by Tom Clancy
IN MOSCOW, the secure fax went into the office of Mike Russell. Oddly, it was a graphic, the first-edition cover of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. The address on the cover sheet told him who was supposed to get it. And on the page was a handwritten message: “Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail have moved to a new hutch.”
So, Russell thought, they did have a Rabbit case, and it had been successfully run. Nothing he could claim to know for certain, but he knew the language spoken in the community. He walked down to Ed Foley’s office and knocked on the door.
“Come,” Foley’s voice called.
“This just came in from Washington, Ed.” Russell handed the fax across.
“Well, that’s good news,” the COS observed. He folded the signal into his jacket pocket for Mary Pat. “There’s an additional message in this fax, Mike,” Foley said.
“What’s that?”
“Our comms are secure, pal. Otherwise it would not have come in this way.”
“Well, thank the Good Lord for that,” Russell said.
Chapter 30.
Flavian Amphitheater
“Ryan? He did what?” Bob Ritter growled.
“Bob, you want to settle down? It’s nothing to get your tits in a flutter about,” James Greer said, half soothingly and half an indirect challenge in the CIA’s in-house power playground. Judge Moore looked on in amusement. “Jack went into the field to observe an operation for which we had no available field officer. He didn’t step on his crank with the golf shoes, and the defector is in a safe house in the English Midlands right now, and from what I hear, he’s singing like a canary.”
“Well, what’s he telling us?”
“For starters,” Judge Moore answered, “it seems that our friend Andropov wants to assassinate the Pope.”
Ritter’s head snapped around. “How solid is that?”
“It’s what made the Rabbit decide to take a walk,” the DCI said. “He’s a conscience defector, and that set him off.”
“Okay, good. What does he know?” the DDO asked.
“Bob, it seems that this defector—his name is Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev, by the way—was a senior watch officer in The Centre’s communications, their version of our MERCURY.”
“Shit,” Ritter observed an instant later. “This is for real?”
“You know, sometimes a guy puts a quarter in the slot and pulls the handle and he really does get the jackpot,” Moore told his subordinate.
“Well, damn.”
“I didn’t think you’d object. And the good part,” the DCI went on, “is that Ivan doesn’t know he’s gone.”
“How the hell did we do that?”
“It was Ed and Mary Pat who twigged to that possibility.” Then Judge Moore explained how it had been carried out. “They both deserve a nice pat on the head, Bob.”
“And all while I was out of town,” Ritter breathed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Yes, there’s a bunch of attaboy letters to be drawn up,” Greer said next. “Including one for Jack.”
“I suppose,” the DDO conceded. He went quiet for a moment, thinking over the possibilities of Operation BEATRIX. “Anything good so far?”
“Aside from the plot against the Pope? Two code names of penetration agents they have working: NEPTUNE—he sounds like somebody working in the Navy—and CASSIUS. He’s probably on The Hill. More to come, I expect.”
“I talked to Ryan a few minutes ago. He’s pretty excited about this guy, says his knowledge is encyclopedic, says there’s gold in these hills, to quote the boy.”
“Ryan does know a thing or two about gold,” Moore thought out loud.
“Fine, we’ll make him our portfolio manager, but he isn’t a field officer,” Ritter groused.
“Bob, he succeeded. We don’t punish people for that, do we?” the DCI asked. This had gone far enough. It was time for Moore to act like the appeals-court judge he had been until a couple years before: the Voice of God.
“Fine, Arthur. You want me to sign the letter of commendation?” Ritter saw the freight train coming, and there was no sense in standing in its way. What the hell, it would just go into the files anyway. CIA commendations almost never saw the light of day. The Agency even classified the names of field officers who’d died heroically thirty years before. It was like a back door into heaven, CIA style.
“Okay, gentlemen, now that we’ve settled the administrative issues, what about the plot to kill the Pope?” Greer asked, trying to bring order back to the meeting of supposed sober senior executives.
“How solid is the information?” Ritter wanted to know.
“I talked to Basil a few minutes ago. He thinks we need to take it seriously, but I think we need to talk to this Rabbit ourselves to quantify the danger to our Polish friend.”
“Tell the President?”
Moore shook his head. “He’s tied up all day today with legislative business, and he’s flying out to California late this afternoon. Sunday and Monday, he’ll be giving speeches in Oregon and Colorado. I’ll see him Tuesday afternoon, about four.” Moore could have asked for an urgent meeting—he could break into the President’s schedule on really vital matters—but until they had the chance to speak face-to-face with the Rabbit, that was out of the question. The President might even want to speak to the guy himself. He was like that.
“What kind of shape is Station Rome in?” Greer asked Ritter.
“The Chief of Station is Rick Nolfi. Good guy, but he retires in three months. Rome’s his sunset post. He asked for it. His wife, Anne, likes Italy. Six officers there, mainly working on NATO stuff—two pretty experienced, four rookies,” Ritter reported. “But before we get them alerted we need to think this threat through, and a little Presidential guidance won’t hurt. The problem is, how the hell do we tell people about this in such a way as not to compromise the source? Guys,” Ritter pointed out, “if we went to all the trouble of concealing the defection, it doesn’t make much sense to broadcast the information we get from him out to the four winds, y’know?”
“That is the problem,” Moore was forced to agree.
“The Pope doubtless has a protective detail,” Ritter went on. “But they can’t have the same latitude that the Secret Service does, can they? And we don’t know how secure they are.”
* * *
“It’s the old story,” Ryan was saying at the same time in Manchester. “If we use the information too freely, we compromise the source and lose all of its utility. But if we don’t use it for fear of compromising it, then we might as well not have the fucking source to begin with.” Jack finished off his wine and poured another glass. “There’s a book on this, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“Double-Edged Secrets. A guy named Jasper Holmes wrote it. He was a U.S. Navy crippie in World War Two, worked signals intelligence in FRUPAC with Joe Rochefort and his bunch. It’s a pretty good book on how the intelligence business works down where the rubber meets the road.”
Kingshot made a mental note to look that book up. Zaitzev was out on the lawn—a very plush one—with his wife and daughter at the moment. Mrs. Thompson wanted to take them all shopping. They had to have their private time—their bedroom suite was thoroughly bugged, of course, complete to a white-noise filter in the bathroom—and keeping the wife and kid happy was crucial to the entire operation.
“Well, Jack, whatever the opposition has planned, it will take time for them to set it up. The bureaucracies over there are even more moribund than ours, you know.”
“KGB, too, Al?” Ryan wondered. “I think that’s the one part of their system that actually works, and Yuriy Andropov isn’t known for his patience, is he? Hell, he was their ambassador in Budapest in 1956, remember? The Russians worked pretty decisively back then, didn’t they?”
“That was a serious political threat to their entire system,” Kingshot pointed out.
“And the Pope isn’t?” Ryan fired back.
“You have me there,” the fi
eld spook admitted.
“Wednesday. That’s what Dan told me. He’s all the way in the open every Wednesday. Okay, the Pope can appear at that porch he uses to give blessings and stuff, and a halfway good man with a rifle can pop him doing that, but a man with a rifle is too visible to even a casual observer, and a rifle says ‘military’ to people, and ‘military’ says ‘government’ to everybody. But those probably aren’t scheduled very far in advance—at least they’re irregular, but every damned Wednesday afternoon he hops in his jeep and parades around the Piazza San Pietro right in the middle of the assembled multitude, Al, and that’s pistol range.” Ryan sat back in his chair and took another sip of the French white.
“I am not sure I’d want to fire a pistol at that close a range.”
“Al, once upon a time they got a guy to do Leon Trotsky with an ice axe—engagement range maybe two feet,” Ryan reminded him. “Sure, different situation now, but since when have the Russians been reticent about risking their troops—and this will be that Bulgarian bastard, remember? Your guy called him an expert killer. It’s amazing what a real expert can do. I saw a gunnery sergeant at Quantico—that guy could write his name with a forty-five at fifty feet. I watched him do it once.” Ryan had never really mastered the big Colt automatic, but that gunny sure as hell had.
“You’re probably being overly concerned.”
“Maybe,” Jack admitted. “But I’d feel a hell of a lot better if His Holiness wore a Kevlar jacket under his vestments.” He wouldn’t, of course. People like that didn’t scare the way civilians did. It wasn’t the sense of invincibility that some professional soldiers had. It was just that to them death wasn’t something to be afraid of. Any really observant Catholic was supposed to feel that way, but Jack wasn’t one of those. Not quite.
“As a practical matter, what can one do? Look for one face in a crowd, and who’s to say it’s the right face?” Kingshot asked. “Who’s to say Strokov hasn’t hired someone else to do the actual shooting? I can see myself shooting someone, but not in a crowd.”
“So, you use a suppressed weapon, a big can-type silencer. Cut down the noise, and you remove a lot of the danger of being identified. All the eyes are going to be on the target, remember, not looking sideways into the crowd.”
“True,” Al conceded.
“You know, it’s too damned easy to find reasons to do nothing. Didn’t Dr. Johnson say that doing nothing is in every man’s power?” Ryan asked forlornly. “That’s what we’re doing, Al, finding reasons not to do anything. Can we let the guy die? Can we just sit here and drink our wine and let the Russians kill the man?”
“No, Jack, but we cannot go off like a loose hand grenade, either. Field operations have to be planned. You need professionals to think things through in a professional way. There are many things professionals can do, but first they have orders to do them.”
But that was being decided elsewhere.
* * *
“Prime minister, we have reason to believe that the KGB has an operation under way to assassinate the Pope of Rome,” C reported. He’d come over on short notice, interrupting her afternoon political business.
“Really?” she asked Sir Basil in dry reply. She was used to hearing the strangest of things from her Intelligence Chief, and had cultivated the habit of not responding too violently to them. “What is the source for that information?”
“I told you several days ago about Operation BEATRIX. Well, we and the Americans have got him out successfully. We even managed to do it in such a way that the Sovs think him dead. The defector is in a safe house outside Manchester right now,” C told his chief of government.
“Have we told the Americans?”
Basil nodded. “Yes, Prime Minister. He’s their fox, after all. We’ll let him fly to America next week, but I discussed the case briefly earlier today with Judge Arthur Moore, their Director of Central Intelligence. I expect he’ll brief the President in early next week.”
“What action do you suppose they will take?” she asked next.
“Difficult to say, ma’am. It’s a rather dicey proposition, actually. The defector—his name is Oleg—is a most important asset, and we must work very hard to protect his identity, and also knowledge of the fact that he is now on our side of the Curtain. Exactly how we might warn the Vatican of the potential danger is a complex issue, to say the least.”
“This is a real operation the Soviets have under way?” the PM asked again. It was rather a lot to swallow, even for them, who she believed capable of almost anything.
“It appears so, yes,” Sir Basil confirmed. “But we do not know the priority, and, of course, we know nothing of the schedule.”
“I see.” The Prime Minister fell quiet for a moment. “Our relations with the Vatican are cordial but not especially close.” That fact went all the way back to Henry VIII, though the Roman Catholic Church had gradually come to letting bygones be bygones over the intervening centuries.
“Regrettably, that is so,” C agreed.
“I see,” she said again, and thought some more before speaking again. When she leaned forward, she spoke with dignity and force. “Sir Basil, it is not the policy of Her Majesty’s Government to stand idly by while a friendly Chief of State is murdered by our adversaries. You are directed to look into any possible action that might forestall this eventuality.”
Some people shot from the hip, Sir Basil thought. Others shot from the heart. For all her outward toughness, the United Kingdom’s Chief of Government was one of the latter.
“Yes, Prime Minister.” The problem was that she didn’t say how the hell he was supposed to do this. Well, he’d coordinate with Arthur at Langley. But for right now he had a mission that would be difficult at best. What exactly was he supposed to do, deploy a squadron of the Special Air Service to St. Peter’s Square?
But you didn’t say no to this Prime Minister, at least not in a 10 Downing Street conference room.
“Anything else this defector has told us?”
“Yes, ma’am. He has identified by code name a Soviet penetration agent, probably in Whitehall. The code name is MINISTER. When we get more information about the man in question, we’ll have the Security Service root about after him.”
“What does he give them?”
“Political and diplomatic intelligence, ma’am. Oleg tells us that it is high-level material, but he has not as yet given us information that would directly identify him.”
“Interesting.” It was not a new story. This one could be one of the Cambridge group that had been so valuable to the USSR back in the war years and then all the way into the 1960s, or perhaps a person recruited by them. Charleston had been instrumental in purging them out of SIS, but Whitehall wasn’t quite his patch. “Do keep me posted on that.” A casual order from her had the force of a granite slab hand-delivered from Mt. Sinai.
“Of course, Prime Minister.”
“Would it be helpful if I spoke to the American President on this matter with the Pope?”
“Better to let CIA brief him first, I think. It wouldn’t do to short-circuit their system. This defector was, after all, mainly an American operation, and it’s Arthur’s place to speak to him first.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But when I do talk to him, I want him to know that we are taking it with the utmost seriousness, and that we expect him to take some substantive action.”
“Prime Minister, I should think he will not take it lying down, as it were.”
“I agree. He’s such a good chap.” The full story on America’s covert support for the Falkland Islands War would not see the light of day for many years. America had to keep her fences with South America well mended, after all. But neither was the PM one to forget such assistance, covert or not.
“This BEATRIX operation, it was well executed?” she asked C.
“Flawlessly, ma’am,” Charleston assured her. “Our people did everything exactly by the book.”
“I trust you will look after
those who carried it out.”
“Most certainly, ma’am,” C assured her.
“Good. Thank you for coming over, Sir Basil.”
“A pleasure as always, Prime Minister.” Charleston stood, thinking that that Ryan fellow would have called her his sort of broad. As, indeed, she was. But all the way back to Century House, he worried about the operation he now had to get under way. What, exactly, would he be doing about it? Figuring such things out, of course, was why he was so lavishly paid.
* * *
“Hi, honey,” Ryan said.
“Where are you?” Cathy asked at once.
“I can’t say exactly, but I’m back in England. The thing I had to do on the continent—well, it developed into something I have to look after here.”
“Can you come home and see us?”
“‘Fraid not.” One major problem was that, although his Chatham home was actually within driving distance, he wasn’t confident enough yet to drive that far without crunching himself on a side road. “Everybody okay?”
“We’re fine, except that you aren’t here,” Cathy responded, with an edge of anger/disappointment in her voice. One thing she was sure of: Wherever Jack had been, it sure as hell hadn’t been Germany. But she couldn’t say that over the phone. She understood the intelligence business that much.
“I’m sorry, babe. I can tell you that what I’m doing is pretty important, but that’s all.”
“I’m sure,” she conceded. And she understood that Jack wanted to be home with his family. He wasn’t one to skip town for the fun of it.
“How’s work?”
“I did glasses all day. Got some surgery tomorrow morning, though. Wait a minute, here’s Sally.”
“Hi, Daddy,” a new and small voice said.
“Hi, Sally. How are you?”
“Fine.” What kids always said.
“What did you do today?”
“Miss Margaret and I colored.”
“Anything good?”
“Yeah, cows and horses!” she reported with considerable enthusiasm. Sally especially liked pelicans and cows.