Red Rabbit Read online

  This guy must teach foxes how to outsmart dogs and horses. Good thing he wasn’t a Brit. The local aristocracy would shoot him for ruining their steeplechases, Ryan told himself. “Okay, sir, I’ll be looking for it. I don’t suppose you can give me a play-by-play?” he asked with a little hope in his voice.

  “That new shortstop—Ripken, is it?—just doubled down the left-field line, drove in run number six, one out, bottom of the seventh.”

  “Thank you for that, sir. It beats Fawlty Towers.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s what they call a comedy over here, Admiral. It’s funny if you can understand it.”

  “Brief me in next time I come over,” the DDI suggested.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Family okay?”

  “We’re all just fine, sir, thank you for asking.”

  “Okay. Have a good one. See ya.”

  “What was that?” Cathy asked in the living room.

  “The boss. He’s sending me something to work on.”

  “What exactly?” She never stopped trying.

  “He didn’t say, just a heads-up that I have something new to play with.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what it was?”

  “The Admiral likes his surprises.”

  “Hmph” was her response.

  THE COURIER SETTLED into his first-class seat. The package in his carry-on bag was tucked under the seat in front, and he had a collection of magazines to read. Since he was covert, not an official diplomatic courier, he could pretend to be a real person, a disguise that he’d shed at Heathrow’s Terminal Four immigration desk, there to catch an embassy car for the ride into Grosvenor Square. Mainly he looked forward to a nice pub and some Brit beer before he flew back home in a day and a half. It was a waste of talent and training for the newly hatched field officer, but everyone had to pay his dues, and this, for a guy fresh out of The Farm, was just that. He consoled himself with the thought that whatever it was, it had to be a little bit important. Sure, Wilbur. If it were all that important, he’d be on the Concorde.

  ED FOLEY WAS sleeping the sleep of the just. The next day, he’d find an excuse to head over to the British Embassy and have a sit-down with Nigel and plan the operation. If that went well, he’d wear his reddest tie and take the message from Oleg Ivan’ch, set up the next face-to-face and go forward with the operation. Who is it, he wondered, who the KGB is trying to kill? The Pope? Bob Ritter had his knickers in a twist over that. Or somebody else? The KGB had a very direct way of dealing with people it didn’t like. CIA did not. They hadn’t actually killed anyone since the fifties, when President Eisenhower had used CIA—actually quite skillfully—as an alternative to employing uniformed troops in an overt fashion. But that skill hadn’t been conveyed to the Kennedy Administration, which had screwed up nearly everything it touched. Too many James Bond books, probably. Everything in fiction was simpler than the real world, even fiction written by a former field spook. In the real world, zipping your zipper could be hard.

  But he was planning a fairly complex operation and telling himself that it wasn’t all that complex. Was he making a mistake? Foley’s mind wandered while the rest of his consciousness slept. Even asleep, he kept going over and over things. In his dreams, he saw rabbits running around a green field while foxes and bears watched. The predators didn’t move on them, perhaps because they were too fast and/or too close to their rabbit holes for them to waste a chase. But what happened when the rabbits got too far away from their holes? Then the foxes could catch them, and the bears could move in to swallow them whole. . . . And his job was to protect the little bunnies, wasn’t it?

  Even so, in his dream the foxes and bears just watched while he, the eagle, circled high and looked down. He, the eagle, had sworn off rabbits, though a fox might be a nice morsel to rip apart, if his talons got it properly, just behind the head to snap the neck, and leave him for the bear to eat, because bears didn’t really care whom they ate. No, Mr. Bear didn’t care one little bit. He was just a big old bear, and his belly was always empty. He’d even eat an eagle if he got the chance, but the eagle was too swift and too smart, wasn’t he? Only so long as he kept his eyes open, the noble eagle told himself; he had great abilities and fine sight, but even he had to be careful. And so the eagle soared aloft, riding the thermals and watching. He couldn’t enter the fray, exactly. At most, he could swoop down and warn the cute little bunnies that there was danger about, but the bunnies were proverbially dumb bunnies, munching their grass and not looking around as much as they ought to. That was his job, the noble eagle told himself, to use his superb eyesight to make sure he knew everything he needed to know. The bunny’s job was to run when he needed to run, and with help from the eagle, to run to a different field, one without foxes and bears around it, so that he could be free to raise more cute little bunnies and live happily ever after, like Beatrix Potter’s little Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail.

  Foley rolled over, and the dream ended, the eagle watching for danger, and the rabbits eating their grass, and the foxes and bears a good way off, just watching but not moving, because they didn’t know which bunny would stray too far from its safe little hole.

  THE ALARM CLOCK’S deliberately annoying buzz caused Foley’s eyes to snap open, and he rolled over to switch it off. Then he jerked himself out of bed and into the bathroom. He suddenly missed his house in Virginia. It had more than one bathroom—two and a half, in fact, which allowed some degree of flexibility should an emergency occur. Little Eddie got up when summoned, then almost immediately sat on the floor in front of the TV set and called out “Worker-womannnn!” when the exercise show came on. That generated a smile from his mom and dad. Even the KGB guys on the other end of the bug wires probably had a little chuckle at that.

  “Anything important planned for the office today?” Mary Pat asked in the kitchen.

  “Well, ought to be the usual weekend traffic from Washington. I have to run over to the Brit Embassy before lunch.”

  “Oh? What for?” his wife asked.

  “I want to stop over and see Nigel Haydock about a couple of things,” he told her, as she set the bacon frying. Mary Pat always did bacon and eggs on the day of important spook work. He wondered if their KGB listeners would ever tumble to that. Probably not. Nobody was that thorough, and American eating habits probably interested them only insofar as foreigners usually ate better than Russians.

  “Well, say hello for me.”

  “Right.” He yawned and took a sip of coffee.

  “We need to have them over—maybe next weekend?”

  “Works for me. Roast beef and the usual?”

  “Yeah, I’ll try to get some frozen corn on the cob.” Russians grew corn you could buy in the open farmers’ markets, and it was okay, but it wasn’t the Silver Queen that they’d come to love in Virginia. So they usually settled for the frozen corn the Air Force flew in from Rhein-Main, along with the Chicago Red hot dogs that they served in the embassy canteen and all the other tastes of home that became so important on a posting like this one. It was probably just as true in Paris, Ed thought. Breakfast went quickly, and half an hour later, he was almost dressed.

  “Which tie today, honey?”

  “Well, in Russia, you should wear red once in a while,” she said, handing the tie over with a wink, along with the lucky silver tie bar.

  “Um-hmm,” he agreed, looking in the mirror to snug it into his collar. “Well, here is Edward Foley, Senior, foreign-service officer.”

  “Works for me, honey.” She kissed him, a little loudly.

  “Bye, Daddy,” Junior said as his father headed for the door. A high five instead of a kiss. He’d gotten a little too old for the sissy stuff.

  The rest of the trip was stultifyingly routine. Walk to the metro. Buy his paper at the kiosk and catch the exact same train for the same five-kopeck fare, because if he caught the same one going home, so as to be marked by KGB as a creature of strict routi
ne, then he had to mirror-image morning and afternoon habits. At the embassy, he entered his office and waited for Mike Russell to bring in the morning message traffic. More than usual, he saw at once, flipping through the messages and checking the headers.

  “Anything about what we talked about?” the communications officer asked, lingering for a moment.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Foley replied. “Got you a little torqued?”

  “Ed, getting secure stuff in and out is my only job, y’know?”

  “Look at it from my side, Mike. If they tumble to me, I’m as useless as tits on a boarhog. Not to mention the guys who get killed because of it.”

  “Yeah, I hear you.” Russell paused. “I just can’t believe they can crack my systems, Ed. Like you said, you’d be losing people left and right.”

  “I want to agree with you, but we can’t be too careful, can we?”

  “Roger that, man. I catch anybody dicking around in my shop, they won’t live long enough to talk to the FBI,” he promised darkly.

  “Don’t get too carried away.”

  “Ed, when I was in Vietnam, nonsecure signals got soldiers killed. That’s as important as things get, y’know?”

  “If I hear anything, I’ll make sure you know about it, Mike.”

  “Okay.” Russell headed out, not quite trailing smoke out of his ears.

  Foley organized his message traffic—it was addressed to the Chief of Station, of course, not to anyone’s name—and started reading through it. There was still concern about KGB and the Pope, but, aside from the Rabbit, he had nothing new to report, and it was only hope that told him the Flopsy had anything to report on that subject. A lot of interest in last week’s Politburo meeting, but for that he’d have to wait for his sources to report in. Questions about Leonid Brezhnev’s health, but while they knew the names of his physicians—a whole team of them—none of them talked to CIA directly. You could see the picture on TV and know that Leonid Ilyich wasn’t going to be running the marathon in the next Olympics. But people like that could linger for years, good news and bad news. Brezhnev wasn’t going to be doing anything new and different, but, as he became increasingly irrational, there was no telling what dumbass things he might try—damned sure he wasn’t going to be pulling out of Afghanistan. He didn’t care a rap about the lives of young Russian soldiers, not when he heard Death’s footsteps approaching his own door. The succession was of interest to CIA, but it was fairly settled that Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov would be the next guy at the seat at the head of the table, absent a sudden death or a major foot put wrong in a political sense. Andropov was too canny a political operator for that, however. No, he was the current czarevich, and that was that. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be too vigorous—and he wouldn’t if the stories about his liver disease were true. Every time Foley saw him on Russian TV, he looked for the yellow tinge on his skin that announced that particular ailment—but makeup could hide that, if they used makeup on their political chieftains. . . . Hmm, how to check that? he wondered. Something to send back to the Science and Technology Directorate at Langley, maybe.

  ZAITZEV TOOK HIS SEAT, after relieving Kolya Dobrik, and looked over his message traffic. He decided to memorize as much as possible, and so he took a little longer than usual forwarding the messages to their end-recipients. There was one from Agent CASSIUS again, routed for political-intelligence people upstairs, and also at the U.S.—Canada Institute, where the academicians read the tea leaves for The Centre as a backup. There was one from NEPTUNE, requesting money for the agent who was giving KGB such good communications intelligence. NEPTUNE suggested the sea, didn’t it? Zaitzev searched his memory for previous signals from that source. Wasn’t it mainly about the American navy? And he was the reason he worried about American signals security. Surely KGB was paying him a huge amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars in American cash, something KGB had a problem getting ahold of—it was far easier for the Soviet Union to pay in diamonds, since it could mine for diamonds in eastern Siberia. They’d paid some Americans in diamonds, but they’d been caught by the vigilant American FBI, and KGB had never tried to negotiate their release . . . so much for loyalty. The Americans tried to do that, he knew, but most of the time the people they tried to get out had already been executed—a thought that stopped his thoughts cold in their tracks.

  But there was no turning back now, and CIA was competent enough that KGB feared it, and didn’t that mean that he was in good hands?

  Then he remembered one other thing he had to do today. In his drawer was a pad of contact reports. Mary had suggested he report their meeting, and so he did. He described her as pretty, in her late twenties or early thirties, mother of a fairly nice little son, and none too bright—very American in mannerisms, he wrote—with modest language skills, good vocabulary but poor syntax and pronunciation, which made her Russian understandable but stilted. He didn’t make an evaluation of her likelihood to be an intelligence officer, which, he figured, was the smart thing to do. After fifteen minutes of writing, he walked it over to the department security officer.

  “This was a waste of time,” he said, handing it to the man, a captain passed over for promotion twice.

  The security officer scanned it. “Where did you meet her?”

  “It’s right there.” He pointed to the contact form. “I took my zaichik for a walk in the park, and she showed up with her little boy. His name is Eddie, actual name is evidently Edward Edwardovich—Edward Junior, as the Americans say it—age four, I think she said, a nice little boy. We talked a few minutes about not very much, and the two of them walked away.”

  “Your impression of her?”

  “If she is a spy, then I am confident of the victory of socialism,” Zaitzev replied. “She is rather pretty, but far too skinny, and not overly bright. What I suppose is a typical American housewife.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It’s all there, Comrade Captain. It took longer to write that up than it did to speak with her.”

  “Your vigilance is noted, Comrade Major.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union.” And Zaitzev headed back to his desk. It was a good idea on her part, he thought, to cross this t so assiduously. There might have been a shadow on her, after all, and if not, then there would be a new entry in her KGB file, reported by a KGB officer, certifying that she was no threat to world socialism.

  Back at his desk, he returned to making extra-careful mental notes of his daily work. The more he gave CIA, the better he’d be paid. Maybe he would take his daughter to that Disney Planet amusement park, and maybe his little zaichik would enjoy herself there. His signals included other countries, too, and he memorized those as well. One code-named MINISTER in England was interesting. He was probably in their Foreign Ministry, and provided excellent political/diplomatic intelligence that they loved upstairs.

  FOLEY TOOK AN embassy car for the drive to the British Embassy. They were cordial enough once he showed his ID, and Nigel came down to meet him in the grand foyer, which was indeed quite grand.

  “Hello, Ed!” He gave a hearty handshake and a smile. “Come this way.” They went up the marble stairs and then right to his office. Haydock closed the door and pointed him to a leather chair.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “We got a Rabbit,” Foley said, skipping the preliminaries.

  And that said it all. Haydock knew that Foley was a spook—a “cousin” in the British terminology.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “We’re going to need your help getting him out. We want to do that through Budapest, and our station there just got burned down. How’s your shop there?”

  “The chief is Andy Hudson. Former officer in the Parachute Regiment, able chap. But do back up, Edward. What can you tell me, and why is this so important?”

  “He’s a walk-in, I guess you’d say. He seems to be a communications guy. He feels real as hell, Nigel. I’ve requested permission to bust him right out, and
Langley has green-lighted it. Pair of fives, man,” he added.

  “So, high priority and high reliability on this chappie?”

  Foley bobbed his head. “Yep. Want the good news?”

  “If there is any.”

  “He says our comms may be compromised, but your new system hasn’t been cracked yet.”

  “Good to hear. So, that means I can communicate freely, but you cannot?”

  Another nod. “I learned this morning that a communications aid is on its way to me—perhaps they ginned up a couple of pads for me to use. I’ll find out later today, maybe.”

  Haydock leaned back in his chair and lit up a smoke, a low-tar Silk Cut. He’d switched to them to make his wife happy.

  “You have a plan?” the Brit spook asked.

  “I figure he takes the train to Budapest. For the rest of it, well . . .” Foley outlined the idea he and Mary Pat had figured out.

  “That is creative, Edward.” Haydock thought. “When did you read up on MINCEMEAT? It’s part of the syllabus at our academy, you know.”

  “Back when I was a kid. I always thought it was pretty clever.”

  “In the abstract, not a bad idea—but, you know, the pieces you need are not something you pick up at the ironmongers.”

  “I kinda figured that, Nigel. So, if we want to make the play, better that we get moving on it right quick.”

  “Agreed.” Haydock paused. “Basil will want to know a few things. What else can I tell him?”

  “He ought to get a hand-carried letter from Judge Moore this morning. All I can really say is, this guy looks pretty real.”

  “You said he’s a communications officer—in The Centre, is it?”

  “Yep.”

  “That could be very valuable indeed,” Haydock agreed. “Especially if he’s a mail clerk.” He pronounced it clark. The invocation of the name of Foley’s training officer almost caused him to smile . . . but not quite.