Red Rabbit Read online

  The message was in fact a photocopy of the original, which had arrived by hand to an office—an important one—in Warsaw only three days before.

  The messenger, a full colonel in his country’s intelligence service, was personally known to the recipient, by sight if not especially by affection. The Russians used their western neighbors for many tasks. The Poles had a real talent for intelligence operations, for the same reason the Israelis did: They were surrounded by enemies. To their west was Germany, and to their east was the Soviet Union. The unhappy circumstances involved in both had resulted in Poland’s putting many of its best and brightest into the intelligence business.

  The recipient knew all that. In fact, he already knew word for word the content of the message. He’d learned it the previous day. He was not surprised at the delay, though. The Polish government had taken that day to consider the contents and its import before forwarding it, and the recipient took no umbrage. Every government in the world took at least one day to go over such things. It was just the nature of men in positions of authority to diddle and waver, even though they had to know that delay was a waste of time and air. Even Marxism-Leninism couldn’t alter human nature. Sad, but true. The New Soviet Man, like the New Polish Man, was, in the end, still a man.

  The ballet being played out now was as stylized as any performed by the Kirov troupe in Leningrad. The recipient even imagined he could hear the music playing. He actually preferred Western jazz to classical, but in any case the music at the ballet was just the garnish, the system that told the dancers when to leap together like pretty, trained dogs. The ballerinas were far too slender for Russian tastes, of course, but real women were far too heavy for those little fairies they called men to toss about.

  Why was his mind wandering? He resumed his seat, falling back slowly into his leather chair as he unfolded the letter. It was written in Polish, and he didn’t speak or read Polish, but affixed to it was a translation in literate Russian. Of course, he’d have his own translators go over it, plus two or three psychiatrists to consider the mental state of the drafter and to compose their own multipage analysis, which he’d have to read, time waster though that would be. Then he’d have to report on it, to provide his political superiors—no, his political peers—with all of these additional insights so that they could waste their time going over the message and its import before considering what to do about it.

  The Chairman wondered if this Polish colonel realized how easy his own political bosses had had it. In the end, all they’d had to do was forward it to their own political masters for action, bucking the decision up the tree of responsibility as government functionaries all do, regardless of place or philosophy. Vassals were vassals the world over.

  The Chairman looked up at him. “Comrade Colonel, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Please extend my greetings and my respects to your commander. Dismissed.”

  The Pole snapped to attention, saluted in the curious Polish way, did his best parade-ground about face, then headed off to the door.

  Yuriy Andropov watched the door close before turning his attention back to the message and its appended translation.

  “So, Karol, you threaten us, eh?” He clucked his tongue and shook his head before going on as quietly as before. “You are brave, but your judgment needs adjustment, my cleric comrade.”

  He looked up again, pondering. The office had the usual artwork covering the walls, and for the same reason as in any other office—to avoid blankness. Two were oil paintings by Renaissance masters, borrowed from the collection of some long-dead czar or nobleman. A third portrait, rather a good one, actually, was of Lenin, the pale complexion and domed forehead known to millions all around the world. A nicely framed color photograph of Leonid Brezhnev, the current General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, hung near it. The photo was a lie, a picture of a young and vigorous man, not the senile old goat who now sat at the head of the Politburo table. Well, all men grew old, but in most places, such men left their jobs for honorable retirement. But not in his country, Andropov realized . . . and looked down at the letter. And not this man, either. This job, too, was for life.

  But he is threatening to change that part of the equation, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security thought. And in that was the danger.

  Danger?

  The consequences were unknown, and that was danger enough. His Politburo colleagues would see it the same way, old, cautious, and frightened men that they were.

  And so he had not merely to report the danger. He must also present a means of dealing with it effectively.

  The portraits that ought to have been on his wall right now were of two men who were semiforgotten. One would have been Iron Feliks—Dzerzhinskiy himself, the founder of the Cheka, the antecedent of the KGB.

  The other ought to have been Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. The leader had once posed a question that was relevant to the very situation that faced Andropov now. Then, it had been 1944. Now—now maybe it was even more relevant.

  Well, that remained to be seen. And he’d be the man to make that determination, Andropov told himself. All men could be made to disappear. The thought should have surprised him when it leapt into his head, but it didn’t. This building, built eighty years earlier to be the palatial home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, had seen a lot of that, and its inhabitants had issued orders to cause many, many more deaths. They used to have executions in the basement. That had ended only a few years before, as KGB expanded to include all the space in even this massive structure—and another on the inner ring road around the city—but the cleanup crew occasionally whispered about the ghosts to be seen on quiet nights, sometimes startling the old washerwomen with their buckets and brushes and witch-like hair. The government of this country didn’t believe in such things as spirits and ghosts any more than it believed in a man’s immortal soul, but doing away with the superstitions of the simple peasants was a more difficult task than getting the intelligentsia to buy into the voluminous writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Karl Marx, or Friedrich Engels, not to mention the turgid prose attributed to Stalin (but actually done by a committee formed of frightened men, and all the worse because of it), which was, blessedly, no longer much in demand except to the most masochistic of scholars.

  No, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself, getting people to believe in Marxism wasn’t all that hard. First, they hammered it into their heads in grammar schools, and the Young Pioneers, and high schools, and the Komsomolets, the Young Communist League, and then the really smart ones became full Party members, keeping their Party cards “next to their hearts,” in the cigarette pockets of their shirts.

  But by then, they knew better. The politically aware members professed their belief at Party meetings because they had to do that to get ahead. In the same way, the smart courtiers in pharaonic Egypt kneeled and shielded their eyes from the bright-light-emanating face, lest they be blinded—they held up their hands because, in Pharaoh, in the person of their Living God, was personal power and prosperity, and so they knelt their obeisance and denied their senses and their sensibility and got ahead. So it was here. Five thousand years, was it? He could check a history book. The Soviet Union turned out some of the world’s foremost medieval historians, and doubtless some competent antiquarians as well, because that was one area of scholarship where politics didn’t matter much. The facts of ancient Egypt were too distant from contemporary reality to matter to the philosophical speculation of Marx or the endless ramblings of Lenin. And so some fine scholars went into that field. More went into the pure sciences, because pure science was pure science and a hydrogen atom had no politics.

  But agriculture did. Manufacturing did. And so the best and brightest stayed away from those areas, opting instead for political studies. Because there success was to be found. You didn’t have to believe it any more than you believed that Ramses II was the living son of the sun god, or whatever the hell god he was supposed to have issued f
rom. Instead, Yuriy Vladimirovich figured, the courtiers saw that Ramses had numerous wives and even more numerous progeny, and that, on the whole, wasn’t a bad life for a man to have. The classical equivalent of a dacha in the Lenin Hills and summers on the beach at Sochi. So, did the world ever really change?

  Probably not, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security decided. And his job was largely to protect against change.

  And this letter threatened change, didn’t it? It was a threat, and he might have to do something about the threat. That meant doing something about the man behind it.

  It had happened before. It could happen again, he decided.

  Andropov would not live long enough to learn that in considering this action, he would set in motion the demise of his own country.

  CHAPTER 1

  RUMBLINGS AND DREAMS

  WHEN DO YOU START, JACK?” Cathy asked in the quiet of their bed.

  And her husband was glad it was their bed. Comfortable as the New York hotel had been, it is never the same, and besides, he’d had quite enough of his father-in-law, with his Park Avenue duplex and immense sense of self-importance. Okay, Joe Muller had a good ninety million in the bank and his diversified portfolio, and it was growing nicely with the new presidency, but enough was enough.

  “Day after tomorrow,” her husband answered. “I suppose I might go in after lunch, just to look around.”

  “You ought to be asleep by now,” she said.

  There were drawbacks to marrying a physician, Jack occasionally told himself. You couldn’t hide much from them. A gentle, loving touch could convey your body temperature, heart rate, and Christ knew what else, and docs hid their feelings about what they found with the skill of a professional poker player. Well, some of the time.

  “Yeah, long day.” It was short of five in the evening in New York, but his “day” had lasted longer than the normal twenty-four. He really had to learn to sleep on airplanes. It wasn’t as though his seat had been uncomfortable. He’d upgraded the government-issue tickets to first class on his own American Express card, and soon the frequent-flyer miles would build up so much that such upgrades would be automatic. Yeah, great, Jack thought. They’d know him by sight at Heathrow and Dulles. Well, at least he had his new black diplomatic passport and didn’t have to be troubled with inspections and such. Ryan was technically assigned to the U.S. Embassy at London’s Grosvenor Square, just across the street from the building that had housed Eisenhower’s WW2 office, and with that assignment came the diplomatic status that made him a super-person, untrammeled by such inconveniences as civil law. He could smuggle a couple pounds of heroin into England, and no one could so much as touch his bags without permission—which he could summarily withhold, claiming diplomatic privilege and urgent business. It was an open secret that diplomats didn’t trouble themselves with customs duties for such things as perfumes for their wives (or significant others) and/or booze for themselves, but to Ryan’s Catholic measure of personal conduct, these were venial sins, not mortal.

  The usual muddle of thoughts in a fatigued brain, he recognized. Cathy would never allow herself to operate in this mental state. Sure, as an intern they’d kept her on duty for endless hours—the idea being to get her accustomed to making good decisions under miserable circumstances—but part of her husband wondered how many patients were sacrificed on the altar of medical boot camp. If trial lawyers ever managed to figure out how to make money off of that . . .

  Cathy—Dr. Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, her white lab coat and plastic name tag announced—had struggled through that phase of her training, and more than once her husband had worried about her drive home in her little Porsche sports car, after thirty-six straight hours on duty in obstetrics, or pediatrics, or general surgery, fields she wasn’t interested in herself, but about which she had to know a little in order to be a proper Johns Hopkins doc. Well, she’d known enough to patch up his shoulder that afternoon in front of Buckingham Palace. He hadn’t bled to death in front of his wife and daughter, which would have been pretty ignominious for everyone involved, especially the Brits. Would my knighthood have been awarded posthumously? Jack wondered with a stifled chuckle. Then, finally, his eyes closed for the first time in thirty-nine hours.

  “I HOPE HE likes it over there,” Judge Moore said, at his end-of-the-day senior staff get-together.

  “Arthur, our cousins know their hospitality,” James Greer pointed out. “Basil ought to be a good teacher.”

  Ritter didn’t say anything. This Ryan amateur had gotten himself a lot of—way the hell too much—publicity for any employee of the CIA, even more so since he was a DI guy. As far as Ritter was concerned, the Directorate of Intelligence was the tail wagging the Operations Directorate dog. Sure, Jim Greer was a fine spook and a good man to work with, but he wasn’t a field spook, and—Congress to the contrary—that’s what the Agency needed. At least Arthur Moore understood that. But on The Hill, if you said “field intelligence officer” to the representatives who controlled appropriations, they recoiled like Dracula from a golden crucifix and collectively went ewwwwwww. Then it was time to speak.

  “What do you suppose they’ll let him in on?” the DDO wondered aloud.

  “Basil will regard him as my personal representative,” Judge Moore said, after a moment’s consideration. “So, everything they share with us, they will share with him.”

  “They’re going to co-opt him, Arthur,” Ritter warned. “He’s into things they don’t know about. They will try to squeeze things out of Ryan. He doesn’t know how to defend against that.”

  “Bob, I briefed him on that myself,” Greer announced. The DDO knew that already, of course, but Ritter had a real talent for acting grumpy when he didn’t get his way. Greer wondered what it had been like to be Bob’s mother. “Don’t underestimate this kid, Bob. He’s smart. I’ll wager you a steak dinner that he gets more things out of the Brits than they get out of him.”

  “Sucker bet,” the Deputy Director (Operations) snorted.

  “At Snyder’s,” the Deputy Director (Intelligence) goaded further. It was the favorite steak house for both executives, located just across the Key Bridge in Georgetown.

  Judge Arthur Moore, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, watched the exchange with amusement. Greer knew how to twist Ritter’s tail, and somehow Bob never quite figured out how to defend against it. Maybe it was Greer’s down-east accent. Texans like Bob Ritter (and Arthur Moore himself) deemed themselves superior to anyone who talked through his nose, certainly over a deck of playing cards or around a bottle of bourbon whiskey. The Judge figured he was above such things, though they were fun to watch.

  “Okay, dinner at Snyder’s.” Ritter extended his hand. And it was time for the DCI to resume control of the meeting.

  “Now that we’ve settled that one, gentlemen, the President wants me to tell him what’s going to happen in Poland.”

  Ritter didn’t leap at that. He had a good Station Chief in Warsaw, but the guy only had three proper field officers in his department, and one of them was a rookie. They did, however, have one very good source agent-in-place inside the Warsaw government’s political hierarchy, and several good ones in their military.

  “Arthur, they don’t know. They’re dancing around this Solidarity thing on a day-to-day basis,” the DDO told the others. “And the music keeps changing on them.”

  “It’s going to come down to what Moscow tells them to do, Arthur,” Greer agreed. “And Moscow doesn’t know either.”

  Moore took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. They don’t know what to do when someone openly defies them. Joe Stalin would have shot everyone in sight, but the current bunch doesn’t have the gumption to do that, thank the Good Lord for that.”

  “Collegial rule brings out the coward in everyone, and Brezhnev just doesn’t have the ability to lead. From what I hear, they have to walk him to the men’s room.” It was a slight exaggeration, but it appealed to Ritter tha
t Soviet leadership was softening.

  “What’s CARDINAL telling us?” Moore referred to the Agency’s premiere agent-in-place in the Kremlin, the personal assistant to Defense Minister Dmitriy Fedorovich Ustinov. His name was Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, but to all but a bare handful of active CIA personnel, he was simply CARDINAL.

  “He says that Ustinov despairs of anything useful coming out of the Politburo until they do have a leader who can actually lead. Leonid is slowing down. Everybody knows it, even the man on the street. You can’t camouflage a TV picture, can you?”

  “How long do you suppose he has left?”

  A collection of shrugs, then Greer took the question: “The doctors I’ve talked to say he could drop over tomorrow, or he could dote along for another couple of years. They say they see mild Alzheimer’s, but only mild. His general condition is progressive cardiovascular myopathy, they think, probably exacerbated by incipient alcoholism.”

  “They all have that problem,” Ritter observed. “CARDINAL confirms the heart problem, by the way, along with the vodka.”

  “And the liver is important, and his is probably suboptimum,” Greer went on, with a gross understatement. Then Moore finished the thought.

  “But you can’t tell a Russian to stop drinking any more than you can tell a grizzly bear not to shit in the woods. You know, if anything ever brings these guys down, it will be their inability to handle the orderly transition of power.”

  “Well, gee, Your Honor.” Bob Ritter looked up with a wicked grin. “I guess they just don’t have enough lawyers. Maybe we could ship them a hundred thousand of ours.”