Red Rabbit

what was good and what was evil.

And yet…

And yet, in the heart of every man was an inborn knowledge of right and wrong. To kill another man was wrong. To take a man’s life you had to have a just cause. But it was also men who decided what constituted such cause. The right men in the right place with the right authority had the ability and the right to kill because—why?

Because Marx and Lenin said so.

That was what the government of his country had long since decided.

Zaitzev buttered his last piece of bread and dipped it in the remaining gravy in his bowl before eating it. He knew he was thinking overly deep, even dangerous, thoughts. His parent society did not encourage or even permit independent thinking. You were not supposed to question the Party and its wisdom. Certainly not here. In the KGB cafeteria, you never, ever, not even once heard someone wonder aloud if the Party and the Motherland it served and protected were even capable of doing an incorrect act. Oh, maybe once in a while, people speculated on tactics, but even then the talk was within limits that were taller and stronger than the Kremlin’s own brick walls.

His country’s morality, he mused, had been predetermined by a German Jew living in London, and the son of a czarist bureaucrat who simply hadn’t liked the czar much and whose overly adventurous brother had been executed for taking direct action. That man had found shelter in that most capitalistic of nations, Switzerland, then had been dispatched back to Mother Russia by the Germans in the hope that he could upset the czar’s government, allowing Germany then to defeat the other Western nations on the Western Front of the First World War. All in all, it didn’t sound like something ordained by any deity for some great plan for human advancement, did it? Everything Lenin had used as a model for changing his country—and through it, the entire world—had come from a book written by Karl Marx, more writings by Friedrich Engels, and his own vision for becoming the chief of a new kind of country.

The only thing that distinguished Marxism-Leninism from a religion was the lack of a godhead. Both systems claimed absolute authority over the affairs of men, and both claimed to be right a priori. Except that his country’s system chose to assert that authority by exercising the power of life and death.

His country said it worked for justice, for the good of the workers and peasants all around the world. But other men, higher up in the hierarchy, decided who the workers and peasants were, and they themselves lived in ornate dachas and multi-room flats, and had automobiles and drivers… and privileges.

What privileges they had! Zaitzev had also dispatched messages about pantyhose and perfumes that the men in this building wanted for their women. These items were often delivered in the diplomatic bag from embassies in the West, things his own country could not produce, but which the nomenklatura craved, along with their West German refrigerators and stoves. When he saw the big shots racing down the center of Moscow’s streets in their chauffeured Zils, then Zaitzev understood how Lenin had felt about the czars. The czar had claimed divine right as his personal deed to power. The Party chieftains claimed their positions by the will of the people.

Except that the People had never given anything to them by public acclamation. The Western democracies had elections—Pravda spat upon them every few years—but they were real elections. England was now run by a nasty-looking woman, and America by an aged and buffoonish actor, but both had been chosen by the people of their countries, and the previous rulers had been removed by popular choice. Neither leader was well-loved in the Soviet Union, and he’d seen many official messages sent out to ascertain their mental state and deeply held political beliefs; the concern in those messages had been manifest, and Zaitzev himself had his worries, but as distasteful and unstable as these leaders might be, their people had chosen them. The Soviet people had decidedly not selected the current crop of princes on the Politburo.

And now the new communist princes were thinking about murdering a Polish priest in Rome. But how did he threaten the Rodina? This Pope fellow had no military formations at his command. A political threat, then? But how? The Vatican was supposed to have diplomatic identity, but nationhood without military power was—what? If there was no God, then whatever power the Pope exercised had to be an illusion, of no more substance than a puff of cigarette smoke. Zaitzev’s country had the greatest army on earth, a fact proclaimed regularly by We Serve the Soviet Union, the TV show that everybody watched.

So, why do they want to kill a man who poses no threat? Would he part the oceans with a wave of his staff or bring down plagues on the land? Of course not.

And to kill a harmless man is a crime, Zaitzev told himself, exercising his mind for the first time in his tenure at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square, silently asserting his free will. He’d asked a question and come up with an answer.

It would have been helpful if he’d had someone to talk to about that, but of course that was out of the question. That left Zaitzev without a safety valve—a way to process his feelings and bring them to some kind of resolution. The laws and customs of his nation forced him to recycle his thoughts over and over, and ultimately that led in only one direction. That it was a direction of which the State would not approve was, in the end, a product of the State’s own making.

On finishing his lunch, he sipped his tea and lit a cigarette, but that contemplative act didn’t help the state of his mind. The hamster was still running in its wheel. No one in the huge dining room noticed. To those who saw Zaitzev, he was just one more man enjoying his after-meal smoke in solitude. Like all Soviet citizens, Zaitzev knew how to hide his feelings, and so his face gave nothing away. He just looked at the wall clock so that he wouldn’t be late going back to work for his afternoon watch, just one more bureaucrat in a large building full of them.

UPSTAIRS, it was a little different. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy hadn’t wanted to interrupt the Chairman’s lunch, and so he’d sat in his own office waiting for the hands on the clock to move, munching on his own sandwich but ignoring the cup of soup that had come with it. Like his Chairman, he smoked American Marlboro cigarettes, which were milder and better made than their Soviet counterparts. It was an affectation he’d picked up in the field, but as a high-ranking First Chief Directorate officer, he could shop at the special store in Moscow Centre. They were expensive, even for one paid in “certificate” rubles, but he only drank cheap vodka, so it evened out. He wondered how Yuriy Vladimirovich would react to Goderenko’s message. Ruslan Borissovich was a very capable rezident, careful and conservative, and a man senior enough to be allowed to talk back, as it were. His job, after all, was to feed good information to Moscow Centre, and if he thought something might compromise that mission, it was his duty to warn them about it—and besides, the original dispatch had not carried an obligatory directive in it, just an instruction to ascertain a situation. So, no, Ruslan Borissovich would probably not get into any trouble from his reply. But Andropov might bark and, if he did, then he, Colonel A. N. Rozhdestvenskiy, would bear the noise, which was never fun. His place here was enviable in one way and frightening in another. He had the ear of the Chairman, but being that close meant that he had to be close to the teeth, too. In the history of KGB, it was not unknown for some people to suffer for the actions of others. But it was unlikely in this case. Though an undeniably tough man, Andropov was also a reasonably fair one. Even so, it didn’t pay to be too close to a rumbling volcano. His desk phone rang. It was the Chairman’s private secretary.

“The Chairman will see you now, Comrade Colonel.”

“Spasiba.” He rose and walked down the corridor.

“We have a reply from Colonel Goderenko,” Rozhdestvenskiy reported, handing it over.

For his part, Andropov was not surprised, and to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy’s invisible relief, he did not lose his temper.

“I expected this. Our people have lost their sense of daring, haven’t they, Aleksey Nikolay’ch?”

“Comrade Chairman, the rezident gives you his professional assessment of the problem,” the field officer answered.

“Go on,” Andropov commanded.

“Comrade Chairman,” Rozhdestvenskiy replied, choosing his words with the greatest care, “you cannot undertake an operation like the one you are evidently considering without political risks. This priest has a good deal of influence, however illusory that influence may be. Ruslan Borissovich is concerned that an attack on him might affect his ability to gather information, and that, comrade, is his primary task.”

“The assessment of political risk is my job, not his.”