Red Rabbit

Was the man really an American—or some false-flag from the Second Chief Directorate?

Had the “American” seen his face?

Did that matter? Weren’t his fingerprints on the message form? Zaitzev didn’t have a clue. He’d been careful when tearing off the form—and, if questioned, he could always say that the pad just lay on his desk, and anyone could have taken a form—even asked him for it! It might be enough even to foil a KGB investigation if he stuck to his story. Soon enough, he was off the subway car and walking into the open air. He hoped nobody saw his hands shake as he lit up a smoke.

* * *

Foley’s highly trained senses had failed him. With his coat loose about him, he hadn’t noticed any touch, except for the usual bumps associated with the subway, whether in Moscow or New York. But as he made his way off the train, he stuck his left hand into the left-side pocket, and there was something there, and he knew that it wasn’t something he’d placed there himself. A quizzical look crossed his face, which his training quickly erased. He succumbed to the temptation to look around for a tail, but instantly realized that, given his regular schedule, there’d be a fresh face here on the surface to track him, or most likely a series of cameras atop the surrounding buildings. Movie film was as cheap here as everywhere else in the world. And so he walked home, just as on any other day, nodded at the guard at the gate, and then made his way into the elevator, then through the door.

“I’m home, honey,” Ed Foley announced, taking out the paper only after the door was closed. He was reasonably certain that there were no cameras in the apartment—even American technology wasn’t that far along yet, and he’d seen enough of Moscow to be unimpressed with their technical capabilities. His fingers unfolded the paper, and then he stopped cold in his tracks.

“What’s for dinner?” he called out.

“Come and see, Ed.” Mary Pat’s voice came from the kitchen.

Hamburgers were sizzling on the stove. Mashed potatoes and gravy, plus baked beans, your basic American working-class dinner. But the bread was Russian, and that wasn’t bad. Little Eddie was in front of the TV, watching a Transformers tape, which would keep him occupied for the next twenty minutes.

“Anything interesting happen today?” Mary Pat asked from the stove. She turned for her kiss, and her husband replied with their personal code phrase for the unusual.

“Not a thing, baby.” That piqued her interest enough that when he held up the sheet of paper, she took it, and her eyes went wide.

It wasn’t so much the handwritten message as the printed header: STATE SECURITY OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION.

Damn. His wife’s lips mouthed the word.

The Moscow COS nodded thoughtfully.

“Can you watch the burgers, honey? I have to get something.”

Ed took the spatula and flipped one over. His wife was back quickly, holding a kelly green tie.

Chapter 11. Hand Jive

Of course, there was little to be done at the moment. Dinner was served and eaten, and Eddie went back to his VCR and cartoon tapes. Four-year-olds were easy to please, even in Moscow. His parents got down to business. Years ago, they’d seen The Miracle Worker on TV, in which Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) taught Helen Keller (Patty Duke) the use of the manual alphabet, and they’d decided it was a useful skill to learn as a means of communicating not quickly but quietly and with their own shorthand.

W[ell], what do [yo]u think? Ed asked Mary.

This could b[e] pretty h[ot], his wife replied.

Y[ep].

Ed, this guy works in MERCURY, th[eir] version anyway! Wow!

More likely he just has access to their mess[age] forms, the Chief of Station cautioned slowly. But I’ll wear the green tie and take the same subway train for the next w[eek] or so.

FAB, his wife agreed, which was shorthand for Fuckin’ A, Bubba!

Hope it isn’t a trap or a false-flag, Ed observed.

Part of the terr[itory], h[oney], MP responded. The thought of being burned didn’t frighten her, though she didn’t want to suffer the embarrassment. She looked for opportunities more than her husband did—he worried more. But, strangely, not this time. If the Russians had “made” him as the Chief of Station or even just as a field spook—not likely, Ed thought—they’d be total idiots to burn him like this, not this fast and not this amateurishly. Unless they were trying to make some sort of political point, and he couldn’t see the logic of that—and the KBG was as coldly logical as Mr. Spock ever was on planet Vulcan. Even the FBI wouldn’t play this loose a game. So this opportunity had to be real, unless KGB was shaking down every embassy employee it could, just to see what might fall off the tree. Possible, but damned unlikely, and therefore worth the gamble, Foley judged. He’d wear the green tie and see what happened, and be damned careful to check all the faces on the subway car.

Tell L[angley]? Mary asked next.

He just shook his head. 2 early 4 that.

She nodded agreement. Next, Mary Pat mimed riding a horse. That meant that there was a chase and they were really in the game, finally. It was as though she were afraid that her skills were going stale. Damned little chance of that, her husband thought. He was willing to bet that his wife had gone all the way through parochial school without a single rap on the knuckles, because the sisters had never once caught her misbehaving…

And, for that matter, Ed reflected, neither had he.

W[ell], tomor[row] will be inter[esting], he told her, getting a sexy nod as a reply.

The hard part for the rest of the evening was not dwelling on the opportunity. Even with their training, their thoughts kept coming back to the idea of working an agent in the Russian MERCURY. It was a conceptual homer in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series—Reggie Jackson Foley as Mister October.

Damn.

* * *

“So, Simon, what do we really know about the guy?”

“Not all that much on the personal level,” Harding admitted. “He’s a Party man first, last, and always. His horizons have been broadened, I suppose, from his chairmanship of KGB. There’s talk that he prefers Western liquor to his own vodka, and stories that he enjoys American jazz, but those could be stories floated in-house by The Centre to help him appear amenable to the West—not bloody likely, in my humble opinion. The man is a thug. His Party record is not one of gentleness. One doesn’t advance in that organization except by toughness—and remarkably often the highflyers are men who have crushed their own mentors along the way. It’s a Darwinian organization gone mad, Jack. The fittest survive, but they prove themselves to be the fittest by smashing those who are a threat to them, or merely smashing people to prove their own ruthlessness in the arena they’ve chosen.”

“How smart is he?” Ryan asked next.

Another draw on the briar pipe. “He’s no fool. Highly developed sense of human nature, probably a good— even a brilliant—amateur psychologist.”

“You haven’t compared him to someone from Tolstoy or Chekhov,” Jack noted. Simon was a lit major, after all.

Harding dismissed the thought. “Too easy to do so. No, people like him most often do not appear in literature, because novelists lack the requisite imagination. There was no warning of a Hitler in German literature, Jack. Stalin evidently thought himself another Ivan the Terrible, and Sergei Eisenstein played along with his epic movie about the chap, but that sort of thing is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand. No, Stalin was a complex and fundamentally incomprehensible monster, unless you have psychiatric credentials. I do not,” Harding reminded him. “One need not understand them