“Any other thoughts?” This was Moore again.
“Has anyone thought about how desperate the Russians are? I mean, sure, the Pope was—I guess he still is—a political threat of some sort to them, but, damn it, this was not a rational operation, was it?” Jack asked. “Looks to me as though they’re a lot more desperate than we usually think. We ought to be able to exploit that.” The mixture of alcohol and fatigue made it easier than usual for Ryan to speak his mind, and he’d been chewing on this idea for about twelve hours.
“How?” Ritter asked, reminding himself that Ryan was something of a whiz at economics.
“I’ll tell you one thing for sure: The Catholic Church is not going to be very happy. Lots of Catholics in Eastern Europe, guys. That is a capability we need to think about using. If we approach the Church intelligently, they might just cooperate with us. The Church is big on forgiveness, sure, but you’re supposed to go to confession first.”
Moore raised an eyebrow.
“The other thing is, I’ve been studying their economy. It’s very shaky, a lot more than our people think it is, Admiral,” Jack said, turning to his immediate boss.
“What do you mean?”
“Sir, the stuff our guys are looking at, it’s the official economics reports that come into Moscow, right?”
“We work pretty hard to get it, too,” Moore confirmed.
“Director, why do we think it’s true?” Ryan asked. “Just because the Politburo gets it? We know they lie to us, and they lie to their own people. What if they lie to themselves? If I were an examiner for the SEC, I think I could put a whole lot of guys in Allenwood Federal Prison. What they say they have doesn’t jibe with what we can identify them as actually having. Their economy is teetering, and if that goes bad, even a little bit, the whole shebang comes down.”
“How could we exploit that?” Ritter asked. His own blue-team analysis had said something very similar four days earlier, but even Judge Moore didn’t know that.
“Where do they get their hard currency—I mean, what do they get it from?”
“Oil.” Greer answered the question. The Russians exported as much oil as the Saudis.
“And who controls the world price of oil?”
“OPEC?”
“And who,” Ryan went on, “controls OPEC?”
“The Saudis.”
“Aren’t they our friends?” Jack concluded. “Look at the USSR as a takeover target, like we did at Merrill Lynch. The assets are worth a lot more than the parent corporation, because it’s so badly run. This isn’t hard stuff to figure out.”
“Bob?” Moore asked.
Ritter was warming to the young analyst by the minute. “Ryan, you ever read Edgar Allan Poe?”
“In high school,” Ryan replied in some small confusion.
“How about a story called ‘The Masque of the Red Death?”
“Something about a plague coming in to ruin the party, wasn’t it?”
“Get some rest. Before you fly back to London tomorrow, you’re going to get briefed in on something.”
“Sleep sounds like a plan, gentlemen. Where do I crash for the night?” he asked, letting them know, if they hadn’t already guessed, that he was ready to collapse.
“We have a place for you at the Marriott up the road. You’re all checked in. There’s a car waiting at the entrance for you. Go on, now,” Moore told him.
“Maybe he’s not so dumb after all,” Ritter speculated.
“Robert, it’s nice to see that you’re strong enough to change,” Greer smilingly observed as he reached for Moore’s own office bottle of expensive bourbon whiskey. It was time to celebrate.
The following day in
