Red Rabbit

Y[our] Russian] is pre[etty] g[ood], he agreed.

This time she nodded. She spoke an elegant literary Russian reserved to the well-educated over here, Ed knew. The average Soviet couldn’t believe that a foreigner spoke his language that well. When walking the street or conversing with a shop clerk, she never let that skill slip, instead stumbling over complex phrases. To do otherwise would have been noticed at once, and so avoiding it was an important part of her cover, even more than her blond hair and American mannerisms. It would finger her immediately to their new agent.

When? she asked next.

Iv[an] sez tom[orrow]. Up 4 it? he responded.

She patted his hip and gave a cute, playful smile, which translated to bet your ass.

Foley loved his wife as fully as a man could, and part of that was his respect for her love of the game they both played. Paramount Central Casting could not have given him a better wife. They’d be making love tonight. The rule in boxing might be no sex before a fight, but for Mary Pat the rule was the reverse, and if the microphones in the walls noticed, well, fuck ‘em, the Chief of Station Moscow thought, with a sly smile of his own.

* * *

“When do you leave, Bob?” Greer asked the DDO.

“Sunday. ANA to Tokyo, and from there on to Seoul.”

“Better you than me. I hate those long flights,” the DDI observed.

“Well, you try to sleep about half the way,” and Ritter was good at that. He had a conference scheduled with the KCIA, to go over things on both North Korea and the Chinese, both of which he was worried about—as were the Koreans. “Nothing much happening in my shop at the moment, anyway.”

“Smart of you to skip town while we have the President chewing my backside about the Pope,” Judge Moore thought aloud.

“Well, I’m sorry about that, Arthur,” Ritter retorted, with an ironic smile. “Mike Bostock will be handling things in my absence.” Both senior executives knew and liked Bostock, a career field spook and an expert on the Soviets and the Central Europeans. He was a little too much of a cowboy to be trusted on The Hill, though, which everyone thought was a pity. Cowboys had their uses—like Mary Pat Foley, for example.

“Still nothing out of the Politburo meeting?”

“Not yet, Arthur. Maybe they just talked about routine stuff. You know, they don’t always sit there and plan the next nuclear war.”

“No.” Greer chuckled. “They think we’re always doing that. Jesus, they’re a paranoid bunch.”

“Remember what Henry said: ‘Even paranoids have enemies.’ And that is our job,” Ritter reminded them.

“Still ruminating over your MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH plan, Robert?”

“Nothing specific yet. The in-house people I’ve talked to about it—damn it, Arthur, you tell our people to think outside of the box, and what do they do? They build a better box!”

“We don’t have many entrepreneur types here, remember. Government agency. Pay caps. Tends to militate against creative thinking. That’s what we’re for,” Judge Moore pointed out. “How do we change that?”

“We have a few people from the real world. Hell, I’ve got one on my team—he doesn’t know how to think inside the box.”

“Ryan?” Ritter asked.

“That’s one of them,” Jim Greer confirmed with a nod.

“He’s not one of us,” the DDO observed at once.

“Bob, you can’t have it both ways,” the DDI shot back. “Either you want a guy who thinks like one of our bureaucrats, or a guy who thinks creatively. Ryan knows the rules, he’s an ex-Marine who even knows how to think on his feet, and pretty soon he’s going to be a star analyst.” Greer paused. “He’s about the best young officer I’ve seen in a few years, and what your beef with him is, Robert, I do not understand.”

“Basil likes him,” Moore added to the conversation, “and Basil’s a hard man to fool.”

“Next time I see Jack, I’d like to let him know about RED DEATH.”

“Really?” Moore asked. “It’s way over his pay grade.”

“Arthur, he knows economics better than anyone I have in the DI. I didn’t put him in my economics section only because he’s too smart to be limited that way. Bob, if you want to wreck the Soviet Union—without a war—the only way to do it is to cripple their economy. Ryan made himself a pile of money because he knows all that stuff. I’m telling you, he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe he can figure a way to burn down a wheat field. Anyway, what does it hurt? Your project is entirely theoretical, isn’t it?”

“Well?” the DCI turned to Ritter. Greer was right, after all.

“Oh, what the hell, okay,” the DDO conceded the point. “Just so he doesn’t talk about this to The Washington Post. We don’t need that idea out in the open. Congress and the press would have a meltdown.”

“Jack, talk to the press?” Greer asked. “Not likely. He doesn’t curry favor with people, including us. He’s one guy I think we can trust. The whole Russian KGB doesn’t have enough hard currency to buy him off. That’s more than I can say for myself,” he joked.

“I’ll remember you said that, James,” Ritter promised, with a thin smile of his own. Such jokes were usually limited to the Seventh Floor at Langley.

* * *

A department store was a department store anywhere in the world, and GUM was supposedly Moscow’s counterpart to Macy’s in New York. Theoretically, Ed Foley thought, walking in the main entrance. Just like the Soviet Union was theoretically a voluntary union of republics, and Russia theoretically had a constitution that existed over and above the will of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And there was theoretically an Easter Bunny, too, he thought, looking around.

They took the escalator to the second floor—the escalator was of the old sort, with thick wooden runners instead of the metal type which had long since taken over in the West. The fur department was over on the right, toward the back, and, on initial visual inspection, the selection there wasn’t all that shabby.

Best of all, so was Ivan, wearing the same clothes that he’d worn on the metro. Maybe his best suit? Foley wondered. If so, he’d better get his ass to a Western country as soon as possible.

Other than the at-best-mediocre quality of the goods here, a department store was a department store, though here the departments were semi-independent shops. But their Ivan was smart. He’d suggested a meet in a part of the place where there would certainly be high-quality goods. For millennia, Russia had been a place of cold winters, a place where even the elephants had needed fur coats, and since 25 percent of the human blood supply goes to the brain, men needed hats. The decent fur hats were called shapkas, roughly tubular fur head coverings that had little in the way of precise shape, but did serve to keep the brain from freezing. The really good ones were made out of muskrat—mink and sable went only to the most expensive specialty stores, and those were mainly limited to well-to-do women, the wives and/or mistresses of Party bosses. But the noble muskrat, a swamp creature that smelled—well, the smell was taken out of the skin somehow, lest the wearer of the hat be mistaken for a tidal wetland garbage dump—had very fine fur or hair or whatever it was, and was a good insulator. So, fine, a rat with a high R rating. But that wasn’t the important part, was it?

Ed and Mary Pat could also communicate with their eyes, though the bandwidth was pretty narrow. The time of day helped. The winter hats had just been stocked in the store, and the fall weather didn’t have people racing to buy new ones yet. There was just one guy in a brown jacket, and Mary Pat moved in that direction, after shooing her husband away, as though to buy him something as a semi-surprise.

The man was shopping, just as she was, and he was in the hat department. He’s not a dummy, whoever he is, she thought.

“Excuse me,” she said in Russian.

“Yes?” His head turned. Mary Pat checked him out; he was in his early thirties, but looked older than that, as life in Russia tended to age people more rapidly, even more rapidly than New York City. Brown hair, brown eyes— rather smart-looking in the eyes. That was good.

“I am shopping for a winter hat for my husband, as you suggested,” she added in her very best Russian, “on the metro.”