Red Rabbit

He was. As soon as Ryan alighted from the car, the man came over with a ticket envelope.

“Sir, your flight leaves in forty minutes, Gate Twelve,” the man reported. “You’ll be met in Rome by Tom Sharp.”

“What’s he look like?” Jack asked.

“He will know you, sir.”

“Fair enough.” Ryan took the tickets and headed to the back of the car for his bags.

“I’ll take care of that for you, sir.”

This sort of traveling had its possibilities, Jack thought. He waved at Thompson and headed into the terminal, looking for Gate Twelve. That proved easy enough. Ryan took a seat close by the gate and checked his ticket—1-A again, a first-class ticket. The SIS must have had a comfortable understanding with British Airways. Now all he had to do was survive the flight.

He boarded twenty minutes later, sitting down, strapping in, and turning his watch forward one hour. He endured the usual rigmarole of useless safety briefing and instructions on how to buckle his seat belt, which, in Jack’s case, was already clicked and snugged in.

The flight took two hours, depositing Jack at Leonardo da Vinci Airport at 3:09 local time. Jack walked off the aircraft and looked for the Blue Channel to get his diplomatic passport stamped after a wait of about five seconds —one other diplomat had been ahead of him, and the bonehead had forgotten which pocket his passport was in.

With that done, he retrieved his bags off the carousel and headed out. A man with a gray and brown beard seemed to be eyeballing him.

“You’re Jack Ryan?”

“You must be Tom Sharp.”

“Correct. Let me help you with your bags.” Why people did this, Ryan didn’t know, though on reflection, he’d done it himself often enough, and the Brits were the world champions at good manners.

“And you are?” Ryan asked.

“Station Chief Rome,” Sharp replied. “C called to say you were coming in, Sir John, and that I ought to meet you personally.”

“Good of Basil,” Jack thought out loud.

Sharp’s car was, in this case, a Bentley sedan, bronze in color, with left-hand driver’s seat in deference to the fact that they were in a barbarian country.

“Nice wheels, fella.”

“My cover is Deputy Chief of Mission,” Sharp explained. “I could have had a Ferrari, but it seemed a little too ostentatious. I do little actual field work, you see, just administrative things. I actually am the DCM of the embassy. Too much diplomatic work—that can drive one mad.”

“How’s Italy?”

“Lovely place, lovely people. Not terribly well organized. They say we Brits muddle through things, but we’re bloody Prussians compared to this lot.”

“Their cops?”

“Quite good, actually. Several different police forces. Best of the lot are the Carabinieri, paramilitary police of the central government. Some of them are excellent. Down in Sicily they’re trying to get a handle on the Mafia—pig of a job that is, but, you know, eventually I think they will succeed.”

“You briefed in on why they sent me down?”

“Some people think Yuriy Vladimirovich wants to kill the Pope? That’s what my telex said.”

“Yeah. We just got a defector out who says so, and we think he’s giving us the real shit.”

“Any details?”

“‘Fraid not. I think they sent me down here to work with you until somebody figures out the right thing to do. Looks to me like an attempt might be made Wednesday.”

“The weekly appearance in the square?”

Jack nodded. “Yep.” They were on the highway from the airport to Rome. The country looked odd to Ryan, but it took a minute to figure out why. Then he got it. The pitch of the roofs was different—shallower than what he was used to. They probably didn’t get much snow here in winter. Otherwise the houses looked rather like sugar cubes, painted white to reject the heat of the Italian sun. Well, every country had its unique architecture.

“Wednesday, eh?”

“Yeah. We’re also looking for a guy named Boris Strokov, colonel in the Bulgarian DS. Sounds like a professional killer.”

Sharp concentrated on the road. “I’ve heard the name. Wasn’t he a suspect in the Georgiy Markov killing?”

“That’s the guy. They ought to be sending some photos of him.”

“Courier on your flight,” Sharp reported. “Taking a different way into the city.”

“Any ideas on what the hell to do?”

“We’ll get you settled at the embassy—my house, actually, two blocks away. It’s rather nice. Then we’ll drive down to Saint Peter’s and look around, get a feel for things. I’ve been there to see the artwork and such—the Vatican art collection is on a par with the Queen’s—but I’ve never worked there per se. Ever been to Rome?”

“Never.”

“Very well, let’s take a drive-about first instead, give you a quick feel for the place.”

Rome seemed a remarkably disorganized place—but so did a street map of London, whose city fathers had evidently not been married to the city mothers. And Rome was older by a thousand years or so, built when the fastest thing going was a horse, and they were slower in real life than in a John Ford Western. Not many straight lines for the roads, and a meandering river in the middle. Everything looked old to Ryan—no, not old but old, as though dinosaurs had once walked the streets. That was a little hard to reconcile with the automobile traffic, of course.

“That’s the Flavian Amphitheater. It was called the Coliseum because the Emperor Nero had built a large statue of himself right there”—Sharp pointed—”and the people took to calling the stadium by that name, rather to the annoyance of the Flavian family, which built the place out of proceeds from the Jewish rebellion that Josephus wrote about.”

Jack had seen it on TV and in the movies, but that wasn’t quite the same as driving past it. Men had built that with nothing more than sweat power and hemp ropes. Its shape was strangely reminiscent of Yankee Stadium in New York. But Babe Ruth had never spilled a guy’s guts out in the Bronx. A lot of that had happened here. It was time for Ryan to make an admission.

“You know, if they ever invent a time machine, I think I might like to come back and see what it was like. Makes me a barbarian, doesn’t it?”

“Just their version of rugby,” Sharp said. “And the football here can be pretty tough.”

“Soccer is a girl’s game,” Jack snorted.

“You are a barbarian, Sir John. Soccer,” he explained in his best accent, “is a gentleman’s game played by thugs, while rugby is a thug’s game played by gentlemen.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I just want to see the International Tribune. My baseball team’s in the World Series, and I don’t even know how it’s going.”

“Baseball? Oh, you mean rounders. Yes, that is a girl’s game,” Sharp announced.

“I’ve had this talk before. You Brits just don’t understand.”

“As you do not understand proper football, Sir John. In Italy it’s even more a national passion than at home. They tend to play a fiery game, rather different from the Germans, for example, who play like great bloody machines.”

It was like listening to the distinction between a curveball and a slider or a screwball and a forkball. Ryan wasn’t all that good a baseball fan to be able to grasp all the distinctions; it depended on the TV announcer, who probably just made it up anyway. But he knew that there wasn’t a player in baseball who could smack a good curveball on the outside corner.

Saint Peter’s Basilica was five minutes after that.

“Damn!” Jack breathed.

“Big, isn’t it?”