Red Rabbit

“We don’t know about that yet, do we?” the DCI asked rhetorically.

“Won’t they wonder why the Pope didn’t let us in on his threat…?”

“Probably not. The wording of the letter suggests a private communication.”

“Not so private that Warsaw didn’t forward it to Moscow,” Ritter objected.

“As my wife likes to say, that’s different,” Moore pointed out.

“You know, Arthur, sometimes this wheels-inside-of-other-wheels stuff gives me a headache,” Greer observed.

“The game has rules, James.”

“So does boxing, but those are a lot more straightforward.”

“ ‘Protect yourself at all times,’ “ Ritter pointed out. “That’s Rule Number One here, too. Well, we don’t have any specific warnings yet, do we?” Heads shook wordlessly. No, they didn’t. “What else did he say, Arthur?”

“He wants us to find out if there’s any danger to His Holiness. If anything happens to him, our President is going to be seriously pissed.”

“Along with a billion or so Catholics,” Greer agreed.

“You suppose the Russians might contract the Northern Irish Protestants to do the hit?” Ritter asked, with a nasty smile. “They don’t like him either, remember. Something for Basil to look into.”

“Robert, that’s a little too far off the wall, I think,” Greer analyzed. “They hate communism almost as much as Catholicism, anyway.”

“Andropov doesn’t think that far outside the box,” Moore decided. “Nobody over there does. If he decides to take the Pope out, he’ll use his own assets and try to be clever about it. That’s how we’ll know if, God forbid, it goes that far. And if it looks as if he’s leaning that way, we’ll have to dissuade him from that notion.”

“It won’t get that far. The Politburo is too circumspect,” said the DDL “And it’s too unsubtle for them. It’s not the sort of thing a chess player does, and chess is still their national game.”

“Tell that to Leon Trotsky,” Ritter said sharply.

“That was personal. Stalin wanted to eat his liver with onions and gravy,” Greer replied. “That was pure personal hatred, and it achieved nothing on the political level.”

“Not the way Uncle Joe looked at it. He was genuinely afraid of Trotsky—”

“No, he wasn’t. Okay, you can say he was a paranoid bastard, but even he knew the difference between paranoia and genuine fear.” Greer knew that statement was a mistake the moment the words escaped his lips. He covered his tracks: “And even if he was afraid of the old goat, the current crop isn’t like that. They lack Stalin’s paranoia but, more to the point, they lack his decisiveness.”

“Jim, you’re wrong. The Warsaw Letter is a potentially dangerous threat to their political stability, and they will take that seriously.”

“Robert, I didn’t know you were that religious,” Moore joked.

“I’m not, and neither are they, but they will be worried about this. I think they will be worried a lot. Enough to take direct action? That I’m not sure of, but they will damned well think about it.”

“That remains to be seen,” Moore countered.

“Arthur, that is my assessment,” the DDO shot back, and with the A-word, it became serious, at least within the cloisters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“What changed your mind so quickly, Bob?” the Judge asked.

“The more I think about it, from their point of view, the more serious it starts to look.”

“You planning anything?”

That made Ritter a little uneasy. “It’s a little early to hit the Foleys with a major tasking, but I am going to send them a heads-up, at least to get them thinking about it.”

This was an operational question, on which the others typically deferred to Bob Ritter and his field-spook instincts. Taking information from an agent was often simpler and more routine than getting instructions to an agent. Since it was assumed that every employee of the Moscow embassy was followed on a regular or irregular basis, it was dangerous to make them do something that looked spookish. This was especially true for the Foleys—they were so new that they would be tightly covered. Ritter didn’t want them blown, for the usual reasons and for one other: His selection of this husband/wife team had been a daring play, and if it didn’t work, it would come back at him. A high-stakes poker player, Ritter didn’t like losing his chips any more than the next man. He had very high hopes for the Foleys. He didn’t want their potential blown two weeks into their assignment in Moscow.

The other two didn’t comment, which allowed Ritter to proceed, running his shop as he saw fit.

“You know,” Moore observed, with a lean-back into his chair, “here we are, the best and brightest, the best- informed members of this presidential administration, and we don’t know beans about a subject that may turn out to be of great importance.”

“True, Arthur,” Greer agreed. “But we don’t know with considerable authority. That’s more than anybody else can say, isn’t it?”

“Just what I needed to hear, James.” It meant that those outside this building were free to pontificate, but that these three men were not. No, they had to be cautious in everything they said, because people tended to view their opinions as facts—which, you learned up here on the Seventh Floor, they most certainly were not. If they were that good, they’d be doing something more profitable with their lives, like picking stocks.

Ryan settled back into his easy chair with a copy of the Financial Times. Most people preferred to read it in the morning, but not Jack. Mornings were for general news, to prepare him for the workday at Century House—back home, he’d listened to news radio during the hour-or-so drive, since the intelligence business so often tracked the news. Here and now, he could relax with the financial stuff. This British paper wasn’t quite the same as The Wall Street Journal, but the different twist it put on things was interesting—it gave him a new slant on abstract problems, to which he could then apply his American- trained expertise. Besides, it helped to keep current. There were bound to be financial opportunities out here, waiting for people to harvest them. Finding a few would make this whole European adventure worth the time. He still regarded his CIA sojourn as a side trip in life, whose ultimate destination was too far off in the haze. He’d play his cards one at a time.

“Dad called today,” Cathy said, perusing her medical journal. This was The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the six she subscribed to.

“What did Joe want?”

“Just asked how we were doing, how the kids are, that sort of thing,” Cathy responded.

Didn’t waste any words about me, did he? Ryan didn’t bother asking. Joe Muller, senior VP of Merrill Lynch, didn’t approve of the way his son-in-law had left the trading business, after having had the bad grace to run off with his own daughter, first to teach, and then to play fox-and-hounds with spies and other government employees. Joe didn’t much care for the government and its minions—he deemed them unproductive takers of what he and others made. Jack was sympathetic, but someone had to deal with the tigers of the world, and one of those somebodies was John Patrick Ryan. Ryan liked money as much as the next guy, but to him it was a tool, not an end in itself. It was like a good car—it could take you to nice places but, once there, you didn’t sleep in the car. Joe didn’t see things that way and didn’t even try to understand those who thought otherwise. On the other hand, he did love his daughter, and he had never hassled her about becoming a surgeon. Perhaps he figured taking care of sick people was okay for girls, but making money was man’s work.

“That’s nice, honey,” Ryan said from behind the FT. The Japanese economy was starting to look shaky to Ryan, though not to the paper’s editorial board. Well, they’d been wrong before.

It was a sleepless night in Moscow. Yuriy Andropov had smoked more than his usual complement of Marlboros, but had held himself to only one vodka after he’d gotten home from a diplomatic reception for the ambassador from Spain—a total waste of his time. Spain had joined NATO, and its counterintelligence service was depressingly effective at identifying his attempts to get a penetration agent into their government. He’d probably be better advised to try the king’s court. Courtiers were notoriously talkative, after all, and the elected government would probably keep the newly restored monarch informed, for no other reason than their desire to suck up to him. So he had drunk the wine, nibbled on the finger food, and chattered on with the usual small talk. Yes, it has been a fine summer, hasn’t it? Sometimes he wondered if his elevation to the Politburo was worth