Red Rabbit

hair. In fact, he’d grown up on an Iowa hog farm, gotten a scholarship to Northwestern University, and then a law degree, which had taken him to corporate boardrooms, where he finally ended up as CEO of a major auto company. Along the way, he’d served three years in the U.S. Navy in World War II on the light cruiser USS Boise during the Guadalcanal campaign. He was regarded as a serious player and a gifted amateur by the embassy’s FSOs.

The Defense Attache was Brigadier General George Dalton. By profession an artilleryman, he got along well with his Russian counterparts. Dalton was a bear of a man with curly black hair, who’d played linebacker for West Point twenty-odd years before.

Foley had an appointment with both of them—ostensibly, to talk over relations with the American news correspondents. Even his internal embassy business needed a cover in this station.

“How’s your son adjusting?” Fuller asked.

“He misses his cartoons. Before we came over, I bought one of those new tape machines—you know, the Betamax thing—and some tapes, but those only last so long, and they cost an arm and a leg.”

“There’s a local version of Roadrunner-Coyote,” General Dalton told him. “It’s called Wait a Moment, something like that. It’s not as good as Warner Brothers, but better than that damned exercise show in the morning. The gal on that could whip a command sergeant-major.”

“I noticed that yesterday morning. Is she part of their Olympic weight-lifting squad?” Foley joked. “Anyway…”

“First impressions—any surprises?” Fuller asked.

Foley shook his head. “About what I was briefed to expect. Looks like everywhere I go, I have company. How long you suppose that will last?”

“Maybe a week or so. Take a walk around—better yet, watch Ron Fielding when he takes a walk. He does his job pretty well.”

“Anything major under way?” Ambassador Fuller asked.

“No, sir. Just routine operations at the moment. But the Russians have something very large happening at home.”

“What’s that?” Fuller asked.

“They call it Operation RYAN. Their acronym for Surprise Nuclear Attack on the Motherland. They’re worried that the President might want to nuke them, and they have officers running around back home trying to get a feel for his mental state.”

“You’re serious?” Fuller asked.

“As a heart attack. I guess they took the campaign rhetoric a little too seriously.”

“I have had a few odd questions from their foreign ministry,” the Ambassador said. “But I just wrote it off to small talk.”

“Sir, we’re investing a lot of money in the military, and that makes them nervous.”

“Whereas, when they buy ten thousand new tanks, it’s normal?” General Dalton observed.

“Exactly,” Foley agreed. “A gun in my hand is a defensive weapon, but a gun in your hand is an offensive weapon. It’s a matter of outlook, I suppose.”

“Have you seen this?” Fuller asked, handing across a fax from Foggy Bottom.

Foley scanned it. “Uh-oh.”

“I told Washington it would worry the Soviets a good deal. What do you think?”

“I concur, sir. In several ways. Most important will be the potential unrest in Poland, which could spread throughout their empire. That’s the one area in which they think long-term. Political stability is their sine qua non. What are they saying in Washington?”

“The Agency just showed it to the President, and he handed it off to the Secretary of State, and he faxed it to me for comment. Can you rattle any bushes, see if they’re talking about it in the Politburo?”

Foley thought for a moment and nodded. “I can try.” It made him slightly uncomfortable, but that was his job, wasn’t it? It meant getting a message to one or more of his agents, but that was what they were for. The troubling part was that it meant exposing his wife. Mary Pat would not object—hell, she loved the spy game in the field—but it always bothered her husband to expose her to danger. He supposed it was chauvinism. “What’s the priority on this?”

“Washington is very interested,” Fuller said. That made it important, but not quite an emergency tasking.

“Okay, I’ll get on it, sir.”

“I don’t know what assets you’re running here in Moscow—and I don’t want to know. It’s dangerous to them?”

“They shoot traitors over here, sir.”

“This is rougher than the car business, Foley. I do understand that.”

“Hell, it wasn’t this rough in the Central Highlands,” General Dalton noted. “Ivan plays pretty mean. You know, I’ve been asked about the President, too, usually over drinks by senior officers. They’re really that worried about him, eh?”

“It sure looks that way,” Foley confirmed.

“Good. Never hurts to rattle the other guy’s confidence a little, keep him looking over his shoulder some.”

“Just so it doesn’t go too far,” Ambassador Fuller suggested. He was relatively new to diplomacy, but he had respect for the process. “Okay, anything that I need to know about?”

“Not from my end,” the COS replied. “Still getting used to things. Had a Russian reporter in today, maybe a KGB counterspook checking me out, guy named Kuritsyn.”

“I think he’s a player,” General Dalton said at once.

“I caught a whiff of that. I expect he’ll check me out through the Times correspondent.”

“You know him?”

“Anthony Prince.” Foley nodded. “And that pretty much sums him up. Groton and Yale. I bumped into him a few times in New York when I was at the paper. He’s very smart, but not quite as smart as he thinks he is.”

“How’s your Russian?”

“I can pass for a native—but my wife can pass for a poet. She’s really good at it. Oh, one other thing. I have a neighbor in the compound, Haydock, husband Nigel, wife Penelope. I presume they’re players, too.”

“Big-time,” General Dalton confirmed. “They’re solid.”

Foley thought so, but it never hurt to be sure. He stood. “Okay, let me get some work done.”

“Welcome aboard, Ed,” the Ambassador said. “Duty here isn’t too bad once you get used to it. We get all the theater and ballet tickets we want through their foreign ministry.”

“I prefer ice hockey.”

“That’s easy, too,” General Dalton responded.

“Good seats?” the spook asked.

“First row.”

Foley smiled. “Dynamite.”

* * *

For her part, Mary Pat was out on the street with her son. Eddie was too big for a stroller, which was too bad. You could do a lot of interesting things with a stroller, and she figured the Russians would be hesitant to mess with an infant and a diaper bag—especially when they both came with a diplomatic passport. She was just taking a walk at the moment, getting used to the environment, the sights and smells. This was the belly of the beast, and here she was, like a virus—a deadly one, she hoped. She’d been born Mary Kaminsky, the granddaughter of an equerry to the House of Romanov. Grandfather Vanya had been a central figure of her youth. From him she’d learned Russian as a toddler, and not the base Russian of today, but the elegant, literary Russian of a bygone time. She could read the poetry of Pushkin and weep, and in this she was more Russian than American, for the Russians had venerated their poets for centuries, while in America they were mainly relegated to writing pop songs. There was much to admire and much to love about this country.

But not its government. She’d been twelve, looking forward to her teens with enthusiasm, when Grandfather Vanya had told her the story of Aleksey, the crown prince of Russia—a good child, so her grandfather said, but an