of the U.S. Department of State. Perhaps in the next week, Was.h.i.+ngton would send some Hungarian diplomat back-whether he was a sheep or a goat would be decided in Was.h.i.+ngton. Ericsson thought it would be a sheep. Why let on that the FBI had ID'd a goat, after all? Better to let the goat continue to munch away in whatever garden it had invaded-under close observation. And so the game went on. The Amba.s.sador thought it a stupid game, but every member of his staff played it with greater or lesser enthusiasm.

THE MESSAGE ABOUT SZELL, it turned out, was sufficiently under the radar so that when it was forwarded to CIA headquarters, it was tucked into routine traffic as not worthy of interfering with the DCI's weekend-Judge Moore got a morning brief every single day anyway, of course, and this item would wait until 8:00 A.M. Sunday, the watch officers collectively decided, because judges liked an orderly life. And Budapest wasn't all that important in the Great Scheme of Things, was it?

SUNDAY MORNING IN Moscow was much the same as Sunday morning everywhere else, albeit with fewer people getting dressed up for church. That was true for Ed and Mary Pat, also. A Catholic priest celebrated ma.s.s at the U.S. Emba.s.sy on Sunday mornings, but most of the time they didn't make it-though they were both Catholic enough to feel guilt for their slothful transgressions. They both told themselves that their guilt was mitigated by the fact that they were both doing G.o.d's own work right in the center of the land of the heathen. So the plan for today was to take Eddie for a walk in the park, where he might meet some kids to play with. At least, that was Eddie's mission brief. Ed rolled out of bed and headed to the bathroom first, followed by his wife and then by little Eddie. No morning paper, and the Sunday TV programming was every bit as bad as it was the rest of the week. So they actually had to talk over breakfast, something many Americans find hard to do. Their son was still young and impressionable enough to find Moscow interesting, though nearly all of his friends were Americans or Brits: inmates, like his entire family, in the compound /ghetto, guarded by MGB or KGB-opinions were divided on that question, but everyone knew it made little real difference.

The meeting was set for 11:00. Oleg Ivan'ch would be easy to spot-as would she, Mary Pat knew. Like a peac.o.c.k among crows, her husband liked to say (even though the peac.o.c.k was actually a male bird). She decided to play it down today. No makeup, just casually brushed-out hair, jeans, and a pullover s.h.i.+rt. She couldn't change her figure very much-the local aesthetic preferred women of her height to be about ten kilograms heavier. Diet, she supposed. Or maybe when you had food available in what was largely a hungry country, you ate it. Maybe the fat layer you acquired made the winters more comfortable? Whatever, the level of fas.h.i.+on for the average Russian female was like something from a Dead End Kids movie. You could tell the wives of important people easily, because their clothes looked almost middle-cla.s.s, as opposed to the more normal Appalachia cla.s.s of dress. But that was grossly unfair to the people of Appalachia, Mary Pat decided.

"You coming, Ed?" she asked after breakfast.

"No, honey. I'll clean up the kitchen and get into this new book I got last week."

"The truck driver did it," she offered. "I've read that guy before."

"Thanks a bunch," her husband grumbled.

And with that, she checked her watch and headed out. The park was just three of the long blocks to the east. She waved to the gate guard-definitely KGB, she thought-and headed to the left, holding little Eddie's hand. The traffic on the street was minimal by American standards, and it was definitely getting cooler out. She was glad she'd dressed her son in a long-sleeve s.h.i.+rt. A turn to look down at him revealed no obvious tail. There could, of course, be binoculars in the apartments across the street, but somehow she thought not. She'd pretty well established herself as a dumb American blonde, and just about everyone bought it. Even Ed's press contacts thought her dumber than him-and they thought him to be an a.s.s-which could not have suited her any better. Those chattering blackbirds repeated everything she and Ed said to one another, until the word was as uniformly spread as the icing on one of her cakes. It all got back to KGB as quickly as any rumor could go-d.a.m.ned near the speed of light in that community, because reporters did intellectual incest as a way of life-and the Russians listened to them and put everything in their voluminous dossiers until it became something that "everybody knows." A good field officer always used others to build his or her cover. Such a cover was random-sounding-just as real life always was-and that made it plausible, even to a professional spook.

The park was about as bleak as everything else in Moscow. A few trees, some badly trodden gra.s.s. Almost as though KGB had had all the parks trimmed to make them bad contact points. That it would also limit places for young Muscovites to rendezvous and trade some kisses probably would not have troubled the consciences at The Centre, which were probably about the Pontius Pilate level on a reflective day.

And there was the Rabbit, a hundred meters or so away, nicely located, near some play items that would appeal to a three-year-old-or a four-year-old. Walking closer, she saw again that Russians doted on their little ones, and, in this case, maybe a little more-the Rabbit was KGB, and so he had access to better consumer goods than the average Russian, which, like a good parent in any land, he lavished on his little girl. That was a good sign for his character, Mary Pat decided. Maybe she could even like this guy, an unexpected gift for a field officer. So many agents were screwed up as badly as a South Bronx street mugger. He didn't observe her approach any more than to turn and scan the area in boredom, as men walking their children did. The two Americans headed the right way in what would surely appear to be a random act.

"Eddie, there's a little girl you can say h.e.l.lo to. Try out your Russian on her," his mommy suggested.

"Okay!" and he raced off in the manner of toddlers. Little Eddie ran right up to her and said "h.e.l.lo."

"h.e.l.lo."

"My name is Eddie."

"My name is Svetlana Olegovna. Where do you live?"

"That way." Eddie pointed back to the foreigners' ghetto.

"That is your son?" the Rabbit asked.

"Yes, Eddie Junior. Edward Edwardovich to you."

"So," Oleg Ivan'ch said next, without amus.e.m.e.nt, "is he also CIA?"

"Not exactly." Almost theatrically, she extended her hand to him. She had to protect him, just in case cameras were about. "I am Mary Patricia Foley."

"I see. Does your husband like his shapka?"

"Actually, he does. You have good taste in furs."

"Many Russians do." Then he switched gears. It was time to go back to business. "Have you decided that you can help me or not?"

"Yes, Oleg Ivan'ch, we can. Your daughter is darling. Her name is Svetlana?"