Red Rabbit

by Tom Clancy

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

  “Most certainly, ma’am,” C assured 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 hell 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 glasses 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 God,” 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 analyst who worked at a desk and slept at home, but somehow it wasn’t working out that way, God damn it.

  Dinner was beef Wellington with Yorkshire 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 grass-fed 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 Yorkshire 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 Japanese 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?”

  “Truly,” Kingshot confirmed. “But the Irish are quite good as well. I do love my Guinness, though it’s better in Dublin than in London.”

  “Why waste the good stuff on you guys?” Jack asked.

  “Once a bloody Irishman, always a bloody Irishman,” Kingshot observed.

  “So, Oleg,” Ryan asked, lighting up an after-dinner smoke, “is there anything different we ought to be doing—to make you comfortable, I mean?”

  “I have no complaints, but I expect CIA will not give me so fine a house as this one.”

  “Oleg, I am a millionaire and don’t live in a house this nice,” Ryan confirmed with a laugh. “But your home in America will be more comfortable than your apartment in Moscow.”

  “Will I get car?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait how long?” Zaitzev asked.

  “Wait for what? To buy a car?”

  Zaitzev nodded.

  “Oleg, you can pick from any of hundreds of car dealerships, pick the car you like, pay for it, and drive it home—we usually let our wives pick the color,” Jack added.

  The Rabbit was incredulous. “So easy?”

  “Yep. I used to drive a Volkswagen Rabbit, but I kinda like the Jaguar now. I might get one when I get home. Nice engine. Cathy likes it, but she might go back to a Porsche. She’s been driving them since she was a teenager. Of course, it’s not real practical with two kids,” Ryan added hopefully. He didn’t like the German two-seater that much. Mercedes seemed to him a much safer design.

  “And buy house, also easy?”

  “Depends. If you buy a new house, yes, it’s pretty easy. To buy a house that somebody already owns, first you have to meet the owner and make an offer, but the Agency will probably help you with that.”

  “Where will we live?”

  “Anywhere you want.” After we pick your brain clean, Ryan didn’t add. “There’s a saying in America: ‘It’s a free country.’ It’s also a big country. You can find a place you like and move there. A lot of defectors live in the Washington area. I don’t know why. I don’t much like it. The summers can be mise
rable.”

  “Beastly hot,” Kingshot agreed. “And the humidity is awful.”

  “You think it’s bad there, try Florida,” Jack suggested. “But a lot of people love it down there.”

  “And travel from one part to another, no papers?” Zaitzev asked.

  For a KGB puke, this guy doesn’t know shit, Jack thought. “No papers,” Ryan assured him. “We’ll get you an American Express card to make that easy.” Then he had to explain credit cards to the Rabbit. It took ten minutes, it was so alien a concept to a Soviet citizen. By the end, Zaitzev’s head was visibly swimming.

  “You do have to pay the bill at the end of the month,” Kingshot warned him. “Some people forget that, and they can get into serious financial trouble as a result.”

  C WAS IN HIS Belgravia townhouse, sipping some Louis XIII brandy and chatting with a friend. Sir George Hendley was a colleague of thirty years’ standing. By profession a solicitor, he’d worked closely with the British government for most of his life, often consulting quietly with the Security Service and the Foreign Office. He had a “Most Secret” clearance, plus one into compartmented information. He’d been a confidant of several prime ministers over the years, and was considered as reliable as the Queen herself. He thought it just came along with the Winchester school tie.

  “The Pope, eh?”

  “Yes, George,” Charleston confirmed. “The PM wants us to look into protecting the man. Trouble is, I haven’t a clue at the moment. We can’t contact the Vatican directly about it.”

  “Quite so, Basil. One can trust their loyalty, but not their politics. Tell me, how good do you suppose their own intelligence service is?”

  “I’d have to say it’s top-drawer in many areas. What better confidant than a priest, after all, and what better way to transfer information than inside the confessional? Plus all the other techniques that one can use. Their political intelligence is probably as good as ours—perhaps even better. I would imagine they know everything that happens in Poland, for example. And Eastern Europe probably has few secrets from them as well. One cannot underestimate their ability to call on a man’s highest loyalty, after all. We’ve kept an ear on their communications for decades.”

  “Is that so?” Hendley asked.

  “Oh, yes. During World War Two, they were very valuable to us. There was a German cardinal in the Vatican back then, chap named Mansdorf—odd, isn’t it? Sounds like a Jewish name. First name Dieter, archbishop of Mannheim, then promoted to the Vatican diplomatic service. Traveled a lot. Kept us posted on the inner secrets of the Nazi Party from 1938 through to the end of the war. He didn’t much care for Hitler, you see.”

  “And their communications?”

  “Mansdorf actually gave us his own cipher book to copy. They changed it after the war, of course, and so we got little more in the way of their private mail later on, but they never changed their cipher system, and the chaps at GCHQ have occasional success listening in. Good man, Dieter Cardinal Mansdorf. Never got recognized for his service, of course. Died in ’fifty-nine, I think.”

  “So how do we know that the Romans don’t know about this operation already?” Not a bad question, Charleston thought, but he’d long since considered that one.

  “It is being held very closely, our defector tells us. Hand-delivered messages, not going out on their machine ciphers, that sort of thing. And a bare handful of people involved. The one important name we do know is a Bulgarian field officer, Boris Strokov, colonel in the DS. We suspect he’s the chap who killed Georgiy Markov just up the road from my office.” Which Charleston considered an act of lèse-majesté, perhaps even executed as a direct challenge to the Secret Intelligence Service. CIA and KGB had an informal covenant: Neither service ever killed in the other’s capital. SIS had no such agreement with anyone, a fact that might have cost Georgiy Markov his life.

  “So, you think he might be the prospective assassin?”

  C waved his hands. “It’s all we have, George.”

  “Not much,” Hendley observed.

  “Too thin for comfort, but it’s better than nothing. We have numerous photos of this Strokov fellow. The Yard was close to arresting him when he flew out of Heathrow—for Paris, actually, and from there on to Sofia.”

  “Perhaps he was in a hurry to leave?” Hendley suggested.

  “He’s a professional, George. How many chances do such people take? In retrospect, it’s rather amazing that the Yard got a line on him at all.”

  “So, you think he might be in Italy.” A statement, not a question.

  “It’s a possibility, but whom can we tell?” C asked. “The Italians have criminal jurisdiction to a point. The Lateran Treaty gives them discretionary jurisdiction, subject to a Vatican veto,” Charleston explained. He’d had to look into the legalities of the situation. “The Vatican has its own security service—the Swiss Guards, you know—but however good the men are, it’s necessarily a thin reed, what with the restrictions imposed on them from above. And the Italian authorities cannot flood the area with their own security forces, for obvious reasons.”

  “So, the PM has saddled you with an impossible task.”

  “Yes, again, George,” Sir Basil had to agree.

  “So, what can you do?”

  “All I can really come up with is to put some officers in the crowd and look for this Strokov fellow.”

  “And if they see him?”

  “Ask him politely to depart the area?” Basil wondered aloud. “It would work, probably. He is a professional, and being spotted—I suppose we’d ostentatiously take photographs of him—would give him serious pause, perhaps enough to abandon the mission.”

  “Thin.” Hendley thought of that idea.

  “Yes, it is,” C had to agree. But it would at least give him something to tell the Prime Minister.

  “Whom to send?”

  “We have a good Station Chief in Rome, Tom Sharp. He has four officers in his shop, plus we could send a few more from Century House, I suppose.”

  “Sounds reasonable, Basil. Why did you call me over?”

  “I was hoping you’d have an idea that’s eluded me, George.” A final sip from the snifter. As much as he felt like some more brandy for the night, he demurred.

  “One can only do what one can,” Hendley sympathized.

  “He’s too good a man to be cut down this way—at the hands of the bloody Russians. And for what? For standing up for his own people. That sort of loyalty is supposed to be rewarded, not murdered in public.”

  “And the PM feels the same way.”

  “She is comfortable taking a stand.” For which the PM was famous throughout the world.

  “The Americans?” Hendley asked.

  Charleston shrugged. “They haven’t had a chance to speak to the defector yet. They trust us, George, but not that much.”

  “Well, do what you can. This KGB operation probably will not happen in the immediate future, anyway. How efficient are the Soviets, anyway?”

  “We shall see” was all C had to say.

  IT WAS QUIETER HERE than in his own house, despite the nearby presence of the motorway, Ryan thought, rolling out of bed at 6:50. The sink continued the eccentric British way of having two faucets, one hot and one cold, making sure that your left hand boiled while the right one froze when you washed your hands. As usual, it felt good to shave and brush and otherwise get yourself ready for the day, even if you had to start it with Taster’s Choice.

  Kingshot was already in the kitchen when Jack got there. Funny how people slept late on Sunday but frequently not on Saturday.

  “Message from London,” Al said by way of greeting.

  “What’s that?”

  “A question. How would you feel about a flight to Rome this afternoon?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Sir Basil is sending some people to the Vatican to suss things out. He wants to know if you want to go. It’s a CIA op, after all.”

  “Tell him yes,” Jack sai
d without a moment’s thought. “When?” Then he realized he was being impetuous again. Damn.

  “Noon flight out of Heathrow. You ought to have time to go home and change clothes.”

  “Car?”

  “Nick will drive you over,” Kingshot told him.

  “What are you going to tell Oleg?”

  “The truth. It ought to make him feel more important,” Al thought aloud. It was always a good thing for defectors.

  RYAN AND THOMPSON left within the hour, with Jack’s bags in the “boot.”

  “This Zaitzev chap,” Nick said out on the motorway. “He seems rather an important defector.”

  “Bet your ass, Nick. He’s got all kinds of hot information between his ears. We’re going to treat him like a hod full of gold bricks.”

  “Good of CIA to let us talk to him.”

  “It’d be kinda churlish not to. You guys got him out for us, and covering the defection up was pretty slick.” Jack couldn’t say too much more. As trusted as Nick Thompson was, Jack couldn’t know how much clearance he had.

  The good news was that Thompson knew what not to ask. “So, your father was a police officer?”

  “Detective, yeah. Mainly homicide. Did that more than twenty years. He topped out at lieutenant. Said captains never got to do anything more than administrative stuff, and dad wasn’t into that. He liked busting bad guys and sending them to the joint.”

  “The what?”

  “Prison. The Maryland State Prison is one evil-looking structure in Baltimore, by Jones Falls. Kinda like a medieval fortress, but more forbidding. The inmates call it Frankenstein’s Castle.”

  “Fine with me, Sir John. I’ve never had much sympathy for murderers.”

  “Dad didn’t talk about them much. Didn’t bring his work home. Mom didn’t like hearing about it. Except once, a father killed his son over a crab cake. That’s like a little hamburger made out of crab meat,” Jack explained. “Dad said it seemed like a shitty thing to get killed over. The father—the killer—copped right out, all broken up about it. But it didn’t do his son much good.”

  “Amazing how many murderers react that way. They gather up the rage to take a life, then afterwards they are consumed by remorse.”