by Tom Clancy
So, it just felt right, though “feels right” isn’t something you send by Diplomatic Courier to the Seventh Floor. They’d have to play along with this. They had to trust him. He was Chief of Station in Moscow, the CIA’s top field posting, and with that came a truckload of credibility. They’d have to weigh it against whatever misgivings they were feeling. If a summit meeting were scheduled, then that might queer the deal, but the President had no such plans, nor did SecState. So there was nothing in the way of Langley approving some form of action—if they thought he was right. . . .
Foley didn’t even know why he was questioning himself. He was The Man in Moscow, and that, by God, was that. He lifted the phone and punched three buttons.
“Russell,” a voice said.
“Mike, this is Ed. I need you here.”
“Right.”
It took a minute and a half. The door opened.
“Yeah, Ed?”
“Something for the bag.”
Russell checked his watch. “Not much margin, guy.”
“It’s short. I’ll have to come down with you on this one.”
“Well, let’s get it on, then, bro.” Russell walked out the door, with Foley in pursuit. Fortunately, the corridor was empty, and his office was not far.
Russell sat down in his swivel chair and lit up his cipher machine. Foley handed the sheet over. Russell clipped it to a fixture right over the keyboard. “Short enough,” he said approvingly, and started typing. He was nearly as skillful as the Ambassador’s own secretary, and he finished the job in a minute, including some padding—sixteen surnames taken at random from the Prague telephone book. When the new page came out of the machine, Foley took it, folded it, tucked it in a manila envelope, and sealed it. Wax was dripped over the closure, and Foley handed the envelope back to Russell.
“Back in five, Ed,” the communications officer said on his way out the door. He took the elevator down to the first floor. The diplomatic courier was there. His name was Tommy Cox, a former Army warrant officer/helicopter pilot who’d been shot down four times in the Central Highlands as part of the First Cavalry Division, and a man who had only the most negative feelings for his country’s adversaries. The Diplomatic Bag was a canvas carry-on-type bag that would be handcuffed to his wrist during transit. He was already booked on a Pan Am 747 direct flight to New York’s Kennedy International, a flight of eleven hours, during which he would neither drink nor sleep, though he did have three paperback mysteries to read along the way. He’d be leaving the embassy in an official car in ten minutes, and his diplomatic credentials meant he wouldn’t be troubled with security or immigration procedures. The Russians were actually fairly cordial about that, though they probably drooled over the chance of seeing what was inside the canvas bag. For sure, it wasn’t Russian perfume or pantyhose for a friend in New York or Washington.
“Good flight, Tommy.”
Cox nodded. “Roger that, Mike.”
Russell headed back to Foley’s office topside. “Okay, it’s in the bag. Flight leaves in an hour and ten minutes, man.”
“Good.”
“Is a Rabbit what I think it is?”
“Can’t say, Mike,” Foley pointed out.
“Yeah, I know, Ed. Excuse my question.” Russell wasn’t one to break the rules, though he had as much curiosity as the next man. And he knew what a Rabbit was, of course. He’d spent his entire life inside the black world in one capacity or another, and the jargon wasn’t all that hard to pick up. But the black world had walls, and that was that.
Foley took his copy of the message, tucked it in his office safe, and set both the combination and the alarm. Then he headed down to the embassy cafeteria, where a TV was tuned in to ESPN. There he learned that his Yankees had lost another one—three straight, and in a pennant race! Is there no fairness in the world? he grumbled.
MARY PAT WAS doing housework, which was boring, but a good opportunity for her to put her brain in neutral while her imagination ran wild. Okay, she’d be meeting Oleg Ivanovich again. It would be up to her to figure a way to get the “package”—yet another CIA term of art, meaning the material or person(s) to be taken out of the country—to a safe place. There were many ways to do such a thing. They were all dangerous, but she and Ed and other CIA field spooks were trained to do dangerous things. Moscow was a city of millions, and in such an environment three people on the move were just part of the background noise, like one single leaf falling in an autumn forest, one more buffalo in the herd in Yellowstone National Park, one more car on the L.A. Freeway during rush hour. That wasn’t hard, was it?
Well, actually, it was. In the Soviet Union, every aspect of personal life was subject to control. As applied to America, sure, the package was just one more car on the L.A. Freeway, but going to Las Vegas meant crossing a state line, and you had to have a reason for that. Nothing was easy here in the sense that everything was easy in America.
And there was something else. . . .
It would be better, Mary Pat thought, that the Russians didn’t know he was gone. After all, it was not a murder if there wasn’t a corpse to let everyone know that somebody had died. And it wasn’t a defection unless they knew that one of their citizens had turned up somewhere else—where he wasn’t supposed to be. So, how much the better . . . was it possible . . . ? she wondered.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? But how to make it happen? It was something to speculate on while she vacuumed the living room rug. And, oh, by the way, vacuuming would invalidate whatever bugs the Russians had implanted in the walls. . . . And so she stopped at once. Why waste that chance? She and Ed could communicate with their hands, but the bandwidth was like maple syrup in January.
She wondered if Ed would go for this. He might, she thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d think up. Ed, for all his skills, wasn’t a cowboy. Though he had his talents, and good ones they were, he was more a bomber pilot than a fighter pilot. But Mary Pat thought like Chuck Yeager in the X-1, like Pete Conrad in the lunar module. She was just better at thinking long-ball.
The idea also had strategic implications. If they could get their Rabbit out unknown to the opposition, then they could make indefinite use of whatever he knew, and that possibility, if you could figure out how to make it happen, was very enticing indeed. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might be a needless complication—and if so, it could be discarded—but it was worth thinking about, if she could get Ed’s brain into it. She’d need his planning talents and his reality-checking ability, but the basic idea set her head abuzz. It would come down to available assets. . . . And that would be the hard part. But “hard” didn’t mean “impossible.” And, for Mary Pat, “impossible” didn’t mean “impossible” either, did it? she asked herself.
Hell, no.
THE PAN AM FLIGHT rolled off on time, lurching across the lumpy taxiways of Sheremetyevo Airport, which was famous in the world of aviation for its roller-coaster paving. But the runways were adequate, and the big JT- 9D Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines pushed the airframe to rotation speed, and the aircraft took flight. Tommy Cox, in seat 3-A, noted with a smile the usual reaction when an American airliner departed Moscow: The passengers all cheered and/or applauded. There was no rule, and the flight crew didn’t encourage it. It just happened all on its own—that’s how impressed Americans were with Soviet hospitality. It appealed to Cox, who had no love for the people who’d supplied the machine guns that had splashed his Huey four times and, by the way, earned him a total of three Purple Heart medals, a miniature ribbon of which decorated the lapels of all his suitcoats, along with the two repeat stars. He looked out the window, watching the ground fall away to his left and, when he heard the welcome ding, fished out a Winston to light with his Zippo. It was a pity he couldn’t drink or sleep on these flights, but the movie was one he hadn’t seen, remarkably enough. In this job you learned to appreciate the small things. Twelve hours to New York, but a direct flight was better than having to stop over in Frank
furt or Heathrow. Such places were just an opportunity for him to drag this fucking canvas bag around, sometimes without benefit of a cart or trolley. Well, he had a full pack of smokes, and the dinner menu didn’t look too bad. And the government actually paid him to sit down for twelve hours, baby-sitting a piece of cheap luggage. It was better than flying his Huey around the Central Highlands. Cox was long past wondering what important information he transported in his bag. And if other people were that interested, that was their problem.
RYAN HAD GOTTEN a hot three pages done—not a very productive day, and he couldn’t claim that the artistry of his prose demanded a slow writing pace. His language was literate—he’d learned his grammar from priests and nuns for the most part, and his word mechanics were serviceable—but not particularly elegant. In his first book, Doomed Eagles, every bit of artistic language he’d attempted to put into his manuscript had been edited out, to his quiet and submissive fury. And so the few critics who had read and commented on his historical epic had faintly praised the quality of his analysis, but then tersely noted that it might be a good textbook for academic students of history, but not something on which a casual reader might wish to waste his money. And so the book had netted 7,865 copies sold—not much to show for two and a half years’ work, but that, Jack reminded himself, was just his first outing, and maybe a new publisher would get him an editor who was more an ally than an enemy. He could hope, after all.
But the damned thing would not get done until he did it, and three pages wasn’t much to show for a full day in his den. He was time-sharing his brain with another problem, and that wasn’t a useful productivity tool.
“How did it go?” Cathy asked, suddenly appearing at his shoulder.
“Not too bad,” he lied.
“Where are you up to?”
“May. Halsey is fighting off his skin disease.”
“Dermatitis? That can be nasty, even today,” Cathy noted. “It can drive the poor patients crazy.”
“Since when are you a dermatologist?”
“M.D., Jack, remember? I may not know it all, but I know most of it.”
“All that, and humble, too.” He made a face.
“Well, when you get a cold, don’t I take good care of you?”
“I suppose.” She did, actually. “How are the kids?”
“Fine. Sally had a good time on the swings, and she made a new friend, Geoffrey Froggatt. His father’s a solicitor.”
“Great. Isn’t there anything but lawyers around here?”
“Well, there’s a doctor and a spook,” Cathy pointed out. “Trouble is, I can’t tell people what you do, can I?”
“So what do you tell them?” Jack asked.
“That you work for the embassy.” Close enough.
“Another desk-sitting bureaucrat,” he grumped.
“Well, you want to go back to Merrill Lynch?”
“Ugh. Not in this lifetime.”
“Some people like making tons of money,” she pointed out.
“Only as a hobby, babe.” Were he to go back to trading, his father-in-law would gloat for a year. No, not in this lifetime. He’d served his time in hell, like a good Marine. “I have more important things to do.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t tell you,” he countered.
“I know that,” his wife responded, with a playful smile. “Well, at least it isn’t insider trading.”
Actually, it was, Ryan couldn’t say—the nastiest sort. Thousands of people working every day to find out things they weren’t supposed to know, and then taking action they weren’t supposed to take.
But both sides played that game—played it diligently—because it wasn’t about money. It was about life and death, and those games were as nasty as they got. But Cathy didn’t lose any sleep over the cancer tissue she consigned to the hospital incinerator and probably those cancer cells wanted to live, too, but that was just too damned bad, wasn’t it?
COLONEL BUBOVOY HAD the dispatch on his desk and read it. His hands didn’t shake, but he lit a cigarette to help his contemplation. So, the Politburo was willing to go forward with this. Leonid Ilyich himself had signed the letter to the Bulgarian Party chairman. He’d have the ambassador call Monday morning to set up the meeting, which ought not to take too long. The Bulgarians were lapdogs of the Soviet Union, but occasionally useful lapdogs. The Soviets had assisted in the murder of Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge in London—KGB had supplied the weapon, if you could call it that, an umbrella to deliver the poison-filled metal miniball to transfer the ricin, and so silence the annoying defector who’d talked too much on BBC World Service. That had been a while, and such debts had no expiration date, did they? Not at this level of statecraft. So Moscow was calling in the debt. Besides that, there was the agreement from 1964, when it had been agreed that DS would handle KGB’s wet work in the West. And Leonid Ilyich was promising to transfer a full battalion’s worth of the new version of the T-72 main-battle tank, which was always the sort of thing to make a communist chief of state feel better about his political security. And it was cheaper than the MiG-29s the Bulgarians were asking for. As though a Bulgarian pilot could handle such an aircraft—the Russian joke was that they had to tuck their mustaches into the flight helmet before closing the visor, Bubovoy reminded himself. Mustaches or not, the Bulgarians were regarded as the children of Russia—an attitude that went back to the czars. And, for the most part, they were obedient children, though like them they had little appreciation of right and wrong, so long as they weren’t caught. So he’d show proper respect for this chief of state and be received cordially as the messenger of a greater power, and the Chairman would hem and haw a little bit and then agree. It would be as stylized as a performance of ballet dancer Aleksander Gudonov, and just as predicable in its conclusion.
And then he’d meet with Boris Strokov and get an idea how quickly the operation might proceed. Boris Andreyevich would find the prospect exciting. This would be the biggest mission of his life, like playing in the Olympics, not so much daunting as exhilarating, and there was a sure promotion to be had for its successful completion—perhaps a new car for Strokov and/or a nice dacha outside Sofia. Or even both. And for myself? the KGB officer wondered. A promotion, certainly. General’s stars and a return to Moscow, a plush office at The Centre, a nice flat on Kutusovskiy Prospekt. Going back to Moscow appealed to the rezident, who’d spent a lot of years outside the borders of the Rodina. Enough, he thought. More than enough.
“WHERE’S THE COURIER?” MaryPat asked, vacuuming the living room rug.
“Over Norway by now,” her husband thought out loud.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Oh?” Ed asked with no small degree of trepidation.
“What if we can get the Rabbit out and they don’t know?”
“How the hell do we do that?” her husband asked, in surprise. What was she thinking about now? “Getting him and his family out in the first place won’t exactly be easy.”
She told him the idea she’d evolved in her tricky little head, and an original one it was.
Trust you to come up with something like that, he thought, with a neutral expression. But then he started thinking about it. “Complicated,” the Chief of Station observed tersely.
“But doable,” she countered.
“Honey, that’s a big thought.” But he was thinking about it, Mary Pat saw in his eyes.
“Yeah, but if we can pull it off, what a coup,” she said, getting under the sofa. Eddie slid himself closer to the TV so that he could hear what the Transformer robots were saying. A good sign. If Eddie couldn’t hear, then neither would the KGB microphones.
“It’s worth thinking about,” Ed conceded. “But doing it—damn.”
“Well, they pay us to be creative, don’t they?”
“No way in hell we could pull that one off here”—not without involving a whole lot of assets, some of whom might not be entirely reliable, which was, of c
ourse, their greatest fear, and one they couldn’t easily defend against. That was one of the problems in the spook business. If the counterspies in KGB ID’d one of their assets, they were very often clever about how they handled it. They could, for example, have a little chat with the guy and tell him to keep operating, and then, maybe, he’d live to the end of the year. Their agents were trained to give a danger-wave-off signal, but who was to say that the agent would do it? It demanded a lot from the supposed dedication of their assets, more than some—most—of them would probably give.
“So, there are other places they can go. Eastern Europe, for example. Get them out that way,” she suggested.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he conceded again. “But the mission here is to get them out, not score style points from the East German judge.”
“I know, but think about it. If we can get him away from Moscow, that gives us a lot more flexibility in our options, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, honey. It also means communications problems.” And that meant the risk of screwing everything up. The KISS principle—“keep it simple, stupid”—was as much a part of the CIA ethos as the trench coat and fedora hat that people used in bad movies. Too many cooks fucked up the soup.
Yet what she’d suggested had real merit. Getting the Rabbit out in a way that made the Soviets think him dead would mean that they’d take no precautions. It would be like sending Captain Kirk into KGB headquarters by transporter—and invisible—and extracting him without anyone knowing he’d been there, along with tons of hot information. It would be as close to the perfect play as anything that had ever happened. Hell, Ed thought, as perfect a play as never happened in the real world. He reflected for a moment that he was blessed to have a wife as creative in her work as she was in bed.