by Tom Clancy
“What is amiss, Ryan?” the Rabbit asked. It seemed to Jack a strange word for him to know.
“The information you just gave us. We’ve been worrying about the safety of the Pope for a couple of months, but we had no specific information to make us believe his life was actually at risk. Now you have given that information to us, and someone must decide what to do with it. Do you know anything at all about the operation?”
“No, almost nothing. In Sofia the action officer is the rezident, Colonel Bubovoy, Ilya Fedorovich. Senior colonel, he is—Ambassador, can I say? To Bulgarian DS. This Colonel Strokov, this name I know from old cases. He is officer assassin for DS. He do other things, too, yes, but when man need bullet, Strokov deliver bullet, yes?”
This struck Ryan as something from a bad movie, except that in the movies the big, bad CIA was the one with a special assassination department, like a cupboard with vampire bats inside. When the director needed somebody killed, he’d open the door, and one of the bats flew out and made its kill, then flew back docilely to the cupboard and hung upside down until the next man needed killing. Sure, Wilbur. Hollywood had everything figured out, except that government bureaucracies all ran on paper—nothing happened without a written order of some sort, because only a piece of white paper with black ink on it would cover somebody’s ass when things went bad—and if somebody really needed killing, someone inside the system had to sign the order, and who would sign that kind of order? That sort of thing became a permanent record of something bad, and so the signature blank would be bucked all the way to the Oval Office, and once there it just wasn’t the sort of paper that would find its way into the Presidential Library that memorialized the person known inside the security community as National Command Authority. And nobody in between would sign the order, because government employees never stuck their necks out—that wasn’t the way they were trained.
Except me, Ryan thought. But he wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood. He hadn’t even killed Sean Miller in very hot blood, and while that was a strange thing to be proud of, it beat the hell out of the alternative.
But Jack wasn’t afraid of sticking it out. The loss of his government pay-check would be a net profit for John Patrick Ryan. He could go back to teaching, perhaps at a nice private university that paid halfway decently, and he’d be able to dabble with the stock market on the side, something with which his current job interfered rather badly. . . .
What the hell am I going to do? The worst part of all was that Ryan considered himself to be a Catholic. Maybe he didn’t make it to mass every week. Maybe they’d never name a church after him, but, God damn it, the Pope was someone he was compelled by his lengthy education—Catholic schools all the way, including almost twelve years of Jesuits—to respect. And added to that was something equally important—the education he’d received at the gentle hands of the United States Marine Corps at Quantico’s Basic School. They’d taught him that when you saw something that needed doing, you damned well did it, and you hoped that your senior officers would bless it afterward, because decisive action had saved the day more than once in the history of the Corps. “It’s a lot easier to get forgiveness than permission” was what the major who’d taught that particular class had said, then added with a smile, “But don’t you people ever quote me on that.” You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience—but experience often came from bad decisions.
You’re over thirty now, Jack, and you’ve had experience that you never wanted to get, but be damned if you haven’t learned a hell of a lot from it. He would have been at least a captain by now, Jack thought. Maybe even a junior major, like Billy Tucker, who’d taught that class. Just then, Kingshot walked back into the room.
“Al, we have a problem,” Ryan told him.
“I know, Jack. I just told Sir Basil. He’s thinking about it.”
“You’re a field spook. What do you think?”
“Jack, this is well over my level of expertise and command.”
“You turn your brain off, Al?” Ryan asked sharply.
“Jack, we cannot compromise our source, can we?” Kingshot shot back. “That is the paramount consideration here and now.”
“Al, we know that somebody is going to try to whack the head of my church. We know his name, and Nick has a photo album on the fucker, remember?” Ryan took a deep breath before going on. “I am not going to sit here and do nothing about it,” Ryan concluded, entirely forgetting the presence of the Rabbit for the moment.
“You do nothing? I risk my life for this and you do nothing?” Zaitzev demanded, catching on to the rapid-fire English exchanged in front of him. His face showed both outrage and puzzlement.
Al Kingshot handled the answer. “That is not for us to say. We cannot compromise our source—you, Oleg. We must protect you as well.”
“Fuck!” Ryan stood and walked out of the room. But what the hell could he actually do? Jack asked himself. Then he went looking for the secure phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Murray,” a voice said after the STUs married up.
“Dan, it’s Jack.”
“Where you been? I called two nights ago and Cathy said you were in Germany on NATO business. I wanted to—” Ryan just cut him off.
“Stick it, Dan. I was somewhere else doing something else. Listen up. I need some information and I need it in a hurry,” Jack announced, lapsing briefly back into the voice of an officer of Marines.
“Shoot,” Murray replied.
“I need to know the Pope’s schedule for the next week or so.” It was Friday. Ryan hoped the Bishop of Rome didn’t have anything hopping for the weekend.
“What?” The FBI official’s voice communicated predictable puzzlement.
“You heard me.”
“What the hell for?”
“Can’t tell you—oh, shit,” Ryan swore, and then went on. “Dan, we have reason to believe there’s a contract out on the Pope.”
“Who?” Murray asked.
“It ain’t the Knights of Columbus,” was all Ryan felt comfortable saying.
“Shit, Jack. Are you serious?”
“What the hell do you think?” Ryan demanded.
“Okay, okay. Let me make some phone calls. What exactly am I free to say?”
That question stopped Ryan cold in his tracks. Think, boy, think. “Okay, you’re a private citizen and a friend of yours is going to Rome and he wants to eyeball His Holiness. You want to know what’s the best way to accomplish that mission. Fair enough?”
“What’s Langley say about this?”
“Dan, frankly, I don’t care a rat’s ass right now, okay? Please, get me that information. I’ll call back in an hour. Okay?”
“Roger that, Jack. One hour.” Murray hung up. Ryan knew he could trust Murray. He was himself a Jesuit product, like so many FBI agents, in his case a Boston College alum, just like Ryan, and so whatever additional loyalties he had would work in Ryan’s favor. Breathing a little easier, Ryan returned to the ducal library.
“Whom did you call, Jack?” Kingshot asked.
“Dan Murray at the embassy, the FBI rep. You ought to know him.”
“The Legal Attaché—yes, I do. Okay, what did you ask?”
“The Pope’s schedule for the coming week.”
“But we don’t know anything yet,” Kingshot objected.
“Does that make you feel any better, Al?” Jack inquired delicately.
“You did not compro—”
“Compromise our source? You think I’m that stupid?”
The Brit spook nodded to the logic of the moment. “Very well. No harm done, I expect.”
The next hour of the first interview returned to routine things. Zaitzev fleshed out for the Brits what he knew about MINISTER. It was sufficiently juicy to give them a good start on IDing the guy. It was immediately clear that Kingshot wanted his hide on the barn door. There was no telling how much good information KGB was getting from him—it
was definitely a him, Zaitzev made clear, and “him” was probably a senior civil servant in Whitehall, and soon his residence would be provided by Her Majesty’s Government for the indefinite future—“at the Queen’s pleasure” was the official phrase. But Jack had more pressing concerns. At 2:20 in the afternoon, he went back to the STU in the next room.
“Dan, it’s Jack.”
The Legal Attaché spoke without preamble. “He has a busy week ahead, the embassy in Rome tells me, but the Pope is always in the open on Wednesday afternoons. He parades around in his white jeep in St. Peter’s Square, right in front of the cathedral, for the people to see him and take his blessing. It’s an open car, and, if you want to pop a cap, that sounds to me like a good time to try—unless they have a shooter infiltrated all the way inside. Maybe a cleaning man, plumber, electrician, hard to say, but you have to assume that the inside staff is pretty loyal, and that people keep an eye on them.”
Sure, Jack thought, but those are the guys best suited to do something like this. Only the people you trust can really duck you. Damn. The best people to look into this were with the Secret Service, but he didn’t know anybody in there, and even if he did, getting them into the Vatican bureaucracy—the world’s oldest—would require divine intervention.
“Thanks, pal. I owe you one.”
“Semper fi, bud. Will you be able to tell me more? This sounds like a major case you’re working on.”
“Probably not, but it’s not for me to say, Dan. Gotta run. Later, man.” Ryan hung up and reentered the library.
The sun was over the yardarm, and a wine bottle had just appeared, a French white from the Loire Valley, probably a nice old one. There was dust on the bottle. It had been there for a while, and the cellar downstairs would not be stocked with Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose.
“Zaitzev here has all manner of good information on this MINISTER chap.” Just a matter of dredging it up, Kingshot didn’t add. But tomorrow they’d have skilled psychologists sitting in, using their pshrink skills to massage his memories—maybe even hypnosis. Ryan didn’t know if that actually worked or not; though some police forces believed in the technique, a lot of defense lawyers foamed at the mouth over it, and Jack didn’t know who was right on that issue. On the whole, it was a shame that the Rabbit wasn’t able to come out with photos taken of KGB files, but it would have been asking a lot to request that the guy place his neck not so much on the block as inside the guillotine head-holder and shout for the operator to come over. And so far, Zaitzev had impressed Ryan with his memory.
Might he be a plant, a false defector sent West to give the Agency and others false information? It was possible, but the proof of that pudding would lie in the quality of the agents he identified to the Western counterintelligence services. If MINISTER was really giving out good information, the quality of it would tell the Security Service if he were that valuable an agent. The Russians were never the least bit loyal to their agents—they’d never, not once, tried to bargain for an American or British traitor rotting away in prison, as America had often done, sometimes successfully. No, the Russians considered them expendable assets, and such assets were . . . expended, with little more than a covert decoration that would never be worn by its “honored” recipient. It struck Ryan as very strange. The KGB was the most professional of services in so many ways—didn’t they know that showing loyalty to an agent would help make other agents willing to take greater chances? Perhaps it was a case of national philosophy overruling common sense. A lot of that went on in the USSR.
By 4:00 local time, Jack could be sure that somebody would be at work at Langley. He asked one more question of the Rabbit.
“Oleg Ivan’ch, do you know if KGB can crack our secure phone systems?”
“I think not. I am not sure, but I know that we have an agent in Washington—code name CRICKET—whom we have asked to get information on your STU telephones for us. As yet he has not been able to provide what our communications people wish. We are afraid that you can read our telephone traffic, however, and so we mainly avoid using telephones for important traffic.”
“Thanks.” And Ryan went back to the STU in the next room. The next number was another he had memorized.
“This is James Greer.”
“Admiral, this is Jack.”
“I am told the Rabbit is in his new hutch,” the DDI said by way of a greeting.
“That is correct, sir, and the good news is that he believes our comms are secure, including this one. The earlier fears appear to have been exaggerated or misinterpreted.”
“Is there bad news?” the DDI asked warily.
“Yes, sir. Yuriy Andropov wants to kill the Pope.”
“How reliable is that assertion?” James Greer asked at once.
“Sir, that’s the reason he skipped. I’ll have chapter and verse to you in a day or two at most, but it’s official, there is a no-shit KGB operation to assassinate the Bishop of Rome.We even have the operation designator. You will want to let the Judge in on that, and probably NCA will want to know as well.”
“I see,” Vice Admiral Greer said from thirty-four hundred miles away. “That’s going to be a problem.”
“Damned straight it is.” Ryan took a breath. “What can we do about it?”
“That’s the problem, my boy,” the DDI said next. “First, can we do anything about it? Second, do we want to do anything about it?”
“Admiral, why would we not want to do something about it?” Ryan asked, trying to keep his voice short of insubordinate. He respected Greer as a boss and as a man.
“Back up, son. Think it all the way through. First, our mission in life is to protect the United States of America, and no one else—well, allies, too, of course,” Greer added for the tape recorders that had to be on this line. “But our primary duty is to our flag, not to any religious figure. We will try to help him if we can, but if we cannot, then we cannot.”
“Very well,” Ryan responded through gritted teeth. What about right and wrong? He wanted to ask, but that would have to wait a few moments.
“We do not ordinarily give away classified information, and you can imagine how tightly held this defection is going to be,” Greer went on.
“Yes, sir.” But at least it wasn’t going to be NOFORN—not for distribution to foreigners. The Brits were foreigners, and they already knew all about BEATRIX and the Rabbit, but the Brits weren’t big on sharing, except, sometimes, with America, and usually with a big quid pro quo tacked onto it. It was just how things worked. Similarly, Ryan wasn’t allowed to discuss a single thing about some operations he was cleared into. TALENT KEYHOLE was the code name: the reconnaissance satellites, though CIA and the Pentagon had fallen all over themselves giving the raw data to the British during the Falklands War, plus every intercept the National Security Agency had from South America. Blood was still thicker than water. “Admiral, how will it look in the papers if it becomes known that the Central Intelligence Agency had data on the threat to the Pope and we just sat on our hands?”
“Is that a—”
“Threat? No, sir, not from me. I play by the rules, sir, and you know it. But somebody there will leak the information just because he’s pissed about it, and you know that, and when that happens, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Point taken,” Greer agreed. “Are you proposing anything?”
“That’s above my pay grade, sir, but we have to think hard about possible action of some sort.”
“What else are we getting from our new friend?”
“We have the code names of three major leaks. One is MINISTER, sounds like a political and foreign policy leak in Whitehall. Two for our side of the ocean: NEPTUNE sounds naval, and that’s the source of our communications insecurity. Somebody in Redland is reading the Navy’s mail, sir. And there’s one in D.C. called CASSIUS. Sounds like a leaker on The Hill, top-drawer political intelligence, plus stuff about our operations.”
“Our—you mean CIA?” the DDI asked,
with sudden concern in his voice. No matter how old a player you were, no matter how much experience you had, the idea that your parent agency might be compromised scared the living hell out of you.
“Correct,” Ryan answered. He didn’t need to press that button very hard. Nobody at Langley was entirely comfortable with all the information that went to the “select” intelligence committees in the House and Senate. Politicians talked for a living, after all. Hell, there were few things harder than making a political figure keep his mouth shut. “Sir, this guy is a fantastically valuable source. We’ll get him cut loose from over here in three days or so. I think the debriefing process will take months. I’ve met his wife and daughter. They seem nice enough—the little girl is Sally’s age. I think this guy’s the real deal, sir, and there’s gold in them thar hills.”
“How comfortable is he?”
“Well, they’re all probably in sensory overload at the moment. I’d think hard about getting a pshrink assigned to them to help with the transition. Maybe more than one. We want to keep him settled down—we want him confident in his new life. That might not be easy, but it’ll damned sure pay off for us.”
“We have a couple of guys for that. They know how to talk them through the transition part. Is the Rabbit a flight risk?”
“Sir, I see nothing to suggest that, but we have to remember that he’s made one hell of a broad jump, and the stuff he landed in isn’t exactly what he’s used to.”
“Noted. Good call, Jack. What else?”
“That’s all for the moment. We’ve only been talking to the guy about five and a half hours, just preliminary stuff so far, but the waters look pretty deep.”
“Okay. Arthur is on the phone with Basil right now. I’m going to head over that way and give him your read. Oh, Bob Ritter just got back from Korea—jet-lagged all to hell and gone. We’re going to tell him about your adventure in the field. If he tries to bite your head off, it’s our fault, mine and the Judge’s.”