Red Rabbit

down—if not actually step slightly aside, then at least let others undertake some of his more administrative duties and allow him to concentrate his abilities on the really major questions. The American President was not all that much younger than Brezhnev, but he had lived a healthier life, or perhaps came from hardier peasant stock.

In his reflective moments, it struck Andropov as strange that he objected to this sort of corruption. He saw it precisely as such, but only rarely asked himself why he saw it so. In those moments, he actually did fall back on his Marxist beliefs, the very ones he’d discarded years ago, because even he had to fall back on some sort of ethos, and that was all he had. Stranger still, it was an area in which Marx and Christianity actually overlapped in their beliefs. Must have been an accident. After all, Karl Marx had been a Jew, not a Christian, and whatever religion he rejected or embraced ought to have been his own, not one foreign to him and his heritage. The KGB Chairman dismissed the entire line of thought with an annoyed shake of the head. He had enough on his professional plate, even as he finished what lay before him. There was a discreet knock on the door.

“Come,” Andropov called, knowing who it was by the sound.

“Your car is ready, Comrade Chairman,” the head of the security detail announced.

“Thank you, Vladimir Stepanovich.” He rose from the table, lifted his suit jacket, and shrugged into it for the trip to work.

This was a routine fourteen-minute drive through central Moscow. His ZIL automobile was entirely handmade, actually similar in appearance to the American Checker taxicab. It ran straight down the center of the expansive avenues, in a broad lane kept clear by officers of the Moscow Militia exclusively for senior political officials. They stood out there all day in the heat of summer and the punishing cold of winter, one cop every three blocks or so, making sure no one obstructed the way for longer than it took to make a crossing turn. It made the drive to work as convenient as taking a helicopter, and far easier on the nerves.

Moscow Centre, as KGB was known throughout the world of intelligence, was located in the former home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, and a mighty company it must have been to build such an edifice. Andropov’s car pulled through the gate into the inner courtyard, right up to the bronze doors, where his car door was yanked open, and he alit to the official salutes from uniformed Eighth Directorate men. Inside, he walked to the elevator, which was held for him, of course, and then rode to the top floor. His detail examined his face to ascertain his mood—as such men did all over the world—and, as usual, saw nothing: He guarded his feelings as closely as a professional cardplayer. On the top floor was a walk of perhaps fifteen meters to his secretary’s door. That was because Andropov’s office had no door of its own. Instead, there was a clothes dresser in the anteroom, and the entrance to his office lay within that. This chicanery dated back to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s own chief of clandestine services, who’d had a large and hardly unreasonable fear of assassination and had come up with this security measure, lest a commando team reach all the way into NKVD headquarters. Andropov found it theatrical, but it was something of a KGB tradition and, in its way, roundly entertaining for visitors—it had been around too long to be a secret from anyone able to get this far, in any case.

His schedule gave him fifteen free minutes at the beginning of the day to review the papers on his desk before the daily briefings began, followed by meetings that were scheduled days or even weeks in advance. Today it was almost all internal-security matters, though someone from the Party Secretariat was scheduled before lunch to discuss strictly political business. Oh, yes, that thing in Kiev, he remembered. Soon after becoming KGB Chairman, he’d found that Party affairs paled in importance next to the agreeably broad canvas he had here at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The charter of KGB, insofar as it had such a limitation, was to be the “Sword and Shield” of the Party. Hence its primary mission, theoretically, was to keep an eye on Soviet citizens who might not be as enthusiastic as they ought toward their own country’s government. Those Helsinki Watch people were becoming a major annoyance. The USSR had made an agreement in the Finnish capital seven years before, regarding the monitoring of human rights, and they evidently took it seriously. Worse, they had attracted the on- and-off attention of the Western news media. Reporters could be a huge nuisance, and you couldn’t rough them up the way you used to—not all of them, anyway. The capitalist world treated them like demigods, and expected everyone else to do the same, when everyone knew they were all spies of some kind. It was amusing to see how the American government overtly forbade its intelligence services from adopting journalistic covers. Every other spy service in the world did it. As if the Americans would follow their own lily-white laws, which had been passed only to make other countries feel good about having The New York Times snooping around their countries. It wasn’t even worth a dismissive snort. Preposterous. All foreign visitors in the Soviet Union were spies. Everyone knew it, and that was why his Second Chief Directorate, whose job was counterespionage, was so large a part of the KGB.

Well, the problem that had cost him an hour of sleep the night before wasn’t all that different, was it? Not when you got down to it. Yuriy Vladimirovich punched a button on his intercom.

“Yes, Comrade Chairman,” his secretary—a man, of course—answered immediately.

“Send Aleksey Nikolayi’ch in to see me.”

“At once, comrade.” It took four minutes by Andropov’s desk clock.

“Yes, Comrade Chairman.” Aleksey Nikolayevich Rozhdestvenskiy was a senior colonel in the First Chief —”Foreign”—Directorate, a very experienced field officer who’d served extensively in Western Europe, though never in the Western Hemisphere. A gifted field officer and runner-of-agents, he’d been bumped up to The Centre for his street-smart expertise and to act more or less as an in-house expert for Andropov to consult when he needed information on field operations. Not tall, not especially handsome, he was the sort of man who could turn invisible on any city street in the world, which partly explained his success in the field.

“Aleksey, I have a theoretical problem. You’ve worked in Italy, as I recall.”

“For three years in Station Rome, Comrade Chairman, yes, under Colonel Goderenko. He’s still there, as rezident.”

“A good man?” Andropov asked.

He gave an emphatic nod of the head. “A fine senior officer, yes, Comrade Chairman. He runs a good station. I learned much from him.”

“How well does he know the Vatican?”

That made Rozhdestvenskiy blink. “There is not much to be learned there. We do have some contacts, yes, but it has never been a matter of great emphasis. The Catholic Church is a difficult target to infiltrate, for the obvious reasons.”

“What about through the Orthodox Church?” Andropov asked.

“There are some contacts there, yes, and we have had some feedback, but rarely anything of value. More along the line of gossip and, even then, nothing we cannot get through other channels.”

“How good is security around the Pope?”

“Physical security?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked, wondering where this was going.

“Precisely,” the Chairman confirmed.

Rozhdestvenskiy felt his blood temperature drop a few degrees. “Comrade Chairman, the Pope does have some protection about him, mainly of the passive sort. His bodyguards are Swiss, in plainclothes—that comic-opera group that parades around in striped jumpsuits is mostly for show. They occasionally have to grab a believer overcome by his proximity to the head priest, that sort of thing. I am not even sure if they carry weapons, though I must assume that they do.”

“Very well. I want to know how difficult it might be to get physically close to the Pope. Do you have any ideas?”

Ah, Rozhdestvenskiy thought. “Personal knowledge? No, comrade. I visited Vatican City several times when I was in Rome. The art collection there, as you may imagine, is impressive, and my wife is interested in such things. I took her there perhaps half a dozen times. The area crawls with priests and nuns. I confess I never looked about for security provisions, but nothing was readily apparent, aside from what you’d expect—measures against thefts and vandalism, that sort of thing. There are the usual museum guards, whose main function seems to be to tell people where the lavatories are.

“The Pope lives in the Papal Apartments, which adjoin the church of St. Peter’s. I have never been there. It is not the sort of place in which I had any professional interest. I know our ambassador is there occasionally for diplomatic functions, but I was not invited—my posting was that of Assistant Commercial Attache, you see, Comrade Chairman, and I was too junior,” Rozhdestvenskiy went on. “You say you wish to know about getting close to the Pope. I presume by that you mean…?”

“Five meters, closer if possible, but certainly five meters.”