Red Rabbit

fully to predict their actions, because such people are rational within their own context. One need only understand that, or so I have always believed.”

“Sometimes I think I ought to get Cathy involved in this work.”

“Because she’s a physician?” Harding asked.

Ryan nodded. “Yeah, she’s pretty good reading people. That’s why we had the docs report in on Mikhail Suslov. None of them were pshrinks,” Jack reminded his workmate.

“So, no, we know remarkably little on Andropov’s personal life,” Harding admitted. “No one’s ever been tasked to delve too deeply into it. If he gets elevated to the General-Secretaryship, I imagine his wife will become a semipublic figure. In any case, there’s no reason to think him a homosexual or anything like that. They are quite intolerant of that aberration over there, you know. Some colleague would have used it against him along the way and wrecked his career for fair. No, the closet they live in within the Soviet Union is a very deep one. Better to be celibate,” the analyst concluded.

Okay, Ryan thought, I’ll call the Admiral tonight and tell him that the Brits don’t know, either. It was strangely disappointing, but somehow predictable. For all that the intelligence services knew, the frequency of holes in their knowledge was often surprising to the outsiders, but not so to those on the inside. Ryan was still new enough at the game to be surprised and disappointed. A married man would be used to compromise, to letting his wife have her way on all manner of things, because every married man is pussy-whipped to one extent or another—unless he is a total thug, and few people fit into that category. Fewer still could rise up any hierarchy that way, because in any organization you had to go along in order to get along. That was human nature, and even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union couldn’t repeal that, for all their talk about the New Soviet Man that they kept trying to build over there. Yeah, Ryan thought, sure.

“Well,” Harding said, checking his watch, “I think we’ve served Her Majesty enough for one day.”

“Agreed.” Ryan stood up and collected his jacket off the clothes tree. Take the tube this time to Victoria Station, and catch the Lionel home. The routine was getting to him. It would have been better to get a place in town and cut down the commute, but that way Sally wouldn’t have much in the way of green grass to play on, and Cathy had been adamant about that. Renewed proof that he was indeed pussy-whipped, Jack thought on the way to the elevator. Well, it could have been worse. He did have a good wife to do the whipping, after all.

* * *

Colonel Bubovoy came back to the embassy on his way home from the airport. A short dispatch was waiting, which he quickly decrypted: He’d be working through Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy. No particular surprise there.

Aleksey Nikolay’ch was Andropov’s lapdog. And that was probably a good job, the rezident thought. You just had to keep the boss happy, and Yuriy Vladimirovich was probably not the demanding bastard that Beria had been. Party people might be overly precise in their demands, but anyone who’d worked in the Party Secretariat doubtless knew how to work with people. The age of Stalin had indeed passed.

So, it looked as though he had an assassination to arrange, Bubovoy thought. He wondered how Boris Strokov would react to it. Strokov was a professional, with little in the way of excess emotion, and less in the way of a professional conscience. To him, work was work. But the magnitude of this was higher than anything he would have encountered working for the Dirzhavna Sugurnost. Would that frighten him or excite him? It would be interesting to see. There was a coldness to his Bulgarian colleague that both alarmed and impressed the KGB officer. His particular skills could be useful things to have in one’s pocket. And if the Politburo needed this annoying Pole killed, then he would just have to die. Too bad, but if what he believed was true, then they were just sending him off to heaven as a holy martyr, weren’t they? Surely that was the secret ambition of every priest.

Bubovoy’s only concern was the political repercussions. Those would be epic, and so it was good that he was just a cutout in the operation. If it went bad, well, it wouldn’t be his fault. That Strokov was the best man for the job, based on his curriculum vitae, was something no man could deny, something a board of inquiry, if any, could confirm. He’d warned the Chairman that a shot, however closely taken, would not necessarily be fatal. He’d have to put that in a memo to make sure the thin paper trail on operation 15-8-82-666 would have his formal evaluation in it. He’d draft it himself and send it by diplomatic bag to The Centre—and keep his own copy in his office safe, just to make sure his own backside was properly covered.

But for now he would have to wait for the authorization to come from the Politburo. Would those old women elect to go forward with this? That was the question, and one on which he would not make a wager. Brezhnev was in his dotage. Would that make him bloodthirsty or cautious? It was too hard a question for the colonel to puzzle out. They were saying that Yuriy Vladimirovich was the heir apparent. If so, here was his chance to win his spurs.

* * *

“So, Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, will you support me tomorrow?” Andropov asked over drinks in his flat.

Alexandrov swirled the expensive brown vodka in his glass. “Suslov will not attend tomorrow. They say his kidneys have failed, and he has no more than two weeks,” the ideologue-in-waiting said, briefly dodging the issue. “Will you support me for his chair?”

“Need you ask, Misha?” the Chairman of the Committee for State Security responded. “Of course I will support you.”

“Very well. So, what are the chances for success in this operation you propose?”

“About fifty-fifty, my people tell me. We will use a Bulgarian officer to set it up, but for security reasons the assassin will have to be a Turk…”

“A black-ass Muslim?” Alexandrov asked sharply.

“Misha, whoever it is will almost certainly be apprehended—dead, according to our plan. It is impossible to expect a clean getaway in such a mission. Thus, we cannot use one of our own. The nature of the mission places constraints upon us. Ideally, we would use a trained sniper—from Spetsnaz, for example—from three hundred meters, but that would mark the assassination as a killing done by a nation-state. No, this must appear to be the act of a single madman, as the Americans have them. You know, even with all the evidence the Americans had, some fools over there still blamed Kennedy on us or Castro. No, the evidence we leave must be a clear sign that we were not involved. That limits our operational methods. I think this is the best plan we can come up with.”

“How closely have you studied it?” Alexandrov asked, taking a swallow.

“It has been closely held. Operations like this must be. Security must be airtight, Mikhail Yevgeniyevich.”

The Party man conceded the point: “I suppose that is so, Yuriy—but the risk of failure…”

“Misha, in every aspect of life, there is risk. The important thing is that the operation not be tied to us. That we can assure with certainty. If nothing else, a serious wound will at least lessen Karol’s ardor for making trouble for us, will it not?”

“It should—”

“And half a chance of failure means half a chance of total success,” Andropov reminded his guest.

“Then I will support you. Leonid Ilyich will go along as well. That will carry the day. How long after that to get things moving?”

“A month or so, perhaps six weeks.”

“That quickly?” Party matters rarely sped along that well.

“What is the point of taking such, such—’executive action,’ isn’t that what the Americans call it?—if it is to take so long? If it is to be done, better that it should be done quickly, so as to forestall further political intrigue by this man.”

“Who will replace him?”

“Some Italian, I suppose. His selection was a major aberration. Perhaps his death will encourage the Romans to go back to their old habits,” Andropov suggested. It generated a laugh from his guest.

“Yes, they are so predictable, these religious fanatics.”

“So tomorrow I will float the mission, and you will support me?” Andropov wanted that one very clear.

“Yes, Yuriy Vladimirovich. You will have my support. And you will support me for Suslov’s full voting seat at the table.”

“Tomorrow, comrade,” Andropov promised.