Red Rabbit

a living.

“Churchill called it KBO—keep buggering on.” He shrugged. “We do the best we can, Jack.”

“I suppose I’d feel a hell of a lot better with a platoon of Marines to back my play.”

“As would I, my boy, but one does the best one can with what one has.”

“Tommy,” Mrs. Sharp said. “What exactly are you two talking about?”

“Can’t say, my dear.”

“But you are CIA,” she said next, looking at Jack.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ryan confirmed. “Before that, I taught history at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and before that I traded stocks, and before that I was a Marine.”

“Sir John, you’re the one who—”

“And I’ll never live it down, either.” Why the hell, Jack wondered, hadn’t he just kept his wife and daughter behind that tree on the Mall in London and let Sean Miller do his thing? Cathy would have gotten some pictures and that would have helped with the police, after all. No good—or dumb—deed ever went unpunished, he supposed. “And you can stop the Sir John stuff. I do not own a horse or a steel shirt.” And his only sword was the Mameluke that the Marine Corps gave to its officers upon graduation at Quantico.

“Jack, a knight is ceremonially one who will take up arms in protection of the sovereign. You’ve done that twice, if memory serves. You are, therefore, entitled to the honorific,” Sharp pointed out.

“You guys never forget, do you?”

“Not something like that, Sir John. Courage under fire is one of the things worth remembering.”

“Especially in nightmares, but in those the gun never works, and, yeah, sometimes I have them,” Jack admitted, for the first time in his life. “What are we doing tomorrow, Tom?”

“I have embassy work in the morning. Why don’t you scout the area some more, and I can join you for lunch.”

“Fair enough. Meet where?”

“Just inside the Basilica, to the right, is Michelangelo’s Pieta. Just there at one fifteen exactly.”

“Fair enough,” Jack agreed.

* * *

“So, where is Ryan?” the Rabbit asked.

“Rome,” Alan Kingshot answered. “He’s looking into what you told us.” All of this day had been occupied with uncovering what he knew of KGB operations in the UK. It turned out to be quite a lot, enough that the three-man Security Service team had positively drooled as they took their notes. Ryan had been wrong, Kingshot thought over dinner. This fellow wasn’t a gold mine. No, he was Kimberly, and the diamonds just spilled out from his mouth. Zaitzev was relaxing a little more, enjoying his status. As well he might, Alan thought. Like the man who’d invented the computer chip, this Rabbit was set for life, all the carrots he could eat, and men with guns would protect his hole in the ground against all bears.

The Bunny, as he thought of her, had discovered Western cartoons today. She especially liked “Roadrunner,” immediately noting the similarity to the Russian “Hey, Wait a Minute,” and laughing through every one of them.

Irina, on the other hand, was rediscovering her love for the piano, playing the big Bosendorfer in the home’s music room, making mistakes but learning from them, and starting to recover her former skills, to the admiring looks of Mrs. Thompson, who’d never learned to play herself, but who’d found reams of sheet music in the house for Mrs. Zaitzev to try her hand at.

This family, Kingshot thought, will do well in the West. The child was a child. The father had tons of good information. The mother would breathe free and play her music to her heart’s content. They would wear their newfound freedom like a loose and comfortable garment. They were, to use the Russian word, kulturniy, or cultured people, fit representatives of the rich culture which had long predated communism. Good to know that not all defectors were alcoholic ruffians.

* * *

“Like a canary on amphetamines, Basil says,” Moore told his senior people in the den of his home. “He says this guy will give us more information than we can easily use.”

“Oh, yeah? Try us,” Ritter thought out loud.

“Indeed, Bob. When do we get him over here?” Admiral Greer asked.

“Basil asked for two more days to get him over. Say, Thursday afternoon. I’m having the Air Force send a VC-137 over. Might as well do it first class,” the Judge observed generously. It wasn’t his money, after all. “Basil’s alerted his people in Rome, by the way, just in case KGB is running fast on their operation to whack the Pope.”

“They’re not that efficient,” Ritter said with some confidence.

“I’d be careful about that, Bob,” the DDI thought out loud. “Yuriy Vladimirovich isn’t noted for his patience.” Greer was not the first man to make that observation.

“I know, but their system grinds slower than ours.”

“What about the Bulgarians?” Moore asked. “They think the shooter is a guy named Strokov, Boris Strokov. He’s probably the guy who killed Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge. Experienced assassin, Basil thinks.”

“It figures they’d use the Bulgars,” Ritter observed. “They’re the Eastern Bloc’s Murder Incorporated, but they’re still communists, and they’re chess players, not high-noon types. But we still haven’t figured out how to warn the Vatican. Can we talk to the Nuncio about this?”

They’d all had a little time to think through that question, and now it was time to face it again. The Papal Nuncio was the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, Giovanni Cardinal Sabatino. Sabatino was a longtime member of the Pope’s own diplomatic service and was well regarded by the State Department’s career foreign- service officers, both for his sagacity and his discretion.

“Can we do it in such a way as not to compromise the source?” Greer wondered.

“We can say some Bulgarian talked too much—”

“Pick that fictional source carefully, Judge,” Ritter warned. “Remember, the DS has that special subunit. It reports directly to their Politburo, and they don’t write much down, according to what sources we have over there. Kinda like the commie version of Albert Anastasia. This Strokov guy is one of them, or so we have heard.”

“We could say their party chairman talked to a mistress. He has a few,” Greer suggested. The Director of Intelligence had all manner of information on the intimate habits of world leaders, and the Bulgarian party boss was a man of the people in the most immediate of senses. Of course, if this ever leaked, life might get difficult for the women in question, but adultery had its price, and the Bulgarian chairman was such a copious drinker that he might not remember to whom he’d (never) said what would be attributed to him. That might serve to salve their consciences a little. “Sounds plausible,” Ritter opined. “When could we see the Nuncio?” Moore asked. “Middle of the week, maybe?” Ritter suggested again. They all had a full week before them. The Judge would be on The Hill doing budget business until Wednesday morning.

“Where?” They couldn’t bring him here, after all. The churchman wouldn’t come. Too much potential unpleasantness if anyone noticed. And Judge Moore couldn’t go to the Nuncio. His face, also, was too well known by the Washington establishment.

“Foggy Bottom,” Greer thought out loud. Moore went to see the Secretary of State often enough, and the Nuncio wasn’t exactly a stranger there.

“That’ll work,” the DCI decided. “Let’s get it set up.” Moore stretched. He hated having to do work on a Sunday. Even a judge of the appeals court got weekends off.

“There’s still the issue of what they can actually do with the information,” Ritter warned them. “What is Basil doing?”

“He’s got his Rome Station rooting around, only five of them, but he’s going to send some more troops from London tomorrow just in case they try to make their hit on Wednesday—that’s when His Holiness appears in public. I gather he has a pretty busy work schedule, too.”

“Shame he can’t call off the ride around the plaza, but I guess he wouldn’t listen if anybody asked.”

“Not hardly,” Moore agreed. He didn’t bring up the word from Sir Basil that Ryan had been dispatched to Rome. Ritter would just throw another conniption fit, and Moore wasn’t up to that on a Sunday.

* * *