Red Rabbit

to. What I cannot evaluate is how the Politburo might react—I mean, how much starch they might have in their backbone. When I talked to Basil, I said it comes down to how scared they are by his threat, if you call it a threat.”

“What would you call it, Jack?” the DDI asked from 3,400 miles away.

“Yes, sir, you have me there. I suppose it is a threat of sorts to their way of thinking.”

“Of sorts? How does it look to them?” Jim Greer would have been one tough son of a bitch teaching graduate-level history or political science. Right up there with Father Tim at Georgetown.

“Noted, Admiral. It’s a threat. And they will see it as such. I am not sure, however, how serious a threat they will take it to be. It’s not as though they believe in God. To them, ‘God’ is politics, and politics is just a process, not a belief system as we understand the term.”

“Jack, you need to learn to see reality through the eyes of your adversary. Your analytical ability is first-rate, but you have to work on perception. This isn’t stocks and bonds, where you dealt with hard numbers, not perceptions of numbers. They say El Greco had a stigmatism in his eyes that gave everything a visual slant. They see reality through a different lens, too. If you can replicate that, you’ll be one of the best around, but you have to make that leap of imagination. Harding’s pretty good at that. Learn from him to see the inside of their heads.”

“You know Simon?” Jack asked.

“I’ve been reading his analyses for years.”

None of this is an accident, Jack, he told himself, with more surprise than there ought to have been. His second important lesson of the day. “Understood, sir.”

“Don’t sound too surprised, my boy.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Ryan responded like a Marine shavetail. I won’t make that mistake again, Admiral. And in that moment, John Patrick Ryan became a real intelligence analyst.

“I’ll have the embassy deliver the STU to you. You know about keeping it secure,” the DDI added as a cautionary note.

“Yes, sir. I can do that.”

“Good. Lunchtime here.”

“Yes, sir. Talk to you tomorrow.” Ryan replaced the receiver in the cradle and then extracted the plastic key from the slot in the phone set. That went into his pocket. He checked his watch. Time to close up shop. He’d already cleared his desk of classified folders. A woman came around about 4:30 with a shopping cart to take them back to central-records storage. Right on cue, Simon came back in.

“What time’s your train?”

“Six-ten.”

“Time for a beer, Jack. Interested?”

“Works for me, Simon.” He rose and followed his roommate out the door.

It was only a four-minute walk to the Fox and Cock, a very traditional pub a block from Century House. A little too traditional: It looked like a relic from Shakespeare’s time, with massive wooden timbers and plaster walls. It had to be for architectural effect; no real building could have survived that long, could it? Inside was a cloud of tobacco smoke and a lot of people wearing jackets and ties. Clearly an upscale pub, a lot of the patrons were probably from Century House. Harding confirmed it.

“It’s our watering hole. The publican used to be one of us, probably makes more here than he ever did at the shop.” Without being bidden, Harding ordered two pints of Tetley’s bitter, which arrived quickly. Then he ushered Jack to a corner booth.

“So, Sir John, how do you like it here?”

“No complaints so far.” He took a sip. “Admiral Greer thinks you’re pretty smart.”

“And Basil thinks he’s rather bright as well. Good chap to work for?” Harding asked.

“Yeah, big-time. He listens and helps you think. Doesn’t stomp on you when you goof. He’d rather teach than embarrass you—that’s my experience, anyway. Some of the more senior analysts have had him tear a stripe off their ass. I guess I’m not senior enough for that yet.” Ryan paused. “You supposed to be my training officer over here, Simon?”

The directness of the question surprised his host. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. I’m a Soviet specialist. You’re more a generalist, I take it?”

“Try ‘apprentice,’ “ Ryan suggested.

“Very well. What do you want to know?”

“How to think like a Russian.”

Harding laughed into his beer. “That’s something we all learn every day. The key is to remember that to them everything is politics, and politics, remember, is all about nebulous ideas, aesthetics. Especially in Russia, Jack. They can’t deliver real products like automobiles and television sets, so they have to concentrate on everything fitting into their political theory, the sayings of Marx and Lenin. And, of course, Lenin and Marx knew sod-all about doing real things in the real world. It’s like a religion gone mad, but instead of thunderbolts or biblical plagues, they kill their apostates with firing squads. In their world outlook, everything that goes wrong is the result of political apostasy. Their political theory ignores human nature, and since their political theory is Holy Writ, and therefore is never wrong, it must be human nature that’s wrong. It’s not logically consistent, you see. Ever study metaphysics?”

“Boston College, second year. The Jesuits make you spend a semester on it,” Ryan confirmed, taking a long sip. “Whether you want to or not.”

“Well, communism is metaphysics applied ruthlessly to the real world, and when things don’t fit, it’s the fault of the square sods who don’t fit into their round bloody holes. That can be rather hard on the poor sods, you see. And so, Joe Stalin murdered roughly twenty million of them, partly because of political theory, partly because of his own mental illness and bloody-mindedness. That insane bugger defined paranoia. One pays a price for being ruled by a madman with a twisted book of rules, you see.”

“But how faithful is the current political leadership to Marxist theory?”

A thoughtful nod. “That’s the question, Jack. The answer is, we don’t bloody know. They all claim to be true believers, but are they?” Harding paused for a contemplative sip of his own. “Only when it suits them, I think. But that depends on who one is talking about. Suslov, for example, believes totally—but the rest of them? To some greater or lesser extent, they do and they don’t. I suppose you can characterize them as people who used to go to church every Sunday, then fell away from the habit. Part of them still believes, but some greater or lesser part does not. What they do believe in is the fact that the state religion is the source of their power and status. And so, for all the common folk out there, they must appear to believe, because believing is the only thing that gives them that power and status.”

“Intellectual inertia?” Ryan wondered aloud.

“Exactly, Jack. Newton’s first law of motion.”

Part of Ryan wanted to object to the discourse. The world had to make more sense than that. But did it? What rule said that it had to? he asked himself. And who enforced such rules? And was it expressed that simply? What Harding had just explained in less than two hundred words purported to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures, strategic weapons of incomprehensible power, and millions of people whose uniforms denoted enmity that demanded aggression and death in time of war or near-war.

But the world was about ideas, good and bad, and the conflict between this one and Ryan’s own defined the reality in which Ryan worked, defined the belief system of the people who’d tried to kill him and his family. And that was as real as it had to be, wasn’t it? No, there was no rule that compelled the world to make sense. People decided on their own what made sense and what did not. So, was everything about the world a matter of perception? Was it all a thing of the mind? What was reality?

But that was the question behind all of metaphysics. When Ryan had studied it at Boston College, it had been so purely theoretical that it seemed to have no attachment at all to reality. It had been a lot for Ryan to absorb at age nineteen, and, he realized, just as much to absorb at age thirty-two. But here the marks were often recorded in human blood, not on a report card.

“Christ, Simon. You know, it would be a lot easier if they did believe in God.”

“Then, Jack, it would be just another religious war, and those are bloody affairs, too, you may recall. Think of it as the crusades, one version of God against another. Those wars were quite nasty enough. The true believers in Moscow think that they are riding the wave of history, that they are bringing perfection to the human condition. It