Red Rabbit Part 54

"It varies. In the summer tourist season, there are enough people here to fill Wembley Stadium. This coming week? Certainly thousands," he estimated. "How many is hard to reckon."

This mission is a real s.h.i.+tburger, Ryan told himself.

"Any way to hit the hotels, try to get a line on this Strokov guy?"

"More hotels in Rome than in London. It's a lot to cover with four field officers. We can't get any help from the local police, can we?"

"What guidance on that from Basil?" Ryan inquired, already guessing the answer.

"Everything is on close hold. No, we cannot let anyone know what we're doing."

He couldn't even call for help from CIA's local station, Jack realized. Bob Ritter would never sanction it. s.h.i.+tburger was optimistic.

CHAPTER 31.

BRIDGE BUILDER.

SHARP'S OFFICIAL RESIDENCE was as impressive in its way as the safe house outside Manchester. There was no guessing what-whom-it had been built for, and Ryan was tired of asking anyway. He had a bedroom and a private bathroom, and that was enough. The ceilings were high in every room, presumably defense against the hot summers Rome was known for. It had been about 80 during the afternoon drive, warm, but not too bad for someone from the Baltimore-Was.h.i.+ngton area, though to an Englishman it must have seemed like the very boiler room of h.e.l.l. Whoever had written about mad dogs and Englishmen must have lived in another age, Jack thought. In London, people started dropping dead in the street when it got to 75. As it was, he thought he had three days to worry, and one in which to execute whatever plan he and Sharp managed to come up with-in the hope that nothing at all would happen, and that CIA would come up with a way to warn His Holiness's security troops that they needed to firm up their means of seeing to his physical safety. Christ, the guy even wore white, the better to make a perfect sight picture for whatever gun the bad guy might use-like a great big paper target blank for the bad guy to put his rounds into. George Armstrong Custer hadn't walked into a worse tactical environment, but at least he'd done it with open eyes, albeit clouded by lethal pride and faith in his own luck. The Pope didn't live under that illusion. No, he believed that G.o.d would come and collect him whenever it suited His purpose, and that was that. Ryan's personal beliefs were not all that different from the Polish priest's, but he figured that G.o.d had given him brains and free will for a reason-did that make Jack an instrument of G.o.d's will? It was too deep a question for the moment, and besides, Ryan wasn't a priest to dope that one out. Maybe it was a lack of faith. Maybe he believed in the real world too much. His wife's job was to fix health problems, and were those problems visited upon people by G.o.d Himself? Some thought so. Or were those problems things G.o.d merely allowed to happen so that people like Cathy could fix them, and thus do His work? Ryan tended to this view, and the Church must have agreed, since it had built so many hospitals across the world.

But for d.a.m.ned sure, the Lord G.o.d didn't approve of murder, and it was now Jack's mission to stop one from happening, if that was possible. Certainly he wasn't one to stand by and ignore it. A priest would have to limit himself to persuasion or, at most, pa.s.sive interference. Ryan knew that if he saw a criminal drawing a bead on the Pope-or, for that matter, anyone else-and he had a gun in his hand, he wouldn't hesitate more than a split second to interrupt the act with a pistol bullet of his own. Maybe that was just how he was made up, maybe it was the things he'd learned from his dad, maybe it was his training in the Green Machine, but for whatever reason, the use of physical force would not make him faint away-at least not until after he'd done the act. There were a few people in h.e.l.l to prove that fact. And so Jack started the mental preparation for what he'd have to do, maybe, if the Bad Guys were in town and he saw them. Then it hit him that he wouldn't even have to answer for it-not with diplomatic status. The State Department had the right to withdraw his protection under the Vienna Convention, but, no, not in a case like this they wouldn't. So whatever he did could be a freebie, and that wasn't so bad a deal, was it?

The Sharps took him out for dinner-just a neighborhood place, but the food was brilliant, renewed proof that the best Italian restaurants are often the little mom-and-pop places. Evidently, the Sharps ate there often, the staff was so friendly to them.

"Tom, what the h.e.l.l are we going to do?" Jack asked openly, figuring that Annie had to know what he did for a living.

"Churchill called it KBO-keep b.u.g.g.e.ring on." He shrugged. "We do the best we can, Jack."

"I suppose I'd feel a h.e.l.l of a lot better with a platoon of Marines to back my play."

"As would I, my boy, but one does the best one can with what one has."

"Tommy," Mrs. Sharp said. "What exactly are you two talking about?"

"Can't say, my dear."

"But you are CIA," she said next, looking at Jack.

"Yes, ma'am," Ryan confirmed. "Before that, I taught history at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and before that I traded stocks, and before that I was a Marine."

"Sir John, you're the one who-"

"And I'll never live it down, either." Why the h.e.l.l, Jack wondered, hadn't he just kept his wife and daughter behind that tree on the Mall in London and let Sean Miller do his thing? Cathy would have gotten some pictures and that would have helped with the police, after all. No good-or dumb-deed ever went unpunished, he supposed. "And you can stop the Sir John stuff. I do not own a horse or a steel s.h.i.+rt." And his only sword was the Mameluke that the Marine Corps gave to its officers upon graduation at Quantico.

"Jack, a knight is ceremonially one who will take up arms in protection of the sovereign. You've done that twice, if memory serves. You are, therefore, ent.i.tled to the honorific," Sharp pointed out.

"You guys never forget, do you?"

"Not something like that, Sir John. Courage under fire is one of the things worth remembering."

"Especially in nightmares, but in those the gun never works, and, yeah, sometimes I have them," Jack admitted, for the first time in his life. "What are we doing tomorrow, Tom?"

"I have emba.s.sy work in the morning. Why don't you scout the area some more, and I can join you for lunch."

"Fair enough. Meet where?"

"Just inside the Basilica, to the right, is Michelangelo's Piet. Just there at one fifteen exactly."

"Fair enough," Jack agreed.

"SO, WHERE IS RYAN?" the Rabbit asked.

"Rome," Alan Kingshot answered. "He's looking into what you told us." All of this day had been occupied with uncovering what he knew of KGB operations in the UK. It turned out to be quite a lot, enough that the three-man Security Service team had positively drooled as they took their notes. Ryan had been wrong, Kingshot thought over dinner. This fellow wasn't a gold mine. No, he was Kimberly, and the diamonds just spilled out from his mouth. Zaitzev was relaxing a little more, enjoying his status. As well he might, Alan thought. Like the man who'd invented the computer chip, this Rabbit was set for life, all the carrots he could eat, and men with guns would protect his hole in the ground against all bears.

The Bunny, as he thought of her, had discovered Western cartoons today. She especially liked "Roadrunner," immediately noting the similarity to the Russian "Hey, Wait a Minute," and laughing through every one of them.

Irina, on the other hand, was rediscovering her love for the piano, playing the big Bsendorfer in the home's music room, making mistakes but learning from them, and starting to recover her former skills, to the admiring looks of Mrs. Thompson, who'd never learned to play herself, but who'd found reams of sheet music in the house for Mrs. Zaitzev to try her hand at.

This family, Kingshot thought, will do well in the West. The child was a child. The father had tons of good information. The mother would breathe free and play her music to her heart's content. They would wear their newfound freedom like a loose and comfortable garment. They were, to use the Russian word, kulturniy, or cultured people, fit representatives of the rich culture which had long predated communism. Good to know that not all defectors were alcoholic ruffians.

"LIKE A CANARY on amphetamines, Basil says," Moore told his senior people in the den of his home. "He says this guy will give us more information than we can easily use."

"Oh, yeah? Try us," Ritter thought out loud.

"Indeed, Bob. When do we get him over here?" Admiral Greer asked.

"Basil asked for two more days to get him over. Say, Thursday afternoon. I'm having the Air Force send a VC-137 over. Might as well do it first cla.s.s," the Judge observed generously. It wasn't his money, after all. "Basil's alerted his people in Rome, by the way, just in case KGB is running fast on their operation to whack the Pope."

"They're not that efficient," Ritter said with some confidence.

"I'd be careful about that, Bob," the DDI thought out loud. "Yuriy Vladimirovich isn't noted for his patience." Greer was not the first man to make that observation.

"I know, but their system grinds slower than ours."

"What about the Bulgarians?" Moore asked. "They think the shooter is a guy named Strokov, Boris Strokov. He's probably the guy who killed Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge. Experienced a.s.sa.s.sin, Basil thinks."

"It figures they'd use the Bulgars," Ritter observed. "They're the Eastern Bloc's Murder Incorporated, but they're still communists, and they're chess players, not high-noon types. But we still haven't figured out how to warn the Vatican. Can we talk to the Nuncio about this?"

They'd all had a little time to think through that question, and now it was time to face it again. The Papal Nuncio was the Vatican's amba.s.sador to the United States, Giovanni Cardinal Sabatino. Sabatino was a longtime member of the Pope's own diplomatic service and was well regarded by the State Department's career foreign-service officers, both for his sagacity and his discretion.

"Can we do it in such a way as not to compromise the source?" Greer wondered.

"We can say some Bulgarian talked too much-"

"Pick that fictional source carefully, Judge," Ritter warned. "Remember, the DS has that special subunit. It reports directly to their Politburo, and they don't write much down, according to what sources we have over there. Kinda like the commie version of Albert Anastasia. This Strokov guy is one of them, or so we have heard."

"We could say their party chairman talked to a mistress. He has a few," Greer suggested. The Director of Intelligence had all manner of information on the intimate habits of world leaders, and the Bulgarian party boss was a man of the people in the most immediate of senses. Of course, if this ever leaked, life might get difficult for the women in question, but adultery had its price, and the Bulgarian chairman was such a copious drinker that he might not remember to whom he'd (never) said what would be attributed to him. That might serve to salve their consciences a little.

"Sounds plausible," Ritter opined.

"When could we see the Nuncio?" Moore asked.

"Middle of the week, maybe?" Ritter suggested again. They all had a full week before them. The Judge would be on The Hill doing budget business until Wednesday morning.

"Where?" They couldn't bring him here, after all. The churchman wouldn't come. Too much potential unpleasantness if anyone noticed. And Judge Moore couldn't go to the Nuncio. His face, also, was too well known by the Was.h.i.+ngton establishment.

"Foggy Bottom," Greer thought out loud. Moore went to see the Secretary of State often enough, and the Nuncio wasn't exactly a stranger there.

"That'll work," the DCI decided. "Let's get it set up." Moore stretched. He hated having to do work on a Sunday. Even a judge of the appeals court got weekends off.

"There's still the issue of what they can actually do with the information," Ritter warned them. "What is Basil doing?"

"He's got his Rome Station rooting around, only five of them, but he's going to send some more troops from London tomorrow just in case they try to make their hit on Wednesday-that's when His Holiness appears in public. I gather he has a pretty busy work schedule, too."

"Shame he can't call off the ride around the plaza, but I guess he wouldn't listen if anybody asked."

"Not hardly," Moore agreed. He didn't bring up the word from Sir Basil that Ryan had been dispatched to Rome. Ritter would just throw another conniption fit, and Moore wasn't up to that on a Sunday.

RYAN AROSE EARLY, as usual, had his breakfast, and caught a taxi to St. Peter's. It was good to walk around the square-which was almost entirely round, of course-just to stretch his legs. It seemed odd that here, inside the capital of the Italian Republic, was a t.i.tularly sovereign state whose official language was Latin. He wondered if the Caesars would have liked that or not, the last home of their language also being the home of the agency that had brought down their world-spanning empire, but he couldn't go to the Forum to ask whatever ghosts lived there.

The church commanded his attention. There were no words for something that large. The funds to build it had necessitated the indulgence selling that had sparked Martin Luther to post his protest on the cathedral door and so start the Reformation, something the nuns at St. Matthew's had not approved of, but for which the Jesuits of his later life had taken rather a broader view. The Society of Jesus also owed its existence to the Reformation-they'd been founded to fight against it.

That didn't much matter at the moment. The basilica beggared description, and it seemed a fit headquarters for the Roman Catholic Church. He walked in and saw that, if anything, the interior seemed even more vast than the outside. You could play a football game in there. A good hundred yards away was the main altar, reserved for use by the Pope himself, under which was the crypt where former popes were buried, including, tradition had it, Simon Peter himself. "Thou art Peter," Jesus was quoted in the Gospel, "and upon this rock I shall build my church." Well, with the help of some architects and what must have been an army of workers, they'd certainly built a church here. Jack felt drawn into it as though it were G.o.d's own personal house. The cathedral in Baltimore would scarcely have been an alcove here. Looking around, he saw the tourists, also staring at the ceiling with open mouths. How had they built this place without structural steel? Jack wondered. It was all stone resting on stone. Those old guys really knew their stuff, Ryan reflected. The sons of those engineers now worked for Boeing or NASA. He spent a total of twenty minutes walking around, then reminded himself that he wasn't, after all, a tourist.

This had once been the site of the original Roman Circus Maximus. The big racetrack for chariots, like those in the movie Ben-Hur, had then been torn down and a church built here, the original St. Peter's, but over time that church had deteriorated, and so a century-plus-long project to build this one had been undertaken and was finished in the sixteenth century, Ryan remembered. He went back outside to survey the area once again. Much as he looked for alternatives, it seemed that his first impression had been the correct one. The Pope got in his car there, drove around that way, and the place of greatest vulnerability was . . . right about there. The problem was that there was a semicircular s.p.a.ce perhaps two hundred yards long.

Okay, he thought, time to do some a.n.a.lysis. The shooter would be a pro. A pro would have two considerations: one, getting a good shot off; and two, getting the h.e.l.l out of here alive.

So Ryan turned to see potential exit routes. To the left, closest to the faade of the church, people would really pile up there in their desire to get the first look at the Pope as he came out. Farther down, the open vehicle path widened somewhat, increasing the range of the shot-something to be avoided. But the shooter still needed to get his a.s.s out of Dodge City, and the best way to do that was toward the side street where Sharp had parked the day before. You could stash a car there, probably, and if you made it that far, you'd go pedal-to-the-metal and race the h.e.l.l off to wherever you had a backup car parked-a backup, because the cops would sure as h.e.l.l be looking for the first one, and Rome had a goodly supply of police officers who'd run through fire to catch whoever had popped a cap on the Pope.

Back to the shooting place. He wouldn't want to be in the thickest part of the crowd, so he wouldn't want to be too close to the church. But he'd want to boogie out through that arch. Maybe sixty or seventy yards. Ten seconds, maybe? With a clear path, yeah, about that. Double it, just to be sure. He'd probably yell something like "There he goes!" as a distraction. It might make him easier to identify later, but Colonel Strokov will be figuring to sleep Wednesday night in Sofia. Check flight times, Jack told himself. If he takes the shot and gets away, he won't be swimming home, will he? No, he'll opt for the fastest way out-unless he has a really deep hidey-hole here in Rome.

That was a possibility. The problem was that he was dealing with an experienced field spook, and he could have a lot of things planned. But this was reality, not a movie, and professionals kept things simple, because even the simplest things could go to s.h.i.+t in the real world.

He'll have at least one backup plan. Maybe more, but sure as h.e.l.l he'll have one.

Dress up like a priest, maybe? There were a lot of them in evidence. Nuns, too-more than Ryan had ever seen. How tall is Strokov? Anything over five-eight and he'd be too tall for a nun. But if he dressed as a priest, you could hide a f.u.c.king RPG in a ca.s.sock. That was a pleasant thought. But how fast could one run in a ca.s.sock? That was a possible downside.

You have to a.s.sume a pistol, probably a suppressed pistol. A rifle-no, its dangers lay in its virtues. It was so long that the guy standing next to him could bat the barrel off target, and he'd never get a good round off. An AK-47, maybe, able to go rock-and-roll? But, no, it was only in the movies that people fired machine guns from the hip. Ryan had tried it with his M-16 at Quantico. It felt real John Wayne, but you just couldn't hit s.h.i.+t that way. The sights, the gunnery sergeants had all told his cla.s.s at the Basic School, are there for a reason. Like Wyatt Earp shooting on TV-draw and fire from the hip. It just didn't work unless your other hand was on the f.u.c.ker's shoulder. The sights are there for a reason, to tell you where the weapon is pointed, because the bullet you're shooting is about a third of an inch in diameter, and you are, in fact, shooting at a target just that small, and a hiccup could jerk you off target, and under stress your aim just gets worse . . . unless you're used to the idea of killing people. Like Boris Strokov, colonel of the Dirzhavna Sugurnost. What if he was one of those who just didn't rattle, like Audie Murphy of the Third Infantry Division in WWII? But how many people like that were around? Murphy had been one in eight million American soldiers, and n.o.body had seen that deadly quality in him before it just popped out on the battlefield, probably surprising even him. Murphy himself probably never appreciated how different he was from everybody else.

Strokov is a pro, Jack reminded himself. And so he'll act like a pro. He'll plan every detail, especially the getaway.

"You must be Ryan," a British voice said quietly. Jack turned to see a pale man with red hair.

"Who are you?"

"Mick King," the man replied. "Sir Basil sent the four of us down. Sussing the area out?"

"How obvious am I?" Ryan worried suddenly.

"You could well be an architecture student." King blew it off. "What do you think?"

"I think the shooter would stand right about here, and try to boogie on out that way," Jack said, pointing. King looked around before speaking.

"It's a dicey proposition, however one plans it, with all the people sure to be here, but, yes, that does look the most promising option," the spook agreed.

"If I were planning to do it myself, I'd want to use a rifle from up there. We'll need to have somebody topside to handle that possibility."

"Agreed. I'll have John Sparrow go up there. The chap with short hair over there. He brought a ton of cameras with him."

"One more man to camp out in the street that way. Our bird will probably have a car to skip town with, and that's where I'd park it."

"A little too convenient, don't you think?"

"Hey, I'm an ex-Marine, not a chess master," Ryan replied. But it was good to have somebody second-guessing him. There were a lot of tactical possibilities here, and everybody read a map a little differently, and Bulgarians might well study out of a different playbook altogether.

"It's a pig of a mission they've given us. Best hope is that this Strokov fellow doesn't show up. Oh, here he is," King said, handing Ryan an envelope.

It was full of eight-by-ten prints, actually of pretty good quality.

"Nick Thompson told me he has lifeless eyes," Ryan said, looking at one of them.

"Does seem rather a cold chap, doesn't he?"

"When we come here Wednesday, we going to be carrying?"

"I certainly shall be," King said positively. "Nine-millimeter Browning. There ought to be a few more at the emba.s.sy. I know you can shoot accurately under pressure, Sir John," he added, with casual respect.

"It doesn't mean I like to, pal." And the best engagement range for any pistol was contact range, holding the gun right against the other b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Kinda hard to miss that way. It would even cut the noise down, too. Plus, it was a h.e.l.l of a good way to tell someone not to do anything untoward.

For the next two hours, the five men walked the piazza, but they kept coming back to the same place.

"We can't cover it all, not without a hundred men," Mick King finally said. "And if you can't be strong everywhere, you might as well pick one place and be strong there."

Jack nodded, remembering how Napoleon had ordered his generals to come up with a plan for protecting France from invasion, and when a senior officer had spread his troops evenly along the borders, he'd heartlessly inquired if the guy was trying to protect against smuggling. So, yeah, if you couldn't be strong everywhere, then you planned to be strong somewhere, and prayed that you'd picked the right spot. The key, as always, was to put yourself into the other guy's head, just as they'd taught him to do as an intelligence a.n.a.lyst. Think the way your adversary thinks, and stop him that way. It sounded so good and so easy theoretically. It was rather different in the field, however.

They caught Tom Sharp walking into the basilica, and together they went off to a restaurant for lunch and a talk.

"Sir John is right," King said. "The best spot is over on the left side. We have photos of the b.u.g.g.e.r. We put you, John"-he said to Sparrow-"atop the colonnade with your cameras. Your job will be to sweep the crowd and try to spot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and radio your information to us."

Sparrow nodded, but his face showed what he thought of the job as the beers arrived.

"Mick, you had it right from the beginning," Sparrow said. "It's a pig of a job. We ought to have the whole b.l.o.o.d.y SAS regiment here, and even that would not be enough." The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was actually just a company or two in size, brilliant troopers that they were.