security officer had camped in Nancy 's office with John Clark, as Ryan had led Golovko into his.
“I am not impressed.” Golovko looked around disapprovingly at the painted gypsum-board drywall. Ryan did have a single decent painting borrowed from a government warehouse, and, of course, the not-exactly-required photo of President Fowler over by the clothes tree on which Jack hung his coat.
“I do have a nicer view, Sergey Nikolayevich. Tell me, is the statue of Iron Feliks still in the middle of the square?”
“For the moment.” Golovko smiled. “Your Director is out of town, I gather.”
“Yes, the President decided that he needed some advice.”
“On what?” Golovko asked with a crooked smile.
“Damned if I know,” Ryan answered with a laugh. Lots of things, he didn't say.
“Difficult, is it not? For both of us.” The new KGB Chairman was not a professional spook either — in fact, that was not unusual. More often than not, the director of that grim agency had been a Party man, but the Party was becoming a thing of history also, and Narmonov had selected a computer expert who was supposed to bring new ideas into the Soviet Union 's chief spy agency. That would make it more efficient. Ryan knew that Golovko had an IBM PC behind his desk in Moscow now.
“Sergey, I always used to say that if the world made sense, I'd be out of a job. So, look what's happening. Want some coffee?”
“I would like that, Jack.” A moment later he expressed approval of the brew.
“ Nancy sets it up for me every morning. So. What can I do for you?”
“I have often heard that question, but never in such surroundings as this.” There was a rumbling laugh from Ryan's guest. “My God, Jack, do you ever wonder if this is all the result of some drug-induced dream?”
“Can't be. I cut myself shaving the other day, and I didn't wake up.”
Golovko muttered something in Russian that Jack didn't catch, though his translators would when they went over the tapes.
“I am the one who reports to our parliamentarians on our activities. Your Director was kind enough to respond favorably to our request for advice.”
Ryan couldn't resist that opening: “No problem, Sergey Nikolayevich. You can screen all your information through me. I'd be delighted to tell you how to present it.” Golovko took it like a man.
“Thank you, but the Chairman might not understand.” With jokes aside, it was time for business.
“We want a quid pro quo.” The fencing began.
“And that is?”
“Information on the terrorists you guys used to support.”
“We cannot do that,” Golovko said flatly.
“Sure you can.”
Next Golovko waved the flag: “An intelligence service cannot betray confidences and continue to function.”
“Really? Tell Castro that next time you see him,” Ryan suggested.
“You're getting better at this, Jack.”
“Thank you, Sergey. My government is most gratified indeed for your President's recent statement on terrorism. Hell, I like the guy personally. You know that. We're changing the world, man. Let's clean a few more messes up. You never approved of your government's support for those creeps.”
“What makes you believe that?” the First Deputy Chairman asked.
“Sergey, you're a professional intelligence officer. There's no way you can personally approve the actions of undisciplined criminals. I feel the same way, of course, but in my case it's personal.” Ryan leaned back with a hard look. He would always remember Sean Miller and the other members of the Ulster Liberation Army who'd made two earnest attempts to kill Jack Ryan and his family. Only three weeks earlier, after years exhausting every legal opportunity, after three writs to the Supreme Court, after demonstrations and appeals to the Governor of Maryland and the President of the United States for executive clemency, Miller and his colleagues had, one by one, walked into the gas chamber in Baltimore, and been carried out half an hour later, quite dead. And may God have mercy on their souls, Ryan thought. If God has a strong enough stomach. One chapter in his life was now closed for good.
“And the recent incident…?”
“The Indians? That merely illustrates my case. Those ”revolutionaries“ were dealing drugs to make money. They're going to turn on you, the people you used to fund. In a few years, they're going to be more of a problem for you than they ever were for us.” That was entirely correct, of course, and both men knew it. The terrorist-drug connection was something the Soviets were starting to worry about. Free enterprise was starting most rapidly of all in Russia 's criminal sector. That was as troubling to Ryan as to Golovko. “What do you say?”
Golovko inclined his head to the side. “I will discuss it with the Chairman. He will approve.”
“Remember what I said over in Moscow a couple of years back? Who needs diplomats to handle negotiations when you have real people to settle things?”
“I expected a quote from Kipling or something similarly poetic,” the Russian observed dryly. “So, how do you deal with your Congress?”
Jack chuckled. “Short version is, you tell them the truth.”
“I needed to fly eleven thousand kilometers to hear you say that?”
“You select a handful of people in your parliament you can trust to keep their mouths shut, and whom the rest of parliament trust to be completely honest — that's the hard part — and you brief them into everything they need to know. You have to set up ground rules—”
“Ground rules?”
“A baseball term, Sergey. It means the special rules that apply to a specific playing field.”
Golovko's eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, that is a useful term.”
“Everyone has to agree on the rules, and you may never, ever break them.” Ryan paused. He was talking like a college lecturer again, and it wasn't fair to speak that way to a fellow professional.
Golovko frowned. That was the hard part, of course: never, ever breaking the rules. The intelligence business wasn't often that cut and dried. And conspiracy was part of the Russian soul.
“It's worked for us,” Ryan added.
Or has it? Ryan wondered. Sergey knows if it has or not… well, he knows some things that I don't. He could tell me if we've had major leaks on The Hill, since Peter Henderson… but at the same time he knows that we've penetrated so many of their operations despite their manic passion for the utmost secrecy. Even the Soviets had admitted it publicly: the hemorrhage of defectors from KGB over the years had gutted scores of exquisitely-planned operations against America and the West. In the Soviet Union as in America, secrecy was designed to shield failure as well as success.
“What it comes down to is trust,” Ryan said after another moment. “The people in your parliament are patriots. If they didn't love their country, why would they put up with all the bullshit aspects of public life? It's the same here.”
“Power,” Golovko responded at once.
“No, not the smart ones, not the ones you will be dealing with. Oh, there'll be a few idiots. We have them here. They are not an endangered species. But there are always those who're smart enough to know that the power that comes with government service is an illusion. The duty that comes along with it is always greater in magnitude. No, Sergey, for the most part you'll be dealing with people as smart and honest as you are.”
Golovko's head jerked at the compliment, one professional to another. He'd guessed right a few minutes earlier, Ryan was getting good at this. He started to think that he and Ryan were not really enemies any longer. Competitors, perhaps, but not enemies. There was more than professional respect between them now.
Ryan looked benignly at his visitor, smiling inwardly at having surprised him. And hoping that one of the people Golovko would select for oversight would be Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev, code-name SPINNAKER. Known in the media as one of the most brilliant Soviet parliamentarians in a bumptious legislative body struggling to build a new country, his reputation for intelligence and integrity belied the fact that he'd been on the CIA payroll for several years, the best of all the agents recruited by Mary Pat Foley. The game goes on, Ryan thought. The rules were different. The world was different. But the game went on. Probably always would, Jack thought, vaguely sorry it was true. But, hell, America even spied on Israel — it was called “keeping an eye on things”; it was never called
