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  “And you said what, Jack?” Harding interrupted.

  “Simon, I said, whether the big shots saw it or not, it simply could not be true. That report was total bullshit—which makes me wonder how the hell their Politburo makes policy when the data they base it on is about as truthful as Alice-in-goddamned-Wonderland. You know, when I was in the Marine Corps, we worried that Ivan Ivanovich the Russian Soldier might be ten feet tall. He isn’t. There may be a lot of them, but they’re actually smaller than our people because they don’t eat as well as children, and their weapons suck. The AK-47’s a nice rifle, but I’ll take the M-16 over it any time, and a rifle is a damned sight simpler than a portable radio. So I finally get into CIA and find out the tactical radios their army uses are for shit, and so it turns out I was right about that back when I was a shavetail butter-bar in the Green Machine. Bottom line, Simon, they lie to the Politburo on what are supposed to be economic realities, and if they lie to those folks, they’ll lie about anything.”

  “So, what happened to the report to your President?”

  “They sent it to him, but with five pages of mine appended to the back. I hope he got that far. They say he reads a lot. Anyway, what I’m saying is that they base their policy on lies, and maybe we can make better policy by appreciating reality a little bit better. I think their economy’s in the shitter, Simon. It can’t be performing as well as their data says it is. If it were, we’d be seeing the positive results in the products they make, but we don’t, do we?”

  “Why be afraid of a country that can’t feed itself?”

  “Yep.” Ryan nodded.

  “In the Second World War—”

  “In 1941, Russia got invaded by a country that they never liked much, but Hitler was too damned stupid to make their antipathy for their own government work for him, so he implemented racist policies that were calculated to drive the Russian people back into the arms of Joe Stalin. So that’s a false comparison, Simon. The Soviet Union is fundamentally unstable. Why? Because it’s an unjust society, and there ain’t no such thing as a stable unjust society. Their economy . . .” He paused. “You know, there ought to be a way to make that work for us . . .”

  “And do what?”

  “Shake their foundations some. Maybe a mild earthquake,” Ryan suggested.

  “And bring them crashing down?” Harding asked. His eyebrows went up. “They do have a lot of nuclear weapons, you might want to remember.”

  “Okay, fine, we try to arrange a soft landing.”

  “Bloody decent of you, Jack.”

  CHAPTER 7

  SIMMERING

  ED FOLEY’S JOB as Press Attaché was not overly demanding in terms of the time required to stroke the local American correspondents and occasionally others. “Others” included reporters purportedly from Pravda and other Russian publications. Foley assumed that all of them were KGB officers or stringers—there was no difference between the two since KGB routinely used journalistic covers for its field officers. As a result, most Soviet reporters in America as often as not had an FBI agent or two in close attendance, at least when the FBI had agents to spare for the task, which wasn’t all that often. Reporters and field intelligence officers had virtually identical functions.

  He’d just been pinged hard by a Pravda guy named Pavel Kuritsyn, who was either a professional spook or sure as hell had read a lot of spy novels. Since it was easier to act dumb than smart, he’d fumbled through his Russian, smiling with apparent pride at how well he’d mastered the complex language. For his part, Kuritsyn had advised the American to watch Russian TV, the quicker to master the mother tongue. Foley had then drafted a contact report for the CIA files, noting that this Pavel Yevgeniyevich Kuritsyn smelled like a Second Chief Directorate boy who was checking him out, and opining that he thought he’d passed the test. You couldn’t be sure, of course. For all he knew, the Russians did employ people who read minds. Foley knew that they’d experimented in almost everything, even something called remote viewing, which to his professional mind was a step down from gypsy fortune-tellers—but which had gotten the Agency to start a program of its own, much to Foley’s disgust. For Ed Foley, if you couldn’t hold it, then it wasn’t real. But there was no telling what those pantywaists in the Directorate of Intelligence would try, just to bypass what the DO people—the real spooks in CIA—had to do every goddamned day.

  It was enough that Ivan had eyes, and Christ knew how many ears, in the embassy, though the building was regularly swept by electronics experts. (Once they’d even succeeded in planting a bug in the ambassador’s own office.) Just across the street was a former church that was used by KGB. In the U.S. Embassy, it was known as Our Lady of the Microchips, because the structure was full of microwave transmitters aimed at the embassy, their function being to interfere with all the listening devices that Station Moscow used to tap in to Soviet phone and radio systems. The amount of radiation that came in flirted with dangerous-to-your-health levels, and as a result the embassy was protected with metal sheeting in the drywall, which reflected a lot of it right back at the people across the street. The game had rules, and the Russians pretty much played within them, but the rules often didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. There had been quiet protests to the local natives about the microwaves, but these were invariably met with shrugs of “Who, us?” And that was as far as it usually went. The embassy doc said he wasn’t worried—but his office was in the basement, shielded from the radiation by stone and dirt. Some people said you could cook a hot dog by putting it on the east-facing windowsills.

  Two people who did know about Ed Foley were the ambassador and the Defense Attaché. The former was Ernest Fuller. Fuller looked like an illustration from a book about patricians: tall, slim, with a regal mane of white hair. In fact, he’d grown up on an Iowa hog farm, gotten a scholarship to Northwestern University, and then a law degree, which had taken him to corporate boardrooms, where he finally ended up as CEO of a major auto company. Along the way, he’d served three years in the U.S. Navy in World War II on the light cruiser USS Boise during the Guadalcanal campaign. He was regarded as a serious player and a gifted amateur by the embassy’s FSOs.

  The Defense Attaché was Brigadier General George Dalton. By profession an artilleryman, he got along well with his Russian counterparts. Dalton was a bear of a man with curly black hair, who’d played linebacker for West Point twenty-odd years before.

  Foley had an appointment with both of them—ostensibly, to talk over relations with the American news correspondents. Even his internal embassy business needed a cover in this station.

  “How’s your son adjusting?” Fuller asked.

  “He misses his cartoons. Before we came over, I bought one of those new tape machines—you know, the Betamax thing—and some tapes, but those only last so long, and they cost an arm and a leg.”

  “There’s a local version of Roadrunner-Coyote,” General Dalton told him. “It’s called Wait a Moment, something like that. It’s not as good as Warner Brothers, but better than that damned exercise show in the morning. The gal on that could whip a command sergeant-major.”

  “I noticed that yesterday morning. Is she part of their Olympic weight-lifting squad?” Foley joked. “Anyway . . .”

  “First impressions—any surprises?” Fuller asked.

  Foley shook his head. “About what I was briefed to expect. Looks like everywhere I go, I have company. How long you suppose that will last?”

  “Maybe a week or so. Take a walk around—better yet, watch Ron Fielding when he takes a walk. He does his job pretty well.”

  “Anything major under way?” Ambassador Fuller asked.

  “No, sir. Just routine operations at the moment. But the Russians have something very large happening at home.”

  “What’s that?” Fuller asked.

  “They call it Operation RYAN. Their acronym for Surprise Nuclear Attack on the Motherland. They’re worried that the President might want to nuke them, and they have offic
ers running around back home trying to get a feel for his mental state.”

  “You’re serious?” Fuller asked.

  “As a heart attack. I guess they took the campaign rhetoric a little too seriously.”

  “I have had a few odd questions from their foreign ministry,” the Ambassador said. “But I just wrote it off to small talk.”

  “Sir, we’re investing a lot of money in the military, and that makes them nervous.”

  “Whereas, when they buy ten thousand new tanks, it’s normal?” General Dalton observed.

  “Exactly,” Foley agreed. “A gun in my hand is a defensive weapon, but a gun in your hand is an offensive weapon. It’s a matter of outlook, I suppose.”

  “Have you seen this?” Fuller asked, handing across a fax from Foggy Bottom.

  Foley scanned it. “Uh-oh.”

  “I told Washington it would worry the Soviets a good deal. What do you think?”

  “I concur, sir. In several ways. Most important will be the potential unrest in Poland, which could spread throughout their empire. That’s the one area in which they think long-term. Political stability is their sine qua non. What are they saying in Washington?”

  “The Agency just showed it to the President, and he handed it off to the Secretary of State, and he faxed it to me for comment. Can you rattle any bushes, see if they’re talking about it in the Politburo?”

  Foley thought for a moment and nodded. “I can try.” It made him slightly uncomfortable, but that was his job, wasn’t it? It meant getting a message to one or more of his agents, but that was what they were for. The troubling part was that it meant exposing his wife. Mary Pat would not object—hell, she loved the spy game in the field—but it always bothered her husband to expose her to danger. He supposed it was chauvinism. “What’s the priority on this?”

  “Washington is very interested,” Fuller said. That made it important, but not quite an emergency tasking.

  “Okay, I’ll get on it, sir.”

  “I don’t know what assets you’re running here in Moscow—and I don’t want to know. It’s dangerous to them?”

  “They shoot traitors over here, sir.”

  “This is rougher than the car business, Foley. I do understand that.”

  “Hell, it wasn’t this rough in the Central Highlands,” General Dalton noted. “Ivan plays pretty mean. You know, I’ve been asked about the President, too, usually over drinks by senior officers. They’re really that worried about him, eh?”

  “It sure looks that way,” Foley confirmed.

  “Good. Never hurts to rattle the other guy’s confidence a little, keep him looking over his shoulder some.”

  “Just so it doesn’t go too far,” Ambassador Fuller suggested. He was relatively new to diplomacy, but he had respect for the process. “Okay, anything that I need to know about?”

  “Not from my end,” the COS replied. “Still getting used to things. Had a Russian reporter in today, maybe a KGB counterspook checking me out, guy named Kuritsyn.”

  “I think he’s a player,” General Dalton said at once.

  “I caught a whiff of that. I expect he’ll check me out through the Times correspondent.”

  “You know him?”

  “Anthony Prince.” Foley nodded. “And that pretty much sums him up. Groton and Yale. I bumped into him a few times in New York when I was at the paper. He’s very smart, but not quite as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “How’s your Russian?”

  “I can pass for a native—but my wife can pass for a poet. She’s really good at it. Oh, one other thing. I have a neighbor in the compound, Haydock, husband Nigel, wife Penelope. I presume they’re players, too.”

  “Big-time,” General Dalton confirmed. “They’re solid.”

  Foley thought so, but it never hurt to be sure. He stood. “Okay, let me get some work done.”

  “Welcome aboard, Ed,” the Ambassador said. “Duty here isn’t too bad once you get used to it. We get all the theater and ballet tickets we want through their foreign ministry.”

  “I prefer ice hockey.”

  “That’s easy, too,” General Dalton responded.

  “Good seats?” the spook asked.

  “First row.”

  Foley smiled. “Dynamite.”

  FOR HER PART, Mary Pat was out on the street with her son. Eddie was too big for a stroller, which was too bad. You could do a lot of interesting things with a stroller, and she figured the Russians would be hesitant to mess with an infant and a diaper bag—especially when they both came with a diplomatic passport. She was just taking a walk at the moment, getting used to the environment, the sights and smells. This was the belly of the beast, and here she was, like a virus—a deadly one, she hoped. She’d been born Mary Kaminsky, the granddaughter of an equerry to the House of Romanov. Grandfather Vanya had been a central figure of her youth. From him she’d learned Russian as a toddler, and not the base Russian of today, but the elegant, literary Russian of a bygone time. She could read the poetry of Pushkin and weep, and in this she was more Russian than American, for the Russians had venerated their poets for centuries, while in America they were mainly relegated to writing pop songs. There was much to admire and much to love about this country.

  But not its government. She’d been twelve, looking forward to her teens with enthusiasm, when Grandfather Vanya had told her the story of Aleksey, the crown prince of Russia—a good child, so her grandfather said, but an unlucky one, stricken with hemophilia and for that reason a fragile child. Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, a minor nobleman in the Imperial Horse Guards, had taught the boy to ride a horse, because that was one physical skill a prince needed in that age. He’d had to be ever so careful—Aleksey often went about in the arms of a sailor in the Imperial navy, lest he trip and fall and bleed—but he’d accomplished the task, to the gratitude of Nikolay II and Czarina Alexandra, and along the way the two had become as close as, if not father and son, then uncle and nephew. Grandfather Vanya had gone to the front and fought against the Germans, but early in the war had been captured at the Battle of Tannenberg. It had been in a German prisoner-of-war camp that he’d learned of the revolution. He’d managed to come back to Mother Russia, and fought with the White Guards in the doomed counterrevolutionary effort—then learned that the czar and his entire family had been murdered by the usurpers at Ekaterinberg. He’d known then that the war was lost, and he’d managed to escape and make his way to America, where he’d begun a new life, but one in perpetual mourning for the dead.

  Mary Pat remembered the tears in his eyes when he told the tale, and the tears had communicated to her his visceral hatred for the Bolsheviks. It had muted somewhat. She wasn’t a fanatic, but when she saw a Russian in a uniform, or in a speeding ZIL, headed for a Party meeting, she saw the face of the enemy, an enemy that needed defeating. That communism was her country’s adversary was merely sauce for the goose. If she could find a button that would bring down this odious political system, she’d push it without a blink of hesitation.

  And so the appointment to Moscow had been the best of all dream assignments. Just as Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky had told her his ancient and sad story, so he had given her a mission for her life, and a passion for its achievement. Her choice to join CIA had been as natural as brushing out her honey-blond hair.

  And now, walking about, for the first time in her life she really understood her grandfather’s passionate love for things past. Everything was different from what she knew in America, from the pitch of the building roofs to the color of the asphalt in the streets to the blank expressions on the faces of the people. They looked at her as they passed, for in her American clothes she stood out like a peacock among crows. Some even managed a smile for little Eddie, because dour as the Russians were, they were unfailingly kind to children. For the fun of it, she asked for directions from a militiaman, as the local police were called, and he was polite to her, helping with her poor pronunciation of his language and giving d
irections. So that was one good thing. She had a tail, she noted, a KGB officer, about thirty-five, following behind by about fifty yards, doing his best to remain invisible. His mistake was in looking away when she turned. That’s probably how he had been trained, so that his face would not become too familiar to his surveillance target.

  The streets and sidewalks were wide here, but not overly crowded with people. Most Russians were at work, and there was no population of free women here, out shopping or heading to social affairs or golf outings—maybe the wives of the really important party members, that was all. Kind of like the idle rich at home, Mary Pat reflected, if there were still such people. Her mom had always worked, at least in her memory—still did, in fact. But here working women used shovels while the men drove dump trucks. They were always fixing potholes in the streets, but never quite fixing them well enough. Just like in Washington and New York, she thought.

  There were street vendors here, though, selling ice cream, and she bought one for little Eddie, whose eyes were taking it all in. It troubled her conscience to inflict this place and this mission on her son, but he was only four and it would be a good learning experience for him. At least he’d grow up bilingual. He’d also learn to appreciate his country more than most American kids, and that, she thought, was a good thing. So, she had a tail. How good was he? Perhaps it was time to find out. She reached into her purse and surreptitiously removed a length of paper tape. It was red in color, a bright red. Turning a corner, she stuck it to a lamppost in a gesture so casual as to be invisible and kept going. Then, fifty yards down the new block, she turned to look back as though lost . . . and she saw him walk right past that lamppost. So he hadn’t seen her leave the flag signal. Had he seen her, he would at least have looked . . . and he was the only one following her; her route had been so randomly chosen that there wouldn’t be anyone else assigned to her, unless there was a really major surveillance effort applied to her, and that didn’t seem likely. She’d never been blown on any of her field assignments. She remembered every single moment of her training at The Farm in Tidewater, Virginia. She’d been at the top of her class, and she knew she was good—and better still, she knew that you were never so good that you could forget to be careful. But as long as you were careful, you could ride any horse. Grandfather Vanya had taught her to ride, too.