Red Rabbit Read online

  The train slowed to a stop. He walked up the steps, and there were a few cabs topside. Jack imagined they had the train schedule memorized.

  “Good evening, Sir John.” Jack saw it was Ed Beaverton, his morning pickup.

  “Hi, Ed. You know,” Ryan said, getting into the front seat for a change. Better legroom. “My name is actually Jack.”

  “I can’t call you that,” Beaverton objected. “You’re a knight.”

  “Only honorary, not a real one. I do not own a sword—well, only my Marine Corps one, and that’s back home in the States.”

  “And you were a lieutenant, and I was only a corporal.”

  “And you jumped out of airplanes. Damned if I ever did anything that stupid, Eddie.”

  “Only twenty-eight times. Never broke anything,” the taxi driver reported, turning up the hill.

  “Not even an ankle?”

  “Just a sprain or two. The boots help with that, you see,” the cabbie explained.

  “I haven’t learned to like flying yet—damned sure I’ll never jump out of an airplane.” No, Jack was sure, he never would have opted for Force Recon. Those Marines just weren’t wired right. He’d learned the hard way that flying over the beach in helicopters was scary enough. He still had dreams about it—the sudden sensation of falling, and seeing the ground rush up—but he always woke up just before impact, usually lurching up to a sitting position in the bed and then looking around the darkened bedroom to make sure he wasn’t in that damned CH-46 with a bad aft rotor, falling to the rocks on Crete. It was a miracle that he and a lot of his Marines hadn’t been killed. But his had been the only major injury. The rest of his platoon had gotten away with nothing worse than sprains.

  Why the hell are you thinking about that? he demanded of himself. It was more than eight years in his past.

  They were pulling up in front of the house in Grizedale Close. “Here we are, sir.”

  Ryan handed him his fare, plus a friendly tip. “The name’s Jack, Eddie.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Roger that.” Ryan walked off, knowing he’d never win that battle. The front door was unlocked in anticipation of his arrival. His tie went first, as he headed to the kitchen.

  “Daddy!” Sally fairly screamed, as she ran to his arms. Jack scooped her up and gave and got a hug. “How’s my big girl?”

  “Fine.”

  Cathy was at the stove, fixing dinner. He set Sally down and headed to his wife for a kiss. “How is it,” her husband asked, “that you’re always home first? At home you’re usually later.”

  “Unions,” she replied. “Everybody clocks out on time here, and ‘on time’ is usually pretty early—not like Hopkins.” Where, she didn’t add, just about everyone on the professional staff worked late.

  “Must be nice to work bankers’ hours.”

  “Even dad doesn’t leave his office this early, but everybody over here does. And lunch means a full hour—half the time away from the hospital. Well,” she allowed, “the food’s a little better that way.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Spaghetti.” And Jack saw that the pot was full of her special meat sauce. He turned to see a baguette of French bread on the counter.

  “Where’s the little guy?”

  “Living room.”

  “Okay.” Ryan headed that way. Little Jack was in his crib. He’d just mastered sitting up—it was a little early for that, but that was fine with his dad. Around him was a collection of toys, all of which found their way into his mouth. He looked up to see his father and managed a toothless smile. Of course, that merited a pickup, which Jack accomplished. His diaper felt dry and fresh. Doubtless, Miss Margaret had changed him before scooting off—as always, before Jack made it home from the shop. She was working out fairly well. Sally liked her, and that was the important part. He set his son back down, and the little guy resumed playing with a plastic rattle and watching the TV—especially the commercials. Jack went off to the bedroom to change into more comfortable clothes, then back to the kitchen. Then the doorbell chimed, much to everyone’s surprise. Jack went to answer it.

  “Dr. Ryan?” the voice asked in American English. It was a guy of Ryan’s height and general looks, dressed in a jacket and tie, holding a large box.

  “That’s right.”

  “I got your STU for you, sir. I work comms at the embassy,” the guy explained. “Mr. Murray said I should bring this right over.”

  The box was a cardboard cube about two and a half feet on a side, and blank, with no printing on it. Ryan let the man into the house and led him directly to his den. It took about three minutes to extract the oversized phone from the box. It went next to Jack’s Apple IIe computer.

  “You’re NSA?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes, sir. Civilian. Used to be in the Army Security Agency, E-5. Got out and got a pay increase as a civilian. Been over here two years. Anyway, here’s your encryption key.” He handed over the plastic device. “You know how these things work, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” Ryan nodded. “Got one on my desk downtown.”

  “So you know the rules about this. If anything breaks, you call me”—he handed over his card—“and nobody but me or one of my people is allowed to look at the inside. If that happens, the system self-destructs, of course. Won’t start a fire or anything, but it does stink some, ’cause of the plastic. Anyway, that’s it.” He broke down the box.

  “You want a Coke or anything?”

  “No, thanks. Gotta get home.” And with that, the communications expert walked back out the door to his car.

  “What was that, Jack?” Cathy asked from the kitchen.

  “My secure phone,” Jack explained, returning to his wife’s side.

  “What’s that for?”

  “So I can call home and talk to my boss.”

  “Can’t you do that from the office?”

  “There’s the time difference and, well, there are some things I can’t talk about there.”

  “Secret-agent stuff,” she snorted.

  “That’s right.” Just like the pistol he had in his closet. Cathy accepted the presence of his Remington shotgun with some equanimity—he used it for hunting, and she was prepared to tolerate that, since you could cook and eat the birds, and the shotgun was unloaded. But she was less comfortable with a pistol. And so, like civilized married people, they didn’t talk about it, so long as it was well out of Sally’s reach, and Sally knew that her father’s closet was off-limits. Ryan had gotten fond of his Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic, which was loaded with fourteen Federal hollow-point cartridges and two spare magazines, plus tritium match sights and custom-made grips. If he ever needed a pistol again, this would be the one. He’d have to find a place to practice shooting, Ryan reminded himself. Maybe the nearby Royal Navy base had a range. Sir Basil could probably make a phone call and straighten it out. As an honorary knight, he didn’t own a sword, but a pistol was the modern equivalent, and it could be a useful tool on occasion.

  So could a corkscrew. “Chianti?” Ryan asked.

  Cathy turned. “Okay, I don’t have anything scheduled for tomorrow.”

  “Cath, I’ve never understood what a glass or two of wine tonight would have to do with surgery tomorrow—it’s ten or twelve hours away.”

  “Jack, you don’t mix alcohol with surgery,” she explained patiently. “Okay? You don’t drink and drive. You don’t drink and cut, either. Not ever. Not once.”

  “Yes, doctor. So tomorrow you just set glasses prescriptions for people?”

  “Uh-huh, simple day. How about you?”

  “Nothing important. Same crap, different day.”

  “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Well, it’s interesting, secret crap, and you have to be a spook to understand it.”

  “Right.” She poured the spaghetti sauce into a bowl. “Here.”

  “I haven’t got the wine open yet.”

  “So wor
k faster.”

  “Yes, Professor the Lady Ryan,” Jack responded, taking the bowl of sauce and setting it on the table. Then he pulled the cork out of the Chianti.

  Sally was too big a girl for a high chair but still small enough for a booster seat, which she carried to the chair herself. Since the dinner was “pisgetty,” her father tucked the cloth napkin into her collar. The sauce would probably get to her pants anyway, but it would teach his little girl about napkins, and that, Cathy thought, was important. Then Ryan poured the wine. Sally didn’t ask for any. Her father had indulged her once (over his wife’s objections), and that had ended that. Sally got some Coca-Cola.

  SVETLANA WAS ASLEEP, finally. She liked to stay up as long as she could, every night the same, or so it seemed, until she finally put her head down. She slept with a smile, her father saw, like a little angel, the sort that decorated Italian cathedrals in the travel books he used to read. The TV was on. Some World War II movie, it sounded like. They were all the same. The Germans attacked cruelly—well, occasionally there was a German character with something akin to humanity, usually a German communist, it would be revealed along the way, torn by conflicting loyalties to his class (working class, of course) and his country—and the Soviets resisted bravely, losing a lot of defiant men at first until turning the tide, usually outside Moscow in December 1941, at Stalingrad in January 1943, or the Kursk Bulge in the summer of 1943. There was always a heroic political officer, a courageous private soldier, a wise old sergeant, and a bright young junior officer. Toss in a grizzled general who wept quietly and alone for his men, then had to set his feelings aside and get the job done. There were about five different formulas, all of them variations of the same theme, and the only real difference was whether Stalin was seen as a wise, godlike ruler or simply wasn’t mentioned at all. That depended on when the film had been shot. Stalin had fallen out of fashion in the Soviet film industry about 1956, soon after Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had made his famous but then-secret speech revealing what a monster Stalin had been—something Soviet citizens still had trouble with, especially the cabdrivers, or so it seemed. Truth in his country was a rare commodity, and almost always one hard to swallow.

  But Zaitzev wasn’t watching the movie now. Oleg Ivanovich sipped at his vodka, eyes focused on the TV screen, without seeing it. It had just struck him how huge a step he’d taken that afternoon on the metro. At the time, it had almost been a lark, like a child playing a prank, reaching into that American’s pocket like a sneak-thief, just to see if he could do it. No one had noticed. He’d been clever and careful about it, and even the American hadn’t noticed, or else he would have reacted.

  So he’d just proven that he had the ability to . . . what? To do what? Oleg Ivan’ch asked himself with surprising intensity.

  What the hell had he done on the metro coach? What had he been thinking about? Actually, he hadn’t really thought about it at all. It had just been some sort of foolish impulse . . . hadn’t it?

  He shook his head and took another sip of his drink. He was a man of intelligence. He had a university degree. He was an excellent chess player. He had a job that required the highest security clearance, that paid well, and that had just put him at the bottom entry level of the nomenklatura. He was a person of importance—not much, but some. The KGB trusted him with knowledge about many things. The KGB had confidence in him . . . but . . .

  But what? he asked himself. What came after the “but” part? His mind was wandering in directions he didn’t understand and could barely see. . . .

  The priest. It came down to that, didn’t it? Or did it? What was he thinking? Zaitzev asked himself. He didn’t really know if he was thinking anything at all. It was as though his hand had developed a mind of its own, taking action without the brain’s or the mind’s permission, leading off in a direction that he didn’t understand.

  Yes, it had to be that damned priest. Was he bewitched? Was some outside force taking control of his body?

  No! That is not possible! Zaitzev told himself. That was something from ancient tales, the sort of thing old women discussed—prattled about—over a boiling pot.

  But why, then, did I put my hand in the American’s pocket? his mind demanded of itself, but there was no immediate answer.

  Do you want to be a part of murder? some small voice asked. Are you willing to facilitate the murder of an innocent man?

  Was he innocent? Zaitzev asked himself, taking another swallow. Not a single dispatch crossing his desk suggested otherwise. In fact, he could hardly remember any mention of this Father Karol in any KGB messages during the past couple years. Yes, they’d taken note of his trip back to Poland soon after being elected Pope, but what man didn’t go home after his promotion to see his friends and seek their approval of his new place in the world?

  The Party was made up of men, too. And men made mistakes. He saw them every day, even from the skilled, highly trained officers of KGB, who were punished, or chided, or just remarked upon by their superiors in The Centre. Leonid Ilyich made mistakes. People chuckled about them over lunch often enough—or talked more quietly about the things his greedy children did, especially his daughter. Hers was a petty corruption, and while people talked about it, they usually spoke quietly. But he was thinking about a much larger and more dangerous kind of corruption.

  Where did the legitimacy of the State come from? In the abstract, it came from the people, but the people had no say in things. The Party did, but only a small minority of the people were in the Party, and of those only a much smaller minority achieved anything resembling power. And so the legitimacy of his State resided atop what was by any logical measure . . . a fiction . . .

  And that was a very big thought. Other countries were ruled by dictators, often fascists on the political Right. Fewer countries were ruled by people on the political Left. Hitler represented the most powerful and dangerous of the former, but he’d been overthrown by the Soviet Union and Stalin on one side, and by the Western states on the other. The two most unlikely of allies had combined to destroy the German threat. And who were they? They claimed to be democracies, and while that claim was consistently denigrated by his own country, the elections held in those countries were real—they had to be, since his country and his agency, the KGB, spent time and money trying to influence them—and so there, the Will of the People had some reality to it, or else why would KGB try to affect it? Exactly how much, Zaitzev didn’t know. There was no telling from the information available in his own country, and he didn’t bother listening to the Voice of America and other obvious propaganda arms of the Western nations.

  So, it wasn’t the people who wanted to kill the priest. It was Andropov, certainly, and the Politburo, possibly, who wished to do it. Even his workmates at The Centre had no particular bone to pick with Father Karol. There was no talk of his enmity to the Soviet Union. The State TV and radio had not called out for class hatred against him, as they did for other foreign enemies. There had been no pejorative articles about him in Pravda that he’d seen of late. Just some rumbles about the labor problems in Poland, and those were not overly loud, more the sort of thing a neighbor might say about a misbehaving child next door.

  But that’s what it had to be all about. Karol was Polish, and a source of pride for the people there, and Poland was politically troubled because of labor disputes. Karol wanted to use his political or spiritual power to protect his people. That was understandable, wasn’t it?

  But was killing him understandable?

  Who would stand up and say, “No, you cannot kill this man because you dislike his politics”? The Politburo? No, they’d go along with Andropov. He was the heir apparent. When Leonid Ilyich died, he’d be the one to take his chair at the head of the table. Another Party man. Well, what else could he be? The Party was the Soul of the People, so the saying went. That was about the only mention of “soul” the Party permitted.

  Did some part of a man live on after death? That was what the soul was
supposed to be, but here the Party was the soul, and the Party was a thing of men, and little more. And corrupt men at that.

  And they wanted to kill a priest.

  He’d seen the dispatches. In a very small way, he, Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev, was helping. And that was eating at something inside him. A conscience? Was he supposed to have one of those? But a conscience was something that measured one set of facts or ideas against another and was either content or not. If not, if it found some action at fault, then the conscience started complaining. It whispered. It forced him to look and keep looking until the issue was resolved, until the wrong action was stopped, or reversed, or atoned for—

  But how did you stop the Party or the KGB from doing something?

  To do that, Zaitzev knew, you had, at the very least, to demonstrate that the proposed action was contrary to political theory or would have adverse political consequences, because politics was the measure of right and wrong. But wasn’t politics too fleeting for that? Didn’t “right” and “wrong” have to depend on something more solid than mere politics? Wasn’t there some higher value system? Politics was just tactics, after all, wasn’t it? And while tactics were important, strategy was more so, because strategy was the measure of what you used tactics for, and strategy in this case was supposed to be what was right—transcendentally right. Not just right at the moment, but right for all times—something historians could examine in a hundred or a thousand years and pronounce as correct action.

  Did the Party think in such terms? How exactly did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union make its decisions? What was good for the people? But who measured that? Individuals did, Brezhnev, Andropov, Suslov, the rest of the full voting members of the Politburo, advised by the nonvoting candidate members, further advised by the Council of Ministers and the members of the Central Committee of the Party, all the senior members of the nomenklatura—the ones to whom the rezident in Paris shipped perfume and pantyhose in the diplomatic bag. Zaitzev had seen enough of those dispatches. And he’d heard the stories. Those were the ones who lavished presents and status upon their children, the ones who raced down the center lane of the broad Moscow boulevards, the corrupt Marxist princes who ruled his country with hands of iron.