Red Rabbit Read online

  “The Court of Public Opinion. Yes,” Charleston agreed. “It is quite real, and modern technology has made it even more so, and, yes, that is troubling to our friends across the wire. You know, this CNN news network that just started up on your side of the ocean. It just might change the world. Information has its own way of circulating. Rumors are bad enough. You cannot stop them, and they have a way of acquiring a life of their own—”

  “But a picture really is worth a thousand words, isn’t it?”

  “I wonder who first said that. Whoever he was, he was no one’s fool. It’s even more true for a moving picture.”

  “I presume we’re using that . . .”

  “Your chaps are reticent about doing so. I am less so. It’s easy enough to have an embassy functionary have a pint with some reporter and maybe drop the odd hint in the course of a conversation. One thing about reporters, they are not ungracious if you give them the odd decent story.”

  “At Langley, they hate the press, Sir Basil. And I do mean hate.”

  “Rather backward of them. But, then, we can exercise more control over the press here than you can in America, I suppose. Still and all, it’s not that hard to outsmart them, is it?”

  “I’ve never tried. Admiral Greer says that talking to a reporter is like dancing with a rottweiler. You can’t be sure if he’s going to lick your face or rip your throat out.”

  “They’re not bad dogs at all, you know. You just need to train them properly.”

  Brits and their dogs, Ryan reflected. They like their pets more than their kids. He didn’t care for big dogs all that much. A Labrador like Ernie was different. Labs had a soft mouth. Sally really missed him.

  “So, what’s your take on Poland, Jack?”

  “I think the pot’s going to simmer until the lid slides off, and then when it boils over, there’s going to be a hell of a mess. The Poles haven’t really bought into communism all that well. Their army has chaplains, for Christ’s sake. A lot of their farmers operate on a free-agent basis, selling hams and stuff. The most popular TV show over there is Kojak, they even show it on Sunday morning to draw people away from going to church. That shows two things. The people there like American culture, and the government is still afraid of the Catholic Church. The Polish government is unstable, and they know they’re unstable. Allowing a little wiggle room is probably smart, at least in the short term, but the fundamental problem is that they operate a fundamentally unjust regime. Unjust countries are not stable, sir. However strong they appear, they’re rotten underneath.”

  Charleston nodded thoughtfully. “I briefed the PM just three days ago out at Chequers, and told her much the same thing.” The Director General paused for a moment, then decided. He lifted a file folder from the pile on his desk and handed it across.

  The cover read MOST SECRET. So, Jack thought, now it starts. He wondered if Basil had learned to swim by falling into the Thames, and thought everyone should learn the same way.

  Flipping the cover open, he saw that this information came from a source called WREN. He was clearly Polish, and by the look of the report, well placed, and what he said—

  “Damn,” Ryan observed. “This is reliable?”

  “Very much so. It’s a five-five, Jack.” By that he meant that the source was rated 5 on a scale of 5 for reliability, and the importance of the information reported was graded the same way. “You’re Catholic, I think.” He knew, of course. It was just the English way of talking.

  “Jesuits at high school, Boston College, and Georgetown, plus the nuns at Saint Matthew’s. I’d better be.”

  “What do you think of your new Pope?”

  “First non-Italian in four centuries, maybe more: That’s saying something right there. When I heard the new one was Polish, I expected it to be Cardinal Wiszynski from Warsaw—guy’s got the brains of a genius and the cunning of a fox. This guy, I didn’t know beans about, but from what I’ve read since, he’s a very solid citizen. Good parish priest, good administrator, politically very astute . . .” Ryan paused. He was discussing the head of his church as though he were a political candidate, and he was damned sure there was more substance to him than that. This had to be a man of deep faith, with the sort of core convictions that an earthquake couldn’t budge or crack. He’d been chosen by other such men to be the leader and spokesman for the world’s largest church, which, by the way, also happened to be Ryan’s church. He’d be a man who didn’t fear much of anything, a man for whom a bullet was his get-out-of-jail-free card, a key to God’s own presence. And he’d be a man who felt God’s presence in everything he did. He was not someone you could scare, not someone you could turn away from what he deemed the right thing.

  “If he wrote this letter, Sir Basil, it’s not a bluff. When was it delivered?”

  “Less than four days ago. Our chap broke a rule getting it to us so quickly, but its importance is patently clear, is it not?”

  Welcome to London, Jack, Ryan thought. He’d just fallen into the soup. A big pot, like they used to boil missionaries in the cartoons.

  “Okay, it’s been forwarded to Moscow, right?”

  “So our chap tells us. So, Sir John, what will Ivan have to say about this?” And with that question, Sir Basil Charleston lit the fire under Jack’s personal cauldron.

  “That’s a multifaceted question,” Ryan said, dodging as artfully as the situation allowed.

  It wasn’t very far: “He will say something,” Charleston observed, leveling his hazel eyes at Ryan.

  “Okay, they won’t like it. They will see it as a threat. The questions are how seriously they will take it and how much credence they will attach to it. Stalin might have laughed it off . . . or maybe not. Stalin defined paranoia, didn’t he?” Ryan paused and looked out the windows. Was that a rain cloud blowing in? “No, Stalin would have acted somehow.”

  “Think so?” Charleston was evaluating him, Jack knew. This was like the orals for his doctorate at Georgetown. Father Tim Riley’s rapier wit and needlepoint questions. Sir Basil was more civilized than the acerbic priest, but this exam was not going to be an easy one.

  “Leon Trotsky was no threat to him. That assassination came from a combination of paranoia and pure meanness. It was a personal thing. Stalin made enemies, and he never forgot them. But the current Soviet leadership doesn’t have the guts to do the stuff he did.”

  Charleston pointed out the plate glass window toward Westminster Bridge. “My lad, the Russians had the intestinal fortitude to kill a man right on that bridge, less than five years ago—”

  “And got blamed for it,” Ryan reminded his host. It had been a combination of good luck and a very smart British doctor, and it hadn’t been worth a damn in saving the poor bastard’s life. They had identified the cause of death, though, and it hadn’t resulted from a street hood.

  “Think they lost any sleep over that incident? I do not,” C assured him.

  “Looks bad. They don’t do much of this anymore, not that I’ve heard about.”

  “Only at home, I grant you that. But Poland is ‘home’ for them, well within their sphere of influence.”

  “But the Pope lives in Rome, and that isn’t. It comes down to how scared they are, sir. Father Tim Riley at Georgetown, back when I got my doctorate, he said never to forget that wars are begun by frightened men. They fear war, but more than that, they fear what will happen if they don’t start one—or take equivalent action, I suppose. So, the real questions are, as I said, how seriously they will take the threat and how serious it will appear to them. On the former, yes, I don’t think this is a bluff. The Pope’s character, background, and personal courage—those are not things to be doubted. So the threat is a real one. The larger question is how to evaluate the magnitude of the threat to them. . . .”

  “Go on,” the Director General ordered gently.

  “If they’re smart enough to recognize it—yes, sir, in their position, I’d be concerned about it . . . maybe even a little frightened
. As much as the Soviets think they’re a superpower—America’s equal and all that—deep down they know that their state is not really legitimate. Kissinger gave a lecture to us at Georgetown. . . . ” Jack leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment to recapture the performance. “It was something he said near the end, talking about the character of the Russian leaders. Brezhnev was showing him around some official building or other in the Kremlin, where Nixon was going to come for his last summit meeting. He was lifting cloth covers off the statuary, showing how they’d taken the time to clean everything up in preparation for the visit. Why do that, I wondered at the time. I mean, sure, they have maids and maintenance people. Why make a point of showing it to Henry? It has to be a sense of inferiority, fundamental insecurity. We keep hearing that they’re ten feet tall, but I don’t think so, and the more I learn about them, the less formidable I think they are. The Admiral and I have argued this one back and forth for the last couple of months. They have a large military. Their intelligence services are first-rate. They are big. Big ugly bear, like Muhammad Ali used to say, but you know, Ali beat the bear twice, didn’t he?

  “That’s a roundabout way of saying that, yes, sir, I think this letter will scare them. Question is, scare them enough to do something?” Ryan shook his head. “Possibly yes, but we have insufficient data at this time. If they decide to push that particular button, will we know beforehand?”

  Charleston had been waiting for Ryan to turn the tables on him. “One can hope so, but it’s impossible to be sure.”

  “In the year I’ve been at Langley, the impression I get is that our knowledge of the target is deep but narrow in some areas, shallow and broad in others. I’ve yet to meet somebody who feels comfortable analyzing them—well, that’s not exactly true. Some are comfortable, but their analyses are often—to me at least—unreliable. Like the stuff we get on their economy—”

  “James lets you into that?” Basil was surprised.

  “The Admiral sent me all around the barn the first couple of months. My first degree was economics from Boston College. I passed my CPA exam before I went away with the Marine Corps—certified public accountant. You call it something different over here. Then, after I left the Corps, I did okay in the stock-and-bond business before I finished up my doctorate and went into teaching.”

  “Exactly how much did you make on Wall Street?”

  “While I was at Merrill Lynch? Oh, between six and seven million. A lot of that was the Chicago and North Western Railroad. My uncle Mario—my mom’s brother—told me that the employees were going to buy out the stock and try to get the railroad profitable again. I took a look at it and liked what I saw. It paid off a net of twenty-three to one on my investment. I ought to have dropped more into it, but they taught me to be conservative at Merrill Lynch. Never worked in New York, by the way. I was in the Baltimore office. Anyway, the money’s still in stocks, and the market looks pretty healthy at the moment. I still dabble in it. You never know when you’re going to stumble across a winner, and it’s still an interesting hobby.”

  “Indeed. If you see anything promising, do let me know.”

  “No fees—but no guarantees, either,” Ryan joked.

  “I’m not accustomed to those, Jack, not in this bloody business. I’m going to assign you to our Russian working group with Simon Harding. Oxford graduate, doctorate in Russian literature. You’ll see just about everything he sees—everything but source information—” Ryan stopped him with two raised hands.

  “Sir Basil, I do not want to know that stuff. I don’t need it, and knowing it would keep me awake at night. Just so I see the raw. I prefer to do my own analysis. This Harding guy is smart?” Ryan asked with deliberate artlessness.

  “Very much so. You’ve probably seen his product before. He did the personal evaluation on Yuriy Andropov we turned out two years ago.”

  “I did read that. Yeah, that was good work. I figured he was a pshrink.”

  “He’s read psychology, but not quite enough for a degree. Simon’s a clever lad. Wife is an artist, painter, lovely lady.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not? I must get back to my work. Come, I’ll walk you down.”

  It wasn’t far. Ryan immediately learned that he’d be sharing an office right here on the top floor. This came as a surprise. Getting to the Seventh Floor at Langley took years, and often meant climbing over bloody bodies. Somebody, Jack speculated, must have thought he was smart.

  Simon Harding’s office was not overly impressive. The two windows overlooked the upriver side of the building, mainly two- and three-story brick structures of indeterminate occupancy. Harding himself was crowding forty, pale and fair-haired with china-blue eyes. He wore an unbuttoned vest—waistcoat locally—and a drab tie. His desk was covered with folders trimmed in striped tape, the universal coding for secret material.

  “You must be Sir John,” Harding said, setting down his briar pipe.

  “The name’s Jack,” Ryan corrected him. “I’m really not allowed to pretend I’m a knight. Besides, I don’t own a horse or a steel shirt.” Jack shook hands with his workmate. Harding had small, bony hands, but those blue eyes looked smart.

  “Take good care of him, Simon.” Sir Basil immediately took his leave.

  There was already a swivel chair in place at a suspiciously clean desk. Jack tried it out. The room was going to be a little crowded, but not too badly so. His desk phone had a scrambler under it for making secure calls, Ryan wondered if it worked as well as the STU he’d had at Langley. GCHQ out at Cheltenham worked closely with NSA, and maybe it was the same innards with a different plastic case. He’d have to keep reminding himself that he was in a foreign country. That ought not to be too hard, Ryan hoped. People did talk funny here: grahss, rahsberry and cahstle, for example, though the effect of American movies and global television was perverting the English language to the American version slowly but surely.

  “Did Bas talk to you about the Pope?” Simon asked.

  “Yeah. That letter could be a bombshell. He’s wondering how Ivan’s going to react to it.”

  “We all are, Jack. You have any ideas?”

  “I just told your boss, if Stalin was sitting there, he might want to shorten the Pope’s life, but that would be a hell of a big gamble.”

  “The problem, I think, is that although they are rather collegial in their decision-making, Andropov is in the ascendancy, and he might be less reticent than the rest of them.”

  Jack settled back in to his chair. “You know, my wife’s friends at Hopkins flew over there a couple of years ago. Mikhail Suslov had diabetic retinopathy of the eyes—he was also a high myope, very nearsighted—and they went over to fix it, and to teach some Russian docs how to do the procedure. Cathy was just a resident then. But Bernie Katz was on the fly team. He’s the director at Wilmer. Super eye surgeon, hell of a good guy. The Agency interviewed him and the others after they came back. Ever see that document?”

  There was interest in his eyes now: “No. Is it any good?”

  “One of the things I’ve learned being married to a doc is that I listen to what she says about people. I’d damned sure listen to Bernie. It’s worth reading. There’s a universal tendency for people to talk straight to surgeons and, like I said, docs are good for seeing things that most of us miss. They said Suslov was smart, courteous, businesslike, but underneath he was the sort of guy you wouldn’t trust with a gun in his hand—or more likely a knife. He really didn’t like the fact that he needed Americans to save his sight for him. It didn’t tickle his fancy that no Russians were able to do what he needed done. On the other hand, they said that the hospitality was Olympic-class once they did the job. So they’re not complete barbarians, which Bernie halfway expected—he’s Jewish, family from Poland, back when it belonged to the czar, I think. Want me to have the Agency send that one over?”

  Harding waved a match over his pipe. “Yes, I would like to see that. The Russians—they’re a rum lot
, you know. In some ways, wonderfully cultured. Russia is the last place in the world where a man can make a decent living as a poet. They revere their poets, and I rather admire that about them, but at the same time . . . you know, Stalin himself was reticent about going after artists—the writing sort, that is. I remember one chap who lived years longer than one would have expected. . . . Even so, he eventually died in the Gulag. So, their civilization has its limits.”

  “You speak the language? I never learned it.”

  The Brit analyst nodded. “It can be a wonderful language for literature, rather like Attic Greek. It lends itself to poetry, but it masks a capacity for barbarism that makes the blood run cold. They are a fairly predictable people in many ways, especially their political decisions, within limits. Their unpredictability lies in playing off their inherent conservatism against their dogmatic political outlook. Our friend Suslov is seriously ill, heart problems—from the diabetes, I suppose—but the chap behind him is Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov, equal parts Russian and Marxist, with the morals of Lavrenti Beria. He bloody hates the West. I expect he counseled Suslov—they are old, old friends—to accept blindness rather than submit to American physicians. And if this Katz chap is Jewish, you said? That would not have helped, either. Not an attractive chap at all. When Suslov departs—a few months, we think—he’ll be the new ideologue on the Politburo. He will back Yuriy Vladimirovich on anything he wishes to do, even if it means a physical attack on His Holiness.”