Red Rabbit Part 6

It was only a four-minute walk to the Fox and c.o.c.k, a very traditional pub a block from Century House. A little too traditional: It looked like a relic from Shakespeare's time, with ma.s.sive wooden timbers and plaster walls. It had to be for architectural effect; no real building could have survived that long, could it? Inside was a cloud of tobacco smoke and a lot of people wearing jackets and ties. Clearly an upscale pub, a lot of the patrons were probably from Century House. Harding confirmed it.

"It's our watering hole. The publican used to be one of us, probably makes more here than he ever did at the shop." Without being bidden, Harding ordered two pints of Tetley's bitter, which arrived quickly. Then he ushered Jack to a corner booth.

"So, Sir John, how do you like it here?"

"No complaints so far." He took a sip. "Admiral Greer thinks you're pretty smart."

"And Basil thinks he's rather bright as well. Good chap to work for?" Harding asked.

"Yeah, big-time. He listens and helps you think. Doesn't stomp on you when you goof. He'd rather teach than embarra.s.s you-that's my experience, anyway. Some of the more senior a.n.a.lysts have had him tear a stripe off their a.s.s. I guess I'm not senior enough for that yet." Ryan paused. "You supposed to be my training officer over here, Simon?"

The directness of the question surprised his host. "I wouldn't say that exactly. I'm a Soviet specialist. You're more a generalist, I take it?"

"Try 'apprentice,' " Ryan suggested.

"Very well. What do you want to know?"

"How to think like a Russian."

Harding laughed into his beer. "That's something we all learn every day. The key is to remember that to them everything is politics, and politics, remember, is all about nebulous ideas, aesthetics. Especially in Russia, Jack. They can't deliver real products like automobiles and television sets, so they have to concentrate on everything fitting into their political theory, the sayings of Marx and Lenin. And, of course, Lenin and Marx knew sod-all about doing real things in the real world. It's like a religion gone mad, but instead of thunderbolts or biblical plagues, they kill their apostates with firing squads. In their world outlook, everything that goes wrong is the result of political apostasy. Their political theory ignores human nature, and since their political theory is Holy Writ, and therefore is never wrong, it must be human nature that's wrong. It's not logically consistent, you see. Ever study metaphysics?"

"Boston College, second year. The Jesuits make you spend a semester on it," Ryan confirmed, taking a long sip. "Whether you want to or not."

"Well, communism is metaphysics applied ruthlessly to the real world, and when things don't fit, it's the fault of the square sods who don't fit into their round b.l.o.o.d.y holes. That can be rather hard on the poor sods, you see. And so, Joe Stalin murdered roughly twenty million of them, partly because of political theory, partly because of his own mental illness and b.l.o.o.d.y-mindedness. That insane b.u.g.g.e.r defined paranoia. One pays a price for being ruled by a madman with a twisted book of rules, you see."

"But how faithful is the current political leaders.h.i.+p to Marxist theory?" A thoughtful nod. "That's the question, Jack. The answer is, we don't b.l.o.o.d.y know. They all claim to be true believers, but are they?" Harding paused for a contemplative sip of his own. "Only when it suits them, I think. But that depends on who one is talking about. Suslov, for example, believes totally-but the rest of them? To some greater or lesser extent, they do and they don't. I suppose you can characterize them as people who used to go to church every Sunday, then fell away from the habit. Part of them still believes, but some greater or lesser part does not. What they do believe in is the fact that the state religion is the source of their power and status. And so, for all the common folk out there, they must appear to believe, because believing is the only thing that gives them that power and status."

"Intellectual inertia?" Ryan wondered aloud.

"Exactly, Jack. Newton's first law of motion."

Part of Ryan wanted to object to the discourse. The world had to make more sense than that. But did it? What rule said that it had to? he asked himself. And who enforced such rules? And was it expressed that simply? What Harding had just explained in less than two hundred words purported to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures, strategic weapons of incomprehensible power, and millions of people whose uniforms denoted enmity that demanded aggression and death in time of war or near-war.

But the world was about ideas, good and bad, and the conflict between this one and Ryan's own defined the reality in which Ryan worked, defined the belief system of the people who'd tried to kill him and his family. And that was as real as it had to be, wasn't it? No, there was no rule that compelled the world to make sense. People decided on their own what made sense and what did not. So, was everything about the world a matter of perception? Was it all a thing of the mind? What was reality?

But that was the question behind all of metaphysics. When Ryan had studied it at Boston College, it had been so purely theoretical that it seemed to have no attachment at all to reality. It had been a lot for Ryan to absorb at age nineteen, and, he realized, just as much to absorb at age thirty-two. But here the marks were often recorded in human blood, not on a report card.

"Christ, Simon. You know, it would be a lot easier if they did believe in G.o.d."

"Then, Jack, it would be just another religious war, and those are b.l.o.o.d.y affairs, too, you may recall. Think of it as the crusades, one version of G.o.d against another. Those wars were quite nasty enough. The true believers in Moscow think that they are riding the wave of history, that they are bringing perfection to the human condition. It must drive them mad when they see that their country can scarcely feed itself, and so they try to ignore it-but it is difficult to ignore an empty belly, isn't it? So they blame it all on us and on 'wreckers'-traitors and saboteurs-in their own country. Those are the people they imprison or kill." Harding shrugged. "Personally, I regard them as infidels, believers in a false G.o.d. It's just easier that way. I've studied their political theology, but that has limited value because, as I said, so many of them do not really believe in the substance of their system. Sometimes they think like tribal Russians, whose outlook on the world has always been skewed by our standards. Russian history is such a muddle that studying it has its own limits in terms of Western logic. They're xenophobes of a very high order, always have been-but for fairly reasonable historical causes. They've always had threats from both east and west. The Mongols, for example, have been as far west as the Baltic, and the Germans and French have hammered on the gates of Moscow. As we say, they're a rum lot. One thing I do know is that no sane man wants them as masters. A pity, really. They have so many marvelous poets and composers."

"Flowers in a junkyard," Ryan suggested.

"Exactly, Jack. Very good." Harding fished for his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match. "So, how do you like the beer?"

"Excellent, much better than at home."

"I don't know how you Americans can stomach it. But your beef is better than ours."

"Corn-fed. Turns out better meat than gra.s.s does," Ryan sighed. "I'm still getting used to life over here. Every time I start feeling comfortable, something hits me like a snake in high gra.s.s."

"Well, you've had less than a week to get used to us."

"My kids will be talking funny."

"Civilized, Jack, civilized," Harding observed with a good laugh. "You Yanks do ravage our language, you know."

"Yeah, right." Pretty soon he'd refer to baseball as "rounders," which was a girls' game over here. They didn't know d.i.c.k about a good fastball.

FOR HIS PART, Ed Foley found himself suddenly outraged by the bugs that he knew had to be in his apartment. Every time he made love to his wife, some KGB desk weenie was listening in. Probably a nice perverse diversion for their counterespionage spooks, but it was, by G.o.d, the Foleys' love life, and was nothing sacred? He and Mary Pat had been briefed in on what to expect, and his wife had actually joked about it, on the flight over-you couldn't bug airplanes. She'd called it a way of showing those barbarians how real people lived, and he'd laughed, but here and now it wasn't so G.o.dd.a.m.ned funny. It was like being an animal in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned zoo, with people watching and laughing and pointing. Would KGB keep a log of how often he and his wife got it on? They might, he thought, looking for marital difficulties as a pretext for recruiting him or Mary Pat. Everyone did it. So, they'd have to make love regularly just to discourage that possibility, though playing a reverse false-flag did have interesting theoretical possibilities of its own.... No, the Station Chief decided, it'd be an unnecessary complication for their stay in Moscow, and being Chief of Station was already complex enough.

Only the amba.s.sador, the defense attache, and his own officers were allowed to know who he was. Ron Fielding was the overt COS, and his job was to wiggle like a good worm on the hook. When parking his car, he'd occasionally leave his sun visor down or rotated ninety degrees; sometimes he'd wear a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole and take it out halfway down a block as though signalling someone or, best of all, he'd b.u.mp into people, simulating a brush-pa.s.s. That sort of thing could make the Second Chief Directorate counterspooks go nuts-race after innocent Muscovites, perhaps s.n.a.t.c.h a few up for interrogations, or put a squad of officers on the poor random b.a.s.t.a.r.d to watch everything he did. If nothing else, it forced KGB to waste a.s.sets on fool's errands, chasing after phantom geese. Best of all, it persuaded them that Fielding was a clumsy Station Chief. It always made the other side feel good, and that was always a smart move for CIA. The game he played made other power moves look like a game of Chutes and Ladders.

But the fact that there were probably bugs in his bedroom p.i.s.sed him off. And he couldn't do the usual things to contravene them, like playing the radio and talking under it. No, he couldn't act like a trained spook. He had to be dumb, and playing dumb required brains and discipline and the utmost thoroughness. Not a single mistake was allowed. That one mistake could get people killed, and Ed Foley had a conscience. It was a dangerous thing for a field spook to have, but it was impossible not to have. You had to care about your agents, those foreign nationals who worked for you and fed you information. All-well, nearly all-had problems. The big one here was alcoholism. He expected every agent he ran into to be a boozer. Some were quite mad. Most were people who wanted to get even-with their bosses, with the system, with the country, with communism, with their spouses, with the whole perverse world. Some, a very few, might be genuinely attractive people. But Foley would not pick them. They would pick him. And he'd have to play the cards he was dealt. The rules of this game were hard and d.a.m.ned harsh. His life was safe. Oh, sure, he might get a little roughed up-or Mary Pat-but they both had diplomatic pa.s.sports, and to seriously mess with him meant that somewhere in America some Soviet diplomat of fairly high rank might get a rough time at the hands of some street thugs-who might or might not be trained lawenforcement personnel. Diplomats didn't like such things, and so it was avoided; in fact, the Russians played by the rules more faithfully than the Americans did. So he and his wife were safe, but their agents, if and when blown, would get less mercy than a mouse would get from a particularly s.a.d.i.s.tic cat. There was still torture here, still interrogations that lasted into long hours. Due process of law was whatever the government at the time felt like it was. And the appeals process was limited to whether or not the shooter's pistol was loaded. So he had to treat his agents, whether drunks, wh.o.r.es, or felons, like his own children, changing their diapers, getting them a bedtime gla.s.s of water, and wiping their noses.

All in all, Ed Foley thought, it was one h.e.l.l of a game. And it kept him awake at night. Could the Russians tell that? Were there cameras in the walls? Wouldn't that be perverse? But American technology wasn't that advanced, so he was d.a.m.ned sure the Russians' wasn't. Probably. Foley reminded himself that there were smart people here, and a lot of them worked for KGB.

What amazed him was that his wife slept the sleep of the just, lying there next to him. She really was a better field spook than he was. She took to it like a seal to ocean water, chasing after her fish. But what about the sharks? He supposed it was normal for a man to worry about his wife, however capable she might be as a spook. That was just how men were programmed, as she was programmed to be a mother. Mary Pat looked like an angel to him in the dim light, the cute little sleep-smile she had, and the way her baby-fine blond hair always got messed up the instant she lay down on the pillow. To the Russians, she was a potential spy, but to Edward Foley she was his beloved wife, workmate, and mother of his child. It was so strange that people could be so many different things, depending on who looked at them, and yet all were true. With that philosophical thought-Christ, he did need sleep!-Ed Foley closed his eyes.

"SO, WHAT DID HE SAY?" Bob Ritter asked.

"He's not terribly pleased," Judge Moore replied, to n.o.body's surprise. "But he understands that there's not a h.e.l.l of a lot we can do about it. He'll probably make a speech next week about the n.o.bility of the workingman, especially the unionized sort."

"Good," Ritter grunted. "Let him tell the air-traffic controllers." The DDO was the master of the cheap shot, though he had the good sense not to say such things in the wrong company.

"Where's the speech?" the DDI asked.

"Chicago, next week. There's a large ethnic Polish population there," Moore explained. "He'll talk about the s.h.i.+pyard workers, of course, and point out that he once headed his own union. I haven't seen the speech yet, but I expect it will be mainly vanilla, with a few chocolate chips tossed in."

"And the papers will say that he's courting the blue-collar vote," Jim Greer observed. Sophisticated as they purported to be, the newspapers didn't catch on to much until you presented it to them with french fries and ketchup. They were masters of political discourse, but they didn't know s.h.i.+t about how the real game was played until they were briefed-in, preferably with single-syllable words. "Will our Russian friends notice?"

"Perhaps. They have good people reading the tea leaves at the U.S.-Canada Inst.i.tute. Maybe someone will drop a word en pa.s.sant in a casual conversation over at Foggy Bottom that we look upon the Polish situation with some small degree of concern, since we have so many American citizens of Polish ancestry. Can't take it much further than that at the moment," Moore explained.

"So, we're concerned about Poland, but not the Pope right now," Ritter clarified the situation.

"We don't know about that yet, do we?" the DCI asked rhetorically.

"Won't they wonder why the Pope didn't let us in on his threat . . . ?"

"Probably not. The wording of the letter suggests a private communication."

"Not so private that Warsaw didn't forward it to Moscow," Ritter objected.

"As my wife likes to say, that's different," Moore pointed out.

"You know, Arthur, sometimes this wheels-inside-of-other-wheels stuff gives me a headache," Greer observed.

"The game has rules, James."

"So does boxing, but those are a lot more straightforward."

" 'Protect yourself at all times,' " Ritter pointed out. "That's Rule Number One here, too. Well, we don't have any specific warnings yet, do we?" Heads shook wordlessly. No, they didn't. "What else did he say, Arthur?"

"He wants us to find out if there's any danger to His Holiness. If anything happens to him, our President is going to be seriously p.i.s.sed."

"Along with a billion or so Catholics," Greer agreed.

"You suppose the Russians might contract the Northern Irish Protestants to do the hit?" Ritter asked, with a nasty smile. "They don't like him either, remember. Something for Basil to look into."

"Robert, that's a little too far off the wall, I think," Greer a.n.a.lyzed. "They hate communism almost as much as Catholicism, anyway."

"Andropov doesn't think that far outside the box," Moore decided. "n.o.body over there does. If he decides to take the Pope out, he'll use his own a.s.sets and try to be clever about it. That's how we'll know if, G.o.d forbid, it goes that far. And if it looks as if he's leaning that way, we'll have to dissuade him from that notion."

"It won't get that far. The Politburo is too circ.u.mspect," said the DDI.

"And it's too unsubtle for them. It's not the sort of thing a chess player does, and chess is still their national game."

"Tell that to Leon Trotsky," Ritter said sharply.

"That was personal. Stalin wanted to eat his liver with onions and gravy," Greer replied. "That was pure personal hatred, and it achieved nothing on the political level."

"Not the way Uncle Joe looked at it. He was genuinely afraid of Trotsky-"

"No, he wasn't. Okay, you can say he was a paranoid b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but even he knew the difference between paranoia and genuine fear." Greer knew that statement was a mistake the moment the words escaped his lips. He covered his tracks: "And even if he was afraid of the old goat, the current crop isn't like that. They lack Stalin's paranoia but, more to the point, they lack his decisiveness."

"Jim, you're wrong. The Warsaw Letter is a potentially dangerous threat to their political stability, and they will take that seriously."

"Robert, I didn't know you were that religious," Moore joked.

"I'm not, and neither are they, but they will be worried about this. I think they will be worried a lot. Enough to take direct action? That I'm not sure of, but they will d.a.m.ned well think about it."

"That remains to be seen," Moore countered.

"Arthur, that is my a.s.sessment," the DDO shot back, and with the A-word, it became serious, at least within the cloisters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"What changed your mind so quickly, Bob?" the Judge asked.

"The more I think about it, from their point of view, the more serious it starts to look."

"You planning anything?"

That made Ritter a little uneasy. "It's a little early to hit the Foleys with a major tasking, but I am going to send them a heads-up, at least to get them thinking about it."

This was an operational question, on which the others typically deferred to Bob Ritter and his field-spook instincts. Taking information from an agent was often simpler and more routine than getting instructions to an agent. Since it was a.s.sumed that every employee of the Moscow emba.s.sy was followed on a regular or irregular basis, it was dangerous to make them do something that looked spookish. This was especially true for the Foleys-they were so new that they would be tightly covered. Ritter didn't want them blown, for the usual reasons and for one other: His selection of this husband/wife team had been a daring play, and if it didn't work, it would come back at him. A high-stakes poker player, Ritter didn't like losing his chips any more than the next man. He had very high hopes for the Foleys. He didn't want their potential blown two weeks into their a.s.signment in Moscow.

The other two didn't comment, which allowed Ritter to proceed, running his shop as he saw fit.

"You know," Moore observed, with a lean-back into his chair, "here we are, the best and brightest, the best-informed members of this presidential administration, and we don't know beans about a subject that may turn out to be of great importance."

"True, Arthur," Greer agreed. "But we don't know with considerable authority. That's more than anybody else can say, isn't it?"

"Just what I needed to hear, James." It meant that those outside this building were free to pontificate, but that these three men were not. No, they had to be cautious in everything they said, because people tended to view their opinions as facts-which, you learned up here on the Seventh Floor, they most certainly were not. If they were that good, they'd be doing something more profitable with their lives, like picking stocks.

RYAN SETTLED BACK into his easy chair with a copy of the Financial Times. Most people preferred to read it in the morning, but not Jack. Mornings were for general news, to prepare him for the workday at Century House-back home, he'd listened to news radio during the hour-or-so drive, since the intelligence business so often tracked the news. Here and now, he could relax with the financial stuff. This British paper wasn't quite the same as The Wall Street Journal, but the different twist it put on things was interesting-it gave him a new slant on abstract problems, to which he could then apply his American-trained expertise. Besides, it helped to keep current. There were bound to be financial opportunities out here, waiting for people to harvest them. Finding a few would make this whole European adventure worth the time. He still regarded his CIA sojourn as a side trip in life, whose ultimate destination was too far off in the haze. He'd play his cards one at a time.

"Dad called today," Cathy said, perusing her medical journal. This was The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the six she subscribed to.

"What did Joe want?"

"Just asked how we were doing, how the kids are, that sort of thing," Cathy responded.

Didn't waste any words about me, did he? Ryan didn't bother asking. Joe Muller, senior VP of Merrill Lynch, didn't approve of the way his son-in-law had left the trading business, after having had the bad grace to run off with his own daughter, first to teach, and then to play fox-and-hounds with spies and other government employees. Joe didn't much care for the government and its minions-he deemed them unproductive takers of what he and others made. Jack was sympathetic, but someone had to deal with the tigers of the world, and one of those somebodies was John Patrick Ryan. Ryan liked money as much as the next guy, but to him it was a tool, not an end in itself. It was like a good car-it could take you to nice places but, once there, you didn't sleep in the car. Joe didn't see things that way and didn't even try to understand those who thought otherwise. On the other hand, he did love his daughter, and he had never ha.s.sled her about becoming a surgeon. Perhaps he figured taking care of sick people was okay for girls, but making money was man's work.

"That's nice, honey," Ryan said from behind the FT. The j.a.panese economy was starting to look shaky to Ryan, though not to the paper's editorial board. Well, they'd been wrong before.

IT WAS A sleepless night in Moscow. Yuriy Andropov had smoked more than his usual complement of Marlboros, but had held himself to only one vodka after he'd gotten home from a diplomatic reception for the amba.s.sador from Spain-a total waste of his time. Spain had joined NATO, and its counterintelligence service was depressingly effective at identifying his attempts to get a penetration agent into their government. He'd probably be better advised to try the king's court. Courtiers were notoriously talkative, after all, and the elected government would probably keep the newly restored monarch informed, for no other reason than their desire to suck up to him. So he had drunk the wine, nibbled on the finger food, and chattered on with the usual small talk. Yes, it has been a fine summer, hasn't it? Sometimes he wondered if his elevation to the Politburo was worth the demands on his time. He hardly ever had time to read anymore-just his work and his diplomatic/political duties, which were endless. Now he knew what it must be like to be a woman, Andropov thought. No wonder they all nagged and groused so much at their men.

But the thought that never left his mind was the Warsaw Letter. If the government of Warsaw persists in its unreasonable repression of the people, I will be compelled to resign the papacy and return to be with my people in their time of trouble. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Threatening the peace of the world. Had the Americans put him up to it? None of his field officers had turned up anything like that, but one could never be sure. The American President was clearly no friend to his country, he was always looking for ways to sting Moscow-the nerve of that intellectual nonent.i.ty, saying that the Soviet Union was the center of evil in the world! That f.u.c.king actor saying such things! Even the howls of protest from the American news media and academia hadn't lessened the sting. Europeans had picked up on it-worst of all, the Eastern European intelligentsia had seized on it, which had caused all manner of problems for his subordinate counterintelligence throughout the Warsaw Pact. As if they weren't busy enough already, Yuriy Vladimirovich grumbled, as he pulled another cigarette out of the red-and-white box and lit it with a match. He didn't even listen to the music that was playing, as his brain turned the information over and over in his head.

Warsaw had to clamp down on those counterrevolutionary troublemakers in Danzig-strangely, Andropov always thought of that port city by the old German name-lest its government come completely unglued. Moscow had told them to sort things out in the most direct terms, and the Poles knew how to follow orders. The presence of Soviet Army tanks on their soil would help them understand what was necessary and what was not. If this Polish "Solidarity" rubbish went much further, the infection would begin to spread-west to Germany, south to Czechoslovakia . . . and east to the Soviet Union? They couldn't allow that.

On the other hand, if the Polish government could suppress it, then things would quiet down again. Until the next time? Andropov wondered.

Had his outlook been just a little broader, he might have grasped the fundamental problem. As a Politburo member, he was insulated from the more unpleasant aspects of life in his country. He lacked for nothing. Good food was no farther away than his telephone. His lavish apartment was well furnished, outfitted with German appliances. The furniture was comfortable. The elevator in his building was never out of service. He had a driver to take him to and from the office. He had a protective detail to make sure that he was never troubled by street hooligans. He was as protected as Nikolay II had been and, like all men, he a.s.sumed that his living conditions were normal, even though intellectually he knew that they were anything but. The people outside his windows had food to eat, TV and films to watch, sports teams to cheer for, and the chance to own an automobile, didn't they? In return for giving them all those things, he enjoyed a somewhat better lifestyle. That was entirely reasonable, wasn't it? Didn't he work harder than they all did? What the h.e.l.l else did those people want?

And now this Polish priest was trying to upset the entire thing.

And he just might do it, too, Andropov thought. Stalin had once famously asked how many divisions the Pope had at his command, but even he must have known that not all the power in the world grew out of the barrel of a gun.

If Karol did resign the papacy, then what? He'd try to come back to Poland. Might the Poles keep him out-revoke his citizens.h.i.+p, for example? No, somehow he'd manage to get back into Poland. Andropov and the Poles had their agents inside the church, of course, but such things only went so far. To what extent did the church have his agencies infiltrated? There was no telling. So no, any attempt to keep him out of Poland was probably doomed to failure, and, once attempted, if the Pope did get into Poland, that would be an epic disaster.

They could try diplomatic contacts. The right Foreign Ministry official could fly to Rome and meet clandestinely with Karol and try to dissuade him from following through on his threat. But what cards would he be able to play? An overt threat on his life . . . that would not work. That sort of challenge would be an invitation to martyrdom and sainthood, which likely would only encourage him to make the trip. For a believer, it would be an invitation to Heaven, one sent by the devil himself, and he'd pick up that gauntlet with alacrity. No, you could not threaten such a man with death. Even threatening his people with harsher measures would only encourage him further-he'd want to come home to protect them all the sooner, so as to appear more heroic to the world.

The sophistication of the threat he had sent to Warsaw was something that only appreciated with contemplation, Andropov admitted to himself. But there was one certain answer to it: Karol would have to find out for himself if there really was a G.o.d.

Is there a G.o.d? Andropov wondered. A question for the ages, answered by many people in many ways until Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had settled the matter-at least so far as the Soviet Union was concerned. No, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself, it was too late for him to reconsider his own answer to that question. No, there is no G.o.d. Life was here and now, and when it ended, it ended, and so what you did was the best you could, living your life as fully as possible, taking the fruit you could reach and building a ladder to seize those you could not.

But Karol was trying to change that equation. He was trying to shake the ladder-or perhaps the tree? That question was a little too deep.

Andropov turned in his chair and poured some vodka out of the decanter, then took a contemplative sip. Karol was trying to enforce his false beliefs on his own, trying to shake the very foundations of the Soviet Union and its far-flung alliances, trying to tell people that there was something better to believe in. In that, he was trying to upset the work of generations, and he and his country could not permit it. But he could not forestall Karol's effort. He could not persuade him to turn away. No, Karol would have to be stopped in a manner that would forestall him fully and finally.

It would not be easy, and it would not be entirely safe. But doing nothing was even less safe, for him, for his colleagues, and for his country.

And so, Karol had to die. First, Andropov would have to come up with a plan. Then he'd have to take it to the Politburo. Before he proposed action, he'd have to have the action fully plotted out, with a guarantee of success. Well, that was what he had KGB for, wasn't it?