“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.”
Gunther 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 Gunther 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?”
“That'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 earth-shaking, 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 10 percent each in the Congress of People's Deputies. The remaining 80 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
