Red Rabbit

Flavian Amphitheater

“Ryan? He did what?” Bob Ritter growled.

“Bob, you want to settle down? It’s nothing to get your tits in a flutter about,” James Greer said, half soothingly and half an indirect challenge in the CIA’s in-house power playground. Judge Moore looked on in amusement. “Jack went into the field to observe an operation for which we had no available field officer. He didn’t step on his crank with the golf shoes, and the defector is in a safe house in the English Midlands right now, and from what I hear, he’s singing like a canary.”

“Well, what’s he telling us?”

“For starters,” Judge Moore answered, “it seems that our friend Andropov wants to assassinate the Pope.”

Ritter’s head snapped around. “How solid is that?”

“It’s what made the Rabbit decide to take a walk,” the DCI said. “He’s a conscience defector, and that set him off.”

“Okay, good. What does he know?” the DDO asked.

“Bob, it seems that this defector—his name is Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev, by the way—was a senior watch officer in The Centre’s communications, their version of our MERCURY.”

“Shit,” Ritter observed an instant later. “This is for real?”

“You know, sometimes a guy puts a quarter in the slot and pulls the handle and he really does get the jackpot,” Moore told his subordinate.

“Well, damn.”

“I didn’t think you’d object. And the good part,” the DCI went on, “is that Ivan doesn’t know he’s gone.”

“How the hell did we do that?”

“It was Ed and Mary Pat who twigged to that possibility.” Then Judge Moore explained how it had been carried out. “They both deserve a nice pat on the head, Bob.”

“And all while I was out of town,” Ritter breathed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Yes, there’s a bunch of attaboy letters to be drawn up,” Greer said next. “Including one for Jack.”

“I suppose,” the DDO conceded. He went quiet for a moment, thinking over the possibilities of Operation BEATRIX. “Anything good so far?”

“Aside from the plot against the Pope? Two code names of penetration agents they have working: NEPTUNE—he sounds like somebody working in the Navy—and CASSIUS. He’s probably on The Hill. More to come, I expect.”

“I talked to Ryan a few minutes ago. He’s pretty excited about this guy, says his knowledge is encyclopedic, says there’s gold in these hills, to quote the boy.”

“Ryan does know a thing or two about gold,” Moore thought out loud.

“Fine, we’ll make him our portfolio manager, but he isn’t a field officer,” Ritter groused.

“Bob, he succeeded. We don’t punish people for that, do we?” the DCI asked. This had gone far enough. It was time for Moore to act like the appeals-court judge he had been until a couple years before: the Voice of God.

“Fine, Arthur. You want me to sign the letter of commendation?” Ritter saw the freight train coming, and there was no sense in standing in its way. What the hell, it would just go into the files anyway. CIA commendations almost never saw the light of day. The Agency even classified the names of field officers who’d died heroically thirty years before. It was like a back door into heaven, CIA style.

“Okay, gentlemen, now that we’ve settled the administrative issues, what about the plot to kill the Pope?” Greer asked, trying to bring order back to the meeting of supposed sober senior executives.

“How solid is the information?” Ritter wanted to know.

“I talked to Basil a few minutes ago. He thinks we need to take it seriously, but I think we need to talk to this Rabbit ourselves to quantify the danger to our Polish friend.”

“Tell the President?”

Moore shook his head. “He’s tied up all day today with legislative business, and he’s flying out to California late this afternoon. Sunday and Monday, he’ll be giving speeches in Oregon and Colorado. I’ll see him Tuesday afternoon, about four.” Moore could have asked for an urgent meeting—he could break into the President’s schedule on really vital matters—but until they had the chance to speak face-to-face with the Rabbit, that was out of the question. The President might even want to speak to the guy himself. He was like that.

“What kind of shape is Station Rome in?” Greer asked Ritter.

“The Chief of Station is Rick Nolfi. Good guy, but he retires in three months. Rome’s his sunset post. He asked for it. His wife, Anne, likes Italy. Six officers there, mainly working on NATO stuff—two pretty experienced, four rookies,” Ritter reported. “But before we get them alerted we need to think this threat through, and a little Presidential guidance won’t hurt. The problem is, how the hell do we tell people about this in such a way as not to compromise the source? Guys,” Ritter pointed out, “if we went to all the trouble of concealing the defection, it doesn’t make much sense to broadcast the information we get from him out to the four winds, y’know?”

“That is the problem,” Moore was forced to agree.

“The Pope doubtless has a protective detail,” Ritter went on. “But they can’t have the same latitude that the Secret Service does, can they? And we don’t know how secure they are.”

* * *

“It’s the old story,” Ryan was saying at the same time in Manchester. “If we use the information too freely, we compromise the source and lose all of its utility. But if we don’t use it for fear of compromising it, then we might as well not have the fucking source to begin with.” Jack finished off his wine and poured another glass. “There’s a book on this, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“Double-Edged Secrets. A guy named Jasper Holmes wrote it. He was a U.S. Navy crippie in World War Two, worked signals intelligence in FRUPAC with Joe Rochefort and his bunch. It’s a pretty good book on how the intelligence business works down where the rubber meets the road.”

Kingshot made a mental note to look that book up. Zaitzev was out on the lawn—a very plush one—with his wife and daughter at the moment. Mrs. Thompson wanted to take them all shopping. They had to have their private time—their bedroom suite was thoroughly bugged, of course, complete to a white-noise filter in the bathroom—and keeping the wife and kid happy was crucial to the entire operation.

“Well, Jack, whatever the opposition has planned, it will take time for them to set it up. The bureaucracies over there are even more moribund than ours, you know.”

“KGB, too, Al?” Ryan wondered. “I think that’s the one part of their system that actually works, and Yuriy Andropov isn’t known for his patience, is he? Hell, he was their ambassador in Budapest in 1956, remember? The Russians worked pretty decisively back then, didn’t they?”

“That was a serious political threat to their entire system,” Kingshot pointed out.

“And the Pope isn’t?” Ryan fired back.

“You have me there,” the field spook admitted.

“Wednesday. That’s what Dan told me. He’s all the way in the open every Wednesday. Okay, the Pope can appear at that porch he uses to give blessings and stuff, and a halfway good man with a rifle can pop him doing that, but a man with a rifle is too visible to even a casual observer, and a rifle says ‘military’ to people, and ‘military’ says ‘government’ to everybody. But those probably aren’t scheduled very far in advance—at least they’re irregular, but every damned Wednesday afternoon he hops in his jeep and parades around the Piazza San Pietro right in the middle of the assembled multitude, Al, and that’s pistol range.” Ryan sat back in his chair and took another sip of the French white.

“I am not sure I’d want to fire a pistol at that close a range.”

“Al, once upon a time they got a guy to do Leon Trotsky with an ice axe—engagement range maybe two feet,” Ryan reminded him. “Sure, different situation now, but since when have the Russians been reticent about risking their troops—and this will be that Bulgarian bastard, remember? Your guy called him an expert killer. It’s amazing what a real expert can do. I saw a gunnery sergeant at Quantico—that guy could write his name with a forty-five at fifty feet. I watched him do it once.” Ryan had never really mastered the big Colt automatic, but that gunny sure as hell had.