Red Rabbit

Cathy turned. “He said, and I quote, ‘Jack’s in the CIA, isn’t he? Have him shoot the bastards.’ End of quote.” She turned back to her cooking.

“You need to tell him that we don’t do that sort of thing.” Jack managed a smile. This, at least, wasn’t a lie, and he hoped she could tell.

“I know. You’d never be able to carry it on your conscience.”

“Too Catholic,” he confirmed.

“Well, at least I know you’ll never fool around on me.”

“May God strike me dead with cancer if I ever do.” It was the one imprecation about cancer that she almost approved of.

“You’ll never have reason to, Jack.” And that was true enough. She didn’t like guns and she didn’t like bloodshed, but she did love him. And that was sufficient to the moment.

Dinner turned out okay, followed by the usual evening activities, until it was time for their four-year-old to put on her yellow sleeper and climb into her big-girl bed.

With Sally in bed and Little Jack dozing as well, there was time for the usual mindless TV watching. Or so Jack hoped, until…

“Okay, Jack, what’s the bad news?”

“Nothing much,” he answered. The worst possible answer. Cathy was just too good at reading his mind.

“What’s that mean?”

“I have to go on a little trip—to Bonn,” Jack remembered the advice from Sir Basil. “It’s a NATO thing I got stuck with.”

“Doing what?”

“I can’t say, babe.”

“How long?”

“Three or four days, probably. They think I am uniquely suited to this for some damned reason or other.”

“Uh-huh.” Ryan’s semi-truthfulness was just oblique enough to foil her mind reading for once.

“You’re not going to be carrying a gun or anything?”

“Honey, I am an analyst, not a field officer, remember? That sort of thing is not my job. For that matter, I don’t think field spooks carry guns very much anyway. Too hard to explain away if somebody notices.”

“But—”

“James Bond is in the movies, babe, not real life.”

Ryan returned his attention to the TV. ITV was doing a repeat of Danger— UXB, and again Jack found himself wondering if Brian would survive his job of defusing unexploded bombs and then marry Suzy when he returned to civilian life. EOD, now there was a miserable job, but, if you made a mistake, at least it wouldn’t hurt for very long.

* * *

“Heard anything from Bob?” Greer asked just before six in the evening.

Judge Moore stood up from his expensive swivel chair and stretched.

Too much time sitting down, and not enough moving around. Back in Texas, he had a small ranch—called that because he owned three quarter horses; you couldn’t be a prominent citizen in Texas unless you owned a horse or two—and three or four times a week, he’d saddle Aztec up and ride around for an hour or so, mainly to get his head clear, to allow himself to think outside his office. That was how he tended to get his best thinking done. Maybe, Moore thought, that’s why he felt so goddamned unproductive here. An office just wasn’t a very good place for thinking, but every executive in the world pretended it was. Christ knew why. That’s what he needed at Langley—his own stable. There was plenty of room on the Langley campus—a good five times what he had in Texas. But if he ever did that, the stories would spread around the world: The American DCI liked to ride horses with his black Stetson hat—that went along with the horse—and probably a Colt .45 on his hip—that was optional —and that just wouldn’t look good to the TV crews that would sooner or later appear at the perimeter fence with their minicams. And so, for reasons of personal vanity, he had to deny himself the chance to do some good creative thinking. It was totally asinine, the former judge told himself, to allow such considerations to affect the way he did his work. Over in England, Basil could chase foxes on the back of a nice hunter- thoroughbred, and would anyone over there care? Hell, no. He’d be admired for it, or at worst thought a tiny bit eccentric, in a country where eccentricity was an admirable quality. But in the Land of the Free, men were enslaved by customs imposed on them by news reporters and elected officials who screwed their secretaries. Well, there was no rule that the world had to make sense, was there?

“Nothing important. Just a cable that said his meetings with our Korean friends were going well,” Moore reported.

“You know, those people scare me a little,” Greer observed. He didn’t have to explain why. The KCIA occasionally had its field personnel deal a little too directly with employees of the other Korean government. The rules were a little different over there. The ongoing state of war between North and South was still a very real thing and, in time of war, some people lost their lives. CIA hadn’t done such things in almost thirty years. Asian people hadn’t adopted Western ideas of the value of human life. Maybe because their countries were just too crowded. Maybe because they have different religious beliefs. Maybe a lot of things, but for whatever reason they were just a little different in the operational parameters they felt free to work within—or without.

“They’re our best eye on North Korea and China, James,” Moore reminded him. “And they are very faithful allies.”

“I know, Arthur.” It was nice to hear things about the People’s Republic of China once in a while. Penetrating that country was one of CIA’s most frustrating tasks. “I just wish they weren’t so cavalier about murder.”

“They operate within fairly strict rules, and both sides seem to play by them.”

And on both sides, killings had to be authorized at a very high level. Not that this would matter all that much to the corpse in question. “Wet” operations interfered with the main mission, which was gathering information. That was something people occasionally forgot, but something that CIA and KGB mainly understood, which was why both agencies had gotten away from it.

But when the information retrieved frightened or otherwise upset the politicians who oversaw the intelligence services, then the spook shops were ordered to do things that they usually preferred to avoid—and so, then, they took their action through surrogates and/or mercenaries, mainly…

“Arthur, if KGB wants to hurt the Pope, how do you suppose they’d go about it?”

“Not one of their own,” Moore thought. “Too dangerous. It would be a political catastrophe, like a tornado going right through the Kremlin. It would sure as hell kibosh Yuriy Vladimirovich’s political career and, you know, I don’t see him taking that much risk for any cause. Power is just too important to him.”

The DDI nodded. “Agreed. I think he’s going to resign his chairmanship soon. Has to. They wouldn’t even let him jump from KGB boss to the General Secretaryship. That’s a little too sinister even for them. They still remember Beria—the ones who sit around that table do, anyway.”

“That’s a good point, James,” Moore said, turning back from the window. “I wonder how much longer Leonid Illyich has.” Ascertaining Brezhnev’s health was a constant CIA interest—hell, it was a matter of interest to everyone in Washington.

“Andropov is our best indicator on that. We’re pretty sure he’s Brezhnev’s replacement. When it looks like Leonid Illyich is heading for the last roundup, then Yuriy Vladimirovich changes jobs.”

“Good point, James. I’ll float that to State and the White House.”

Admiral Greer nodded. “It’s what they pay us for. Back to the Pope,” he suggested.

“The President is still asking questions,” Moore confirmed.

“If they do anything, it won’t be a Russian. Too many political pitfalls, Arthur.”

“Again, I agree. But what the hell does that leave us?”

“They use the Bulgarians for wet work,” Greer pointed out.

“So, look for a Bulgarian shooter?”

“How many Bulgars make pilgrimages to Rome, you suppose?”

“We can’t tell the Italians to look into that, can we? It would leak sure as hell, and we can’t have that. It would look pretty stupid in the press. It’s just something we can’t do, James.”