by Tom Clancy
“Is there a game at Denver today?”
“No, that’s tomorrow night, Broncos and the Seahawks. Won’t be much of a game. The Broncos are rebuilding this year.”
“I see.” Bock left the room and arranged for the concierge to get them tickets to Denver in the morning.
Cathy got up to see him off. She even fixed breakfast. Her solicitude over the past few days had not made her husband feel any better. Quite the reverse. But he couldn’t say anything about it, could he? Even the way she overdid it, straightening his tie and kissing him on the way out the door. The smile, the loving look, all for a husband who couldn’t get it up, Jack thought on his way out to the car. The same sort of smothering attention you might give to some poor bastard in a wheelchair.
“Morning, doc.”
“Hello, John.”
“Catch the Vikings-Chargers game yesterday?”
“No, I, uh, took my son to see the Orioles. They lost six to one.” Success was following Jack everywhere, but at least he’d kept his word to his son. That was something, wasn’t it?
“Twenty-four to twenty-one in overtime. God, that Wills kid is incredible. They held him to ninety-six yards, but when he had to deliver, he popped it for twenty yards and set up the field goal,” Clark reported.
“You have money on the game?”
“Five bucks at the office, but it was a three-point spread. The education fund won that one.”
It gave Ryan something to chuckle about. Gambling was as illegal at CIA as it was in every other government office, but a serious attempt to enforce a ban on football betting might have started a revolution—the same was true at the FBI, Jack was sure, which enforced interstate gambling statutes—and the semiofficial system was that half-point betting spreads were not allowed. All “pushes” (odds-caused ties) forfeited into the Agency’s in-house charity, the Education Aid Fund. It was something that even the Agency’s own Inspector General winked at—in fact, he liked to lay money on games as much as the next guy.
“Looks like you at least got some sleep, Jack,” Clark noted as they made their way toward Route 50.
“Eight hours,” Jack said. He’d wanted another chance the previous night, but Cathy had said no. You’re too tired, Jack. That’s all it is. You’re working too hard, and I want you to take it easy, okay?
Like I’m a goddamned stud horse that’s been overworked.
“Good for you,” Clark said. “Or maybe your wife insisted, eh?”
Ryan stared ahead at the road. “Where’s the box?”
“Here.”
Ryan unlocked it and started looking at the weekend’s dispatches.
They caught an early direct flight from Washington National to Denver’s Stapleton International. It was a clear day most of the way across the country. Bock got a window seat and looked at the country, his first time in America. As were most Europeans, he was surprised, almost awed by the sheer size and diversity. The wooded hills of Appalachia; the flat farmlands of Kansas, speckled with the immense circular signature of the traveling irrigation systems; the stunning way the plains ended and the Rockies began within easy sight of Denver. No doubt Marvin would say something when they arrived about how this had all been property of his people. What rubbish. They’d been nomadic barbarians, following the herds of bison, or whatever had once been there before civilization arrived. America might be his enemy, but it was a civilized country, and all the more dangerous for it. By the time the aircraft landed, he was squirming with his need for a smoke. Ten minutes after landing they’d rented a car and were examining a map. Bock’s head was dizzy from the lack of oxygen here. Nearly fifteen hundred meters of altitude, he realized. It was a wonder that people could play American football here.
They’d landed behind the morning rush hour, and driving to the stadium was simple. Southwest of the city, the new Skydome was a distinctive structure located on an immense plot of ground to allow ample room for parking. He parked the car close to a ticket window and decided that the simple approach would be best.
“Can I get two tickets for tonight’s match?” he asked the attendant.
“Sure, we have a few hundred left. Where do you want them?”
“I don’t know the stadium at all, I’m afraid.”
“You must be new here,” the lady observed with a friendly smile. “All we got’s in the upper deck, Section Sixty-six and Sixty-eight.”
“Two, please. Is cash all right?”
“Sure is. Where are you from?”
“Denmark,” Bock replied.
“Really? Well, welcome to Denver! Hope you enjoy the game.”
“Can I look around to see where my seat is?”
“Technically, no, but nobody really minds.”
“Thank you.” Bock smiled back at the simpering fool.
“They had seats for tonight?” Marvin Russell asked. “I’ll be damned.”
“Come, we will see where they are.”
Bock walked through the nearest open gate, just a few meters from the big ABC vans that carried the satellite equipment for the evening broadcast. He took the time to notice that the stadium was hard-wired for the equipment. So the TV vans would always be in the same place, just by Gate 5. Inside, he saw a team of technicians setting up their equipment, then he headed up the nearest ramp, deliberately heading in the wrong direction.
The stadium had to seat sixty thousand people, perhaps a little more. It had three primary levels, called lower, mezzanine, and upper, plus two complete ranks of enclosed boxes, some of which looked quite luxurious. Structurally it was quite impressive. Massive reinforced-concrete construction, all the upper decks were cantilevered. There were no pillars to block a spectator’s view. A fine stadium. A superb target. Beyond the parking lot to the north were endless hectares of low-rise apartment buildings. To the east was a government office center. The stadium was not in the city center, but that couldn’t be helped. Bock found and took his seat, orienting himself with the compass and the TV equipment. The latter was quite easy. An ABC banner was being hung below one of the press boxes.
“Hey!”
“Yes?” Bock looked down at a security guard.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Sorry.” He held up his tickets. “I just bought them, and I wanted to see where my seats were so that I would know where to park. I’ve never seen an American football game,” he added, heavy on the accent. Americans, he’d heard, were always nice to people with European accents.
“You want to park in Area A or B. Try to arrive early, like before five. You want to beat the rush-hour traffic. It can be a bear out there.”
Günther bobbed his head. “Thank you. I’ll be leaving now.”
“No problem, sir. It’s no big deal. I mean, it’s the insurance, y’know? You have people wandering around, they might get hurt and sue.”
Bock and Russell left. They circled the bottom level, just so that Günther could be sure he had the configuration memorized. Then that became unnecessary when he found a stadium diagram printed on a small card.
“Seen what you wanted?” Marvin asked when they got back to the car.
“Yes, possibly.”
“You know, that’s pretty subtle,” the American mused aloud.
“What do you mean?”
“Dickin’ with the TV. The really dumb thing about revolutionaries is that they overlook the psychological stuff. You don’t have to kill a lot of people, just pissin’ them off, scarin’ them, that’s enough, isn’t it?”
Bock stopped at the parking-lot exit and looked at his companion. “You have learned much, my friend.”
“This is pretty hot stuff,” Ryan said, leafing through the pages.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” Mary Patricia Foley agreed.
“How are you feeling?”
The senior field officer’s eyes twinkled. “Clyde has dropped. Waiting for my water to break.”
Jack looked up. “Clyde?”
“T
hat’s what I’m calling him—her—whatever.”
“Doing your exercises?”
“Rocky Balboa should be in the shape I’m in. Ed’s got the nursery all painted up. The crib is put back together. All ready, Jack.”
“How much time will you be taking off?”
“Four weeks, maybe six.”
“I may want you to go over some of this at home,” Ryan said, lingering on page two.
“Long as you pay me.” Mary Pat laughed.
“What do you think, MP?”
“I think SPINNAKER is the best source we have. If he says it, it’s probably true.”
“We haven’t caught a whiff of this anywhere else....”
“That’s why you recruit good penetration agents.”
“True,” Ryan had to agree.
The report from Agent SPINNAKER wasn’t quite earthshaking, but it was like the first rumble that got people worrying about a major quake. Since the Russians had taken the cork out of the bottle, the Soviet Union had developed an instant case of political schizophrenia. Wrong term, Ryan reflected. Multiple-personality disorder, perhaps. There were five identifiable political areas: the true-believing communists, who thought that any divergence from the True Path was a mistake (the Forward-to-the-Past crowd, some called them); the progressive socialists, who wanted to create socialism with a human face (something that had singularly failed in Massachusetts, Jack thought wryly); the middle-of-the-roaders, who wanted some free-market capitalism backed up with a solid safety net (or craved the worst of both worlds, as any economist could say); the reformists, who wanted a thin net and a lot of capitalism (but no one knew what capitalism was yet, except for a rapidly expanding criminal sector); and on the far right, those who wanted a right-wing authoritarian government (which was what had put communism in place over seventy years before). The groups on the extreme ends of the spectrum had perhaps ten percent in the Congress of People’s Deputies. The remaining eighty percent of the votes were fairly evenly split among the three vaguely centrist positions. Naturally enough, various issues scrambled allegiances—environmentalism was particularly hot and divisive—and the biggest wild card was the incipient breakup of the republics that had always chafed under Russian rule, all the more so because of the political coda imposed from Moscow. Finally, each of the five groupings had its own political subsets. For example, there was currently a lot of talk from the political right of inviting the most likely Romanov heir-presumptive back to Moscow—not to take over, but merely to accept a semiofficial apology for the murder of his ancestors. Or so the cover story went. Whoever had come up with that idea, Jack thought, was either the most naive son of a bitch since Alice went down the rabbit hole or a politician with a dangerously simplistic mind-set. The good news, CIA’s Station Paris reported, was that the Prince of all the Russias had a better feel for politics and his own safety than his sponsors did.
The bad news was that the political and economic situation in the Soviet Union looked utterly hopeless. SPINNAKER’S report merely made it look more ominous. Andrey Il’ych Narmonov was desperate, running out of options, running out of allies, running out of ideas, running out of time, and running out of maneuvering room. He was, the report said, overly concerned with his waffling on the nationalities problem, to the point that he was trying to strengthen his hold on the security apparatus—MVD, KGB, and the military—so that he could keep the empire together by force. But the military, SPINNAKER said, was both unhappy with that mission, and unhappy with the halfhearted way Narmonov planned to implement it.
There had been speculation about the Soviet military and its supposed political ambitions since the time of Lenin. It wasn’t new. Stalin had taken a scythe through his officer corps in the late 1930s; it was generally agreed that Marshal Tukhashevskiy had not really posed a political threat, that it had been yet another case of Stalin’s malignant paranoia. Khrushchev had done the same in the late ’50s, but without the mass executions; that had been done because Khrushchev had wanted to save money on tanks and depend on nuclear arms instead. Narmonov had retired quite a few generals and colonels also; in this case, the move had been exclusively one of economizing on military expense across the board. But this time also, the military reductions had been accompanied by a political renaissance. For the first time there was a true political opposition movement in the country, and the fact of the matter was that the Soviet Army had all the guns. To counter that worrisome possibility, the KGB’s Third Chief Directorate had existed for generations—KGB officers who wore military uniforms and whose mission it was to keep an eye on everything. But the Third Chief Directorate was a mere shadow of what it had been. The military had persuaded Narmonov to remove it as a precondition to its own goal of a truly professional force, loyal to the country and the new constitution.
Historians invariably deemed the age in which they lived to be one of transition. For once they were right, Jack thought. If this were not an age of transition, then it was hard to imagine what the hell was. In the case of the Soviets, they were poised between two political and economic worlds, teetering, not quite balanced, not quite sure which way they would go. And that made their political situation dangerously vulnerable to ... what? Jack asked himself.
Damned near anything.
SPINNAKER said Narmonov was being pressured to make a deal with the military, which, he said, was part of the Forward-to-the-Past mob. Group One. The danger existed, he said, that the Soviet Union would revert to a quasi-military state that repressed its progressive elements; that Narmonov had lost his nerve.
“He says he’s had one-on-one meetings with Andrey Il’ych,” Mary Pat pointed out. “Intel doesn’t come any better than that.”
“Also true,” Jack replied. “It is worrisome, isn’t it?”
“I’m not really concerned about a reversion to Marxist rule. ... What worries me—”
“Yeah, I know. Civil war.” Civil war in a country with thirty thousand nuclear warheads. There’s a cheery thought.
“Our position has been to cut Narmonov as much slack as he needs, but if our guy is right, that might be the wrong policy.”
“What’s Ed think?”
“Same as me. We trust Kadishev. I recruited him. Ed and I have seen every report he’s ever sent in. He delivers. He’s smart, well placed, very perceptive, ballsy son of a gun. When’s the last time he gave us bad stuff?”
“I don’t know that he ever has,” Jack replied.
“Neither do I, Jack.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair. “Christ, I just love these easy calls.... I don’t know, MP. The time I met Narmonov ... that is one tough, smart, agile son of a bitch. He’s got real brass ones.” Jack stopped. More than you can say for yourself, boy.
“We all have our limitations. Even the brass ones go soft.” Mrs. Foley smiled. “Oops, wrong metaphor. People run out of steam. Stress, hours, time in the saddle. Reality grinds us all down. Why do you think I’m taking time off? Being pregnant gives me a great excuse. Having a newborn isn’t exactly a picnic, but I get a month or so off the fundamentals, real-life instead of the stuff we do here every day. That’s one advantage we have over men, doc. You guys can’t break away like we women can. That may be Andrey Il’ych’s problem. Who can he turn to for advice? Where can he go for help? He’s been there a long time. He’s dealing with a deteriorating situation, and he’s running out of gas. That’s what SPINNAKER tells us, and it is consistent with the facts.”
“Except that we haven’t heard anything like this from anyone else.”
“But he’s our best guy for the inside stuff.”
“Which completes the circularity of the argument, Mary Pat.”
“Doc, you have the report, and you have my opinion,” Mrs. Foley pointed out.
“Yes, ma’am.” Jack set the document on his desk.
“What are you going to tell them?” “Them” was the top row of the executive branch: Fowler, Elliot, Talbot.
“I guess I go with your e
valuation. I’m not entirely comfortable with it, but I don’t have anything to counter your position with. Besides, the last time I went against you, turned out I was the one who blew the call.”
“You know, you’re a pretty good boss.”
“And you’re pretty good at letting me down easy.”
“We all have bad days,” Mrs. Foley said as she got awkwardly to her feet. “Let me waddle back to my office.”
Jack rose also and walked to open the door for her. “When are you due?”
She smiled back at him. “October thirty-first—Halloween, but I’m always late, and they’re always big ones.”
“You take care of yourself.” Jack watched her leave, then walked in to see the Director.
“You’d better look this over.”
“Narmonov? I heard another SPINNAKER came in.”
“You heard right, sir.”
“Who’s doing the writeup?”
“I will,” Jack said. “I want to do some cross-checking first, though.”
“I go down tomorrow. I’d like to have it then.”
“I’ll have it done tonight.”
“Good. Thanks, Jack.”
This is the place, Günther told himself halfway into the first quarter. The stadium accommodated sixty-two thousand seven hundred twenty paying fans. Bock figured another thousand or so people selling snacks and beverages. The game was not supposed to be an important one, but it was clear that Americans were as serious about their football as Europeans were. There was a surprising number of people with multicolored paint on their faces—the local team colors, of course. Several were actually stripped to the waist and had their chests painted up like football sweaters, complete with the huge numbers the Americans used. Various exhortatory banners hung from the rails at the front of the upper decks. There were women on the playing field selected for their dancing ability and other physical attributes, leading the fans in cheers. Bock learned about a curious kind of demonstration called The Wave.