Mountain, Ed had joked that CIA ought to rent the whole place for one day and take the Soviet Politburo around, let them ride every ride and gobble down the burgers and swill the Cokes, and then, on the way out, tell them, “This is what Americans do for fun. Unfortunately, we can’t show you the things we do when we’re serious.” And if that didn’t scare the piss out of them, nothing would. But it would scare the piss out of them, both Foleys were sure. They—even the important ones with access to everything KGB got out of the Main Enemy—even they were the most insular and provincial of people. For the most part, they really did believe the propaganda because they had nothing to measure it against, because they were as much victims of their system as the poor dumb muzhiks— peasants—driving the dump trucks.
But the Foleys didn’t live in a fantasy world.
So, w[e] d[o] what he says, then what? she asked next.
Zaitzev wasn’t communicating with his wife. For him, right now, even a half liter of vodka couldn’t help him sleep. He’d made his request. Only tomorrow would he know for sure if he was dealing with someone able to help him. What he’d asked wasn’t entirely reasonable, but he didn’t have the time or the security to be reasonable. He was secure in the knowledge that even KGB couldn’t fake what he’d specified. Oh, sure, maybe they could get the Poles or the Romanians or some other socialist country to do it, but not the Americans. Even KGB had its limits.
So, again, he got to wait, but sleep didn’t come. Tomorrow he would not be a very happy comrade. He could feel the hangover coming already, like an earthquake trapped and contained inside his skull…
“How’d it go, Simon?” Ryan asked.
“It could have been worse. The PM didn’t rip my head off. I told her that we only have what we have, and Basil backed me up. She wants more. She said that in my presence.”
“No surprise. Ever hear of a president who wanted less information, buddy?”
“Not recently,” Harding admitted. Ryan saw the stress bleeding off his workmate. Damned sure he’d have a beer at the pub before heading home. The Brit analyst loaded his pipe and lit it, taking a long pull.
“If it makes you feel any better, Langley doesn’t have any more than you guys do.”
“I know. She asked, and that’s what Basil said. Evidently, he talked to your Judge Moore before driving over.”
“So we’re all ignorant together.”
“Bloody comforting,” Simon Harding snorted.
It was far past going-home time. Ryan had waited to see what Simon would say about the meeting at 10 Downing Street, because Ryan was also here to gather intelligence on the Brits. They would understand, because that was the game they all played. He checked his watch.
“Well, I’ve got to boogie on home. See you tomorrow.”
“Sleep well,” Harding said, as Ryan headed out the door. Jack was reasonably sure that Simon would not. He knew what Harding made, as a mid-level civil servant, and it wasn’t quite enough for this stressful a day.
“What did you tell your people, Bob?” Judge Moore asked.
“Just what you told me, Arthur. The President wants to know. No feedback yet. Tell the Boss he’s going to have to be patient.”
“I said that. He was not overly pleased,” the DCI responded.
“Well, Judge, I can’t stop the rain from falling. We don’t have power over a lot of things, and time is one of them. He’s a big boy; he can understand that, can’t he?”
“Yes, Robert, but he likes to get what he needs. He’s worried about His Holiness, now that the Pope has kicked over the anthill—”
“Well, we think he has. The Russians might be smart enough to work through diplomatic channels and tell him to cool down and let things work out, and—”
“Bob, that wouldn’t work,” Admiral Greer put in. “He’s not the sort of guy you can warn off with lawyer talk, is he?”
“No,” Ritter admitted. This Pope was not a man to compromise on issues of great importance. He’d seen himself through all manner of unpleasantness, from Hitler’s Nazis to Stalin’s NKVD, and he’d kept his church together by circling the wagons, like settlers against Indian attacks in those old Western movies. He hadn’t managed to keep his church alive in Poland by giving in on important issues, had he? And, by holding his ground, he’d maintained enough moral and political strength to threaten the other of the world’s superpowers. No, this guy wasn’t going to fold under pressure.
Most men feared death and ruin. This one didn’t. The Russians would never understand why, but they would understand the respect it earned him. It was becoming clear to Bob Ritter and the other senior intelligence officers in this room that the one single response that would make sense to the Politburo was an attack on the Pope. And the Politburo had met today, though what they had discussed and concluded were frustratingly unknown.
“Bob, do we have any assets who can find out what they talked about in the Kremlin today?”
“We have a few, and they will be alerted in the next two days—or, if they come up with something important, they can decide to get the information on their own hook. If they become aware of something this hot, you’d expect them to figure it out on their own and get a packet of information out to their handlers,” Ritter told the DCI. “Hey, Arthur, I don’t like waiting and not knowing any more than you do, but we have to let this thing take its course. You know the dangers of a balls-to-the-wall alert to our agents as well as I do.”
And all three of them did. That sort of thing had gotten Oleg Penkovskiy killed. The information he’d gotten out had probably averted a nuclear war—and had assisted in the recruitment of CIA’s longest-lived agent-in-place, CARDINAL—but that hadn’t done Penkovskiy much good. On his discovery, no less a figure than Khrushchev himself had demanded his blood—and gotten it.
“Yeah,” Greer agreed, “and this isn’t all
“No,” Judge Moore had to admit, though he didn’t especially look forward to explaining that one to the President. But the new Boss did understand things once you made them clear. The really scary part was what the President might do if the Pope were to die unexpectedly. The Boss, too, was a man of principle, but also a man of emotions. It would be as enraging as waving the Soviet flag in front of a fighting bull. You couldn’t let emotion get in the way of statecraft—it only called out more emotion, frequently the mourning of the newly dead. And the miracle of modern technology only served to make the number of such people all the larger. The DCI reproached himself for that thought. The new President was a thoughtful man. His emotions were the servant of his intellect, and his intellect was far larger than it was generally believed, especially by the media, who only saw the smile and the theatrical personality. But the media, like a lot of politicians, was a lot more comfortable dealing with appearances than reality. It was a lot less intellectually demanding, after all. Judge Moore looked at his principal subordinates. “Okay, but let’s remember that it can be lonely facing him in the Oval Office when you don’t have what he wants.”
“I’m sure it is, Arthur,” Ritter sympathized.
He could still turn back, Zaitzev told himself, as sleep still had not come. Next to him, Irina was breathing placidly in sleep. The sleep of the just, it was called. Not the sleeplessness of the traitor.
All he had to do was stop. That was all. He’d taken two small steps, but no more. The American might know his face, but that was easily fixed—take a different metro, walk onto a different carriage. He’d never see him again; their contact would be as broken as a water glass dropped to the floor, and his life would return to normal, and his conscience…
… would never trouble him again? He snorted. It was his conscience that had gotten him into this mess. No, that wasn’t going to go away.
