Red Rabbit

a better disguise…

* * *

Zaitzev waited until the train slowed. Bodies shifted as it did so, and he reached quickly in and out of the offered pocket. Then he turned away, slowly, not so far as to be obvious, just a natural motion easily explained by the movement of the metro car.

* * *

Yes! Well done, Ivan. Every fiber of his being wanted to turn and eyeball the guy, but the rules didn’t allow that. If there was a shadow in the car, those people noticed that sort of thing, and it wasn’t Ed Foley’s job to be noticed. So he waited patientiy for his subway stop, and this time he turned right, away from Ivan, and made his way off the car, onto the platform, and up to the cool air on the street.

He didn’t reach into his pocket. Instead, he walked all the way home, as normal as a sunset on a clear day, into the elevator, not reaching in even then, because there could well be a video camera in the ceiling.

Not until he got into his flat did Foley pull out the message blank. This time it was anything but blank, covered with black ink letters—as before, written in English. Whoever Ivan was, Foley reflected, he was educated, and that was very good news, wasn’t it?

“Hi, Ed.” A kiss for the microphones. “Anything interesting happen at work?”

“The usual crap. What’s for dinner?”

“Fish,” she answered, looking at the paper in her husband’s hand and giving an immediate thumbs-up.

Bingo! They both thought. They had an agent. A no-shit spy in KGB. Working for them.

Chapter 16. A Fur Hat for the Winter

“They did what?” Jack asked.

“They broke for lunch in the middle of surgery and went to a pub and had a beer each!” Cathy replied, repeating herself.

“Well, so did I.”

“You weren’t doing surgery!”

“What would happen if you did that at home?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Cathy said. “You’d probably lose your license to practice medicine—after Bernie amputated your fucking hands with a chain saw!”

That got Jack’s attention. Cathy didn’t talk like that.

“No shit?”

“I had a bacon, lettuce, and tom-AH-to sandwich with chips—that’s French fries for us dumb colonials. I had a Coke, by the way.”

“Glad to hear it, doctor.” Ryan walked over to give his wife a kiss. She appeared to need it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she went on. “Oh, maybe out in Bumfuck, Montana, they do stuff like that, but not in a real hospital.”

“Cathy, settle down. You’re talking like a stevedore.”

“Or maybe a foulmouthed ex-Marine.” She finally managed a smile. “Jack, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Those two eye cutters are technically senior to me, but if they ever tried that sort of shit at home, they’d be finished. They wouldn’t even let them work on dogs.”

“Is the patient okay?”

“Oh, yeah. The frozen section came back cold as ice—totally benign, not malignant—and we took out the growth and closed him back up. He’ll be just fine—four or five days for recovery. No impairment to his sight, no more headaches, but those two bozos operated on him with booze in their systems!”

“No harm, no foul, babe,” he suggested, lamely.

“Jack, it isn’t supposed to be that way.”

“So report them to your friend Byrd.”

“I ought to. I really ought to.”

“And what would happen?”

That lit her up again: “I don’t know!”

“It’s a big deal to take the bread off somebody’s table, and you’d be branded as a troublemaker,” Jack warned.

“Jack, at Hopkins, I’d’ve called them on it right then and there, and there would have been hell to pay, but over here—over here I’m just a guest.”

“And the customs are different.”

“Not that different. Jack, it’s grossly unprofessional. It’s potentially harmful to the patient, and that’s a line you never cross. At Hopkins, if you have a patient in recovery, or you have surgery the next day, you don’t even have a glass of wine with dinner, okay? That’s because the good of the patient comes before everything else. Okay, sure, if you’re driving home from a party and you see a hurt person on the side of the road, and you’re the only one around, you do what you can, and get him to a doc who’s got it all together, and you probably tell that doc that you had a couple before you saw the emergency. I mean, sure, during internship, they work you through impossible hours so you can train yourself to make good decisions when you’re not fully functional, but there’s always somebody to back you up if you’re not capable, and you’re supposed to be able to tell when you’re in over your head. Okay? I had that happen to me once on pediatric rotation, and it scared the hell out of me when that little kid stopped breathing, but I had a good nurse backing me up and we got the senior resident down in one big fucking hurry, and we got him going again with no permanent damage, thank God. But, Jack, you don’t go creating a suboptimal situation. You don’t go looking for them. You deal with them when they happen, but you don’t voluntarily jump into the soup, okay?”

“Okay, Cath, so, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. At home, I’d go right to Bernie, but I’m not at home…”

“And you want my advice?”

Her blue eyes fixed on her husband’s. “Well, yes. What do you think?”

What he thought didn’t really matter, Jack knew. It was just a question of guiding her to her own decision. “If you do nothing, how will you feel next week?”

“Terrible. Jack, I saw something that—”

“Cathy.” He hugged her. “You don’t need me. Go ahead and do what you think is right. Otherwise, well, it’ll just eat you up. You’re never sorry for doing the right thing, no matter what the adverse consequences are. Right is right, my lady.”

“They said that, too. I’m not comfortable with—”

“Yeah, babe. Every so often at work, they call me Sir John. You roll with the punch. It’s not like it’s an insult.”

“Over here, they call a surgeon Mr. Jones or Mrs. Jones, not Doctor Jones. What the hell is that all about?”

“Local custom. It goes back to the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century. A ship’s doctor was usually a youngish lieutenant, and aboard ship that rank is called mister rather than leftenant. Somehow or other it carried over to civilian life, too.”

“How do you know that?” Cathy demanded.

“Cathy you are a doctor of medicine. I am a doctor of history, remember? I know a lot of things, like putting a Band-Aid on a cut, after that painful Merthiolate crap. But that’s as far as my knowledge of medicine goes—well, they taught us a little at the Basic School, but I don’t expect to patch up a bullet wound any time soon. I’ll leave that to you. Do you know how?”

“I patched you up last winter,” she reminded him.

“Did I ever thank you for that?” he asked. Then he kissed her. “Thanks, babe.”