Red Rabbit

information—what if the whole job had as its objective nothing more than to ID the COS Moscow? But they couldn’t have targeted him without knowing who he was, could they? Even KGB didn’t have the assets to shotgun such a mission and ping on every embassy staffer—it was way too clumsy and was certain to alert embassy personnel to something very strange under way.

No, KGB was too professional for that.

So they couldn’t target him without knowing, and if they knew, they’d want to hide that information, lest they alert CIA to a source or method that they’d be far better advised to conceal.

So Oleg Ivanovich couldn’t be a false-flag, and that was that.

So, he had to be the real thing. Didn’t he?

For all his intelligence and experience, Foley could not come up with a construct that made the Rabbit anything but the genuine item. The problem was that it made little sense.

But what in espionage ever made sense?

What did make sense was the necessity of getting this guy out. They had a Rabbit, and the Rabbit needed to run away from the Bear.

* * *

“You can’t say what’s bothering you?” Cathy asked. “Nope.”

“But it’s important?”

“Yep.” He nodded. “Yeah, it sure is, but the problem is that we don’t know how serious.”

“Something for me to worry about?”

“Well, no. It’s not World War Three or anything like that. But I really can’t talk about it.”

“Why?”

“You know why—it’s classified. You don’t tell me about your patients, do you? That’s because you have rules of ethics, and I have rules of classification.” Smart as Cathy was, she still hadn’t fully grasped that one yet.

“Isn’t there any way I can help?”

“Cathy, if you were cleared for this, maybe you could offer insights. But maybe not. You’re not a pshrink, and that’s the medical field that applies to this—how people respond to threats, what their motivations are, how they perceive reality, and how those perceptions determine their actions. I’ve been trying to get inside the heads of people I haven’t met to figure out what they’re going to do about something. I’ve been studying how they think for quite a while, even before I joined the Agency, but you know—”

“Yeah, it’s hard to look inside somebody’s brain. And you know what?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s harder with the sane ones than the crazy ones. People can think rationally and still do crazy things.”

“Because of their perceptions?”

She nodded. “Partially that, but partially because they’ve chosen to believe totally false things—for entirely rational reasons, but the things they believe in are still false.”

This struck Ryan as worth pursuing. “Okay. Tell me about… Josef Stalin, for instance. He killed a lot of people. Why?”

“Part of it was rational, and part of it was wild paranoia. When he saw a threat, he dealt with it decisively. But he tended to see threats that weren’t there or weren’t serious enough to merit deadly force. Stalin lived on the borderline between madness and normality, and he crossed back and forth like a guy on a bridge who couldn’t make up his mind about where he lived. In international affairs, he was supposed to be just as rational as everybody else, but he had a ruthless streak and nobody ever said ‘no’ to him. One of the docs at Hopkins wrote a book on the guy. I read it when I was in med school.”

“What did it say?”

Mrs. Dr. Ryan shrugged. “It wasn’t all that satisfactory. The current thinking is that it’s chemical imbalances in the brain that cause mental illness, not whether your dad slapped you around too much or you saw your mom in bed with a goat. But we can’t test Stalin’s blood chemistry now, can we?”

“Not hardly. I think they finally burned him up and put him in—where? I don’t remember,” Jack admitted. It wasn’t the Kremlin wall, was it? Or maybe they just buried the pine box instead of burning it all up. It wasn’t worth finding out, was it?

“It’s funny. A lot of historical figures did the stuff they did because they were mentally unstable. Today, we could fix them with lithium or other stuff we’ve learned about—mainly in the last thirty years or so—but back then, all they had was alcohol and iodine. Or maybe an exorcism,” she added, wondering if those were real.

“And Rasputin had a bad chemical imbalance, too?” Jack wondered aloud.

“Maybe. I don’t know much about that, except he was supposed to be a crazy kinda priest, wasn’t he?”

“Not a priest, some kinda mystic civilian. I suppose today he’d be a TV evangelist, right? Whatever he was, he brought down the House of Romanov—but they were pretty useless anyway.”

“And then Stalin took over?”

“Lenin first, then Stalin. Vladimir Ilyich checked out from strokes.”

“Hypertensive, maybe, or just cholesterol buildup and he clotted in the brain and that did him. And Stalin was worse, right?”

“Lenin was no day at the beach, but Stalin was pretty amazing—Tamerlane come back to the twentieth century, or maybe one of the Caesars. When the Romans reconquered a rebellious city, they killed everything there was, right down to the dogs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but the Brits always spared the dogs. Too sentimental about them,” Jack added.

“Sally misses Ernie,” Cathy reminded him in female fashion—almost, but not totally irrelevant to the conversation. Ernie was their dog back home.

“So do I, but he’s going to have a lot of fun this fall—duck season soon. He’ll get to retrieve all the dead birds out of the water.”

Cathy shivered. She’d never hunted anything more alive than the hamburger at the local supermarket—but she carved up human beings with knives. Like that makes any sense, Ryan thought with a wry smile. But the world had no rule that required logic on its surface—not the last time he’d checked.

“Don’t worry, babe. Ernie will like it. Trust me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“He loves to go swimming,” Jack pointed out, extending the needle. “So, what interesting eyeball problems at the hospital next week?”

“Just routine stuff—checking eyes and prescribing glasses all week.”

“No fun stuff, like cutting some poor bastard’s left eye in half and then sewing it back together?”

“That’s not a procedure,” she pointed out.

“Babe, I could never cut into a person’s eyeball with a knife without tossing my cookies—or maybe fainting.” The very thought of it made him shiver.

“Wimp” was all she had to say about that admission. She didn’t understand that this was a skill not covered in the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico, Virginia.

* * *

Mary Pat could feel that her husband was still awake, but it wasn’t a time to talk, even with their personal hand-jive technique. Instead she was thinking about operations—how to get the package out. Moscow would be too hard. Other parts of the Soviet Union were no easier, because Moscow Station didn’t have all that many assets it could use elsewhere in this vast country—intelligence operations tended to be centered in national capitals because that was where you could place “diplomats” who were truly wolves in sheep’s clothing. The obvious counter for that was to use your government capital just for strictly government-related administrative services, distanced from military and other sensitive affairs, but nobody would do that, for the simple reason that government big shots wanted all their functionaries within arm’s length so that they —the big shots—could enjoy their exercise of power. And that was what they all lived for, whether it was in Moscow, Hitler’s Berlin, or Washington, D.C.

So, if not out of Moscow, then where? There were only so many places the Rabbit was free to go. Nowhere west of the wire, as she thought of the Iron Curtain that had fallen across Europe in 1945. And there were few