Red Rabbit

class once they did the job. So they’re not complete barbarians, which Bernie halfway expected—he’s Jewish, family from Poland, back when it belonged to the czar, I think. Want me to have the Agency send that one over?”

Harding waved a match over his pipe. “Yes, I would like to see that. The Russians—they’re a rum lot, you know. In some ways, wonderfully cultured. Russia is the last place in the world where a man can make a decent living as a poet. They revere their poets, and I rather admire that about them, but at the same time… you know, Stalin himself was reticent about going after artists—the writing sort, that is. I remember one chap who lived years longer than one would have expected… Even so, he eventually died in the Gulag. So, their civilization has its limits.”

“You speak the language? I never learned it.”

The Brit analyst nodded. “It can be a wonderful language for literature, rather like Attic Greek. It lends itself to poetry, but it masks a capacity for barbarism that makes the blood run cold. They are a fairly predictable people in many ways, especially their political decisions, within limits. Their unpredictability lies in playing off their inherent conservatism against their dogmatic political outlook. Our friend Suslov is seriously ill, heart problems—from the diabetes, I suppose—but the chap behind him is Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov, equal parts Russian and Marxist, with the morals of Lavrenti Beria. He bloody hates the West. I expect he counseled Suslov—they are old, old friends—to accept blindness rather than submit to American physicians. And if this Katz chap is Jewish, you said? That would not have helped, either. Not an attractive chap at all. When Suslov departs—a few months, we think— he’ll be the new ideologue on the Politburo. He will back Yuriy Vladimirovich on anything he wishes to do, even if it means a physical attack on His Holiness.”

“You really think it could go that far?” Jack asked.

“Could it? Possibly, yes.”

“Okay, has this letter been sent to Langley?”

Harding nodded. “Your local Station Chief came over to collect it today. I would expect your chaps have their own sources, but there’s no sense taking chances.”

“Agreed. You know, if Ivan does anything that extreme, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

“Perhaps so, but they do not see things in the same way we do, Jack.”

“I know. Hard to make the full leap of imagination, however.”

“It does take time,” Simon agreed.

“Does reading their poetry help?” Ryan wondered. He’d only seen a little of it, and only in translation, which was not how one read poetry.

Harding shook his head. “Not really. That’s how some of them protest. The protests have to be sufficiently roundabout that the more obtuse of their readers can just enjoy the lyrical tribute to a particular girl’s figure without noticing the cry for freedom of expression. There must be a whole section of KGB that analyzes the poems for the hidden political content, to which no one pays particular attention until the Politburo members notice that the sexual content is a little too explicit. They are a bunch of prudes, you know… How very odd of them to have that sort of morality and no other.”

“Well, one can hardly knock them for disapproving Debbie Does Dallas,” Ryan suggested.

Harding nearly choked on his pipe smoke. “Quite so. Not exactly King Lear, is it? They did produce Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pasternak.”

Jack hadn’t read any of them, but this didn’t seem the time to admit to it.

“He said what!” Alexandrov asked.

The outrage was predictable, but remarkably muted, Andropov thought. Perhaps he only raised his voice for a fuller audience, or more likely his subordinates over at the Party Secretariat building.

“Here is the letter, and the translation,” the KGB Chairman said, handing over the documents.

The chief-ideologue-in-waiting took the message forms and read them over slowly. He didn’t want his rage to miss a single nuance. Andropov waited, lighting a Marlboro as he did so. His guest didn’t touch the vodka that he’d poured, the Chairman noted.

“This holy man grows ambitious,” he said finally, setting the papers down on the coffee table.

“I would agree with that,” Yuriy observed.

Amazement in his voice: “Does he feel invulnerable? Does he not know that there are consequences for such threats?”

“My experts feel that his words are genuine, and, no, they believe he does not fear the possible consequences.”

“If martyrdom is what he wishes, perhaps we should accommodate him…” The way his voice trailed off caused a chill even in Andropov’s cold blood. It was time for a warning. The problem with ideologues was that their theories did not always take reality into proper account, a fact to which they were mostly blind.

“Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, such actions are not to be undertaken lightly. There could be political consequences.”

“No, not great ones, Yuriy. Not great ones,” Alexandrov repeated himself. “But, yes, I agree, what we do in reply must be considered fully before we take the necessary action.”

“What does Comrade Suslov think? Have you consulted him?”

“Misha is very ill,” Alexandrov replied, without any great show of regret. That surprised Andropov. His guest owed much to his ailing senior, but these ideologues lived in their own little circumscribed world. “I fear his life is coming to its end.”

That part was not a surprise. You only had to look at him at the Politburo meetings. Suslov had the desperate look you saw on the face of a man who knew that his time was running out. He wanted to make the world right before he departed from it, but he also knew that such an act was beyond his capacity, a fact that had come to him as an unwelcome surprise. Did he finally grasp the reality that Marxism-Leninism was a false path? Andropov had come to that conclusion about five years before. But that wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about in the Kremlin, was it? And not with Alexandrov, either.

“He has been a good comrade these many years. If what you say is true, he will be sorely missed,” the KGB Chairman noted soberly, genuflecting to the altar of Marxist theory and its dying priest.

“That is so,” Alexandrov agreed, playing his role as his host did—as all Politburo members did, because it was expected… because it was necessary. Not because it was true, or even approximately so.

Like his guest, Yuriy Vladimirovich believed not because he believed, but because what he purported to believe was the source of the real thing: power. What, the Chairman wondered, would this man say next? Andropov needed him, and Alexandrov needed him as well, perhaps even more. Mikhail Yevgeniyevich did not have the personal power needed to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was respected for his theoretical knowledge, his devotion to the state religion that Marxism-Leninism had become, but no one who sat around the table thought him a proper candidate for leadership. But his support would be vital to whoever did have that ambition. As in medieval times, when the eldest son became the lord of the manor, and the second son became the bishop of the attendant diocese, so Alexandrov, like Suslov in his time, had to provide the spiritual—was that the proper word?—justification for his ascension to power. The system of checks and balances remained, just more perversely than before.

“You will, of course, take his place when the time conies,” Andropov offered as the promise of an alliance.

Alexandrov demurred, of course… or pretended to: “There are many good men in the Party Secretariat.”

The Chairman of the Committee for State Security waved his hand dismissively. “You are the most senior and the most trusted.”

Which Alexandrov well knew. “You are kind to say so, Yuriy. So, what will we do about this foolish Pole?”

And that, so baldly stated, would be the cost of the alliance. To get Alexandrov’s support for the General Secretaryship, Andropov would have to make the ideologue’s blanket a little thicker by… well, by doing something he was already thinking about anyway. That was painless, wasn’t it?

The KGB Chairman adopted a clinical, businesslike tone of voice: “Misha, to undertake an operation of this sort is not a trivial or a simple exercise. It must be planned very carefully, prepared with the greatest caution and thoroughness, and then the Politburo must approve it with open eyes.”