Red Rabbit Part 7

CHAPTER 5.

GETTING CLOSE.

AN EARLY RISER, Yuriy Vladimirovich was showered, shaved, dressed, and eating his breakfast before seven in the morning. For him it was bacon, three scrambled eggs, and thickly cut Russian bread with Danish b.u.t.ter. The coffee was German in origin, just like the kitchen appliances his apartment boasted. He had the morning Pravda, plus selected cuttings from Western newspapers, translated by KGB linguists, and some briefing material prepared in the early hours of the morning at The Centre and hand-delivered to his flat every morning at six. There was nothing really important today, he saw, lighting his third cigarette and drinking his second cup of coffee. All routine. The American President hadn't rattled his sabre the night before, which was an agreeable surprise. Perhaps he'd dozed off in front of the TV, as Brezhnev often did.

How much longer would Leonid continue to head the Politburo? Andropov wondered. Clearly the man would not retire. If he did, his children would suffer, and they enjoyed being the royal family of the Soviet Union too much to let their father do that. Corruption was never a pretty thing. Andropov did not suffer from it himself-indeed, that was one of his core beliefs. That was why the current situation was so frustrating. He would-he had to-save his country from the chaos into which it was falling. If I live long enough, and Brezhnev dies soon enough, that is. Leonid Ilyich was clearly in failing health. He'd managed to stop smoking-at the age of seventy-six, which, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself, was fairly impressive-but the man was in his dotage. His mind wandered. He had trouble remembering things. He occasionally dozed off at important meetings, to the dismay of his a.s.sociates. But his grasp of power was a deathgrip. He'd engineered the downfall of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev through a masterful series of political maneuvers, and n.o.body in Moscow forgot that tidbit of political history-a trick like that was unlikely to work on someone who'd engineered it himself. No one had even suggested to Leonid that he might wish to slow down-if not actually step slightly aside, then at least let others undertake some of his more administrative duties and allow him to concentrate his abilities on the really major questions. The American President was not all that much younger than Brezhnev, but he had lived a healthier life, or perhaps came from hardier peasant stock.

In his reflective moments, it struck Andropov as strange that he objected to this sort of corruption. He saw it precisely as such, but only rarely asked himself why he saw it so. In those moments, he actually did fall back on his Marxist beliefs, the very ones he'd discarded years ago, because even he had to fall back on some sort of ethos, and that was all he had. Stranger still, it was an area in which Marx and Christianity actually overlapped in their beliefs. Must have been an accident. After all, Karl Marx had been a Jew, not a Christian, and whatever religion he rejected or embraced ought to have been his own, not one foreign to him and his heritage. The KGB Chairman dismissed the entire line of thought with an annoyed shake of the head. He had enough on his professional plate, even as he finished what lay before him. There was a discreet knock on the door.

"Come," Andropov called, knowing who it was by the sound.

"Your car is ready, Comrade Chairman," the head of the security detail announced.

"Thank you, Vladimir Stepanovich." He rose from the table, lifted his suit jacket, and shrugged into it for the trip to work.

This was a routine fourteen-minute drive through central Moscow. His ZIL automobile was entirely handmade, actually similar in appearance to the American Checker taxicab. It ran straight down the center of the expansive avenues, in a broad lane kept clear by officers of the Moscow Militia exclusively for senior political officials. They stood out there all day in the heat of summer and the punis.h.i.+ng cold of winter, one cop every three blocks or so, making sure no one obstructed the way for longer than it took to make a crossing turn. It made the drive to work as convenient as taking a helicopter, and far easier on the nerves.

Moscow Centre, as KGB was known throughout the world of intelligence, was located in the former home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, and a mighty company it must have been to build such an edifice. Andropov's car pulled through the gate into the inner courtyard, right up to the bronze doors, where his car door was yanked open, and he alit to the official salutes from uniformed Eighth Directorate men. Inside, he walked to the elevator, which was held for him, of course, and then rode to the top floor. His detail examined his face to ascertain his mood-as such men did all over the world-and, as usual, saw nothing: He guarded his feelings as closely as a professional cardplayer. On the top floor was a walk of perhaps fifteen meters to his secretary's door. That was because Andropov's office had no door of its own. Instead, there was a clothes dresser in the anteroom, and the entrance to his office lay within that. This chicanery dated back to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's own chief of clandestine services, who'd had a large and hardly unreasonable fear of a.s.sa.s.sination and had come up with this security measure, lest a commando team reach all the way into NKVD headquarters. Andropov found it theatrical, but it was something of a KGB tradition and, in its way, roundly entertaining for visitors-it had been around too long to be a secret from anyone able to get this far, in any case.

His schedule gave him fifteen free minutes at the beginning of the day to review the papers on his desk before the daily briefings began, followed by meetings that were scheduled days or even weeks in advance. Today it was almost all internal-security matters, though someone from the Party Secretariat was scheduled before lunch to discuss strictly political business. Oh, yes, that thing in Kiev, he remembered. Soon after becoming KGB Chairman, he'd found that Party affairs paled in importance next to the agreeably broad canvas he had here at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The charter of KGB, insofar as it had such a limitation, was to be the "Sword and s.h.i.+eld" of the Party. Hence its primary mission, theoretically, was to keep an eye on Soviet citizens who might not be as enthusiastic as they ought toward their own country's government. Those Helsinki Watch people were becoming a major annoyance. The USSR had made an agreement in the Finnish capital seven years before, regarding the monitoring of human rights, and they evidently took it seriously. Worse, they had attracted the on-and-off attention of the Western news media. Reporters could be a huge nuisance, and you couldn't rough them up the way you used to-not all of them, anyway. The capitalist world treated them like demiG.o.ds, and expected everyone else to do the same, when everyone knew they were all spies of some kind. It was amusing to see how the American government overtly forbade its intelligence services from adopting journalistic covers. Every other spy service in the world did it. As if the Americans would follow their own lily-white laws, which had been pa.s.sed only to make other countries feel good about having The New York Times snooping around their countries. It wasn't even worth a dismissive snort. Preposterous. All foreign visitors in the Soviet Union were spies. Everyone knew it, and that was why his Second Chief Directorate, whose job was counterespionage, was so large a part of the KGB.

Well, the problem that had cost him an hour of sleep the night before wasn't all that different, was it? Not when you got down to it. Yuriy Vladimirovich punched a b.u.t.ton on his intercom.

"Yes, Comrade Chairman," his secretary-a man, of course-answered immediately.

"Send Aleksey Nikolay'ch in to see me."

"At once, comrade." It took four minutes by Andropov's desk clock.

"Yes, Comrade Chairman." Aleksey Nikolayevich Rozhdestvenskiy was a senior colonel in the First Chief-"Foreign"-Directorate, a very experienced field officer who'd served extensively in Western Europe, though never in the Western Hemisphere. A gifted field officer and runner-of-agents, he'd been b.u.mped up to The Centre for his streetsmart expertise and to act more or less as an in-house expert for Andropov to consult when he needed information on field operations. Not tall, not especially handsome, he was the sort of man who could turn invisible on any city street in the world, which partly explained his success in the field.

"Aleksey, I have a theoretical problem. You've worked in Italy, as I recall."

"For three years in Station Rome, Comrade Chairman, yes, under Colonel G.o.derenko. He's still there, as rezident."

"A good man?" Andropov asked.

He gave an emphatic nod of the head. "A fine senior officer, yes, Comrade Chairman. He runs a good station. I learned much from him."

"How well does he know the Vatican?"

That made Rozhdestvenskiy blink. "There is not much to be learned there. We do have some contacts, yes, but it has never been a matter of great emphasis. The Catholic Church is a difficult target to infiltrate, for the obvious reasons."

"What about through the Orthodox Church?" Andropov asked.

"There are some contacts there, yes, and we have had some feedback, but rarely anything of value. More along the line of gossip and, even then, nothing we cannot get through other channels."

"How good is security around the Pope?"

"Physical security?" Rozhdestvenskiy asked, wondering where this was going.

"Precisely," the Chairman confirmed.

Rozhdestvenskiy felt his blood temperature drop a few degrees. "Comrade Chairman, the Pope does have some protection about him, mainly of the pa.s.sive sort. His bodyguards are Swiss, in plainclothes-that comic-opera group that parades around in striped jumpsuits is mostly for show. They occasionally have to grab a believer overcome by his proximity to the head priest, that sort of thing. I am not even sure if they carry weapons, though I must a.s.sume that they do."

"Very well. I want to know how difficult it might be to get physically close to the Pope. Do you have any ideas?"

Ah, Rozhdestvenskiy thought. "Personal knowledge? No, comrade. I visited Vatican City several times when I was in Rome. The art collection there, as you may imagine, is impressive, and my wife is interested in such things. I took her there perhaps half a dozen times. The area crawls with priests and nuns. I confess I never looked about for security provisions, but nothing was readily apparent, aside from what you'd expect-measures against thefts and vandalism, that sort of thing. There are the usual museum guards, whose main function seems to be to tell people where the lavatories are.

"The Pope lives in the Papal Apartments, which adjoin the church of St. Peter's. I have never been there. It is not the sort of place in which I had any professional interest. I know our amba.s.sador is there occasionally for diplomatic functions, but I was not invited-my posting was that of a.s.sistant Commercial Attache, you see, Comrade Chairman, and I was too junior," Rozhdestvenskiy went on. "You say you wish to know about getting close to the Pope. I presume by that you mean . . . ?"

"Five meters, closer if possible, but certainly five meters."

Pistol range, Rozhdestvenskiy grasped at once. "I don't know enough myself. That would be a job for Colonel G.o.derenko and his people. The Pope gives audiences for the faithful. How you get into those, I do not know. He also appears in public for various purposes. I do not know how such things are scheduled."

"Let's find out," Andropov suggested lightly. "Report directly to me. Do not discuss this with anyone else."

"Yes, Comrade Chairman," the colonel said, coming to attention with the receipt of the order. "The priority?"

"Immediate," Andropov replied, in the most casual of voices.

"I shall see to it myself, Comrade Chairman," Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy promised. His face revealed nothing of his feelings. Indeed, he had few of those. KGB officers were not trained to have much in the way of scruples, at least outside politics, in which they were supposed to have a great deal of faith. Orders from above carried the force of Divine Will. Aleksey Nikolay'ch's only concerns at the moment were centered on the potential political fallout to be had from dropping this particular nuclear device. Rome was more than a thousand kilometers from Moscow, but that would probably not be far enough. However, political questions were not his to ask, and he scrubbed the matter from his mind-for the moment, anyway. While he did so, the intercom box on the Chairman's desk buzzed. Andropov flipped the top-right switch.

"Yes?"

"Your first appointment is here, Comrade Chairman." His secretary announced.

"How long will this take, Aleksey, do you suppose?"

"Several days, probably. You want an immediate a.s.sessment, I a.s.sume, followed by what sort of specific data?"

"Correct. For the moment, just a general a.s.sessment," Yuriy Vladimirovich said. "We're not planning any sort of operation just yet."

"By your order, Comrade Chairman. I'll go down to the communications center directly."

"Excellent. Thank you, Aleksey."

"I serve the Soviet Union" was the automatic reply. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy came to attention again, then left-faced for the door. He had to duck his head going out into the secretary's room, as most men did, and from there he turned right and out into the corridor.

So, how does one get close to the Pope, this Polish priest? Rozhdestvenskiy wondered. It was, at least, an interesting theoretical question. KGB abounded with theoreticians and academics who examined everything, from how to a.s.sa.s.sinate chiefs of foreign governments-useful in the event that a major war was about to be undertaken-to the best way to steal and interpret medical records from hospitals. The broad scope of KGB field operations knew few limitations.

One could not have guessed much from the colonel's face as he walked to the elevator bank. He pushed the b.u.t.ton and waited for forty seconds until the doors opened.

"Bas.e.m.e.nt," he told the operator. The elevators all had operators. Elevators were too good a potential dead-drop location to leave unattended. Even then, the operators were trained to look for brush-pa.s.ses. n.o.body was trusted in this building. There were too many secrets to be had. If there were one single place in the Soviet Union in which an enemy would want to place a penetration agent, this building was it, and so everyone looked at everyone else in some sort of black game, always watching, measuring every conversation for an inner meaning. Men made friends here as they did in every walk of life. They chatted about their wives and children, about sports and weather, about whether to buy a car or not, about getting a dacha in the country for the lucky ones with seniority. But rarely did men chat about work, except with their immediate workmates, and then only in conference rooms where such things were supposed to be discussed. It never occurred to Rozhdestvenskiy that these inst.i.tutional restrictions reduced productivity and might actually hinder the efficiency of his agency. That circ.u.mscription was just part of the inst.i.tutional religion of the Committee for State Security.

He had to pa.s.s a security checkpoint to enter the communications room. The watch NCO checked his photo pa.s.s and waved him through without much in the way of acknowledgment.

Rozhdestvenskiy had been here before, of course, often enough that he was known by face and name to the senior operators, and he knew them. The desks were arranged with a lot of s.p.a.ce between them, and the background noise of the teleprinters prevented ordinary conversation from being overheard at a distance of more than three or four meters, even by the most sensitive ears. This, and nearly everything else about the arrangement of the room, had evolved over the years until the security provisions were as close to perfect as anyone could imagine, though that didn't keep the efficiency experts on the third floor from wandering about with their scowls, always looking for something wrong. He walked to the desk of the senior communications watch officer.

"Oleg Ivanovich," he said in greeting.

Zaitzev looked up to see his fifth visitor of the young day, the fifth visitor and the fifth interruption. It was often a curse being the senior watch officer here, especially on the morning s.h.i.+ft. The overnight watch was boring, but at least you could work in a straight line.

"Yes, Colonel, what can I do for you this morning?" he asked pleasantly, junior officer to senior.

"A special message to Station Rome, personal to the rezident. I think a one-time pad for this one. I'd prefer that you handle it yourself." Instead of having a cipher clerk do the encryption, he didn't say. This was somewhat unusual, and it p.r.i.c.ked Zaitzev's interest. He would have to see it anyway. Eliminating the cipher clerk just halved the number of people that would see this particular message.

"Very well." Captain Zaitzev took up a pad and pencil. "Go on."

"Most Secret. IMMEDIATE AND URGENT. FROM MOSCOW CENTRE, OFFICE OF CHAIRMAN. TO COLONEL RUSLAN BORISSOVICH G.o.dERENKO, REZIDENT, ROME. MESSAGE FOLLOWS: ASCERTAIN AND REPORT MEANS OF GETTING PHYSICALLY CLOSE TO THE POPE. ENDS."

"That's all?" Zaitzev asked, surprised. "And if he asks what that means? It's not very clear in its intent."

"Ruslan Borissovich will understand what it means," Rozhdestvenskiy a.s.sured him. He knew that Zaitzev wasn't asking anything he shouldn't. One-time cipher pads were a nuisance to use, and so messages sent that way were supposed to be explicit in all details, lest the back-and-forth clarification messages compromise the communications links. As it was, this message would be telexed, and so was certain to be intercepted, and equally certain to be recognized by its formatting as a one-time-pad encipherment, hence a message of some importance. American and British codebreakers would probably attack it, and everyone was wary of them and their clever tricks. The West's d.a.m.ned intelligence agencies worked so closely together.

"If you say so, Comrade Colonel. I'll send it out within the hour." Zaitzev checked the wall clock to make sure he could do that. "It should be on his desk when he gets into his office."

It will take twenty minutes for Ruslan to decrypt it, Rozhdestvenskiy estimated. Then will he query us about it, as Zaitzev suggests? Probably. G.o.derenko is a careful, thorough man-and politically astute. Even with Andropov's name at the top, Ruslan Borissovich will be curious enough to ask for a clarification.

"If there is a reply, call me as soon as you have the clear text."

"You are the point of contact for this line?" Zaitzev asked, just to make sure he routed things correctly. After all, the message header, as this colonel had dictated it to him, said "Office of the Chairman."

"That is correct, Captain."

Zaitzev nodded, then handed the message blank to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy for his signature/confirmation. Everything in KGB had to have a paper trail. Zaitzev looked down at the checklist. Message, originator, recipient, encryption method, point of contact . . . yes, he had everything, and all s.p.a.ces were properly signed. He looked up. "Colonel, it will go out shortly. I will call you to confirm transmission time." He would also send a paper record upstairs for the permanent operations files. He made a final written notation and handed off the carbon copy.

"Here's the dispatch number. It will also be the operation-reference number until such time as you change it."

"Thank you, Captain." The colonel took his leave.

Oleg Ivanovich looked again at the wall clock. Rome was three hours behind Moscow time. Ten or fifteen minutes for the rezident to clear-text the message-the field people were so clumsy at such things, he knew-and then to think about it, and then . . . ? Zaitzev made a small wager with himself. The Rome rezident would send back a request for clarification. Sure as h.e.l.l. The captain had been sending out messages and getting them back from this man for some years. G.o.derenko was a careful man who liked things clear. So he'd leave the Rome pad in his desk drawer in readiness for the return message. He counted: 209 characters, including blank s.p.a.ces and punctuation. A pity they couldn't do this on one of those new American computers they were playing with upstairs. But there was no sense wis.h.i.+ng for the moon. Zaitzev pulled out the cipher-pad book from his desk drawer and unnecessarily wrote down its number before walking to the west side of the capacious room. He knew nearly all of them by number, a product of his chess background, Zaitzev imagined.

"Pad one-one-five-eight-nine-zero," he told the clerk behind the metal screen, handing off the paper slip. The clerk, a man of fifty-seven long years, most of them here, walked a few meters to fetch the proper cipher book. It was a loose-leaf binder, about ten centimeters across by twentyfive high, filled with punched paper pages, probably five hundred or more. The current page was marked with a plastic tag.

The pages looked like those in a telephone book, until you looked closely and saw that the letters didn't form names in any known language, except by random accident. There were on average two or three such occurrences per page. Outside Moscow, on the Outer Ring Road, was the headquarters of Zaitzev's own directorate, the Eighth, the part of KGB tasked with making and breaking codes and ciphers. On the roof of the building was a highly sensitive antenna which led to a teletype machine. The receiver that lay between the antenna and the teletype listened in on random atmospheric noise, and the teletype interpreted these "signals" as dot-dash letters, which the adjacent teletype machine duly printed up. In fact, several such machines were cross-connected in such a way that the randomness of the atmospheric noise was re-randomized into totally unpredictable gibberish. From that gibberish were made the one-time pads, which were supposed to be totally random transpositions that no mathematical formula could predict or, therefore, decrypt. The one-time-pad cipher was universally regarded as the most secure of encryption systems. That was important, since the Americans were the world leaders at cracking ciphers. Their "Venona" project had even compromised Soviet ciphers of the late 1940s and '50s, much to the discomfort of Zaitzev's parent agency. The most secure one-time pads were also the most c.u.mbersome and inconvenient, even for experienced hands like Captain Zaitzev. But that couldn't be helped. And Andropov himself wanted to know how to get physically close to the Pope.

That's when it hit Zaitzev: Physically close to the Pope. But why would anyone want that? Surely Yuriy Vladimirovich didn't want anyone to hear his confession.

What was he being asked to transmit?

The Rome rezident, G.o.derenko, was a highly experienced field officer whose rezidentura operated many Italian and other nationals as agents for the KGB. He forwarded all manner of information, some overtly important, some merely amusing, though potentially useful in compromising otherwise important people with embarra.s.sing foibles. Was it that only the important had such weaknesses, or did their positions merely allow them to entertain themselves in manners which all men dreamt about but few could indulge in? Whatever the answer, Rome would have to be a good city for it. City of the Caesars, Zaitzev thought, it ought to be. He thought of the travel and history books he'd read on the city and the era-cla.s.sical history in the Soviet Union had some political commentary, but not all that much. The political spin applied to every single aspect of life was the most tiring intellectual feature of life in his country, often enough to drive a man to drink-which, in the USSR, wasn't all that distant a drive, of course. Time to go back to work. He took a cipher wheel from his top drawer. It was like a phone dial-you set the letter to be transposed at the top of one dial, then rotated the other to the letter indicated on the page of the transposition pad. In this case, he was working from the beginning of the twelfth line of page 284. That reference would be included in the first line of the transmission so that the recipient would know how to get clear text from the transmitted gibberish.

It was laborious despite the use of the cipher wheel. He had to set the clear-text letter he'd written in the message form, then dial to the transposition letter on the printed page of the cipher-pad book, and write down each individual result. Each operation required him to set his pencil down, dial, pick up the pencil again, recheck his results-twice in his case-and begin again. (The cipher clerks, who did nothing else, worked two-handed, a skill Zaitzev had not acquired.) It was beyond tedious, hardly the sort of work designed for someone educated in mathematics. Like checking spelling tests in a primary school, Zaitzev grumbled to himself. It took more than six minutes to get it right. It would have taken less time had he been allowed to have a helper in the process, but that would have violated the rules, and here the rules were adamantine.

Then, with the task done, he had to repeat everything to make sure he hadn't transmitted any garbles, because garbles screwed everything up on both ends of the system, and this way, if they happened, he could blame them on the teletype operators-which everyone did anyway. Another four and a half minutes confirmed that he hadn't made any errors. Good.

Zaitzev rose and walked to the other side of the room, through the door into the transmission room. The noise there was enough to drive a man mad. The teletypes were of an old design-actually, one had been stolen from Germany in the 1930s-and sounded like machine guns, though without the banging noise of exploding cartridges. In front of each machine was a uniformed typist-they were all men, each sitting erect like a statue, his hands seemingly affixed to the keyboard in front of him. They all had ear protection, lest the noise in the room land them in a psychiatric hospital. Zaitzev walked his message form to the room supervisor, who took the sheet without a word-he wore ear-protectors, too-and walked it to the leftmost typist in the back row. There, the supervisor clipped it to a vertical board over the keyboard. At the top of the form was the identifier for the destination. The typist dialed the proper number, then waited for the warbling sound of the teleprinter at the other end-it had been designed to get past the ear plugs, and it also lit up a yellow light on the teletype machine. He then typed in the gibberish.

How they did that without going mad, Zaitzev did not understand. The human mind craved patterns and good sense, but typing TKALNNETPTN required robotic attention to detail and a total denial of humanity. Some said that the typists were all expert pianists, but that couldn't be true, Zaitzev was sure. Even the most discordant piano piece had some unifying harmony to it. But not a one-time-pad cipher.

The typist looked up after just a few seconds: "Transmission complete, comrade." Zaitzev nodded and walked back to the supervisor's desk.

"If anything comes in with this operation-reference number, bring it to me immediately."

"Yes, Comrade Captain," the supervisor acknowledged, making a notation on his set of "hot" numbers.

With that done, Zaitzev headed back for his desk, where the work pile was already quite high enough, and only marginally less mind-numbing than that of the robots in the next room. Perhaps that was why something started whispering at the back of his head: physically close to the Pope . . . why?

THE ALARM WENT OFF at a quarter of six. That was an uncivilized hour. At home, Ryan told himself, it was quarter of one, but that thought did not bear reflection. He flipped the covers clear off the bed and rose, staggering to the bathroom. There was still a lot to get used to here. The toilets flushed pretty much the same, but the sink . . . Why the h.e.l.l, Ryan wondered, did you need two spouts to put water in the sink, one for hot and one for cold? At home you just held your hand under the d.a.m.ned spout, but here the water had to mix up in the sink first, and that slowed you down. The first morning look in the mirror was difficult. Do I really look like that? he always wondered on the way back into the bedroom to pat his wife on the rump.

"It's time, honey."

An oddly feminine grumble. "Yeah. I know."

"Want me to get Little Jack?"

"Let him sleep," Cathy advised. The little guy hadn't felt like sleeping the previous evening. So now, of course, he wouldn't feel like waking up.

" 'Kay." Jack headed to the kitchen. The coffee machine only needed its b.u.t.ton punched, and Ryan was able to handle that task. Just before flying over, he'd seen a new American company IPO. It sold premium coffee, and since Jack had always been something of a coffee sn.o.b, he'd invested $100,000 and gotten himself some of their product-as fine a country as England might be, it was not a place you visited for the coffee. At least he could get Maxwell House from the Air Force, and perhaps he'd get this new Starbucks outfit to s.h.i.+p him some of their brew. One more mental note to make. Next he wondered what Cathy might make for breakfast. Surgeon or not, she regarded the kitchen as her domain. Her husband was allowed to make sandwiches and fix drinks, but that was about it. That suited Jack, for whom a stove was terra incognita. The stove here was gas, like his mom had used, but with a different trademark. He stumbled to the front door, hoping to find a newspaper.

It was there. Ryan had signed up for the Times, to go with the International Herald Tribune he picked up at the train station in London. Finally, he switched on the TV. Remarkably, there was a start-up version of cable TV in this subdivision, and, mirabile dictu, it had the new American CNN news service-just in time for baseball scores. So England was civilized after all. The Orioles had knocked off Cleveland the previous night, 54, in eleven innings. The ballplayers were doubtless in bed right now, sleeping off the postgame beers they'd quaffed at their hotel bar. What a pleasant thought that was. They had a good eight hours of sack time ahead of them. At the turn of the hour, the CNN night crew in Atlanta summarized the previous day's events. Nothing overly remarkable. The economy was still a little fluky. The Dow Jones had snapped back nicely, but the unemployment rate always lagged behind, and so did working-cla.s.s voters. Well, that was democracy for you. Ryan had to remind himself that his view of the economy was probably different from that of the guys who made the steel and a.s.sembled the Chevys. His dad had been a union member, albeit a police lieutenant and part of management rather than labor, and his dad had voted Democrat most of the time. Ryan hadn't registered in either party, opting instead to be an independent. It limited the junk mail you got, and who cared about primaries, anyway?

"Morning, Jack," Cathy said, entering the kitchen in her pink housecoat. It was shabby, which was surprising, since his wife was always a fastidious dresser. He hadn't asked, but supposed it had sentimental significance.

"Hey, babe." Jack rose to give his wife the first kiss of the day, accompanied by a rather limp hug. "Paper?"

"No. I'll save it for the train." She pulled open the refrigerator door and pulled some things out. Jack didn't look.

"Having coffee this morning?"

"Sure. I don't have any procedures scheduled." If she had a surgery scheduled, Cathy kept off the coffee, lest the caffeine give her hands a minor tremor. You couldn't have that when you were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g an eyeball back together. No, today was get-acquainted day with Professor Byrd. Bernie Katz knew him and called him a friend, which boded well, and besides, Cathy was about as good as eye surgeons got, and there was no reason for her to be the least bit concerned about a new hospital and a new boss. Still, such concerns were human, though Cathy was too macho to let it show. "How does bacon and eggs grab you?" she asked.

"I'm allowed to have some cholesterol?" her husband asked in surprise.

"Once a week," Mrs. Dr. Ryan replied, imperiously. Tomorrow she'd serve him oatmeal.

"Sounds good to me, babe," Ryan said, with some pleasure.

"I know you'll get something bad for you at the office anyway."

"Moi?"

"Yeah, croissant and b.u.t.ter, probably. They're made entirely out of b.u.t.ter anyway, you know."

"Bread without b.u.t.ter is like a shower without soap."