Red Rabbit Read online

  “Who ever told you that?”

  “My gunny,” Jack said, from behind closed eyes.

  “Who?”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Phillip Tate, United States Marine Corps. He ran my platoon for me until I got killed in that chopper crash—ran it after I left, too, I suppose.” Ryan still sent him Christmas cards. Had Tate screwed up, that “killed” might not have been the limp joke he pretended it was. Tate and a Navy Hospital Corpsman Second Class named Michael Burns had stabilized Ryan’s back, at the very least preventing a permanent crippling injury. Burns got a Christmas card, too.

  About ten minutes to Victoria, Ryan rubbed his eyes and sat up straight.

  “Welcome back,” Cathy observed dryly.

  “You’ll be doing it by the middle of next week.”

  She snorted. “For an ex-Marine, you sure are lazy.”

  “Honey, if there’s nothing to do, you might as well use the time productively.”

  “I do.” She held up her copy of The Lancet.

  “What have you been reading up on?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she replied. It was true. Ryan’s knowledge of biology was limited to the frog he’d disassembled in high school. Cathy had done that, too, but she’d probably put it together again and watched it hop back to its lily pad. She could also deal cards like a Vegas cardsharp, a talent that flat amazed her husband every time she demonstrated it. But she wasn’t worth a damn with a pistol. Most physicians probably weren’t, and here guns were regarded as unclean objects, even by the cops, some of whom were allowed to carry them. Funny country.

  “How do I get to the hospital?” Cathy asked, as the train slowed for its last stop.

  “Take a cab the first time. You can take the tube, too,” Jack suggested. “It’s a new city. Takes time to learn your way around.”

  “How’s the neighborhood?” she asked. It came from growing up in New York and working in Baltimore’s inner city, where you did well to keep your eyes open.

  “Damned sight better than the one around Hopkins. You won’t be seeing too much gunshot trauma in the ER. And the people are as nice as they can be. When they figure out that you’re an American, they practically give you the joint.”

  “Well, they were nice to us in the grocery store yesterday,” Cathy allowed. “But, you know, they don’t have grape juice here.”

  “My God, no civilization at all!” Jack exclaimed. “So get Sally some of the local bitter.”

  “You moron!” she laughed. “Sally likes her grape juice, remember, and Hi-C cherry. All they have here is black-currant juice. I was afraid to buy it.”

  “Yeah, and she’s going to learn to spell funny, too.” Jack didn’t worry about his little Sally. Kids were the most adaptable of creatures. Maybe she’d even learn the rules for cricket. If so, she could explain the incomprehensible game to her daddy.

  “My God, everybody smokes here,” Cathy observed as they pulled into Victoria Station.

  “Honey, think of it as a future income source for all the docs.”

  “It’s an awful and a dumb way to die.”

  “Yes, dear.” Whenever Jack smoked a cigarette, there was hell to pay in the Ryan house. One more cost of being married to a doc. She was right, of course, and Jack knew it, but everyone was entitled to at least one vice. Except Cathy. If she had one, she concealed it with great skill. The train slowed to a halt, allowing them to stand and open the compartment door.

  They stepped out into the arriving rush of office workers. Just like Grand Central Terminal in New York, Jack thought, but not quite as crowded. London had a lot of stations, laid out like the legs of an octopus. The platform was agreeably wide, and the rush of people politer than New York would ever be. Rush hour was rush hour everywhere, but the English city had a patina of gentility that was hard not to like. Even Cathy would soon be admiring it. Ryan led his wife to the outside, where a rank of cabs waited. He walked her to the first one in line.

  “Hammersmith Hospital,” he told the driver. Then he kissed his wife good-bye.

  “See you tonight, Jack.” She always had a smile for him.

  “Have a good one, babe.” And Ryan made his way to the other side of the building. Part of him hated the fact that Cathy had to work. His mom never had. His father, like all men of his generation, had figured that it was the man’s job to put food on the table. Emmet Ryan had liked the fact that his son had married a physician, but his chauvinistic attitude about a woman’s place had somehow or other carried over to his son despite the fact that Cathy made a lot more than Jack did, probably because ophthalmologists were more valuable to society than intelligence analysts. Or the marketplace thought so, anyway. Well, she couldn’t do what he did, and he couldn’t do what she did, and that was that.

  At Century House, the uniformed security guard recognized him with a wave and a smile.

  “Good morning, Sir John.”

  “Hey, Bert.” Ryan slid his card into the slot. The light blinked green, and Jack transited the security gate. From there, it was just a few steps to the elevator.

  Simon Harding was just arriving, too. The usual greeting: “Morning, Jack.”

  “Hey,” Jack grunted in reply on the way to his desk. There was a manila envelope waiting for him. The cover tag said it had been messengered over from the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He ripped the top open to see that it was the report from Hopkins on Mikhail Suslov. Jack flipped through the pages and saw something he’d forgotten. Bernie Katz, ever the thorough doc, had evaluated Suslov’s diabetes as dangerously advanced, and predicted that his longevity was going to be limited.

  “Here, Simon. Says here the head commie’s sicker than he looks.”

  “Pity,” Harding observed, taking it as he fumbled with his pipe. “He’s not a very nice chap, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Next in Ryan’s pile were the morning briefing papers. They were labeled SECRET, which meant that the contents might not be in the newspapers for a day or two. It was interesting even so, because this document occasionally gave sources, and that sometimes told you if the information was good or not. Remarkably, not all the data received by the intelligence services was very reliable. A lot of it could be classified as gossip, because even important people inside the world’s government loops indulged in it. They were jealous and backbiting sons-of-bitches, like anyone else. Especially in Washington. Perhaps even more so in Moscow? He asked Harding.

  “Oh, yes, very much so. Their society depends so much on status, and the backstabbing can be—well, Jack, you could say that it’s their national sport. I mean, we have it here as well, of course, but over there it can be remarkably vicious. Rather like it must have been in a medieval court, I imagine—people jockeying for position every bloody day. The infighting inside their major bureaucracies must be horrific.”

  “And how does that affect this sort of information?”

  “I often think I should have read psychology at Oxford. We have a number of psychiatrists on staff here—as I’m sure you do at Langley.”

  “Oh, yeah. I know a few of the pshrinks. Mainly in my directorate, but some in S and T, too. We’re not as good at that as we ought to be.”

  “How so, Jack?”

  Ryan stretched in his chair. “A couple of months ago, I was talking to one of Cathy’s pals at Hopkins, his name’s Solomon, neuropsychiatrist. You’d have to understand Sol. He’s real smart—department chairman and all that. He doesn’t believe much in putting his patients on the couch and talking to them. He thinks most mental illness comes from chemical imbalances in the brain. They nearly chopped him out of the profession for that but, twenty years later, they all realized that he was right. Anyway, Sol told me that most politicians are like movie stars. They surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men and people to whisper nice shit into their ears—and a lot of them start believing it, because they want to believe it. It’s all a great big game to them, but a game where everything is proces
s and damned little of it is product. They’re not like real people. They don’t do any real work, but they appear to. There’s a line in Advise and Consent: Washington is a town where you deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. If that’s true in Washington, then how much more must it be in Moscow? There, everything is politics. It’s all symbols, right? So the infighting and backstabbing must really be wild there. I figure that has to affect us in two ways. First, it means that a lot of the data we get is skewed, because the sources of the data either don’t know reality even when it jumps up and bites them on the ass, or they twist the data for their own ends as they process it and pass it on—whether consciously or unconsciously. Second, it means that even the people on the other side who need the data don’t know good from bad, so even if we can figure it out, we can’t predict what it means because they can’t decide for themselves what the hell to do with it—even if they know what the hell it is in the first place. We here have to analyze faulty information that will probably be incorrectly implemented by the people to whom it’s supposed to go. So, how the hell do we predict what they will do when they themselves don’t know the right thing to do?”

  That was worth a grin around the pipe stem. “Very good, Jack. You’re starting to catch on. Very little they do makes any bloody sense, objectively speaking. However, it isn’t all that hard to predict their behavior. You decide for yourself what the intelligent action is, and then reverse it. Works every time,” Harding laughed.

  “But the other thing Sol said that worries me is that people like that who have power in their hands can be dangerous sons-of-bitches. They don’t know when to stop, and they don’t know how to use their power intelligently. I guess that’s how Afghanistan got started.”

  “Correct.” Simon nodded seriously. “They are captured by their own ideological illusions, and they can’t see their way clear of it. And the real problem is, they do control a bloody great lot of power.”

  “I’m missing something in the equation,” Ryan said.

  “We all are, Jack. That’s part of the job.”

  It was time to change subjects: “Anything new on the Pope?”

  “Nothing yet today. If Basil has anything, I ought to hear about it before lunch. Worried about that?”

  Jack nodded soberly. “Yeah. The problem is, if we do see a real threat, what the hell can we do about it? It’s not like we can put a company of Marines around him, is it? Exposed as he is—I mean, he’s in public so much that you can’t protect him.”

  “And people like him don’t shrink from danger, do they?”

  “I remember when Martin Luther King got whacked. Hell, he knew—he must have known—there were guns out there with his name on them. But he never backed away. It just wasn’t part of his ethos to run and hide. Won’t be any different in Rome, buddy, and every other place he goes.”

  “Moving targets are supposed to be harder to hit,” Simon observed half-heartedly.

  “Not when you know where he’s moving to a month or two in advance. If KGB decides to put a hit on the guy, damn, I don’t see much we can do about it.”

  “Except perhaps to warn him.”

  “Great. So he can laugh about it. He probably would, you know. He’s been through Nazis and communists for the past forty years. What the hell is left to scare the guy with?” Ryan paused. “If they decide to do it, who pushes the button?”

  “I should think it would have to be voted on by the Politburo itself in plenary session. The political implications are too severe for any one member, however senior, to try something like this on his own authority, and remember how collegial they are—no one moves anywhere by himself, even Andropov, who’s the most independent-minded of the lot.”

  “Okay, that’s—what? Fifteen guys have to vote up or down on it. Fifteen mouths, plus staffs and family members to talk to about it. How good are our sources? Will we hear about it?”

  “Sensitive question, Jack. I cannot answer that one, I’m afraid.”

  “Can’t-can’t or can’t-I’m-not-allowed-to?” Jack asked more pointedly.

  “Jack, yes, we have sources of which I am aware, but which I cannot discuss with you.” Harding actually seemed embarrassed to say it.

  “Hey, I understand, Simon.” Jack had some of those himself. For instance, he couldn’t even speak the words TALENT KEYHOLE here, for which he was cleared, but which was NOFORN, no talking about this one to a foreigner—even though Simon and certainly Sir Basil knew quite a bit about it. It was so perverse, because it mainly denied information to people who might have made good use of it. If Wall Street acted this way, all of America would be under the poverty line, Jack groused. Either people were trustworthy or they were not. But the game had its rules, and Ryan played by those rules. That was the cost of admittance into this particular club.

  “This is bloody good stuff,” Harding said, flipping to page three of Bernie Katz’s debriefing.

  “Bernie’s smart,” Ryan confirmed. “That’s why Cathy likes working for him.”

  “But he’s an eye doctor, not a psychiatrist, correct?”

  “Simon, at that level of medicine, everybody is a little bit of everything. I asked Cathy: The diabetic retinopathy Suslov had is indicative of a major health problem. The diabetes messes up the little blood vessels in the back of the eye, and you can see it when you do an examination. Bernie and his team fixed it partway—you can’t fix it all the way—and gave him back about, oh, seventy-five to eighty percent of his sight, good enough to drive a car in daylight, anyway, but the underlying health problem is a mother. It isn’t just the small blood vessels in the eye, right? He’s got that problem all over his body. Figure Red Mike will croak from kidney failure or heart disease in the next two years at the outside.”

  “Our chaps think he’s got five years or so,” Harding offered.

  “Well, I’m not a doc. You can have some people talk to Bernie about it if you want, but everything is right there. Cathy says you can tell a lot about diabetes from looking at the eyeball.”

  “Does Suslov know that?”

  Ryan shrugged. “That is a good question, Simon. Docs don’t always tell their patients, probably less so over there. Figure Suslov’s being treated by a politically reliable doctor of professorial rank. Here, that would mean a top-drawer guy who really knows his stuff. Over there . . . ?”

  Harding nodded. “Correct. He may know his Lenin more than his Pasteur. Did you ever hear about Sergey Korolev, their chief rocket designer? That was a particularly ugly incident. The poor bugger was essentially murdered on the table because two senior surgeons didn’t like each other, and one wouldn’t bail the other out when the boat began to leak badly. It was probably good for the West, but he was a fine engineer, and he was killed by medical incompetence.”

  “Anybody pay up for that one?” Ryan asked.

  “Oh, no. They were both too politically important, lots of patrons in high places. They’re safe, until they kill one of their friends, and that won’t happen. I’m sure they both have competent young people under them to cover their backsides.”

  “You know what they need in Russia? Lawyers. I don’t like ambulance-chasers, but I guess they do keep people on their toes.”

  “In any case, no, Suslov probably does not know the gravity of his condition. At least that’s what our medical consultants think. He still drinks his vodka according to HUMINT reports, and that is definitely contraindicated.” Harding grimaced. “And his replacement will be Alexandrov, every bit as unpleasant a chap as his mentor. I’ll have to see about updating his dossier.” He made a note.

  As for Ryan, he turned back to his morning briefing pages before starting on his official project. Greer wanted Ryan to work on a study of management practices in the Soviet armament industry, to see how—and if—that segment of the Soviet economy worked. Ryan and Harding would be cooperating on the study, which would use both British and American data. It was something that suited Ryan’s academic backgr
ound. It might even get him noticed high up.

  THE RETURN MESSAGE came in at 11:32 hours. Fast work in Rome, Zaitzev thought, as he began the decryption. He’d call Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy as soon as he got through it, but it was going to take a while. The captain checked the wall clock. It would delay his lunch, too, but the priority condemned him to some stomach growls. About the only good news was that Colonel Goderenko had started his encipherment sequence at the top of page 285.

  MOST SECRET

  IMMEDIATE AND URGENT

  FROM: REZIDENT ROME

  TO: OFFICE OF CHAIRMAN, MOSCOW CENTRE

  REFERENCE: YOUR OP DISPATCH 15-8-82-666

  GETTING CLOSE TO THE PRIEST IS NOT DIFFICULT WITHOUT FIXED TIME CONSTRAINTS. GUIDANCE WILL BE NEEDED FOR A FULL EVALUATION OF YOUR REQUEST. PRIEST ENGAGES IN PREDICTABLE PUBLIC AUDIENCES AND APPEARANCES WHICH ARE KNOWN WELL IN ADVANCE. TO MAKE USE OF THIS OPPORTUNITY WILL NOT RPT NOT BE EASY DUE TO LARGE CROWDS ATTENDING FUNCTIONS. SECURITY ARRANGEMENTS FOR HIM DIFFICULT TO ASSESS WITHOUT FURTHER GUIDANCE. RECOMMEND AGAINST PHYSICAL ACTION TO BE TAKEN AGAINST PRIEST DUE TO EXPECTED ADVERSE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES. DIFFICULT TO HIDE ORIGIN OF AN OPERATION AGAINST PRIEST.

  ENDS.

  Well, Zaitzev thought, the rezident didn’t like this idea very much. Would Yuriy Vladimirovich listen to this bit of advice from the field? That, Zaitzev knew, was far above his pay grade. He lifted his phone and dialed.

  “Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy,” the brusque voice answered.

  “Captain Zaitzev in Communications Central. I have a reply to your six-six-six, Comrade Colonel.”

  “On my way,” Rozhdestvenskiy responded.

  The colonel was as good as his word, passing through the control point three minutes later. By that time, Zaitzev had returned the cipher book to central storage and slipped the message form, plus the translation, into a brown envelope, which he handed to the colonel.

  Has anyone seen this?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked.

  “Certainly not, comrade,” Zaitzev replied.

  “Very well.” Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy walked away without another word. For his part, Zaitzev left his work desk and headed off to the cafeteria for lunch. The food was the best reason to work at The Centre.