Red Rabbit

“Arthur, I took my chances, along with everybody else on the boat. I did not tell Tojo where I was in a personal letter.”

“The man has some serious cojones, guys,” Ritter breathed. “We have seen this sort of thing before. Dr. King never took a step back in his life, did he?”

“And I suppose the KKK was as dangerous to him as the KGB is to the Pope,” Moore completed the thought. “Men of the cloth have a different way of looking at the world. It’s called ‘virtue,’ I think.” He sat forward. “Okay, when the President asks me about this—and for damned sure he will—what the hell do I tell him?”

“Our Russian friends might just decide that His Holiness has lived long enough,” Ritter answered.

“That’s a hell of a big and dangerous step to take,” Greer objected. “Not the sort of thing a committee does.”

“This committee might,” the DDO told the DDI.

“There would be hell to pay, Bob. They know that. These men are chess players, not gamblers.”

“This letter backs them into a corner.” Ritter turned. “Judge, I think the Pope’s life might be in danger.”

“It’s much too early to say that,” Greer objected.

“Not when you remember who’s running KGB. Andropov is a Party man. What loyalty he has is to that institution, damned sure not to anything we would recognize as a principle. If this frightens, or merely worries them, they will think about it. The Pope has hurled down his gauntlet at their feet, gentlemen,” the Deputy Director (Operations) told the others. “They just might pick it up.”

“Has any Pope ever done this?” Moore asked.

“Resign his post? Not that I can remember,” Greer admitted. “I don’t even know if there’s a mechanism for this. I grant you it’s one hell of a gesture. We have to assume he means it. I don’t see this as a bluff.”

“No,” Judge Moore agreed. “It can’t be that.”

“He’s loyal to his people. He has to be. He was a parish priest once upon a time. He’s christened babies, officiated at weddings. He knows these people. Not as an amorphous mass—he’s been there to baptize and bury them. They are his people. He probably thinks of all Poland as his own parish. Will he be loyal to them, even at the peril of his life? How can he not be?” Ritter leaned forward. “It’s not just a question of personal courage. If he doesn’t do it, the Catholic Church loses face. No, guys, he’s serious as hell, and he isn’t bluffing. Question is, what the hell can we do about it?”

“Warn the Russians off?” Moore wondered aloud.

“No chance,” Ritter shot back. “You know better than that, Arthur. If they set up an operation, it’ll have more cutouts than anything the Mafia’s ever done. How good do you suppose security is around him?”

“Not a clue,” the DCI admitted. “I know the Swiss Guards exist, with their pretty uniforms and pikes… Didn’t they fight once?”

“I think so,” Greer observed. “Somebody tried to kill him, and they fought a rear-guard action while he skipped town. Most of them got killed, I think.”

“Now they mostly pose for pictures and tell people where the bathroom is, probably,” Ritter thought out loud. “But there has to be something to what they do. The Pope is too prominent a figure not to attract the odd nutcase. The Vatican is technically a sovereign state. It has to have some of the mechanisms of a country. I suppose we could warn them—”

“Only when we have something to warn them about. Which we don’t have, do we?” Greer pointed out. “He knew when he sent this off that he’d be rattling a few cages. What protection he does have must be alerted already.”

“This will get the President’s attention, too. He’s going to want to know more, and he’s going to want options. Jesus, people, ever since he made that Evil Empire speech, there’s been trouble across the river. If they really do something, even if we can’t pin it on them, he’s going to erupt like Mount Saint Helens. There’s damned near a hundred million Catholics right here in America, and a lot of them voted for him.”

For his part, James Greer wondered how far out of control this might spin. “Gentlemen, all we have to this point is a fax of a photocopy of a letter delivered to the government in Warsaw. We do not know for certain that it’s gone to Moscow yet. We have no sign of any reaction to this from Moscow. Now, we can’t tell the Russians we know about it. So we can’t warn them off. We can’t tip our hand in any way. We can’t tell the Pope that we’re concerned, for the same reason. If Ivan’s going to react, hopefully one of Bob’s people will get us the word, and the Vatican has its own intelligence service, and we know that’s pretty good. So, for the moment, all we have is an interesting bit of information that is probably true, but even that is not yet confirmed.”

“So, for the moment, you think we just sit on this and think it through?” Moore asked.

“There’s nothing else we can do, Arthur. Ivan won’t act very fast. He never does—not on something with this degree of political import. Bob?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” the DDI agreed. “Still, the President needs to hear about it.”

“It’s a little thin for that,” Greer cautioned. “But, yes, I suppose so.” Mainly he knew that not telling the President, and then having something dire happen, would cause all of them to seek new employment. “If it goes further in Moscow, we ought to hear about it before anything drastic happens.”

“Fine, I can tell him that,” Judge Moore agreed. Mr. President, we’re taking a very close look at this. That sort of thing usually worked. Moore rang his secretary and asked for some coffee to be sent in. Tomorrow at ten, they’d brief the President in the Oval Office, and then after lunch would be his weekly sit-down with the chiefs of the other services, DIA and NSA, to see what interesting things they had happening. The order should have been reversed, but that’s just how things were usually scheduled.

His first day at work had lingered quite a bit longer than expected before he’d been able to leave. Ed Foley was impressed by the Moscow Metro. The decorator must have been the same madman who’d designed Moscow State University’s wedding-cake stonework—evidently beloved of Joe Stalin, whose personal aesthetic had run the gamut from Y to Z. It was strangely reminiscent of the czarist palaces, as interpreted by a terminal alcoholic. That said, the metro was superbly engineered, if somewhat clunky. More to the point, the crush of people was very agreeable to the spook. Making a brush-pass or other sort of pickup from an agent would not be overly trying, so long as he kept to his training, and that was something Edward Francis Foley was good at. Mary Pat would love it here, he was sure now. The milieu for her would be like Disney World was for Eddie. The crush of people, all speaking Russian. His Russian was pretty good. Hers was literary, having learned it at her grandfather’s knee, though she’d have to de-tune it, lest she be made out as someone whose language skills were a little too good to be merely those of the wife of a minor embassy official.

The subway worked well for him. With one station only a couple of blocks from the embassy, and the other practically at their apartment house’s doorstep, even the most paranoid Directorate Two shadow would not find his use of it terribly suspicious, despite the well-known American love for cars. He didn’t look around any more than a tourist would, and thought that maybe he’d made one tail. There’d probably be more than that for the moment. He was a new embassy employee, and the Russians would want to see if he wiggled like a CIA spook. He decided to act like an innocent American abroad, which might or might not be the same thing to them. It depended on how experienced his current shadow was, and there was no telling that. For certain, he’d have a tail for a couple weeks. That was an expected annoyance. So would Mary Pat. So, probably, would Eddie. The Soviets were a paranoid bunch, but then, he could hardly complain about that, could he? Not hardly. It was his job to crack into the deepest secrets of their country. He was the new Chief of Station, but he was supposed to be a stealthy one. This was one of Bob Ritter’s new and more creative ideas. Typically, the identity of the boss spook in an embassy wasn’t expected to be a secret. Sooner or later, everyone got burned one way or another, either ID’d by a false-flag operation or through an operational error, and that was like losing one’s virginity. Once gone, it never came back. But the Agency only rarely used a husband-wife team in the field, and he’d spent years building his cover. A graduate of New York’s Fordham University, Ed Foley had been recruited fairly young, vetted by an FBI background check, and then gone to work for The New York Times as a reporter on a general beat. He’d turned in a few interesting stories, but not too many, and had eventually been told that, while the Times wasn’t going to fire him, it might be better for him to seek employment with a smaller newspaper where he might blossom better on his own. He’d taken the hint and gotten a job with the State Department as a Press Attache, a job that paid a decent bureaucratic wage, though without a supergrade’s destiny. His official job at the embassy would be to schmooze the elite foreign correspondents of the great American papers