by Tom Clancy
“Sergey, I always used to say that if the world made sense, I’d be out of a job. So look what’s happening. Want some coffee?”
“I would like that, Jack.” A moment later he expressed approval of the brew.
“Nancy sets it up for me every morning. So. What can I do for you?”
“I have often heard that question, but never in such surroundings as this.” There was a rumbling laugh from Ryan’s guest. “My God, Jack, do you ever wonder if this is all the result of some drug-induced dream?”
“Can’t be. I cut myself shaving the other day and I didn’t wake up.”
Golovko muttered something in Russian that Jack didn’t catch, though his translators would when they went over the tapes.
“I am the one who reports to our parliamentarians on our activities. Your Director was kind enough to respond favorably to our request for advice.”
Ryan couldn’t resist that opening: “No problem, Sergey Nikolayevich. You can screen all your information through me. I’d be delighted to tell you how to present it.” Golovko took it like a man.
“Thank you, but the Chairman might not understand.” With jokes aside, it was time for business.
“We want a quid pro quo. ”The fencing began.
“And that is?”
“Information on the terrorists you guys used to support.”
“We cannot do that,” Golovko said flatly.
“Sure you can.”
Next Golovko waved the flag: “An intelligence service cannot betray confidences and continue to function.”
“Really? Tell Castro that next time you see him,” Ryan suggested.
“You’re getting better at this, Jack.”
“Thank you, Sergey. My government is most gratified indeed for your President’s recent statement on terrorism. Hell, I like the guy personally. You know that. We’re changing the world, man. Let’s clean a few more messes up. You never approved of your government’s support for those creeps.”
“What makes you believe that?” the First Deputy Chairman asked.
“Sergey, you’re a professional intelligence officer. There’s no way you can personally approve the actions of undisciplined criminals. I feel the same way, of course, but in my case it’s personal.” Ryan leaned back with a hard look. He would always remember Sean Miller and the other members of the Ulster Liberation Army who’d made two earnest attempts to kill Jack Ryan and his family. Only three weeks earlier, after years exhausting every legal opportunity, after three writs to the Supreme Court, after demonstrations and appeals to the Governor of Maryland and the President of the United States for executive clemency, Miller and his colleagues had, one by one, walked into the gas chamber in Baltimore, and been carried out half an hour later, quite dead. And may God have mercy on their souls, Ryan thought. If God has a strong enough stomach. One chapter in his life was now closed for good.
“And the recent incident ... ?”
“The Indians? That merely illustrates my case. Those ‘revolutionaries’ were dealing drugs to make money. They’re going to turn on you, the people you used to fund. In a few years they’re going to be more of a problem for you than they ever were for us.” That was entirely correct, of course, and both men knew it. The terrorist-drug connection was something the Soviets were starting to worry about. Free enterprise was starting most rapidly of all in Russia’s criminal sector. That was as troubling to Ryan as to Golovko. “What do you say?”
Golovko inclined his head to the side. “I will discuss it with the Chairman. He will approve.”
“Remember what I said over in Moscow a couple of years back? Who needs diplomats to handle negotiations when you have real people to settle things?”
“I expected a quote from Kipling or something similarly poetic,” the Russian observed dryly. “So how do you deal with your Congress?”
Jack chuckled. “Short version is, you tell them the truth.”
“I needed to fly eleven thousand kilometers to hear you say that?”
“You select a handful of people in your parliament you can trust to keep their mouths shut, and whom the rest of parliament trust to be completely honest—that’s the hard part—and you brief them into everything they need to know. You have to set up ground rules—”
“Ground rules?”
“A baseball term, Sergey. It means the special rules that apply to a specific playing field.”
Golovko’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, that is a useful term.”
“Everyone has to agree on the rules, and you may never, ever break them.” Ryan paused. He was talking like a college lecturer again, and it wasn’t fair to speak that way to a fellow professional.
Golovko frowned. That was the hard part, of course: never, ever breaking the rules. The intelligence business wasn’t often that cut and dried. And conspiracy was part of the Russian soul.
“It’s worked for us,” Ryan added.
Or has it? Ryan wondered. Sergey knows if it has or not ... well, he knows some things that I don’t. He could tell me if we’ve had major leaks on the Hill since Peter Henderson... but at the same time he knows that we’ve penetrated so many of their operations despite their manic passion for the utmost secrecy. Even the Soviets had admitted it publicly: the hemorrhage of defectors from KGB over the years had gutted scores of exquisitely planned operations against America and the West. In the Soviet Union as in America, secrecy was designed to shield failure as well as success.
“What it comes down to is trust,” Ryan said after another moment. “The people in your parliament are patriots. If they didn’t love their country, why would they put up with all the bullshit aspects of public life? It’s the same here.”
“Power,” Golovko responded at once.
“No, not the smart ones, not the ones you will be dealing with. Oh, there’ll be a few idiots. We have them here. They are not an endangered species. But there are always those who’re smart enough to know that the power that comes with government service is an illusion. The duty that comes along with it is always greater in magnitude. No, Sergey, for the most part you’ll be dealing with people as smart and honest as you are.”
Golovko’s head jerked at the compliment, one professional to another. He’d guessed right a few minutes earlier, Ryan was getting good at this. He started to think that he and Ryan were not really enemies any longer. Competitors, perhaps, but not enemies. There was more than professional respect between them now.
Ryan looked benignly at his visitor, smiling inwardly at having surprised him. And hoping that one of the people Golovko would select for oversight would be Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev, code name SPINNAKER. Known in the media as one of the most brilliant Soviet parliamentarians in a bumptious legislative body struggling to build a new country, his reputation for intelligence and integrity belied the fact that he’d been on the CIA payroll for several years, the best of all the agents recruited by Mary Pat Foley. The game goes on, Ryan thought. The rules were different. The world was different. But the game went on. Probably always would, Jack thought, vaguely sorry it was true. But, hell, America even spied on Israel—it was called “keeping an eye on things”; it was never called “running an operation.” The oversight people in Congress would have leaked that in a minute. Oh, Sergey, do you have a lot of new things to learn about!
Lunch followed. Ryan took his guest to the executive dining room, where Golovko found the food somewhat better than KGB standards—something Ryan would not have believed. He also found that the top CIA executives wanted to meet him. The Directorate chiefs and their principal deputies all stood in line to shake his hand and be photographed. Finally there was a group photo before Golovko had taken the executive elevator back to his car. Then the people from Science and Technology, and Security had swept every inch of every corridor and room Golovko and his bodyguard had traveled. Finding nothing, they had swept again. And again. And once more until it was decided that he had not availed himself of the opportunity to play his own games. One of th
e S&T people had lamented the fact that it just wasn’t the same anymore.
Ryan smiled, remembering the remark. Things were happening so goddamned fast. He settled back into the chair and tightened his seat belt. The VC-20 was approaching the Alps, and the air might be bumpy there.
“Want a paper, sir?” the attendant asked. It was a girl for a change, and a pretty one. Also married and pregnant. A pregnant staff sergeant. It made Ryan uneasy to be served by someone like that.
“What d’you have?”
“International Trib. ”
“Great!” Ryan took the paper—and nearly gasped. There it was, right on the front page. Some bonehead had leaked one of the photos. Golovko, Ryan, the directors of S&T, Ops, Admin, Records, and Intelligence, plunging through their lunches. None of the American identities were secret, of course, but even so....
“Not a real good picture, sir,” the sergeant noted with a grin. Ryan was unable to be unhappy.
“When are you due, Sarge?”
“Five more months, sir.”
“Well, you’ll be bringing your child into a much better world than the one either one of us was stuck with. Why don’t you sit down and relax? I’m not liberated enough to be waited on by a pregnant lady.”
The International Herald-Tribune is a joint venture of The New York Times and The Washington Post. The one sure way for Americans traveling in Europe to keep track of the ball scores and important comic strips, it had already broadened its distribution into what had been the Eastern Bloc to serve American businessmen and tourists who were flooding the former communist nations. The locals also used it, both as a way to hone their English skills and to keep track of what was happening in America, more than ever a fascination to people learning how to emulate something they’d been raised to hate. In addition it was as fine an information source as had ever been available in those countries. Soon everyone was buying it, and the American management of the paper was expanding operations to broaden its readership still further.
One such regular reader was Günther Bock. He lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, having left Germany—the eastern part—rather hurriedly some months before, after a warning tip from a former friend in the Stasi. With his wife, Petra, Bock had been a unit leader in the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and after that had been crushed by the West German police, in the Red Army Faction. Two near arrests by the Bundeskriminalamt had frightened him across the Czech border, and thence on to the DDR, where he had settled into a quiet semiretirement. With a new identity, new papers, a regular job—he never showed up, but the employment records were completely in Ordnung—he’d deemed himself safe. Neither he nor Petra had reckoned with the popular revolt that had overturned the government of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but they both decided that they could survive that change in anonymity. They’d never counted on a popular riot storming into Stasi headquarters, either. That event had resulted in the destruction of literally millions of documents. Many of the documents had not been destroyed, however. Many of the rioters had been agents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the West German intelligence agency, who’d been in the front ranks of the intruders and known exactly which rooms to savage. Within days, people from the RAF had started disappearing. It had been hard to tell at first. The DDR telephone system was so decrepit that getting phone calls through had never been easy, and for obvious security reasons the former associates had not lived in the same areas, but when another married couple had failed to make a rendezvous for dinner, Günther and Petra had sensed trouble. Too late. While the husband made rapid plans to leave the country, five heavily armed GSG-9 commandos had kicked down the flimsy door of the Bock apartment in East Berlin. They’d found Petra nursing one of her twin daughters, but whatever sympathy they might have felt at so touching a scene had been mitigated by the fact that Petra Bock had murdered three West German citizens, one quite brutally. Petra was now in a maximum-security prison, serving a life sentence in a country where “life” meant that you left prison in a casket or not at all. The twin daughters were the adopted children of a Munich police captain and his barren wife.
It was very odd, Günther thought, how much that stung him. After all, he was a revolutionary. He had plotted and killed for his cause. It was absurd that he would allow himself to be enraged by the imprisonment of his wife ... and the loss of his children. But. But they had Petra’s nose and eyes, and they’d smiled for him. They would not be taught to hate him, Günther knew. They’d never even be told who he and Petra had been. He’d dedicated himself to something larger and grander than mere corporeal existence. He and his colleagues had made a conscious and reasoned decision to build a better and more just world for the common man, and yet—and yet he and Petra had decided, also in a reasoned and conscious way, to bring into it children who would learn their parents’ ways, to be the next generation of Bocks, to eat the fruits of their parents’ heroic labor. Günther was enraged that this might not happen.
Worse still was his bewilderment. What had happened was quite impossible. Unmöglich. Unglaublich. The people, the common Volk of the DDR had risen up like revolutionaries themselves, forsaking their nearly perfect socialist state, opting instead to merge with the exploitative monstrosity crafted by the imperialist powers. They’d been seduced by Blaupunkt appliances and Mercedes automobiles, and—what? Günther Bock genuinely did not understand. Despite his inborn intelligence, the events did not connect into a comprehensible pattern. That the people of his country had examined “scientific socialism” and decided it did not work, and could never work—that was too great a leap of imagination for him to make. He’d committed too much of his life to Marxism ever to deny it. Without Marxism, after all, he was a criminal, a common murderer. Only his heroic revolutionary ethos elevated his activities above the acts of a thug. But his revolutionary ethos had been summarily rejected by his own chosen beneficiaries. That was simply impossible. Unmöglich.
It wasn’t quite fair that so many impossible things piled one upon another. As he opened the paper he’d bought twenty minutes before at a kiosk seven blocks from his current residence, the photo on the front page caught his eye, as the paper’s editor had fully intended.
CIA FETES KGB, the caption began.
“Was ist das denn für Quatsch?” Günther muttered.
“In yet another remarkable turn in a remarkable time, the Central Intelligence Agency hosted the First Deputy Chairman of the KGB in a conference concerning ‘issues of mutual concern’ to the world’s two largest intelligence empires....” the story read. “Informed sources confirm that the newest area of East-West cooperation will include information-sharing on the increasingly close ties between international terrorists and the international drug trade. CIA and KGB will work together to...”
Bock set the paper down and stared out the window. He knew what it was to be a hunted animal. All revolutionaries did. It was the path he had chosen, along with Petra, and all their friends. The task was a clear one. They would test their cunning and skill against their enemies. The forces of light against the forces of darkness. Of course, it was the forces of light that had to run and hide, but that was a side issue. Sooner or later the situation would be reversed when the common people saw the truth and sided with the revolutionaries. Except for one little problem. The common people had chosen to go another way. And the terrorist world was rapidly running out of dark places in which the forces of light might hide.
He’d come to Bulgaria for two reasons. Of all the former East Bloc countries, Bulgaria was the most backward and because of it had managed the most orderly transition from communist rule. In fact, communists still ran the country, though under different names, and the country was still politically safe, or at least neutral. The Bulgarian intelligence apparat, once the source of designated killers for KGB whose hands had finally become too clean for such activity, was still peopled with reliable friends. Reliable friends, Günther thought. But the Bulgarians were still in the thrall of their Russian masters—associates, now
—and if KGB were really cooperating with CIA ... The number of safe places was being reduced by one more digit.
Giinther Bock should have felt a chill at the increased personal danger. Instead his face flushed and pulsed with rage. As a revolutionary he’d often enough bragged that every hand in the world was turned against him—but whenever he’d said that, it had been with the inner realization that such was not and would never be the case. Now his boast was becoming reality. There were still places to run, still contacts he could trust. But how many? How soon before trusted associates would bend to the changes in the world? The Soviets had betrayed themselves and world socialism. The Germans. The Poles. The Czechs, the Hungarians, the Romanians. Who was next?
Couldn’t they see? It was all a trap, some kind of incredible conspiracy of counterrevolutionary forces. A lie. They were casting away what could be—should be—was—the perfect social order of structured freedom from want, orderly efficiency, of fairness and equality. Of ...
Could that all be a lie? Could it all have been a horrible mistake? Had he and Petra killed those cowering exploiters for nothing?
But it didn’t matter, did it? Not to Günther Bock, not right now. He was soon to be hunted again. One more safe patch of ground was about to become a hunting preserve for his enemies. If the Bulgarians shared their papers with the Russians, if the Russians had a few men in the right office, with the right credentials and the right access, his address and new identity could already be on its way to Washington, and from there to BND headquarters, and in a week’s time he might be sharing a cell close to Petra’s.
Petra, with her light brown hair and laughing blue eyes. As brave a girl as any man could want. Seemingly cold to her victims, wonderfully warm to her comrades. So fine a mother she’d been to Erika and Ursel, so superior at that task as she’d been at every other she’d ever attempted. Betrayed by supposed friends, caged like an animal, robbed of her own offspring. His beloved Petra, comrade, lover, wife, believer. Robbed of her life. And now he was being driven farther from her. There had to be a way to change things back.