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  “You really think it could go that far?” Jack asked.

  “Could it? Possibly, yes.”

  “Okay, has this letter been sent to Langley?”

  Harding nodded. “Your local Station Chief came over to collect it today. I would expect your chaps have their own sources, but there’s no sense taking chances.”

  “Agreed. You know, if Ivan does anything that extreme, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  “Perhaps so, but they do not see things in the same way we do, Jack.”

  “I know. Hard to make the full leap of imagination, however.”

  “It does take time,” Simon agreed.

  “Does reading their poetry help?” Ryan wondered. He’d only seen a little of it, and only in translation, which was not how one read poetry.

  Harding shook his head. “Not really. That’s how some of them protest. The protests have to be sufficiently roundabout that the more obtuse of their readers can just enjoy the lyrical tribute to a particular girl’s figure without noticing the cry for freedom of expression. There must be a whole section of KGB that analyzes the poems for the hidden political content, to which no one pays particular attention until the Politburo members notice that the sexual content is a little too explicit. They are a bunch of prudes, you know. . . . How very odd of them to have that sort of morality and no other.”

  “Well, one can hardly knock them for disapproving Debbie Does Dallas,” Ryan suggested.

  Harding nearly choked on his pipe smoke. “Quite so. Not exactly King Lear, is it? They did produce Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pasternak.”

  Jack hadn’t read any of them, but this didn’t seem the time to admit to it.

  “HE SAID WHAT?” Alexandrov asked.

  The outrage was predictable, but remarkably muted, Andropov thought. Perhaps he only raised his voice for a fuller audience, or more likely his subordinates over at the Party Secretariat building.

  “Here is the letter, and the translation,” the KGB Chairman said, handing over the documents.

  The chief-ideologue-in-waiting took the message forms and read them over slowly. He didn’t want his rage to miss a single nuance. Andropov waited, lighting a Marlboro as he did so. His guest didn’t touch the vodka that he’d poured, the Chairman noted.

  “This holy man grows ambitious,” he said finally, setting the papers down on the coffee table.

  “I would agree with that,” Yuriy observed.

  Amazement in his voice: “Does he feel invulnerable? Does he not know that there are consequences for such threats?”

  “My experts feel that his words are genuine, and, no, they believe he does not fear the possible consequences.”

  “If martyrdom is what he wishes, perhaps we should accommodate him. . . .” The way his voice trailed off caused a chill even in Andropov’s cold blood. It was time for a warning. The problem with ideologues was that their theories did not always take reality into proper account, a fact to which they were mostly blind.

  “Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, such actions are not to be undertaken lightly. There could be political consequences.”

  “No, not great ones, Yuriy. Not great ones,” Alexandrov repeated himself. “But, yes, I agree, what we do in reply must be considered fully before we take the necessary action.”

  “What does Comrade Suslov think? Have you consulted him?”

  “Misha is very ill,” Alexandrov replied, without any great show of regret. That surprised Andropov. His guest owed much to his ailing senior, but these ideologues lived in their own little circumscribed world. “I fear his life is coming to its end.”

  That part was not a surprise. You only had to look at him at the Politburo meetings. Suslov had the desperate look you saw on the face of a man who knew that his time was running out. He wanted to make the world right before he departed from it, but he also knew that such an act was beyond his capacity, a fact that had come to him as an unwelcome surprise. Did he finally grasp the reality that Marxism-Leninism was a false path? Andropov had come to that conclusion about five years before. But that wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about in the Kremlin, was it? And not with Alexandrov, either.

  “He has been a good comrade these many years. If what you say is true, he will be sorely missed,” the KGB Chairman noted soberly, genuflecting to the altar of Marxist theory and its dying priest.

  “That is so,” Alexandrov agreed, playing his role as his host did—as all Politburo members did, because it was expected . . . because it was necessary. Not because it was true, or even approximately so.

  Like his guest, Yuriy Vladimirovich believed not because he believed, but because what he purported to believe was the source of the real thing: power. What, the Chairman wondered, would this man say next? Andropov needed him, and Alexandrov needed him as well, perhaps even more. Mikhail Yevgeniyevich did not have the personal power needed to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was respected for his theoretical knowledge, his devotion to the state religion that Marxism-Leninism had become, but no one who sat around the table thought him a proper candidate for leadership. But his support would be vital to whoever did have that ambition. As in medieval times, when the eldest son became the lord of the manor, and the second son became the bishop of the attendant diocese, so Alexandrov, like Suslov in his time, had to provide the spiritual—was that the proper word?—justification for his ascension to power. The system of checks and balances remained, just more perversely than before.

  “You will, of course, take his place when the time comes,” Andropov offered as the promise of an alliance.

  Alexandrov demurred, of course . . . or pretended to: “There are many good men in the Party Secretariat.”

  The Chairman of the Committee for State Security waved his hand dismissively. “You are the most senior and the most trusted.”

  Which Alexandrov well knew. “You are kind to say so, Yuriy. So, what will we do about this foolish Pole?”

  And that, so baldly stated, would be the cost of the alliance. To get Alexandrov’s support for the General Secretaryship, Andropov would have to make the ideologue’s blanket a little thicker by . . . well, by doing something he was already thinking about anyway. That was painless, wasn’t it?

  The KGB Chairman adopted a clinical, businesslike tone of voice: “Misha, to undertake an operation of this sort is not a trivial or a simple exercise. It must be planned very carefully, prepared with the greatest caution and thoroughness, and then the Politburo must approve it with open eyes.”

  “You must have something in mind. . . .”

  “I have many things in mind, but a daydream is not a plan. To move forward requires some in-depth thinking and planning merely to see if such a thing is possible. One cautious step at a time,” Andropov warned. “Even then, there are no guarantees or promises to be made. This is not something for a movie production. The real world, Misha, is complex.” It was as close as he could come to telling Alexandrov not to stray too far from his sand-box of theories and toys and into the real world of blood and consequences.

  “Well, you are a good Party man. You know what the stakes in this game are.” With those words, Alexandrov told his host what was expected by the Secretariat. For Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, the Party and its beliefs were the State—and the KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party.

  Oddly, Andropov realized, this Polish Pope surely felt the same about his beliefs and his view of the world. But those beliefs weren’t, strictly speaking, an ideology, were they? Well, for these purposes, they might as well be, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself.

  “My people will look at this carefully. We cannot do the impossible, Misha, but—”

  “But what is impossible for this agency of the Soviet state?” A rhetorical question with a bloody answer. And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized.

  How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideolo
gy that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy. Surely he regarded both Russia and communism as enemies, one for nationalistic reasons, the other for reasons of his religious conviction. . . . But did he fear that enemy?

  No, probably not, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself. That made his task harder. His was an agency that needed fear to get its way. Fear was its source of power, and a man lacking fear was a man he could not manipulate. . . .

  But those whom he could not manipulate could always be killed. Who, after all, remembered much about Leon Trotsky?

  “Few things are truly impossible. Merely difficult,” the Chairman belatedly agreed.

  “So, you will look into the possibilities?”

  He nodded cautiously. “Yes, starting in the morning.” And so the processes began.

  CHAPTER 3

  EXPLORATIONS

  WELL, JACK’S GOT HIS DESK in London,” Greer told his colleagues on the Seventh Floor.

  “Glad to hear it,” Bob Ritter observed. “Think he knows what to do with it?”

  “Bob, what is it with you and Ryan?” the DDI asked.

  “Your fair-haired boy is moving up the ladder too fast. He’s going to fall off someday and it’s going to be a mess.”

  “You want me to turn him into just one more ordinary desk-weenie?” James Greer had often enough fended off Ritter’s beefs about the size and consequent power of the Intelligence Directorate. “You have some burgeoning stars in your shop, too. This kid’s got possibilities, and I’m going to let him run until he hits the wall.”

  “Yeah, I can hear the splat now,” the DDO grumbled. “Okay, which one of the crown jewels does he want to hand over to our British cousins?”

  “Nothing much. The appraisal of Mikhail Suslov that the doctors up at Johns Hopkins did when they flew over to fix his eyes.”

  “They don’t have that already?” Judge Moore asked. It wasn’t as though it were a super-sensitive document.

  “I guess they never asked. Hell, Suslov won’t be around much longer anyway, from what we’ve been seeing.”

  The CIA had many ways to determine the health of senior Soviet officials. The most commonly used was photographs or, better yet, motion-picture coverage of the people in question. The Agency employed physicians—most often full professors at major medical schools—to look at the photos and diagnose their ills without getting within four thousand miles of them. It wasn’t good medicine, but it was better than nothing. Also, the American Ambassador, every time he went into the Kremlin, came back to the embassy and dictated his impressions of everything he saw, however small and insignificant it might seem. Often enough, people had lobbied for putting a physician in the post of ambassador, but it had never happened. More often, direct DO operations had been aimed at collecting urine samples of important foreign statesmen, since urine was a good diagnostic source of information. It made for some unusual plumbing arrangements at Blair House, across the street from the White House, where foreign dignitaries were often quartered, plus the odd attempt to break into doctors’ offices all over the world. And gossip, there was always gossip, especially over there. All of this came from the fact that a man’s health played a role in his thinking and decision-making. All three men in this office had joked about hiring a gypsy or two and observed, rightly, that it would have produced results no less accurate than they got from well-paid professional intelligence officers. At Fort Meade, Maryland, was yet another operation, code-named STARGATE, where the Agency employed people who were well to the left of gypsies; it had been started mainly because the Soviets also employed such people.

  “How sick is he?” Moore asked.

  “From what I saw three days ago, he won’t make Christmas. Acute coronary insufficiency, they say. We have a shot of him popping what looks like a nitroglycerine pill, not a good sign for Red Mike,” James Greer concluded with Suslov’s in-house nickname.

  “And Alexandrov replaces him? Some bargain,” Ritter observed tersely. “I think the gypsies switched them at birth—another True Believer in the Great God Marx.”

  “We can’t all be Baptists, Robert,” Arthur Moore pointed out.

  “This came in two hours ago on the secure fax from London,” Greer said, passing the sheets around. He’d saved the best for last. “Might be important,” the DDI added.

  Bob Ritter was a multilingual speed-reader: “Jesus!”

  Judge Moore took his time. As a judge should, he thought. About twenty seconds later than the DDO: “My goodness.” A pause. “Nothing about this from our sources?”

  Ritter shifted in his chair. “Takes time, Arthur, and the Foleys are still settling in.”

  “I presume we’ll hear about this from CARDINAL.” They didn’t often invoke that agent’s code name. In the pantheon of CIA crown jewels, he was the Cullinan Diamond.

  “We should, if Ustinov talks about it, as I expect he will. If they do something about it—”

  “Will they, gentlemen?” the DCI asked.

  “They’ll sure as hell think about it,” Ritter opined at once.

  “It’s a big step to take,” Greer thought more soberly. “You suppose His Holiness is courting it? Not too many men walk up to the tiger, open the cage door, and then make faces at him.”

  “I’ll have to show this to the President tomorrow.” Moore paused for a moment’s thought. His weekly meeting at the White House was set for 10:00 the following morning. “The Papal Nuncio is out of town, isn’t he?” It turned out that the others didn’t know. He’d have to have that one checked out.

  “What would you say to him, anyway?” This was Ritter. “You have to figure that the other guys in Rome tried to talk him out of this.”

  “James?”

  “Kinda takes us back to Nero, doesn’t it? It’s almost as though he’s threatening the Russians with his own death. . . . Damn, do people really think that way?”

  “Forty years ago, you put your life on the line, James.” Greer had served his time on fleet boats in the Second World War, and often wore a miniature of his gold dolphins on the lapel of his suit coat.

  “Arthur, I took my chances, along with everybody else on the boat. I did not tell Tojo where I was in a personal letter.”

  “The man has some serious cojones, guys,” Ritter breathed. “We have seen this sort of thing before. Dr. King never took a step back in his life, did he?”

  “And I suppose the KKK was as dangerous to him as the KGB is to the Pope,” Moore completed the thought. “Men of the cloth have a different way of looking at the world. It’s called ‘virtue,’ I think.” He sat forward. “Okay, when the President asks me about this—and for damned sure he will—what the hell do I tell him?”

  “Our Russian friends might just decide that His Holiness has lived long enough,” Ritter answered.

  “That’s a hell of a big and dangerous step to take,” Greer objected. “Not the sort of thing a committee does.”

  “This committee might,” the DDO told the DDI.

  “There would be hell to pay, Bob. They know that. These men are chess players, not gamblers.”

  “This letter backs them into a corner.” Ritter turned. “Judge, I think the Pope’s life might be in danger.”

  “It’s much too early to say that,” Greer objected.

  “Not when you remember who’s running KGB. Andropov is a Party man. What loyalty he has is to that institution, damned sure not to anything we would recognize as a principle. If this frightens, or merely worries them, they will think about it. The Pope has hurled down his gauntlet at their feet, gentlemen,” the Deputy Director (Operations) told the others. “T
hey just might pick it up.”

  “Has any Pope ever done this?” Moore asked.

  “Resign his post? Not that I can remember,” Greer admitted. “I don’t even know if there’s a mechanism for this. I grant you it’s one hell of a gesture. We have to assume he means it. I don’t see this as a bluff.”

  “No,” Judge Moore agreed. “It can’t be that.”

  “He’s loyal to his people. He has to be. He was a parish priest once upon a time. He’s christened babies, officiated at weddings. He knows these people. Not as an amorphous mass—he’s been there to baptize and bury them. They are his people. He probably thinks of all Poland as his own parish. Will he be loyal to them, even at the peril of his life? How can he not be?” Ritter leaned forward. “It’s not just a question of personal courage. If he doesn’t do it, the Catholic Church loses face. No, guys, he’s serious as hell, and he isn’t bluffing. Question is, what the hell can we do about it?”

  “Warn the Russians off?” Moore wondered aloud.

  “No chance,” Ritter shot back. “You know better than that, Arthur. If they set up an operation, it’ll have more cutouts than anything the Mafia’s ever done. How good do you suppose security is around him?”

  “Not a clue,” the DCI admitted. “I know the Swiss Guards exist, with their pretty uniforms and pikes. . . . Didn’t they fight once?”

  “I think so,” Greer observed. “Somebody tried to kill him, and they fought a rear-guard action while he skipped town. Most of them got killed, I think.”

  “Now they mostly pose for pictures and tell people where the bathroom is, probably,” Ritter thought out loud. “But there has to be something to what they do. The Pope is too prominent a figure not to attract the odd nutcase. The Vatican is technically a sovereign state. It has to have some of the mechanisms of a country. I suppose we could warn them—”

  “Only when we have something to warn them about. Which we don’t have, do we?” Greer pointed out. “He knew when he sent this off that he’d be rattling a few cages. What protection he does have must be alerted already.”