Red Rabbit

his eyes like that war film on television. They continued to do so during breakfast, causing a distant look in his eyes that his wife noticed but decided not to comment on. Soon enough it was time to go to work. He went along the way like an automaton, taking the right path to the metro station by rote memory, his brain both quiescent and furiously active, as though he’d suddenly split into two separate but distantly connected people, moving along parallel paths to a destination he couldn’t see and didn’t understand. He was being carried there, though, like a chip of wood down mountain rapids, the rock walls passing so rapidly by his left and right that he couldn’t even see them. It came almost as a surprise when he found himself aboard the metro carriage, traveling down the darkened tunnels dug by political prisoners of Stalin’s under the direction of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, surrounded by the quiet, almost faceless bodies of other Soviet citizens also making their way to workplaces for which they had little love and little sense of duty. But they went to them because it was how they earned the money with which they bought food for their families, minuscule cogs in the gigantic machine that was the Soviet state, which they all purported to serve and which purported to serve them and their families…

But it was all a lie, wasn’t it? Zaitzev asked himself. Was it? How did the murder of a priest serve the Soviet State? How did it serve all these people? How did it serve him and his wife and his little daughter? By feeding them? By giving him the ability to shop in the “closed” shops and buy things that the other workers could not even think about getting for themselves?

But he was better off than nearly everyone else on the subway car, Oleg Ivan’ch reminded himself. Ought he not be grateful for that? Didn’t he eat better food, drink better coffee, watch a better TV set, sleep on better sheets? Didn’t he have all the creature comforts that these people would like to have? Why am I suddenly so badly troubled? the communicator asked himself. The answer was so obvious that it took nearly a minute for him to grasp the answer. It was because his position, the one that gave him the comforts he enjoyed, also gave him knowledge, and in this case, for the first time in his life, knowledge was a curse. He knew the thoughts of the men who determined the course his country was taking, and in that knowledge he saw that the course was a false one… an evil one, and inside his mind was an agency that looked at the knowledge and judged it wrong. And in that judgment came the need to do something to change it. He could not object and expect to keep what passed for freedom in his country. There was no agency open to him through which he could make his judgment known to others, though others might well concur with his judgment, might ask the men who governed their country for a redress of their grievances. No, there was no way for him to act within such a system as it existed. To do that, you had to be so very senior that before you voiced doubts you had to think carefully, lest you lose your privilege, and so whatever consciences you had were tempered by the cowardice that came with having so much to lose. He’d never heard of any senior political figure in his country standing up that way, standing on a matter of principle and telling his peers that they were doing something wrong. No, the system precluded that by the sort of people it selected. Corrupted men only selected other corrupted men to be their peers, lest they have to question the things that gave them their own vast privileges. Just as the princes under the czars rarely if ever considered the effect their rule had on the serfs, so the new princes of Marxism never questioned the system that gave them their place in the world. Why? Because the world hadn’t changed its shape—just its color, from czarist white to socialist red—and in keeping the shape, it kept its method of working, and in a red world, a little extra spilled blood was difficult to notice.

The metro carriage stopped at his station, and Zaitzev made his way to the sliding metal door, to the platform, left to the escalator, up to the street on a fine, clear, late-summer day, again part of a crowd, but one that dispersed as it moved. A medium-sized contingent walked at a steady pace toward the stone edifice of The Centre, through the bronze doors, and past the first security checkpoint. Zaitzev showed his pass to the uniformed guard, who checked the picture against his face and jerked his head to the right, signaling that it was all right for him to enter the vast office building. Showing the same lack of emotion as he would any other day, Zaitzev took the stone steps down to the basement level through another checkpoint and finally into the open-bay work area of the signals center.

The night crew was just finishing up. At Zaitzev’s desk was the man who worked the midnight-to-eight shift, Nikolay Konstantinovich Dobrik, a newly promoted major like himself.

“Good morning, Oleg,” Dobrik said in comradely greeting, accompanied by a stretch in his swivel chair.

“And to you, Kolya. How was the night watch?”

“A lot of traffic last night from Washington. That madman of a president was at it again. Did you know that we are ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’?”

“He said that?” Zaitzev asked incredulously.

Dobrik nodded. “He did. The Washington rezidentura sent us the text of his speech—it was red meat for his party faithful, but it was incendiary even so. I expect the ambassador will get instructions from the foreign ministry about it, and the Politburo will probably have something to say. But at least it gave me a lively watch to read it all!”

“They didn’t put it on the pad, did they?” A complete transmission on a one-time cipher pad would have been a nightmare job for the clerks.

“No, it was a machine job, thank God,” Dobrik replied. His choice of words wasn’t entirely ironic. That euphemism was a common one, even at The Centre. “Our officers are trying to make sense of his words even now. The political department will be going over it for hours—days, more likely, complete with the psychiatrists, I wager.”

Zaitzev managed a chuckle. The back-and-forth between the head doctors and the field officers would undoubtedly be entertaining to read—and, like good clerks, they tended to read all of the entertaining dispatches.

“You have to wonder how such men get to rule major countries,” Dobrik observed, standing up and lighting a cigarette.

“I think they call it the democratic process,” Zaitzev responded.

“Well, in that case, thanks be for the Collective Will of the People as expressed through the beloved Party.” Dobrik was a good Party member, despite the planned irony of his remark, as was everyone in this room, of course.

“Indeed, Kolya. In any case”—Zaitzev looked over at the wall clock. He was six minutes early—”I relieve you, Comrade Major.”

“And I thank you, Comrade Major.” Dobrik headed off to the exit.

Zaitzev took the seat, still warm from Dobrik’s backside, and signed in on the time sheet, noting the time. Next he dumped the contents of the desk ashtray into the trash bucket—Dobrik never seemed to do that—and started a new day at the office. Relieving his colleague had been a rote process, if a pleasant one. He hardly knew Dobrik, except for these moments at the start of his day. Why anyone would volunteer for continuous night duty mystified him. At least Dobrik always left a clean desk behind, not one piled up with unfinished work, which gave Zaitzev a few minutes to get caught up and mentally organized for the day.

In this case, however, those few minutes merely brought back the images that, it seemed, were not about to go away. And so Oleg Ivanovich lit up his first work cigarette of the day and shuffled the papers on the metal desk while his mind was elsewhere, doing things that he himself didn’t want to know about just yet. It was ten minutes after the hour when a cipher clerk came to him with a folder.

“From Station Washington, Comrade Major,” the clerk announced.

“Thank you, comrade,” Zaitzev acknowledged.

Taking the manila folder, he opened it and started leafing through the dispatches.

Ah, he thought, this CASSIUS fellow has reported in… yes, more political intelligence. He didn’t know the name or face that went along with CASSIUS, but he had to be an aide to a senior parliamentarian, possibly even a senator. He delivered high-quality political intelligence that hinted at access to hard intelligence information. So a servant to a very senior American politician worked for the Soviet Union, too. He wasn’t paid, which made him an ideologically motivated agent, the very best sort.

He read through the dispatch and then searched his memory for the right recipient upstairs… Colonel Anatoliy Gregorovich Fokin, in the political department, whose address was Washington Desk, Line PR, First Department, First Chief Directorate, up on the fourth floor.

* * *

Outside of town, Colonel Ilya Fedorovich Bubovoy walked off his morning flight from Sofia. To catch it, he’d had to arise at three in the morning, an embassy car taking him to the airport for the flight to Moscow. The