Red Rabbit

him during Sally’s infancy. Like moving furniture and taking out the garbage, the household tasks for which men were genetically prepared.

It was like cleaning a rifle to a soldier: unscrew the top, reverse the nipple, place bottle in pot with four to five inches of water, turn on stove, and wait a few minutes.

That would be Miss Margaret’s task, however. Jack saw the taxi outside the window, just pulling onto the parking pad.

“Car’s here, babe.”

“Okay,” was the resigned response. Cathy didn’t like leaving her kids for work. Well, probably no mother did. Jack watched her head into the half-bath to wash her hands, then emerge to put on the suit coat that went with her gray outfit—even gray cloth-covered flat shoes. She wanted to make a good first impression. A kiss for Sally, and one for the little guy, and she headed for the door, which Jack held open for her.

The taxi was an ordinary Land Rover saloon car—only London required the classic English taxi for public livery, though some of the older ones found their way into the hinterland. Ryan had arranged the morning pickup the previous day. The driver was one Edward Beaverton, and he seemed awfully chipper for a man who had to work before 7:00 A.M.

“Howdy,” Jack said. “Ed, this is my wife. She’s the good-looking Dr. Ryan.”

“Good morning, mum,” the driver said. “You’re a surgeon, I understand.”

“That’s right, ophthalmic—”

Her husband cut her off: “She cuts up eyeballs and sews them back together. You should watch, Eddie, it’s fascinating to see how she does it.”

The driver shuddered. “Thank you, sir, but, no, thank you.”

“Jack just says that to make people throw up,” Cathy told the driver. “Besides, he’s too much of a wuss to come watch any real surgery.”

“And properly so, mum. Much better to cause surgery than to attend it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a former Marine?”

“That’s right. And you?”

“I was in the Parachute Regiment. That’s what they taught us: Better to inflict harm on the other bloke than to suffer it yourself.”

“Most Marines would agree with that one, pal,” Ryan agreed with a chuckle.

“That’s not what they taught us at Hopkins,” Cathy sniffed.

* * *

It was an hour later in Rome. Colonel Goderenko, titularly the Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, had about two hours per day of diplomatic duties, but most of his time was taken up by his job as rezident, or Chief of Station for the KGB. It was a busy posting. Rome was a major information nexus for NATO, a city in which one could obtain all manner of political and military intelligence, and that was his main professional concern. He and his six full- and part-time officers ran a total of twenty-three agents—Italian (and one German) nationals who fed information to the Soviet Union for political or pecuniary reasons. It would have been better for him if their motivation was mainly ideological, but that was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The rezidentura in Bonn had a better atmosphere in which to work. Germans were Germans, and many of them could be persuaded that helping out their co-linguists in the DDR was preferable to working with the Americans, British, and French who called themselves allies of the Fatherland. For Goderenko and his fellow Russians, Germans would never be allies, whatever politics whey might claim to have, though the fig leaf of Marxism-Leninism could sometimes be a useful disguise.

In Italy, things were different. The lingering memory of Benito Mussolini was pretty well faded now, and the local true-believer communists were more interested in wine and pasta than revolutionary Marxism, except for the bandits of the Red Brigade—and they were dangerous hooligans rather than politically reliable operatives. Vicious dilettantes more than anything else, though not without their uses. He occasionally saw to their trips to Russia, where they studied political theory and, more to the point, learned proper fieldcraft skills that at least had some tactical use.

On his desk was a pile of overnight dispatches, topmost of which was a message flimsy from Moscow Centre. The header told him it was important, and the cipher book: 115890. This was in his office safe, in the credenza behind his desk. He had to turn in his swivel chair and half-kneel to dial in the combination to open the door, after first deactivating the electronic alarm that was wired to the dial. That took a few seconds. Atop the book was his cipher wheel. Goderenko cordially hated using one-time pads, but they were as much a part of his life as using the toilet. Distasteful, but necessary. Decryption of the dispatch took him ten minutes. Only when it was done did he grasp the actual message. From the Chairman himself? he thought. As with any mid-level government official across the world, it was like being called to the principal’s office.

The Pope? Why the hell does Yuriy Vladimirovich care a rat’s ass about getting close to the Pope? Then he thought for a second. Oh, of course. It’s not about the head of the Catholic Church. It’s about Poland. You can take the Polack out of Poland, but you can’t take Poland out of the Polack. It’s political. That made it important.

But it did not please Goderenko.

“ASCERTAIN AND REPORT MEANS OF GETTING PHYSICALLY CLOSE TO THE POPE,” he read again. In the professional language of the KGB, that could only mean one thing.

Kill the Pope? Goderenko thought. That would be a political disaster. As Catholic as Italy was, the Italians were not a conspicuously religious people. La dolce vita, the sweet life—that was the religion of this country. The Italians were the most profoundly disorganized people in the world. How they had ever been allies to the Hitlerites boggled the imagination. For the Germans, everything was supposed to be in Ordnung, properly arranged, clean and ready for use at all times. About the only things the Italians kept in proper order were their kitchens and perhaps their wine cellars. Aside from that, everything was so casual here. To a Russian, coming to Rome was a culture shock, akin to being bayoneted in the chest. The Italians had no sense of discipline. You only had to observe their traffic to see that, and driving in it was what flying a fighter plane must be like.

But the Italians were all born with a sense of style and propriety. There were some things one could not do here. Italians had a collective sense of beauty that was difficult for any man to fault, and to violate that code could have the most serious of consequences. For one thing, it could compromise his intelligence sources. Mercenaries or not… Even mercenaries would not work against their very religion, would they? Every man had some scruples, even—no, he corrected himself, especially—here. So the political consequences of something like this potential mission could adversely affect the productivity of his rezidentura and would seriously impact recruitment.

So, what in hell do I do now? he asked himself. A senior colonel in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and a highly successful rezident, he had a certain degree of flexibility in his actions. He was also a member of a huge bureaucracy, and the easiest thing for him to do was what all bureaucrats did. He would delay, obfuscate, and obstruct.

There was some degree of skill required for this, but Ruslan Borissovich Goderenko knew all he needed to know about that.

Chapter 6. But Not Too Close

New things are always interesting, and that was true for surgeons, too. While Ryan read his paper, Cathy looked out the train window. It was another bright day, with a sky as blue as his wife’s pretty eyes. For his part, Jack had the route pretty well memorized, and boredom invariably made him sleepy. He slumped in the corner of the seat and found his eyelids getting heavy.

“Jack, are you going to sleep? What if you miss the stop?”

“It’s a terminal,” her husband explained. “The train doesn’t just stop there; it ends there. Besides, never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”