Red Rabbit

growing nicely with the new presidency, but enough was enough.

“Day after tomorrow,” her husband answered. “I suppose I might go in after lunch, just to look around.”

“You ought to be asleep by now,” she said.

There were drawbacks to marrying a physician, Jack occasionally told himself. You couldn’t hide much from them. A gentle, loving touch could convey your body temperature, heart rate, and Christ knew what else, and docs hid their feelings about what they found with the skill of a professional poker player. Well, some of the time.

“Yeah, long day.” It was short of five in the evening in New York, but his “day” had lasted longer than the normal twenty-four. He really had to learn to sleep on airplanes. It wasn’t as though his seat had been uncomfortable. He’d upgraded the government-issue tickets to first class on his own American Express card, and soon the frequent-flyer miles would build up so much that such upgrades would be automatic. Yeah, great, Jack thought. They’d know him by sight at Heathrow and Dulles. Well, at least he had his new black diplomatic passport and didn’t have to be troubled with inspections and such. Ryan was technically assigned to the U.S. Embassy at London’s Grosvenor Square, just across the street from the building that had housed Eisenhower’s WW2 office, and with that assignment came the diplomatic status that made him a super-person, un- trammeled by such inconveniences as civil law. He could smuggle a couple pounds of heroin into England, and no one could so much as touch his bags without permission—which he could summarily withhold, claiming diplomatic privilege and urgent business. It was an open secret that diplomats didn’t trouble themselves with customs duties for such things as perfumes for their wives (or significant others) and/or booze for themselves, but to Ryan’s Catholic measure of personal conduct, these were venial sins, not mortal.

The usual muddle of thoughts in a fatigued brain, he recognized. Cathy would never allow herself to operate in this mental state. Sure, as an intern they’d kept her on duty for endless hours—the idea being to get her accustomed to making good decisions under miserable circumstances—but part of her husband wondered how many patients were sacrificed on the altar of medical boot camp. If trial lawyers ever managed to figure out how to make money off of that…

Cathy—Dr. Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, her white lab coat and plastic name tag announced—had struggled through that phase of her training, and more than once her husband had worried about her drive home in her little Porsche sports car, after thirty-six straight hours on duty in obstetrics, or pediatrics, or general surgery, fields she wasn’t interested in herself, but about which she had to know a little in order to be a proper Johns Hopkins doc. Well, she’d known enough to patch up his shoulder that afternoon in front of Buckingham Palace. He hadn’t bled to death in front of his wife and daughter, which would have been pretty ignominious for everyone involved, especially the Brits. Would my knighthood have been awarded posthumously? he wondered with a stifled chuckle. Then, finally, his eyes closed for the first time in thirty-nine hours.

* * *

“I hope he likes it over there,” Judge Moore said, at his end-of-the-day senior staff get-together.

“Arthur, our cousins know their hospitality,” James Greer pointed out. “Basil ought to be a good teacher.”

Ritter didn’t say anything. This Ryan amateur had gotten himself a lot of—way the hell too much—publicity for any employee of the CIA, even more so since he was a DI guy. As far as Ritter was concerned, the Directorate of Intelligence was the tail wagging the Operations Directorate dog. Sure, Jim Greer was a fine spook and a good man to work with, but he wasn’t a field spook, and—Congress to the contrary—that’s what the Agency needed. At least Arthur Moore understood that. But on The Hill, if you said “field intelligence officer” to the representatives who controlled appropriations, they recoiled like Dracula from a golden crucifix and collectively went ewwwwwww. Then it was time to speak.

“What do you suppose they’ll let him in on?” the DDO wondered aloud.

“Basil will regard him as my personal representative,” Judge Moore said, after a moment’s consideration. “So, everything they share with us, they will share with him.”

“They’re going to co-opt him, Arthur,” Ritter warned. “He’s into things they don’t know about. They will try to squeeze things out of Ryan. He doesn’t know how to defend against that.”

“Bob, I briefed him on that myself,” Greer announced. The DDO knew that already, of course, but Ritter had a real talent for acting grumpy when he didn’t get his way. Greer wondered what it had been like to be Bob’s mother. “Don’t underestimate this kid, Bob. He’s smart. I’ll wager you a steak dinner that he gets more things out of the Brits than they get out of him.”

“Sucker bet,” the Deputy Director (Operations) snorted.

“At Snyder’s,” the Deputy Director (Intelligence) goaded further. It was the favorite steak house for both executives, located just across the Key Bridge in Georgetown.

Judge Arthur Moore, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, watched the exchange with amusement. Greer knew how to twist Ritter’s tail, and somehow Bob never quite figured out how to defend against it. Maybe it was Greer’s down-east accent. Texans like Bob Ritter (and Arthur Moore himself) deemed themselves superior to anyone who talked through his nose, certainly over a deck of playing cards or around a bottle of bourbon whiskey. The Judge figured he was above such things, though they were fun to watch.

“Okay, dinner at Snyder’s.” Ritter extended his hand. And it was time for the DCI to resume control of the meeting.

“Now that we’ve settled that one, gentlemen, the President wants me to tell him what’s going to happen in Poland.”

Ritter didn’t leap at that. He had a good Station Chief in Warsaw, but the guy only had three proper field officers in his department, and one of them was a rookie. They did, however, have one very good source agent-in- place inside the Warsaw government’s political hierarchy, and several good ones in their military.

“Arthur, they don’t know. They’re dancing around this Solidarity thing on a day-to- day basis,” the DDO told the others. “And the music keeps changing on them.”

“It’s going to come down to what Moscow tells them to do, Arthur,” Greer agreed. “And Moscow doesn’t know either.”

Moore took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. They don’t know what to do when someone openly defies them. Joe Stalin would have shot everyone in sight, but the current bunch doesn’t have the gumption to do that, thank the Good Lord for that.”

“Collegial rule brings out the coward in everyone, and Brezhnev just doesn’t have the ability to lead. From what I hear, they have to walk him to the men’s room.” It was a slight exaggeration, but it appealed to Ritter that Soviet leadership was softening.

“What’s CARDINAL telling us?” Moore referred to the Agency’s premiere agent-in-place in the Kremlin, the personal assistant to Defense Minister Dmitriy Fedorovich Ustinov. His name was Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, but to all but a bare handful of active CIA personnel, he was simply CARDINAL.

“He says that Ustinov despairs of anything useful coming out of the Politburo until they do have a leader who can actually lead. Leonid is slowing down. Everybody knows it, even the man on the street. You can’t camouflage a TV picture, can you?”

“How long do you suppose he has left?”

A collection of shrugs, then Greer took the question: “The doctors I’ve talked to say he could drop over tomorrow, or he could dote along for another couple of years. They say they see mild Alzheimer’s, but only mild. His general condition is progressive cardiovascular myopathy, they think, probably exacerbated by incipient alcoholism.”

“They all have that problem,” Ritter observed. “CARDINAL confirms the heart problem, by the way, along with the vodka.”

“And the liver is important, and his is probably suboptimum,” Greer went on, with a gross understatement. Then Moore finished the thought.

“But you can’t tell a Russian to stop drinking any more than you can tell a grizzly bear not to shit in the woods. You know, if anything ever brings these guys down, it will be their inability to handle the orderly transition of power.”

“Well, gee, Your Honor.” Bob Ritter looked up with a wicked grin. “I guess they just don’t have enough lawyers. Maybe we could ship them a hundred thousand of ours.”

“They’re not that stupid. Better we shoot a few Poseidon missiles at them. Less net damage to their society,” the DDI said.