Red Rabbit

“You must have something in mind…”

“I have many things in mind, but a daydream is not a plan. To move forward requires some in-depth thinking and planning merely to see if such a thing is possible. One cautious step at a time,” Andropov warned. “Even then, there are no guarantees or promises to be made. This is not something for a movie production. The real world, Misha, is complex.” It was as close as he could come to telling Alexandrov not to stray too far from his sandbox of theories and toys and into the real world of blood and consequences.

“Well, you are a good Party man. You know what the stakes in this game are.” With those words, Alexandrov told his host what was expected by the Secretariat. For Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, the Party and its beliefs were the State—and the KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party.

Oddly, Andropov realized, this Polish Pope surely felt the same about his beliefs and his view of the world. But those beliefs weren’t, strictly speaking, an ideology, were they? Well, for these purposes, they might as well be, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself.

“My people will look at this carefully. We cannot do the impossible, Misha, but—”

“But what is impossible for this agency of the Soviet state?” A rhetorical question with a bloody answer. And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized.

How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideology that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy. Surely he regarded both Russia and communism as enemies, one for nationalistic reasons, the other for reasons of his religious conviction… But did he fear that enemy?

No, probably not, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself. That made his task harder. His was an agency that needed fear to get its way. Fear was its source of power, and a man lacking fear was a man he could not manipulate…

But those whom he could not manipulate could always be killed. Who, after all, remembered much about Leon Trotsky?

“Few things are truly impossible. Merely difficult,” the Chairman belatedly agreed.

“So, you will look into the possibilities?”

He nodded cautiously. “Yes, starting in the morning.” And so the processes began.

Chapter 3. Explorations

“Well, Jack’s got his desk in London,” Greer told his colleagues on the Seventh Floor.

“Glad to hear it,” Bob Ritter observed. “Think he knows what to do with it?”

“Bob, what is it with you and Ryan?” the DDI asked.

“Your fair-haired boy is moving up the ladder too fast. He’s going to fall off someday and it’s going to be a mess.”

“You want me to turn him into just one more ordinary desk-weenie?” James Greer had often enough fended off Ritter’s beefs about the size and consequent power of the Intelligence Directorate. “You have some burgeoning stars in your shop, too. This kid’s got possibilities, and I’m going to let him run until he hits the wall.”

“Yeah, I can hear the splat now,” the DDO grumbled. “Okay, which one of the crown jewels does he want to hand over to our British cousins?”

“Nothing much. The appraisal of Mikhail Suslov that the doctors up at Johns Hopkins did when they flew over to fix his eyes.”

“They don’t have that already?” Judge Moore asked. It wasn’t as though it were a super-sensitive document.

“I guess they never asked. Hell, Suslov won’t be around much longer anyway, from what we’ve been seeing.”

The CIA had many ways to determine the health of senior Soviet officials. The most commonly used was photographs or, better yet, motion-picture coverage of the people in question. The Agency employed physicians— most often full professors at major medical schools—to look at the photos and diagnose their ills without getting within four thousand miles of them. It wasn’t good medicine, but it was better than nothing. Also, the American Ambassador, every time he went into the Kremlin, came back to the embassy and dictated his impressions of everything he saw, however small and insignificant it might seem. Often enough, people had lobbied for putting a physician in the post of ambassador, but it had never happened. More often, direct DO operations had been aimed at collecting urine samples of important foreign statesmen, since urine was a good diagnostic source of information. It made for some unusual plumbing arrangements at Blair House, across the street from the White House, where foreign dignitaries were often quartered, plus the odd attempt to break into doctors’ offices all over the world. And gossip, there was always gossip, especially over there. All of this came from the fact that a man’s health played a role in his thinking and decision-making. All three men in this office had joked about hiring a gypsy or two and observed, rightly, that it would have produced results no less accurate than they got from well-paid professional intelligence officers. At Fort Meade, Maryland, was yet another operation, code-named STARGATE, where the Agency employed people who were well to the left of gypsies; it had been started mainly because the Soviets also employed such people.

“How sick is he?” Moore asked.

“From what I saw three days ago, he won’t make Christmas. Acute coronary insufficiency, they say. We have a shot of him popping what looks like a nitroglycerine pill, not a good sign for Red Mike,” James Greer concluded with Suslov’s in-house nickname.

“And Alexandrov replaces him? Some bargain,” Ritter observed tersely. “I think the gypsies switched them at birth—another True Believer in the Great God Marx.”

“We can’t all be Baptists, Robert,” Arthur Moore pointed out.

“This came in two hours ago on the secure fax from London,” Greer said, passing the sheets around. He’d saved the best for last. “Might be important,” the DDI added.

Bob Ritter was a multilingual speed-reader: “Jesus!”

Judge Moore took his time. As a judge should, he thought. About twenty seconds later than the DDO. “My goodness.” A pause. “Nothing about this from our sources?”

Ritter shifted in his chair. “Takes time, Arthur, and the Foleys are still settling in.”

“I presume we’ll hear about this from CARDINAL.” They didn’t often invoke that agent’s code name. In the pantheon of CIA crown jewels, he was the Cullinan Diamond.

“We should, if Ustinov talks about it, as I expect he will. If they do something about it—”

“Will they, gentlemen?” the DCI asked.

“They’ll sure as hell think about it,” Ritter opined at once.

“It’s a big step to take, “ Greer thought more soberly. “You suppose His Holiness is courting it? Not too many men walk up to the tiger, open the cage door, and then make faces at him.”

“I’ll have to show this to the President tomorrow.” Moore paused for a moment’s thought. His weekly meeting at the White House was set for 10:00 the following morning. “The Papal Nuncio is out of town, isn’t he?” It turned out that the others didn’t know. He’d have to have that one checked out.

“What would you say to him, anyway?” This was Ritter. “You have to figure that the other guys in Rome tried to talk him out of this.”

“James?”

“Kinda takes us back to Nero, doesn’t it? It’s almost as though he’s threatening the Russians with his own death… Damn, do people really think that way?”

“Forty years ago, you put your life on the line, James.” Greer had served his time on fleet boats in the Second World War, and often wore a miniature of his gold dolphins on the lapel of his suit coat.