Red Rabbit Part 51

"Well, Jack, whatever the opposition has planned, it will take time for them to set it up. The bureaucracies over there are even more moribund than ours, you know."

"KGB, too, Al?" Ryan wondered. "I think that's the one part of their system that actually works, and Yuriy Andropov isn't known for his patience, is he? h.e.l.l, he was their amba.s.sador in Budapest in 1956, remember? The Russians worked pretty decisively back then, didn't they?"

"That was a serious political threat to their entire system," Kingshot pointed out.

"And the Pope isn't?" Ryan fired back.

"You have me there," the field spook admitted.

"Wednesday. That's what Dan told me. He's all the way in the open every Wednesday. Okay, the Pope can appear at that porch he uses to give blessings and stuff, and a halfway good man with a rifle can pop him doing that, but a man with a rifle is too visible to even a casual observer, and a rifle says 'military' to people, and 'military' says 'government' to everybody. But those probably aren't scheduled very far in advance-at least they're irregular, but every d.a.m.ned Wednesday afternoon he hops in his jeep and parades around the Piazza San Pietro right in the middle of the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude, Al, and that's pistol range." Ryan sat back in his chair and took another sip of the French white.

"I am not sure I'd want to fire a pistol at that close a range."

"Al, once upon a time they got a guy to do Leon Trotsky with an ice axe-engagement range maybe two feet," Ryan reminded him. "Sure, different situation now, but since when have the Russians been reticent about risking their troops-and this will be that Bulgarian b.a.s.t.a.r.d, remember? Your guy called him an expert killer. It's amazing what a real expert can do. I saw a gunnery sergeant at Quantico-that guy could write his name with a forty-five at fifty feet. I watched him do it once." Ryan had never really mastered the big Colt automatic, but that gunny sure as h.e.l.l had.

"You're probably being overly concerned."

"Maybe," Jack admitted. "But I'd feel a h.e.l.l of a lot better if His Holiness wore a Kevlar jacket under his vestments." He wouldn't, of course. People like that didn't scare the way civilians did. It wasn't the sense of invincibility that some professional soldiers had. It was just that to them death wasn't something to be afraid of. Any really observant Catholic was supposed to feel that way, but Jack wasn't one of those. Not quite.

"As a practical matter, what can one do? Look for one face in a crowd, and who's to say it's the right face?" Kingshot asked. "Who's to say Strokov hasn't hired someone else to do the actual shooting? I can see myself shooting someone, but not in a crowd."

"So, you use a suppressed weapon, a big can-type silencer. Cut down the noise, and you remove a lot of the danger of being identified. All the eyes are going to be on the target, remember, not looking sideways into the crowd."

"True," Al conceded.

"You know, it's too d.a.m.ned easy to find reasons to do nothing. Didn't Dr. Johnson say that doing nothing is in every man's power?" Ryan asked forlornly. "That's what we're doing, Al, finding reasons not to do anything. Can we let the guy die? Can we just sit here and drink our wine and let the Russians kill the man?"

"No, Jack, but we cannot go off like a loose hand grenade, either. Field operations have to be planned. You need professionals to think things through in a professional way. There are many things professionals can do, but first they have orders to do them."

But that was being decided elsewhere.

"PRIME MINISTER, we have reason to believe that the KGB has an operation underway to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Pope of Rome," C reported. He'd come over on short notice, interrupting her afternoon political business.

"Really?" she asked Sir Basil in dry reply. She was used to hearing the strangest of things from her Intelligence Chief, and had cultivated the habit of not responding too violently to them. "What is the source for that information?"

"I told you several days ago about Operation BEATRIX. Well, we and the Americans have got him out successfully. We even managed to do it in such a way that the Sovs think him dead. The defector is in a safe house outside Manchester right now," C told his chief of government.

"Have we told the Americans?"

Basil nodded. "Yes, Prime Minister. He's their fox, after all. We'll let him fly to America next week, but I discussed the case briefly earlier today with Judge Arthur Moore, their Director of Central Intelligence. I expect he'll brief the President in early next week."

"What action do you suppose they will take?" she asked next.

"Difficult to say, ma'am. It's a rather dicey proposition, actually. The defector-his name is Oleg-is a most important a.s.set, and we must work very hard to protect his ident.i.ty, and also knowledge of the fact that he is now on our side of the Curtain. Exactly how we might warn the Vatican of the potential danger is a complex issue, to say the least."

"This is a real operation the Soviets have under way?" the PM asked again. It was rather a lot to swallow, even for them, who she believed capable of almost anything.

"It appears so, yes," Sir Basil confirmed. "But we do not know the priority, and, of course, we know nothing of the schedule."

"I see." The Prime Minister fell quiet for a moment. "Our relations with the Vatican are cordial but not especially close." That fact went all the way back to Henry VIII, though the Roman Catholic Church had gradually come to letting bygones be bygones over the intervening centuries.

"Regrettably, that is so," C agreed.

"I see," she said again, and thought some more before speaking again. When she leaned forward, she spoke with dignity and force. "Sir Basil, it is not the policy of Her Majesty's Government to stand idly by while a friendly Chief of State is murdered by our adversaries. You are directed to look into any possible action that might forestall this eventuality."

Some people shot from the hip, Sir Basil thought. Others shot from the heart. For all her outward toughness, the United Kingdom's Chief of Government was one of the latter.

"Yes, Prime Minister." The problem was that she didn't say how the h.e.l.l he was supposed to do this. Well, he'd coordinate with Arthur at Langley. But for right now he had a mission that would be difficult at best. What exactly was he supposed to do, deploy a squadron of the Special Air Service to St. Peter's Square?

But you didn't say no to this Prime Minister, at least not in a 10 Downing Street conference room.

"Anything else this defector has told us?"

"Yes, ma'am. He has identified by code name a Soviet penetration agent, probably in Whitehall. The code name is MINISTER. When we get more information about the man in question, we'll have the Security Service root about after him."

"What does he give them?"

"Political and diplomatic intelligence, ma'am. Oleg tells us that it is high-level material, but he has not as yet given us information that would directly identify him."

"Interesting." It was not a new story. This one could be one of the Cambridge group that had been so valuable to the USSR back in the war years and then all the way into the 1960s, or perhaps a person recruited by them. Charleston had been instrumental in purging them out of SIS, but Whitehall wasn't quite his patch. "Do keep me posted on that." A casual order from her had the force of a granite slab hand-delivered from Mt. Sinai.

"Of course, Prime Minister."

"Would it be helpful if I spoke to the American President on this matter with the Pope?"

"Better to let CIA brief him first, I think. It wouldn't do to short-circuit their system. This defector was, after all, mainly an American operation, and it's Arthur's place to speak to him first."

"Yes, I suppose so. But when I do talk to him, I want him to know that we are taking it with the utmost seriousness, and that we expect him to take some substantive action."

"Prime Minister, I should think he will not take it lying down, as it were."

"I agree. He's such a good chap." The full story on America's covert support for the Falkland Islands War would not see the light of day for many years. America had to keep her fences with South America well mended, after all. But neither was the PM one to forget such a.s.sistance, covert or not.

"This BEATRIX operation, it was well executed?" she asked C.

"Flawlessly, ma'am," Charleston a.s.sured her. "Our people did everything exactly by the book."

"I trust you will look after those who carried it out."

"Most certainly, ma'am," C a.s.sured her.

"Good. Thank you for coming over, Sir Basil."

"A pleasure as always, Prime Minister." Charleston stood, thinking that that Ryan fellow would have called her his sort of broad. As, indeed, she was. But all the way back to Century House, he worried about the operation he now had to get under way. What, exactly, would he be doing about it? Figuring such things out, of course, was why he was so lavishly paid.

"HI, HONEY," Ryan said.

"Where are you?" Cathy asked at once.

"I can't say exactly, but I'm back in England. The thing I had to do on the continent-well, it developed into something I have to look after here."

"Can you come home and see us?"

" 'Fraid not." One major problem was that, although his Chatham home was actually within driving distance, he wasn't confident enough yet to drive that far without crunching himself on a side road. "Everybody okay?"

"We're fine, except that you aren't here," Cathy responded, with an edge of anger/disappointment in her voice. One thing she was sure of: Wherever Jack had been, it sure as h.e.l.l hadn't been Germany. But she couldn't say that over the phone. She understood the intelligence business that much.

"I'm sorry, babe. I can tell you that what I'm doing is pretty important, but that's all."

"I'm sure," she conceded. And she understood that Jack wanted to be home with his family. He wasn't one to skip town for the fun of it.

"How's work?"

"I did gla.s.ses all day. Got some surgery tomorrow morning, though. Wait a minute, here's Sally."

"Hi, Daddy," a new and small voice said.

"Hi, Sally. How are you?"

"Fine." What kids always said.

"What did you do today?"

"Miss Margaret and I colored."

"Anything good?"

"Yeah, cows and horses!" she reported with considerable enthusiasm. Sally especially liked pelicans and cows.

"Well, I need to talk to Mommy."

"Okay." And Sally would think of this as a deep and weighty conversation, as she went back to the Wizzerdaboz tape in the living room.

"And how's the little guy?" Jack asked his wife.

"Chewing on his hands, mostly. He's in the playpen right now, watching the TV."

"He's easier than Sally was at that age," Jack observed with a smile.

"He's not colicky, thank G.o.d," Mrs. Dr. Ryan agreed.

"I miss you," Jack said, rather forlornly. It was true. He did miss her.

"I miss you, too."

"Gotta get back to work," he said next.

"When will you be home?"

"Couple of days, I think."

"Okay." She had to surrender to that unhappy fact. "Call me."

"Will do, babe."

"Bye."

"See you soon. Love ya."

"I love you, too."

"Bye."

"Bye, Jack."

Ryan put the phone back in the cradle and told himself that he wasn't designed for this kind of life. Like his father before him, he wanted to sleep in the same bed as his wife-had his father ever slept away from home? Jack wondered. He couldn't remember such a night. But Jack had chosen a line of work in which that was not always possible. It was supposed to have been. He was an a.n.a.lyst who worked at a desk and slept at home, but somehow it wasn't working out that way, G.o.d d.a.m.n it.

Dinner was beef Wellington with Yorks.h.i.+re pudding. Mrs. Thompson could have been head chef at a good restaurant. Jack didn't know where the beef came from, but it seemed more succulent than the usual gra.s.sfed British sort. Either she got the meat in a special place-they still had specialty butcher shops over here-or she really knew how to tenderize it, and the Yorks.h.i.+re pudding was positively ethereal. Toss in the French wine, and this dinner was just plain brilliant-an adjective popular in the U.K.

The Russians attacked the food rather as Georgiy Zhukov had attacked Berlin, with considerable gusto.

"Oleg Ivan'ch, I have to tell you," Ryan admitted in a fit of honesty, "the food in America is not always of this quality." He'd timed this for Mrs. Thompson's appearance at the dining-room door. Jack turned to her. "Ma'am, if you ever need a recommendation as a chef, you just call me, okay?"

Emma had a very friendly smile. "Thank you, Sir John."

"Seriously, ma'am, this is wonderful."

"You're very kind."

Jack wondered if she'd like his steaks on the grill and Cathy's spinach salad. The key was getting good corn-gorged Iowa beef, which wasn't easy here, though he could try the Air Force commissary at Greenham Commons....

It took nearly an hour to finish dinner, and the after-dinner drinks were excellent. They even served Starka vodka, in a gesture of additional hospitality to their Russian guests. Oleg, Jack saw, really gunned it down.

"Even the Politburo does not eat so well," the Rabbit observed, as dinner broke up.

"Well, we raise good beef in Scotland. This was Aberdeen Angus," Nick Thompson advised, as he collected the plates.

"Fed on corn?" Ryan asked. They didn't have that much corn over here, did they?

"I do not know. The j.a.panese feed beer to their Kobe beef," the former cop observed. "Perhaps they do that up in Scotland."

"That would explain the quality," Jack replied with a chuckle. "Oleg Ivan'ch, you must learn about British beer. It's the best in the world."

"Not American?" the Russian asked.

Ryan shook his head. "Nope. That's one of the things they do better than us."

"Truly?"