Red Rabbit

Mercedes. Spooks earned their living most of all by remembering everything and forgetting nothing.

The drive to the embassy was faster than taking the metro at this time of day, but that was factored in to everything else his working routine encompassed. In just a few minutes, he pulled into the embassy gate, past the Marine sentry, and took a visitor’s slot before running in, past some more Marines, and up to his office. There he lifted the phone and made a call, while he took a manila envelope and slid a copy of the International Herald Tribune into it.

“Yeah, Ed?” The voice belonged to Dominic Corso, one of Foley’s field officers. Actually older than his boss, Corso was covered as a Commercial Attache. He’d worked Moscow for three years and was well regarded by his Station Chief. Another New Yorker, he was a native of the Borough of Richmond—Staten Island—the son of an NYPD detective. He looked like what he was, a New York guinea, but he was a quite a bit smarter than ethnic bigots would like to have admitted. Corso had the fey brown eyes of an old red fox, but he kept his intelligence under wraps.

“Need you to do something.”

“What’s that?”

Foley told him.

“You’re serious?” It wasn’t exactly a normal request.

“Yep.”

“Okay, I’ll tell the gunny. He’s going to ask why.” Gunnery Sergeant Tom Drake, the NCO-in-Charge of the Marine detail at the embassy, knew whom Corso worked for.

“Tell him it’s a joke, but it’s an important one.”

“Right.” Corso nodded. “Anything I need to know?”

“Not right now.”

Corso blinked. Okay, this was sensitive if the COS wasn’t sharing information, but that wasn’t so unusual, was it? Corso reflected. In CIA, you often didn’t know what your own team was doing. He didn’t know Foley all that well, but he knew enough to respect him.

“Okay, I’ll go see him now.”

“Thanks, Dom.”

“How’s the boy like Moscow?” the field officer asked his boss on the way out the door.

“He’s adjusting. Be better when he can skate some. He really likes hockey.”

“Well, he’s in the right town for that.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Foley gathered his papers and stood. “Let’s get this one done, Dom.”

“Right now, Ed. See you tomorrow.”

Chapter 14. Danger Signal

If there is anything constant in the business of espionage, it is a persistent lack of sleep for the players. That comes from stress, and stress is always the handmaiden of spooks. When sleep was slow in coming for Ed and Mary Pat Foley, they could at least talk with their hands in bed.

He’s re[al as] h[ell], b[aby], Foley told his wife under the covers.

Y[ep], she agreed. Have w[e] ev[er] had a g[uy] fr[om] that far in [side]? she wondered.

N[o] way Jose, he replied.

Lan[gley] will flip.

B[ig]-time, her husband agreed. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs, full count, and the pitcher had hung a curveball right over Main Street, and he was about to stroke it over the Scoreboard. Assuming we don’t fuck it all up, Foley warned himself.

Want me to get inv[olved]? she wondered next.

Need to wait n s[ee].

A sigh told him, Yeah, I know. Even for them, patience came hard. Foley could see that curveball, hanging right over the middle of the plate, just about belt-high, and the Louisville Slugger was tight in his hands: his eyes were locked on the ball so tight that he could see the stitches turning as it approached—and this one was going out of the park, going down-fuckin’-town. He’d show Reggie Jackson who was the hitter on this playground…

If he didn’t fuck it up, he thought again. But Ed Foley had done this kind of operation in Tehran, had developed an agent in the revolutionary community, and had been the only field officer in the station to get a feel for how bad it was for the Shah, and that series of reports had lit up his star at Langley and made him one of Bob Ritter’s varsity.

And he was going to take this one deep, too.

At Langley, MERCURY was the one place that everyone was afraid of—everybody knew that an employee there under foreign control could damned near bring the whole building down. That was why they all went “on the box” twice a year, polygraphed by the best examiners FBI had—they didn’t even trust CIA’s own polygraph experts for that tasking. A bad field officer or a bad senior analyst could burn agents and missions, and that was bad for everyone involved—but a leaker in MERCURY would be like turning a female KGB officer loose on Fifth Avenue with an American Express Gold Card. She’d be able to get anything her heart desired. Hell, the KGB might even pay a million bucks for such a source. It would bust the Russian exchequer, but they would cash in one of Nikolay II’s Faberge eggs, and be glad for it. Everyone knew there had to be a KGB counterpart office to MERCURY, but nobody in any intelligence service had ever bagged a Russian national from there.

Foley found himself wondering what it was like, how the room looked. At Langley it was immense, the size of a parking garage, with no internal walls or dividers, so that everyone could see everyone else. There were seven drum-shaped cassette storage structures, named for Disney’s Seven Dwarfs; they even had TV cameras on the inside, should some lunatic try to get in there, though he’d almost certainly be killed by such an adventure, since the motorized retrievers turned powerfully and without warning. Besides, only the big mainframe computers—including the fastest and most powerful one, made by Cray Research—knew which cassette had which data and lay in which storage slot. The security there was unreal, multilayered, and checked on a daily—maybe an hourly—basis. The people who worked there were occasionally and randomly followed home from work, probably by the FBI, which was pretty good at such stuff, for a bunch of gumshoed cops. It must have been oppressive for the people who worked there, but if anyone had ever complained about it, those reports hadn’t come to Ed Foley. Marines had to run their three miles per day and undergo formal inspections, and CIA employees had to put up with the overpowering institutional paranoia, and that was just how things were. The polygraph was a particular pain in the ass, and the Agency even had psychiatrists who trained people in how to defeat them. He’d undergone such training, and so had his wife—and still CIA put them on the box at least once a year, whether to test their loyalty or to see if they still remembered their training, who could tell?

But did KGB do that as well? They’d be crazy not to, but he wasn’t sure if they had polygraph technology, and so… maybe, maybe not. There was so much about KGB that he and CIA didn’t know. Langley made a lot of SWAGs—stupid wild-ass guesses—mainly from people who said, “Well, we do it this way, and therefore they must, too,” which was total horseshit. No two people, and damned-sure no two countries, had ever done anything exactly the same way, and that was why Ed Foley deemed himself one of the best in this crazy business. He knew better. He never stopped looking. He never did anything the same way twice, except as a ruse, to give a false impression to someone else—especially Russians, who probably (almost certainly, he figured) suffered from the same bureaucratic disease that circumscribed minds at CIA.

Wh[at] if this g[uy] wants a tick[et] out? Mary Pat asked.

First class on Pan Am, her husband answered, as fast as his fingers could move, and he gets to screw the stew.

U R bad, Mary Patricia responded, with the gagging sound of a suppressed laugh. But she knew he was right. If this guy wanted to play spy, it might be smarter just to yank his ass out of the USSR and fly him to Washington, and toss in a lifetime pass to Disney World for after the debrief. A Russian would go into sensory overload in the Magic Kingdom, not to mention the newly opened Epcot Center. Coming out of Space