Red Rabbit Read online

  What he could not leave behind as he stopped at the lavatory to wash his hands was the message sequence. Yuriy Andropov wanted to kill the Pope, and the rezident in Rome didn’t like the idea. Zaitzev wasn’t supposed to have any opinions. He was just part of the communications system. It rarely occurred to the hierarchy of the Committee for State Security that its people actually had minds . . .

  . . . and even consciences . . .

  Zaitzev took his place in line and got the metal tray and utensils. He decided on the beef stew and four thick slices of bread, with a large glass of tea. The cashier charged him fifty-five kopecks. His usual luncheon mates had already been and gone, so he ended up picking an end seat at a table filled with people he didn’t know. They were talking about football, and he didn’t join in, alone with his thoughts. The stew was quite good, as was the bread, fresh from the ovens. About the only thing they didn’t have here was proper silverware, as they did in the private dining rooms on the upper floors. Instead they used the same feather-light zinc-aluminum as all the other Soviet citizens. It worked well enough, but because it was so light, it felt awkward in his hands.

  So, he thought, I was right. The Chairman is thinking about murdering the Pope. Zaitzev was not a religious man. He had not been to a church in his entire life—except those large buildings converted to museums since the Revolution. All he knew about religion was the propaganda dispensed as a matter of course in Soviet public education. And yet some of the children he’d known in school had talked about believing in God, and he hadn’t reported them, because informing just wasn’t his way. The Great Questions of Life were things he didn’t much think about. For the most part, life in the Soviet Union was limited to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The economic facts of life really didn’t allow a person to make long-term plans. There were no country houses to buy, no luxury cars to desire, no elaborate vacations to save for. In committing what it called socialism on the people, the government of his country allowed—forced—everyone to aspire to much the same things, regardless of individual tastes, which meant getting on an endless list and being notified when one’s name came up—and being unknowingly bumped by those with greater Party seniority—or not, because some people had access to better places. His life, like everyone else’s, was like that of a steer on a feed lot. He was cared for moderately well and fed the same bland food at the same time on endlessly identical days. There was a grayness, an overarching boredom, to every aspect of life—alleviated in his case only by the content of the messages which he processed and forwarded. He wasn’t supposed to think about the messages, much less remember them, but without anybody to talk to, all he could do was dwell on them in the privacy of his own mind. Today his mind had just one occupant, and it would not silence itself. It raced around like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going round and round but always returning to the same place.

  Andropov wants to kill the Pope.

  He’d processed assassination messages before. Not many. KGB was gradually drifting away from it. Too many things went wrong. Despite the professional skill and cleverness of the field officers, policemen in other countries were endlessly clever and had the mindless patience of a spider in its web, and until KGB could just wish a person dead and have it come to pass, there would be witnesses and evidence, because a cloak of invisibility was something found only in tales for children.

  More often he processed messages about defectors or suspected would-be defectors—or, just as deadly, suspicion of officers and agents who’d “doubled,” gone over to serve the enemy. He’d even seen such evidence passed along in message form, calling an officer home for “consultations” from which they’d rarely returned back to their rezidenturas. Exactly what happened to them—that was just the subject of gossip, all of it unpleasant. One officer who’d gone bad, the story went, had been loaded alive into a crematorium, the way the German SS was supposed to have done. He’d heard there was a film of it, and he’d talked to people who knew people who knew people who’d seen it. But he had never actually seen it himself, nor met anyone who had. Some things, Oleg Ivanovich thought, were too beyond the pale even for the KGB. No, most of the stories talked of firing squads—which often fucked up, so the stories went—or a single pistol round in the head, as Lavrenti Beriya had done himself. Those stories, everyone believed. He’d seen photos of Beria, and they seemed to drip with blood. And Iron Feliks would doubtless have done it between bites of his sandwich. He was the kind of man to give ruthlessness an evil name.

  But it was generally felt, if not widely spoken, that KGB was becoming more kulturniy in its dealings with the world. More cultured. More civilized. Kinder and gentler. Traitors, of course, were executed, but only after a trial in which they were at least given a pro forma chance to explain their actions and, if they were innocent, to prove it. It almost never happened, but only because the State only prosecuted the truly guilty. The investigators in the Second Chief Directorate were among the most feared and skilled people in the entire country. It was said they were never wrong and never fooled, like some kind of gods.

  Except that the State said that there were no gods.

  Men, then—and women. Everyone knew about the Sparrow School, about which the men often spoke with twisty grins and winking eyes. Ah, to be an instructor or, better still, a quality-assurance officer there! they dreamed. And to be paid for it. As his Irina often noted, all men were pigs. But, Zaitzev mused, it could be fun to be a pig.

  Kill the Pope—why? He was no threat to this country. Stalin himself had once joked, How many divisions does the Pope have? So why kill the man? Even the rezident warned against it. Goderenko feared the political repercussions. Stalin had ordered Trotsky killed, and had dispatched a KGB officer to do it, knowing that he’d suffer long-term imprisonment for the task. But he’d done it, faithful to the Will of the Party, in a professional gesture that they talked about in the academy training classes—along with the more casual advice that we really don’t do that sort of thing anymore. It was not, the instructors didn’t add, kulturniy. And so, yes, KGB was drifting away from that sort of behavior.

  Until now. Until today. And even our senior rezident is advising against it. Why? Because he doesn’t want himself and his agency—and his country! —to be so nekulturniy?

  Or because to do so would be worse than foolish? It would be wrong . . . ? “Wrong” was a concept foreign to citizens in the Soviet Union. At least, what people perceived as things that were morally wrong. Morality in his country had been replaced by what was politically correct or incorrect. Whatever served the interests of his country’s political system was worthy of praise. That which did not was worthy of . . . death?

  And who decided such things?

  Men did.

  Men did because there was no morality, as the world understood the term. There was no God to pronounce what was good and what was evil.

  And yet . . .

  And yet, in the heart of every man was an inborn knowledge of right and wrong. To kill another man was wrong. To take a man’s life you had to have a just cause. But it was also men who decided what constituted such cause. The right men in the right place with the right authority had the ability and the right to kill because—why?

  Because Marx and Lenin said so.

  That was what the government of his country had long since decided.

  Zaitzev buttered his last piece of bread and dipped it in the remaining gravy in his bowl before eating it. He knew he was thinking overly deep, even dangerous, thoughts. His parent society did not encourage or even permit independent thinking. You were not supposed to question the Party and its wisdom. Certainly not here. In the KGB cafeteria, you never, ever, not even once heard someone wonder aloud if the Party and the Motherland it served and protected were even capable of doing an incorrect act. Oh, maybe once in a while, people speculated on tactics, but even then the talk was within limits that were taller and stronger than the Kremlin’s own brick walls.

  His country�
�s morality, he mused, had been predetermined by a German Jew living in London, and the son of a czarist bureaucrat who simply hadn’t liked the czar much and whose overly adventurous brother had been executed for taking direct action. That man had found shelter in that most capitalistic of nations, Switzerland, then had been dispatched back to Mother Russia by the Germans in the hope that he could upset the czar’s government, allowing Germany then to defeat the other Western nations on the Western Front of the First World War. All in all, it didn’t sound like something ordained by any deity for some great plan for human advancement, did it? Everything Lenin had used as a model for changing his country—and through it, the entire world—had come from a book written by Karl Marx, more writings by Friedrich Engels, and his own vision for becoming the chief of a new kind of country.

  The only thing that distinguished Marxism-Leninism from a religion was the lack of a godhead. Both systems claimed absolute authority over the affairs of men, and both claimed to be right a priori. Except that his country’s system chose to assert that authority by exercising the power of life and death.

  His country said it worked for justice, for the good of the workers and peasants all around the world. But other men, higher up in the hierarchy, decided who the workers and peasant were, and they themselves lived in ornate dachas and multiroom flats, and had automobiles and drivers . . . and privileges.

  What privileges they had! Zaitzev had also dispatched messages about pantyhose and perfumes that the men in this building wanted for their women. These items were often delivered in the diplomatic bag from embassies in the West, things his own country could not produce, but which the nomenklatura craved, along with their West German refrigerators and stoves. When he saw the big shots racing down the center of Moscow’s streets in their chauffeured Zils, then Zaitzev understood how Lenin had felt about the czars. The czar had claimed divine right as his personal deed to power. The Party chieftains claimed their positions by the will of the people.

  Except that the People had never given anything to them by public acclamation. The Western democracies had elections—Pravda spat upon them every few years—but they were real elections. England was now run by a nasty-looking woman, and America by an aged and buffoonish actor, but both had been chosen by the people of their countries, and the previous rulers had been removed by popular choice. Neither leader was well-loved in the Soviet Union, and he’d seen many official messages sent out to ascertain their mental state and deeply held political beliefs; the concern in those messages had been manifest, and Zaitzev himself had his worries, but as distasteful and unstable as these leaders might be, their people had chosen them. The Soviet people had decidedly not selected the current crop of princes on the Politburo.

  And now the new communist princes were thinking about murdering a Polish priest in Rome. But how did he threaten the Rodina? This Pope fellow had no military formations at his command. A political threat, then? But how? The Vatican was supposed to have diplomatic identity, but nationhood without military power was—what? If there was no God, then whatever power the Pope exercised had to be an illusion, of no more substance than a puff of cigarette smoke. Zaitzev’s country had the greatest army on earth, a fact proclaimed regularly by We Serve the Soviet Union, the TV show that everybody watched.

  So, why do they want to kill a man who poses no threat? Would he part the oceans with a wave of his staff or bring down plagues on the land? Of course not.

  And to kill a harmless man is a crime, Zaitzev told himself, exercising his mind for the first time in his tenure at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square, silently asserting his free will. He’d asked a question and come up with an answer.

  It would have been helpful if he’d had someone to talk to about that, but of course that was out of the question. That left Zaitzev without a safety valve—a way to process his feelings and bring them to some kind of resolution. The laws and customs of his nation forced him to recycle his thoughts over and over, and ultimately that led in only one direction. That it was a direction of which the State would not approve was, in the end, a product of the State’s own making.

  On finishing his lunch, he sipped his tea and lit a cigarette, but that contemplative act didn’t help the state of his mind. The hamster was still running in its wheel. No one in the huge dining room noticed. To those who saw Zaitzev, he was just one more man enjoying his after-meal smoke in solitude. Like all Soviet citizens, Zaitzev knew how to hide his feelings, and so his face gave nothing away. He just looked at the wall clock so that he wouldn’t be late going back to work for his afternoon watch, just one more bureaucrat in a large building full of them.

  UPSTAIRS, it was a little different. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy hadn’t wanted to interrupt the Chairman’s lunch, and so he’d sat in his own office waiting for the hands on the clock to move, munching on his own sandwich but ignoring the cup of soup that had come with it. Like his Chairman, he smoked American Marlboro cigarettes, which were milder and better made than their Soviet counterparts. It was an affectation he’d picked up in the field, but as a high-ranking First Chief Directorate officer, he could shop at the special store in Moscow Centre. They were expensive, even for one paid in “certificate” rubles, but he only drank cheap vodka, so it evened out. He wondered how Yuriy Vladimirovich would react to Goderenko’s message. Ruslan Borissovich was a very capable rezident, careful and conservative, and a man senior enough to be allowed to talk back, as it were. His job, after all, was to feed good information to Moscow Centre, and if he thought something might compromise that mission, it was his duty to warn them about it—and besides, the original dispatch had not carried an obligatory directive in it, just an instruction to ascertain a situation. So, no, Ruslan Borissovich would probably not get into any trouble from his reply. But Andropov might bark and, if he did, then he, Colonel A. N. Rozhdestvenskiy, would bear the noise, which was never fun. His place here was enviable in one way and frightening in another. He had the ear of the Chairman, but being that close meant that he had to be close to the teeth, too. In the history of KGB, it was not unknown for some people to suffer for the actions of others. But it was unlikely in this case. Though an undeniably tough man, Andropov was also a reasonably fair one. Even so, it didn’t pay to be too close to a rumbling volcano. His desk phone rang. It was the Chairman’s private secretary.

  “The Chairman will see you now, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Spasiba.” He rose and walked down the corridor.

  “We have a reply from Colonel Goderenko,” Rozhdestvenskiy reported, handing it over.

  For his part, Andropov was not surprised, and to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy’s invisible relief, he did not lose his temper.

  “I expected this. Our people have lost their sense of daring, haven’t they, Aleksey Nikolay’ch?”

  “Comrade Chairman, the rezident gives you his professional assessment of the problem,” the field officer answered.

  “Go on,” Andropov commanded.

  “Comrade Chairman,” Rozhdestvenskiy replied, choosing his words with the greatest care, “you cannot undertake an operation like the one you are evidently considering without political risks. This priest has a good deal of influence, however illusory that influence may be. Ruslan Borissovich is concerned that an attack on him might affect his ability to gather information, and that, comrade, is his primary task.”

  “The assessment of political risk is my job, not his.”

  “That is true, Comrade Chairman, but it is his territory, and it is his job to tell you what he thinks you need to know. The loss of some of his agents’ services could be costly to us both in direct and indirect terms.”

  “How costly?”

  “That is impossible to predict. The Rome rezidentura has a number of highly productive agents for NATO military and political intelligence information. Can we live without it? Yes, I suppose we could, but better that we should live with it. The human factors involved make prediction difficult. Running agents is an art and not a science, you see.
”

  “So you have told me before, Aleksey.” Andropov rubbed his eyes tiredly. His skin was a little sallow today, Rozhdestvenskiy noted. Was his liver problem kicking up again?

  “Our agents are all people, and individual people have their individual peculiarities. There is no avoiding it,” Rozhdestvenskiy explained for perhaps the hundredth time. It could have been worse; Andropov actually listened some of the time. His predecessors had not all been so enlightened. Perhaps it came from Yuriy Vladimirovich’s intelligence.

  “That’s what I like about signals intelligence,” the Chairman of KGB groused. That was what everyone in the business said, Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy noted. The problem was in getting signals intelligence. The West was better at it than his country, despite their infiltration of the West’s signals agencies. The American NSA and British GCHQ, in particular, worked constantly to defeat Soviet communications security and occasionally, they worried, succeeded at it. Which was why KGB depended so absolutely on one-time pads. They couldn’t trust anything else.

  “HOW GOOD IS THIS?” Ryan asked Harding.

  “We think it’s the genuine article, Jack. Part of it comes from open sources, but most comes from documents prepared for their Council of Ministers. At that level, they don’t lie to themselves much.”

  “Why not?” Jack asked pointedly. “Everyone else there does.”

  “But here you’re dealing with something concrete, products that have to be delivered to their army. If they do not appear, it will be noted, and inquiries will be made. In any case,” Harding went on, qualifying himself carefully, “the most important material here has to do with policy questions, and for that you gain nothing by lying.”

  “I suppose. I raised a little hell at Langley last month when I ripped through an economics assessment that was going on to the President’s office. I said it couldn’t possibly be true, and the guy who drew it up said it was just what the Politburo saw at their meetings—”