Red Rabbit Part 9

Simon Harding was just arriving, too. The usual greeting: "Morning, Jack."

"Hey," Jack grunted in reply on the way to his desk. There was a manila envelope waiting for him. The cover tag said it had been messengered over from the U.S. Emba.s.sy in Grosvenor Square. He ripped the top open to see that it was the report from Hopkins on Mikhail Suslov. Jack flipped through the pages and saw something he'd forgotten. Bernie Katz, ever the thorough doc, had evaluated Suslov's diabetes as dangerously advanced, and predicted that his longevity was going to be limited.

"Here, Simon. Says here the head commie's sicker than he looks."

"Pity," Harding observed, taking it as he fumbled with his pipe. "He's not a very nice chap, you know."

"So I've heard."

Next in Ryan's pile were the morning briefing papers. They were labeled SECRET, which meant that the contents might not be in the newspapers for a day or two. It was interesting even so, because this doc.u.ment occasionally gave sources, and that sometimes told you if the information was good or not. Remarkably, not all the data received by the intelligence services was very reliable. A lot of it could be cla.s.sified as gossip, because even important people inside the world's government loops indulged in it. They were jealous and backbiting sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes, like anyone else. Especially in Was.h.i.+ngton. Perhaps even more so in Moscow? He asked Harding.

"Oh, yes, very much so. Their society depends so much on status, and the backstabbing can be-well, Jack, you could say that it's their national sport. I mean, we have it here as well, of course, but over there it can be remarkably vicious. Rather like it must have been in a medieval court, I imagine-people jockeying for position every b.l.o.o.d.y day. The infighting inside their major bureaucracies must be horrific."

"And how does that affect this sort of information?"

"I often think I should have read psychology at Oxford. We have a number of psychiatrists on staff here-as I'm sure you do at Langley."

"Oh, yeah. I know a few of the pshrinks. Mainly in my directorate, but some in S and T, too. We're not as good at that as we ought to be."

"How so, Jack?"

Ryan stretched in his chair. "A couple of months ago, I was talking to one of Cathy's pals at Hopkins, his name's Solomon, neuropsychiatrist. You'd have to understand Sol. He's real smart-department chairman and all that. He doesn't believe much in putting his patients on the couch and talking to them. He thinks most mental illness comes from chemical imbalances in the brain. They nearly chopped him out of the profession for that but, twenty years later, they all realized that he was right. Anyway, Sol told me that most politicians are like movie stars. They surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men and people to whisper nice s.h.i.+t into their ears-and a lot of them start believing it, because they want to believe it. It's all a great big game to them, but a game where everything is process and d.a.m.ned little of it is product. They're not like real people. They don't do any real work, but they appear to. There's a line in Advise and Consent: Was.h.i.+ngton is a town where you deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. If that's true in Was.h.i.+ngton, then how much more must it be in Moscow? There, everything is politics. It's all symbols, right? So the infighting and backstabbing must really be wild there. I figure that has to affect us in two ways. First, it means that a lot of the data we get is skewed, because the sources of the data either don't know reality even when it jumps up and bites them on the a.s.s, or they twist the data for their own ends as they process it and pa.s.s it on-whether consciously or unconsciously. Second, it means that even the people on the other side who need the data don't know good from bad, so even if we can figure it out, we can't predict what it means because they can't decide for themselves what the h.e.l.l to do with it-even if they know what the h.e.l.l it is in the first place. We here have to a.n.a.lyze faulty information that will probably be incorrectly implemented by the people to whom it's supposed to go. So, how the h.e.l.l do we predict what they will do when they themselves don't know the right thing to do?"

That was worth a grin around the pipe stem. "Very good, Jack. You're starting to catch on. Very little they do makes any b.l.o.o.d.y sense, objectively speaking. However, it isn't all that hard to predict their behavior. You decide for yourself what the intelligent action is, and then reverse it. Works every time," Harding laughed.

"But the other thing Sol said that worries me is that people like that who have power in their hands can be dangerous sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes. They don't know when to stop, and they don't know how to use their power intelligently. I guess that's how Afghanistan got started."

"Correct." Simon nodded seriously. "They are captured by their own ideological illusions, and they can't see their way clear of it. And the real problem is, they do control a b.l.o.o.d.y great lot of power."

"I'm missing something in the equation," Ryan said.

"We all are, Jack. That's part of the job."

It was time to change subjects: "Anything new on the Pope?"

"Nothing yet today. If Basil has anything, I ought to hear about it before lunch. Worried about that?"

Jack nodded soberly. "Yeah. The problem is, if we do see a real threat, what the h.e.l.l can we do about it? It's not like we can put a company of Marines around him, is it? Exposed as he is-I mean, he's in public so much that you can't protect him."

"And people like him don't shrink from danger, do they?"

"I remember when Martin Luther King got whacked. h.e.l.l, he knew-he must have known-there were guns out there with his name on them. But he never backed away. It just wasn't part of his ethos to run and hide. Won't be any different in Rome, buddy, and every other place he goes."

"Moving targets are supposed to be harder to hit," Simon observed halfheartedly.

"Not when you know where he's moving to a month or two in advance. If KGB decides to put a hit on the guy, d.a.m.n, I don't see much we can do about it."

"Except perhaps to warn him."

"Great. So he can laugh about it. He probably would, you know. He's been through n.a.z.is and communists for the past forty years. What the h.e.l.l is left to scare the guy with?" Ryan paused. "If they decide to do it, who pushes the b.u.t.ton?"

"I should think it would have to be voted on by the Politburo itself in plenary session. The political implications are too severe for any one member, however senior, to try something like this on his own authority, and remember how collegial they are-no one moves anywhere by himself, even Andropov, who's the most independent-minded of the lot."

"Okay, that's-what? Fifteen guys have to vote up or down on it. Fifteen mouths, plus staffs and family members to talk to about it. How good are our sources? Will we hear about it?"

"Sensitive question, Jack. I cannot answer that one, I'm afraid."

"Can't-can't or can't-I'm-not-allowed-to?" Jack asked more pointedly.

"Jack, yes, we have sources of which I am aware, but which I cannot discuss with you." Harding actually seemed embarra.s.sed to say it.

"Hey, I understand, Simon." Jack had some of those himself. For instance, he couldn't even speak the words TALENT KEYHOLE here, for which he was cleared, but which was NOFORN, no talking about this one to a foreigner-even though Simon and certainly Sir Basil knew quite a bit about it. It was so perverse, because it mainly denied information to people who might have made good use of it. If Wall Street acted this way, all of America would be under the poverty line, Jack groused. Either people were trustworthy or they were not. But the game had its rules, and Ryan played by those rules. That was the cost of admittance into this particular club.

"This is b.l.o.o.d.y good stuff," Harding said, flipping to page three of Bernie Katz's debriefing.

"Bernie's smart," Ryan confirmed. "That's why Cathy likes working for him."

"But he's an eye doctor, not a psychiatrist, correct?"

"Simon, at that level of medicine, everybody is a little bit of everything. I asked Cathy: The diabetic retinopathy Suslov had is indicative of a major health problem. The diabetes messes up the little blood vessels in the back of the eye, and you can see it when you do an examination. Bernie and his team fixed it partway-you can't fix it all the way-and gave him back about, oh, seventy-five to eighty percent of his sight, good enough to drive a car in daylight, anyway, but the underlying health problem is a mother. It isn't just the small blood vessels in the eye, right? He's got that problem all over his body. Figure Red Mike will croak from kidney failure or heart disease in the next two years at the outside."

"Our chaps think he's got five years or so," Harding offered.

"Well, I'm not a doc. You can have some people talk to Bernie about it if you want, but everything is right there. Cathy says you can tell a lot about diabetes from looking at the eyeball."

"Does Suslov know that?"

Ryan shrugged. "That is a good question, Simon. Docs don't always tell their patients, probably less so over there. Figure Suslov's being treated by a politically reliable doctor of professorial rank. Here, that would mean a top-drawer guy who really knows his stuff. Over there . . . ?"

Harding nodded. "Correct. He may know his Lenin more than his Pasteur. Did you ever hear about Sergey Korolev, their chief rocket designer? That was a particularly ugly incident. The poor b.u.g.g.e.r was essentially murdered on the table because two senior surgeons didn't like each other, and one wouldn't bail the other out when the boat began to leak badly. It was probably good for the West, but he was a fine engineer, and he was killed by medical incompetence."

"Anybody pay up for that one?" Ryan asked.

"Oh, no. They were both too politically important, lots of patrons in high places. They're safe, until they kill one of their friends, and that won't happen. I'm sure they both have competent young people under them to cover their backsides."

"You know what they need in Russia? Lawyers. I don't like ambulancechasers, but I guess they do keep people on their toes."

"In any case, no, Suslov probably does not know the gravity of his condition. At least that's what our medical consultants think. He still drinks his vodka according to HUMINT reports, and that is definitely contraindicated." Harding grimaced. "And his replacement will be Alexandrov, every bit as unpleasant a chap as his mentor. I'll have to see about updating his dossier." He made a note.

As for Ryan, he turned back to his morning briefing pages before starting on his official project. Greer wanted Ryan to work on a study of management practices in the Soviet armament industry, to see how-and if-that segment of the Soviet economy worked. Ryan and Harding would be cooperating on the study, which would use both British and American data. It was something that suited Ryan's academic background. It might even get him noticed high up.

THE RETURN MESSAGE came in at 11:32 hours. Fast work in Rome, Zaitzev thought, as he began the decryption. He'd call Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy as soon as he got through it, but it was going to take a while. The captain checked the wall clock. It would delay his lunch, too, but the priority condemned him to some stomach growls. About the only good news was that Colonel G.o.derenko had started his encipherment sequence at the top of page 285.

MOST SECRET.

IMMEDIATE AND URGENT.

FROM: REZIDENT ROME.

TO: OFFICE OF CHAIRMAN, MOSCOW CENTRE.

REFERENCE: YOUR OP DISPATCH 15-8-82-666.

GETTING CLOSE TO THE PRIEST IS NOT DIFFICULT WITHOUT FIXED TIME CONSTRAINTS. GUIDANCE WILL BE NEEDED FOR A FULL EVALUATION OF YOUR REQUEST. PRIEST ENGAGES IN PREDICTABLE.

PUBLIC AUDIENCES AND APPEARANCES WHICH ARE KNOWN WELL IN ADVANCE. TO MAKE USE OF THIS OPPORTUNITY WILL NOT RPT NOT BE EASY DUE TO LARGE CROWDS ATTENDING FUNCTIONS.

SECURITY ARRANGEMENTS FOR HIM DIFFICULT TO a.s.sESS WITHOUT FURTHER GUIDANCE. RECOMMEND AGAINST PHYSICAL ACTION TO BE TAKEN AGAINST PRIEST DUE TO EXPECTED ADVERSE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES. DIFFICULT TO HIDE ORIGIN OF AN OPERATION AGAINST PRIEST. ENDS.

Well, Zaitzev thought, the rezident didn't like this idea very much. Would Yuriy Vladimirovich listen to this bit of advice from the field? That, Zaitzev knew, was far above his pay grade. He lifted his phone and dialed.

"Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy," the brusque voice answered.

"Captain Zaitzev in Communications Central. I have a reply to your six-six-six, Comrade Colonel."

"On my way," Rozhdestvenskiy responded.

The colonel was as good as his word, pa.s.sing through the control point three minutes later. By that time, Zaitzev had returned the cipher book to central storage and slipped the message form, plus the translation, into a brown envelope, which he handed to the colonel.

Has anyone seen this?" Rozhdestvenskiy asked.

"Certainly not, comrade," Zaitzev replied.

"Very well." Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy walked away without another word. For his part, Zaitzev left his work desk and headed off to the cafeteria for lunch. The food was the best reason to work at The Centre.

What he could not leave behind as he stopped at the lavatory to wash his hands was the message sequence. Yuriy Andropov wanted to kill the Pope, and the rezident in Rome didn't like the idea. Zaitzev wasn't supposed to have any opinions. He was just part of the communications system. It rarely occurred to the hierarchy of the Committee for State Security that its people actually had minds . . .

. . . and even consciences . . .

Zaitzev took his place in line and got the metal tray and utensils. He decided on the beef stew and four thick slices of bread, with a large gla.s.s of tea. The cas.h.i.+er charged him fifty-five kopecks. His usual luncheon mates had already been and gone, so he ended up picking an end seat at a table filled with people he didn't know. They were talking about football, and he didn't join in, alone with his thoughts. The stew was quite good, as was the bread, fresh from the ovens. About the only thing they didn't have here was proper silverware, as they did in the private dining rooms on the upper floors. Instead they used the same feather-light zinc-aluminum as all the other Soviet citizens. It worked well enough, but because it was so light, it felt awkward in his hands.

So, he thought, I was right. The Chairman is thinking about murdering the Pope. Zaitzev was not a religious man. He had not been to a church in his entire life-except those large buildings converted to museums since the Revolution. All he knew about religion was the propaganda dispensed as a matter of course in Soviet public education. And yet some of the children he'd known in school had talked about believing in G.o.d, and he hadn't reported them, because informing just wasn't his way. The Great Questions of Life were things he didn't much think about. For the most part, life in the Soviet Union was limited to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The economic facts of life really didn't allow a person to make long-term plans. There were no country houses to buy, no luxury cars to desire, no elaborate vacations to save for. In committing what it called socialism on the people, the government of his country allowed-forced-everyone to aspire to much the same things, regardless of individual tastes, which meant getting on an endless list and being notified when one's name came up-and being unknowingly b.u.mped by those with greater Party seniority-or not, because some people had access to better places. His life, like everyone else's, was like that of a steer on a feed lot. He was cared for moderately well and fed the same bland food at the same time on endlessly identical days. There was a grayness, an overarching boredom, to every aspect of life-alleviated in his case only by the content of the messages which he processed and forwarded. He wasn't supposed to think about the messages, much less remember them, but without anybody to talk to, all he could do was dwell on them in the privacy of his own mind. Today his mind had just one occupant, and it would not silence itself. It raced around like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going round and round but always returning to the same place.

Andropov wants to kill the Pope.

He'd processed a.s.sa.s.sination messages before. Not many. KGB was gradually drifting away from it. Too many things went wrong. Despite the professional skill and cleverness of the field officers, policemen in other countries were endlessly clever and had the mindless patience of a spider in its web, and until KGB could just wish a person dead and have it come to pa.s.s, there would be witnesses and evidence, because a cloak of invisibility was something found only in tales for children.

More often he processed messages about defectors or suspected would-be defectors-or, just as deadly, suspicion of officers and agents who'd "doubled," gone over to serve the enemy. He'd even seen such evidence pa.s.sed along in message form, calling an officer home for "consultations" from which they'd rarely returned back to their rezidenturas. Exactly what happened to them-that was just the subject of gossip, all of it unpleasant. One officer who'd gone bad, the story went, had been loaded alive into a crematorium, the way the German SS was supposed to have done. He'd heard there was a film of it, and he'd talked to people who knew people who knew people who'd seen it. But he had never actually seen it himself, nor met anyone who had. Some things, Oleg Ivanovich thought, were too beyond the pale even for the KGB. No, most of the stories talked of firing squads-which often f.u.c.ked up, so the stories went-or a single pistol round in the head, as Lavrenti Beriya had done himself. Those stories, everyone believed. He'd seen photos of Beria, and they seemed to drip with blood. And Iron Feliks would doubtless have done it between bites of his sandwich. He was the kind of man to give ruthlessness an evil name.

But it was generally felt, if not widely spoken, that KGB was becoming more kulturniy in its dealings with the world. More cultured. More civilized. Kinder and gentler. Traitors, of course, were executed, but only after a trial in which they were at least given a pro forma chance to explain their actions and, if they were innocent, to prove it. It almost never happened, but only because the State only prosecuted the truly guilty. The investigators in the Second Chief Directorate were among the most feared and skilled people in the entire country. It was said they were never wrong and never fooled, like some kind of G.o.ds.

Except that the State said that there were no G.o.ds.

Men, then-and women. Everyone knew about the Sparrow School, about which the men often spoke with twisty grins and winking eyes. Ah, to be an instructor or, better still, a quality-a.s.surance officer there! they dreamed. And to be paid for it. As his Irina often noted, all men were pigs. But, Zaitzev mused, it could be fun to be a pig.

Kill the Pope-why? He was no threat to this country. Stalin himself had once joked, How many divisions does the Pope have? So why kill the man? Even the rezident warned against it. G.o.derenko feared the political repercussions. Stalin had ordered Trotsky killed, and had dispatched a KGB officer to do it, knowing that he'd suffer long-term imprisonment for the task. But he'd done it, faithful to the Will of the Party, in a professional gesture that they talked about in the academy training cla.s.ses-along with the more casual advice that we really don't do that sort of thing anymore. It was not, the instructors didn't add, kulturniy. And so, yes, KGB was drifting away from that sort of behavior.

Until now. Until today. And even our senior rezident is advising against it. Why? Because he doesn't want himself and his agency-and his country! -to be so nekulturniy?

Or because to do so would be worse than foolish? It would be wrong . . . ? "Wrong" was a concept foreign to citizens in the Soviet Union. At least, what people perceived as things that were morally wrong. Morality in his country had been replaced by what was politically correct or incorrect. Whatever served the interests of his country's political system was worthy of praise. That which did not was worthy of . . . death?

And who decided such things?

Men did.

Men did because there was no morality, as the world understood the term. There was no G.o.d to p.r.o.nounce what was good and what was evil.

And yet . . .

And yet, in the heart of every man was an inborn knowledge of right and wrong. To kill another man was wrong. To take a man's life you had to have a just cause. But it was also men who decided what const.i.tuted such cause. The right men in the right place with the right authority had the ability and the right to kill because-why?

Because Marx and Lenin said so.

That was what the government of his country had long since decided.

Zaitzev b.u.t.tered his last piece of bread and dipped it in the remaining gravy in his bowl before eating it. He knew he was thinking overly deep, even dangerous, thoughts. His parent society did not encourage or even permit independent thinking. You were not supposed to question the Party and its wisdom. Certainly not here. In the KGB cafeteria, you never, ever, not even once heard someone wonder aloud if the Party and the Motherland it served and protected were even capable of doing an incorrect act. Oh, maybe once in a while, people speculated on tactics, but even then the talk was within limits that were taller and stronger than the Kremlin's own brick walls.

His country's morality, he mused, had been predetermined by a German Jew living in London, and the son of a czarist bureaucrat who simply hadn't liked the czar much and whose overly adventurous brother had been executed for taking direct action. That man had found shelter in that most capitalistic of nations, Switzerland, then had been dispatched back to Mother Russia by the Germans in the hope that he could upset the czar's government, allowing Germany then to defeat the other Western nations on the Western Front of the First World War. All in all, it didn't sound like something ordained by any deity for some great plan for human advancement, did it? Everything Lenin had used as a model for changing his country-and through it, the entire world-had come from a book written by Karl Marx, more writings by Friedrich Engels, and his own vision for becoming the chief of a new kind of country.

The only thing that distinguished Marxism-Leninism from a religion was the lack of a G.o.dhead. Both systems claimed absolute authority over the affairs of men, and both claimed to be right a priori. Except that his country's system chose to a.s.sert that authority by exercising the power of life and death.

His country said it worked for justice, for the good of the workers and peasants all around the world. But other men, higher up in the hierarchy, decided who the workers and peasant were, and they themselves lived in ornate dachas and multiroom flats, and had automobiles and drivers . . . and privileges.

What privileges they had! Zaitzev had also dispatched messages about pantyhose and perfumes that the men in this building wanted for their women. These items were often delivered in the diplomatic bag from emba.s.sies in the West, things his own country could not produce, but which the nomenklatura craved, along with their West German refrigerators and stoves. When he saw the big shots racing down the center of Moscow's streets in their chauffeured Zils, then Zaitzev understood how Lenin had felt about the czars. The czar had claimed divine right as his personal deed to power. The Party chieftains claimed their positions by the will of the people.

Except that the People had never given anything to them by public acclamation. The Western democracies had elections-Pravda spat upon them every few years-but they were real elections. England was now run by a nasty-looking woman, and America by an aged and buffoonish actor, but both had been chosen by the people of their countries, and the previous rulers had been removed by popular choice. Neither leader was wellloved in the Soviet Union, and he'd seen many official messages sent out to ascertain their mental state and deeply held political beliefs; the concern in those messages had been manifest, and Zaitzev himself had his worries, but as distasteful and unstable as these leaders might be, their people had chosen them. The Soviet people had decidedly not selected the current crop of princes on the Politburo.

And now the new communist princes were thinking about murdering a Polish priest in Rome. But how did he threaten the Rodina? This Pope fellow had no military formations at his command. A political threat, then? But how? The Vatican was supposed to have diplomatic ident.i.ty, but nationhood without military power was-what? If there was no G.o.d, then whatever power the Pope exercised had to be an illusion, of no more substance than a puff of cigarette smoke. Zaitzev's country had the greatest army on earth, a fact proclaimed regularly by We Serve the Soviet Union, the TV show that everybody watched.

So, why do they want to kill a man who poses no threat? Would he part the oceans with a wave of his staff or bring down plagues on the land? Of course not.

And to kill a harmless man is a crime, Zaitzev told himself, exercising his mind for the first time in his tenure at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square, silently a.s.serting his free will. He'd asked a question and come up with an answer.

It would have been helpful if he'd had someone to talk to about that, but of course that was out of the question. That left Zaitzev without a safety valve-a way to process his feelings and bring them to some kind of resolution. The laws and customs of his nation forced him to recycle his thoughts over and over, and ultimately that led in only one direction. That it was a direction of which the State would not approve was, in the end, a product of the State's own making.

On finis.h.i.+ng his lunch, he sipped his tea and lit a cigarette, but that contemplative act didn't help the state of his mind. The hamster was still running in its wheel. No one in the huge dining room noticed. To those who saw Zaitzev, he was just one more man enjoying his after-meal smoke in solitude. Like all Soviet citizens, Zaitzev knew how to hide his feelings, and so his face gave nothing away. He just looked at the wall clock so that he wouldn't be late going back to work for his afternoon watch, just one more bureaucrat in a large building full of them.

UPSTAIRS, it was a little different. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy hadn't wanted to interrupt the Chairman's lunch, and so he'd sat in his own office waiting for the hands on the clock to move, munching on his own sandwich but ignoring the cup of soup that had come with it. Like his Chairman, he smoked American Marlboro cigarettes, which were milder and better made than their Soviet counterparts. It was an affectation he'd picked up in the field, but as a high-ranking First Chief Directorate officer, he could shop at the special store in Moscow Centre. They were expensive, even for one paid in "certificate" rubles, but he only drank cheap vodka, so it evened out. He wondered how Yuriy Vladimirovich would react to G.o.derenko's message. Ruslan Borissovich was a very capable rezident, careful and conservative, and a man senior enough to be allowed to talk back, as it were. His job, after all, was to feed good information to Moscow Centre, and if he thought something might compromise that mission, it was his duty to warn them about it-and besides, the original dispatch had not carried an obligatory directive in it, just an instruction to ascertain a situation. So, no, Ruslan Borissovich would probably not get into any trouble from his reply. But Andropov might bark and, if he did, then he, Colonel A. N. Rozhdestvenskiy, would bear the noise, which was never fun. His place here was enviable in one way and frightening in another. He had the ear of the Chairman, but being that close meant that he had to be close to the teeth, too. In the history of KGB, it was not unknown for some people to suffer for the actions of others. But it was unlikely in this case. Though an undeniably tough man, Andropov was also a reasonably fair one. Even so, it didn't pay to be too close to a rumbling volcano. His desk phone rang. It was the Chairman's private secretary.

"The Chairman will see you now, Comrade Colonel."

"Spasiba." He rose and walked down the corridor.

"We have a reply from Colonel G.o.derenko," Rozhdestvenskiy reported, handing it over.

For his part, Andropov was not surprised, and to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy's invisible relief, he did not lose his temper.

"I expected this. Our people have lost their sense of daring, haven't they, Aleksey Nikolay'ch?"