Red Rabbit Part 14

RYAN WAS AT his computer, thinking over the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when the phone rang. It was the first time for it, with its oddly trilling ringer. He reached in his pocket for the plastic key, slid it into the appropriate slot, then lifted the receiver.

"STAND BY," a mechanical voice said, "SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE; STAND BY, SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE; STAND BY, SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE-LINE IS SECURE," it said at last.

"h.e.l.lo," Ryan said, wondering who had an STU and would call him this late. It turned out to be the obvious answer.

"Hi, Jack," a familiar voice greeted him. One nice thing about the STU: The digital technology made voices as clear as if the speaker were sitting in the room.

Ryan checked the desk clock. "Kinda late there, sir."

"Not as late as in Jolly Old England. How's the family?"

"Mainly asleep at the moment. Cathy is probably reading a medical journal," which was what she did instead of watching TV, anyway. "What can I do for you, Admiral?"

"I have a little job for you."

"Okay," Ryan responded.

"Ask around-casual-like-about Yuriy Andropov. There are a few things about him we don't know. Maybe Basil has the information we want."

"What exactly, sir?" Jack asked.

"Is he married, and does he have any kids?"

"We don't know if he's married?" Ryan realized that he hadn't seen that information in the dossier, but he'd a.s.sumed it was elsewhere, and had taken no particular note of it.

"That's right. The Judge wants to see if Basil might know."

"Okay, I can ask Simon. How important is this?"

"Like I said, casual-like, like it's your own interest. Then call me back from there, your home, I mean."

"Will do, sir. We know his age, birthday, education, and stuff, but not if he's married or has any kids, eh?"

"That's how it works sometimes."

"Yes, sir." And that got Jack thinking. They knew everything about Brezhnev but his d.i.c.k size. They did know his daughter's dress size-12-which someone had thought important enough to get from the Belgian milliner who'd sold the silken wedding dress to her doting father, through the amba.s.sador. But they didn't know if the likely next General Secretary of the Soviet Union was married. Christ, the guy was pus.h.i.+ng sixty, and they didn't know? What the h.e.l.l? "Okay, I can ask. That ought not to be too hard."

"Otherwise, how's London?"

"I like it here, and so does Cathy, but she's a little dubious about their state medical-care system."

"Socialized medicine? I don't blame her. I still get everything done at Bethesda, but it helps a little that I have 'admiral' in front of my name. It's not quite as fast for a retired chief bosun's mate."

"I bet." In Ryan's case, it helped a whole lot that his wife was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. He didn't talk to anyone in a lab coat without "professor" on his nametag, and he'd learned that in the field of medicine, the really smart ones were the teachers, unlike the rest of society.

THE DREAMS CAME after midnight, though he had no way of knowing that. It was a clear Moscow summer day, and a man in white was walking across the Red Square. St. Basil's Cathedral was behind him, and he was walking against the traffic past Lenin's mausoleum. Some children were with him, and he was talking to them in a kindly way, as a favored uncle might . . . or perhaps a parish priest. Then Oleg knew that's what he was, a parish priest. But why in white? With gold brocade, even. The children, four or five each of boys and girls, were holding his hands and looking up at him with innocent smiles. Then Oleg turned his head. Up at the top of the tomb, where they stood for the May Day parades, were the Politburo members: Brezhnev, Suslov, Ustinov, and Andropov. Andropov was holding a rifle and pointing at the little procession. There were other people around-faceless people walking aimlessly, going about their business. Then Oleg was standing with Andropov, listening to his words. He was arguing for the right to shoot the man. Be careful of the children, Yuriy Vladimirovich, Suslov warned. Yes, be careful, Brezhnev agreed. Ustinov reached over to adjust the sights on the rifle. They all ignored Zaitzev, who moved among them, trying to get their attention.

But why? Zaitzev asked. Why are you doing this?

Who is this? Brezhnev asked Andropov.

Never mind him, Suslov snarled. Just shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!

Very well, Andropov said. He took his aim carefully, and Zaitzev was unable to intervene, despite being right there. Then the Chairman squeezed the trigger.

Zaitzev was back on the street now. The first bullet struck a child, a boy on the priest's right, who fell without a sound.

Not him, you idiot-the priest! Mikhail Suslov screamed like a rabid dog.

Andropov shot again, this time hitting a little blonde girl standing at the priest's left. Her head exploded in red. Zaitzev bent down to help her, but she said it was all right, and so he left her and returned to the priest.

Look out, why don't you?

Look out for what, my young comrade? The priest asked pleasantly, then he turned. Come, children, we're off to see G.o.d.

Andropov fired again. This time the bullet struck the priest square in the chest. There was a splash of blood, about the size and color of a rose. The priest grimaced, but kept going, with the smiling children in tow.

Another shot, another rose on the chest, to the left of the first. But still he kept going, walking slowly.

Are you hurt? Zaitzev asked.

It is nothing, the priest replied. But why didn't you stop him?

But I tried! Zaitzev insisted.

The priest stopped walking, turning to look him square in the face. Did you?

That's when the third bullet struck him right in the heart.

Did you? the priest asked again. Now the children were looking at him and not the priest.

Zaitzev found himself sitting up in the bed. It was just before four in the morning, the clock said. He was sweating profusely. There was only one thing to do. He rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom. There he urinated, then had himself a gla.s.s of water, and padded off to the kitchen. Sitting down by the sink, he lit a cigarette. Before he went back to sleep, he wanted to be fully awake. He didn't want to walk back into that dream.

Out the window, Moscow was quiet, the streets completely empty-not even a drunk staggering home. A good thing, too. No apartment house elevators would be working at this hour. There was not a car in view, which was a little odd, but not so much as in a Western city.

The cigarette achieved its goal. He was now awake enough to go back to sleep afresh. But even now he knew that the vision wouldn't leave him. Most dreams faded away, just like cigarette smoke, but this one would not. Zaitzev was sure of that.

CHAPTER 10.

BOLT FROM THE BLUE.

HE HAD A LOT of thinking to do. It was as if the decision had made itself, as if some alien force had overtaken his mind and, through it, his body, and he had been transformed into a mere spectator. Like most Russians, he didn't shower, but washed his face and shaved with a blade razor, nicking himself three times in the process. Toilet paper took care of that-the symptoms, anyway, if not the cause. The images from the dream still paraded before his eyes like that war film on television. They continued to do so during breakfast, causing a distant look in his eyes that his wife noticed but decided not to comment on. Soon enough it was time to go to work. He went along the way like an automaton, taking the right path to the metro station by rote memory, his brain both quiescent and furiously active, as though he'd suddenly split into two separate but distantly connected people, moving along parallel paths to a destination he couldn't see and didn't understand. He was being carried there, though, like a chip of wood down mountain rapids, the rock walls pa.s.sing so rapidly by his left and right that he couldn't even see them. It came almost as a surprise when he found himself aboard the metro carriage, traveling down the darkened tunnels dug by political prisoners of Stalin's under the direction of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, surrounded by the quiet, almost faceless bodies of other Soviet citizens also making their way to workplaces for which they had little love and little sense of duty. But they went to them because it was how they earned the money with which they bought food for their families, minuscule cogs in the gigantic machine that was the Soviet state, which they all purported to serve and which purported to serve them and their families....

But it was all a lie, wasn't it? Zaitzev asked himself. Was it? How did the murder of a priest serve the Soviet State? How did it serve all these people? How did it serve him and his wife and his little daughter? By feeding them? By giving him the ability to shop in the "closed" shops and buy things that the other workers could not even think about getting for themselves?

But he was better off than nearly everyone else on the subway car, Oleg Ivan'ch reminded himself. Ought he not be grateful for that? Didn't he eat better food, drink better coffee, watch a better TV set, sleep on better sheets? Didn't he have all the creature comforts that these people would like to have? Why am I suddenly so badly troubled? the communicator asked himself. The answer was so obvious that it took nearly a minute for him to grasp the answer. It was because his position, the one that gave him the comforts he enjoyed, also gave him knowledge, and in this case, for the first time in his life, knowledge was a curse. He knew the thoughts of the men who determined the course his country was taking, and in that knowledge he saw that the course was a false one . . . an evil one, and inside his mind was an agency that looked at the knowledge and judged it wrong. And in that judgment came the need to do something to change it. He could not object and expect to keep what pa.s.sed for freedom in his country. There was no agency open to him through which he could make his judgment known to others, though others might well concur with his judgment, might ask the men who governed their country for a redress of their grievances. No, there was no way for him to act within such a system as it existed. To do that, you had to be so very senior that before you voiced doubts you had to think carefully, lest you lose your privilege, and so whatever consciences you had were tempered by the cowardice that came with having so much to lose. He'd never heard of any senior political figure in his country standing up that way, standing on a matter of principle and telling his peers that they were doing something wrong. No, the system precluded that by the sort of people it selected. Corrupted men only selected other corrupted men to be their peers, lest they have to question the things that gave them their own vast privileges. Just as the princes under the czars rarely if ever considered the effect their rule had on the serfs, so the new princes of Marxism never questioned the system that gave them their place in the world. Why? Because the world hadn't changed its shape-just its color, from czarist white to socialist red-and in keeping the shape, it kept its method of working, and in a red world, a little extra spilled blood was difficult to notice.

The metro carriage stopped at his station, and Zaitzev made his way to the sliding metal door, to the platform, left to the escalator, up to the street on a fine, clear, late-summer day, again part of a crowd, but one that dispersed as it moved. A medium-sized contingent walked at a steady pace toward the stone edifice of The Centre, through the bronze doors, and past the first security checkpoint. Zaitzev showed his pa.s.s to the uniformed guard, who checked the picture against his face and jerked his head to the right, signaling that it was all right for him to enter the vast office building. Showing the same lack of emotion as he would any other day, Zaitzev took the stone steps down to the bas.e.m.e.nt level through another checkpoint and finally into the open-bay work area of the signals center.

The night crew was just finis.h.i.+ng up. At Zaitzev's desk was the man who worked the midnight-to-eight s.h.i.+ft, Nikolay Konstantinovich Dobrik, a newly promoted major like himself.

"Good morning, Oleg," Dobrik said in comradely greeting, accompanied by a stretch in his swivel chair.

"And to you, Kolya. How was the night watch?"

"A lot of traffic last night from Was.h.i.+ngton. That madman of a president was at it again. Did you know that we are 'the focus of evil in the modern world'?"

"He said that?" Zaitzev asked incredulously.

Dobrik nodded. "He did. The Was.h.i.+ngton rezidentura sent us the text of his speech-it was red meat for his party faithful, but it was incendiary even so. I expect the amba.s.sador will get instructions from the foreign ministry about it, and the Politburo will probably have something to say. But at least it gave me a lively watch to read it all!"

"They didn't put it on the pad, did they?" A complete transmission on a one-time cipher pad would have been a nightmare job for the clerks.

"No, it was a machine job, thank G.o.d," Dobrik replied. His choice of words wasn't entirely ironic. That euphemism was a common one, even at The Centre. "Our officers are trying to make sense of his words even now. The political department will be going over it for hours-days, more likely, complete with the psychiatrists, I wager."

Zaitzev managed a chuckle. The back-and-forth between the head doctors and the field officers would undoubtedly be entertaining to read-and, like good clerks, they tended to read all of the entertaining dispatches.

"You have to wonder how such men get to rule major countries," Dobrik observed, standing up and lighting a cigarette.

"I think they call it the democratic process," Zaitzev responded.

"Well, in that case, thanks be for the Collective Will of the People as expressed through the beloved Party." Dobrik was a good Party member, despite the planned irony of his remark, as was everyone in this room, of course.

"Indeed, Kolya. In any case"-Zaitzev looked over at the wall clock. He was six minutes early-"I relieve you, Comrade Major."

"And I thank you, Comrade Major." Dobrik headed off to the exit.

Zaitzev took the seat, still warm from Dobrik's backside, and signed in on the time sheet, noting the time. Next he dumped the contents of the desk ashtray into the trash bucket-Dobrik never seemed to do that-and started a new day at the office. Relieving his colleague had been a rote process, if a pleasant one. He hardly knew Dobrik, except for these moments at the start of his day. Why anyone would volunteer for continuous night duty mystified him. At least Dobrik always left a clean desk behind, not one piled up with unfinished work, which gave Zaitzev a few minutes to get caught up and mentally organized for the day.

In this case, however, those few minutes merely brought back the images that, it seemed, were not about to go away. And so Oleg Ivanovich lit up his first work cigarette of the day and shuffled the papers on the metal desk while his mind was elsewhere, doing things that he himself didn't want to know about just yet. It was ten minutes after the hour when a cipher clerk came to him with a folder.

"From Station Was.h.i.+ngton, Comrade Major," the clerk announced.

"Thank you, comrade," Zaitzev acknowledged.

Taking the manila folder, he opened it and started leafing through the dispatches.

Ah, he thought, this Ca.s.sIUS fellow has reported in . . . yes, more political intelligence. He didn't know the name or face that went along with Ca.s.sIUS, but he had to be an aide to a senior parliamentarian, possibly even a senator. He delivered high-quality political intelligence that hinted at access to hard intelligence information. So a servant to a very senior American politician worked for the Soviet Union, too. He wasn't paid, which made him an ideologically motivated agent, the very best sort.

He read through the dispatch and then searched his memory for the right recipient upstairs . . . Colonel Anatoliy Gregorovich Fokin, in the political department, whose address was Was.h.i.+ngton Desk, Line PR, First Department, First Chief Directorate, up on the fourth floor.

OUTSIDE OF TOWN, Colonel Ilya Fedorovich Bubovoy walked off his morning flight from Sofia. To catch it, he'd had to arise at three in the morning, an emba.s.sy car taking him to the airport for the flight to Moscow. The summons had come from Aleksey Rozhdestvenskiy, whom he'd known for some years and who had shown him the courtesy to call the day before and a.s.sure him that nothing untoward was meant by this summons to The Centre. Bubovoy had a clear conscience, but it was nice to know, even so. You never could be sure with KGB. Like children called to the princ.i.p.al's office, officers were often known to have a few uppergastric b.u.t.terflies on the way into headquarters. In any case, his tie was properly knotted, and his good shoes s.h.i.+ned properly. He did not wear his uniform, as his ident.i.ty as the Sofia rezident was technically secret.

A uniformed sergeant of the Red Army met him at the gate and led him out to a car-in fact, the sergeant was KGB, but that wasn't for public knowledge: Who knew if CIA or other Western services had eyes at the airport? Bubovoy picked up a copy of Sovietskiy Sport at a kiosk on the walk out to the car. It would be thirty-five minutes in. Sofia's soccer team had just beaten Moscow Dynamo, 32, a few days before. The colonel wondered if the local sportswriters would be calling for the heads of the Moscow team, couched in appropriate Marxist rhetoric, of course. Good socialists always won, but the sportswriters tended to get confused when one socialist team lost to another.

FOLEY WAS ON the metro as well, running a little late this morning. A power failure had reset his alarm clock without formal notice, so he'd been awakened by sunlight through the windows instead of the usual metallic buzz. As always, he tried not to look around too much, but he couldn't help checking for the owner of the hand that had searched his pocket. But none of the faces looked back at him. He'd try again that afternoon, on the train that left the station at 17:41, just in case. In case of what? Foley didn't know, but that was one of the exciting things about his chosen line of work. If it had been just happenstance, all well and good, but for the next few days he'd be on the same train, in the same coach, standing in much the same place. If he had a shadow, the man wouldn't remark on it. The Russians actually found it comforting to trail someone who followed a routine-the randomness of Americans could drive them to distraction. So, he'd be a "good" American, and show them what they want, and they wouldn't find it strange. The Moscow Chief of Station shook his head in amazement.

Reaching his stop, he took the escalator up to the street level, and from there it was a short walk to the emba.s.sy, just across the street from Our Lady of the Microchips, and the world's largest microwave oven. Foley always liked to see the flag on the pole, and the Marines inside, more proof that he was in the right place. They always looked good, in their khaki s.h.i.+rts over dress-blue uniform trousers, holstered pistols, and white caps.

His office was as shabby as usual-it was part of his cover to be a little on the untidy side.

But his cover did not include the communications department. It couldn't. Heading emba.s.sy comms was Mike Russell, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Army Security Agency-ASA was the Army's own communications-security arm-and now a civilian with the National Security Agency, which officially did the same for the entire government. Moscow was a hards.h.i.+p tour for Russell. Black and divorced-single, he didn't get much female action here, since the Russians were notoriously dubious of people with dark skin. The knock on the door was distinctive.

"Come on in, Mike," Foley said.

"Morning, Ed." Russell was under six feet, and he needed to watch his eating by the look of his waist. But he was a good guy with codes and comms, and that was sufficient for the moment. "Quiet night for you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, just this." He fished an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it over. "Nothing important, looks like." He had also decrypted the dispatch. Even the amba.s.sador wasn't cleared as high as the head of communications. Foley was suddenly glad for Russian racism. It made Mike that much less likely to get turned. That was a scary thought. Of all the people in the emba.s.sy, Mike Russell was the one guy who could rat everyone out, which was why intelligence services always tried to corrupt cipher clerks, the underpaid and spat-upon people who had enormous information power in any emba.s.sy.

Foley took the envelope and opened it. The dispatch inside was lower than routine, proof positive that CIA was just one more government bureaucracy, however important its work might be. He snorted and entered the paper into his shredder, where rotating steel wheels reduced it to fragments about two centimeters square.

"Must be nice to get your day's work done in ten seconds," Russell observed, with a laugh.

"Wasn't like that in Vietnam, I bet."

"Not hardly. I remember once one of my troops DF'd a VC transmitter at MAC-V headquarters, and that was one busy night."

"Get him?"

"Oh yeah," Russell replied with a nod. "The locals were seriously p.i.s.sed about that little d.i.n.k. He came to a bad end, they told me." Russell had been a first lieutenant then. A Detroit native, his father had built B-24 bombers during World War II, and had never stopped telling his son how much more satisfying that had been than making Fords. Russell detested everything about this country (they didn't even appreciate good soul music!), but the extra pay that came with duty here-Moscow was officially a hards.h.i.+p posting-would buy him a nice place on the Upper Peninsula someday, where he'd be able to hunt birds and deer to his heart's content. "Anything to go out, Ed?"

"Nope, not today-not yet, anyway."

"Roger that. Have a good one." And Russell disappeared out the door.

It wasn't like the spy novels-the job of a CIA officer was composed of a good deal more boredom than excitement. At least two-thirds of Foley's time as a field officer was taken up with writing reports that somebody at Langley might or might not read, and/or waiting for meets that might or might not come off. He had case officers to do most of the street work, because his ident.i.ty was too sensitive to risk exposure-something about which he had to lecture his wife on occasion. Mary Pat just liked the action a little too much. It was somewhat worrying, though neither of them faced much real physical danger. They both had diplomatic immunity, and the Russians were a.s.siduous about respecting that, for the most part. Even if things should get a little rough, it would never be really rough. Or so he told himself.

"GOOD MORNING, Colonel Bubovoy," Andropov said pleasantly, without rising.

"Good day to you, Comrade Chairman," the Sofia rezident replied, swallowing his relief that Rozhdestvenskiy hadn't lied to him. You could never be too careful, after all, or too paranoid.

"How go things in Sofia?" Andropov waved him to the leather seat opposite the big oak desk.

"Well, Comrade Chairman, our fraternal socialist colleagues remain cooperative, especially with Turkish matters."

"Good. We have a proposed mission to undertake and I require your opinion of its feasibility." The voice stayed entirely pleasant.

"And what might that be?" Bubovoy asked.

Andropov outlined the plans, watching his visitor's face closely for his reaction. There was none. The colonel was too experienced for that, and besides, he knew the look he was getting.