by Tom Clancy
“They asked why, but Dom didn’t tell them anything. Hell, he doesn’t know either, does he?”
“He’s a good spook, Dominic is,” Mary Pat judged.
“Ritter likes him. Oh,” Foley remembered. He fished a message out of his drawer and handed it across.
“Shit,” his wife breathed, scanning it quickly. “The Pope? Those motherfuckers want to kill the Pope?” Mary Pat didn’t always talk like a California blonde.
“Well, there’s no information to suggest that directly, but, if they want to, we’re supposed to find out.”
“Sounds like a job for WOODCUTTER,” who was their man in the Party Secretariat.
“Or maybe CARDINAL?” Ed wondered.
“We haven’t flagged him yet,” MP pointed out, but it would soon be time to check in with him. They checked his apartment every night for the light-and-blinds combination in his living room. His apartment was agreeably close to their own, and the ratline was well established, beginning with a piece of paper tape on a lamppost. Setting that flag signal was MP’s job. She’d already walked Little Eddie by it half a dozen times. “Is this a job for him?” she asked.
“The President wants to know,” her husband pointed out.
“Yeah.” But CARDINAL was their most important agent-in-place, and not one to be alerted unless it was really critical. CARDINAL would also know to get something like this out on his own if he became aware of it. “I’d hold off on that unless Ritter says different.”
“Agreed,” Ed Foley conceded. If Mary Pat advised caution, then caution was justified. After all, she was the one who enjoyed taking risks and betting her skill against the house odds. But that didn’t mean that his wife was a reckless player, either. “I’ll sit on that one for a while.”
“Be nice to see what your new contact will do next.”
“Bet your cute little tushy, babe. Want to meet the Ambassador?”
“I suppose it’s time,” she agreed.
“SO, RECOVER FROM yesterday?” Ryan asked Harding. It was the first time he’d beaten his workmate into the office.
“Yes, I suppose I have.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t met the President yet, myself. And I’m not exactly looking forward to the experience. Like Mark Twain said about the guy who got himself tarred and feathered, if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon have missed it.”
Harding managed a brief laugh. “Precisely, Jack. One does go a little weak in the knees.”
“Is she as tough as they say?”
“I’m not sure I’d want to play rugger against her. She’s also very, very bright. Doesn’t miss a thing, and asks bloody good questions.”
“Well, answering them is what they pay us for, Simon,” Ryan pointed out. There was no sense being afraid of people who were only doing their job as well, and who needed good information to do it properly.
“And her, too, Jack. She has to do questions in Parliament.”
“On this sort of thing?” Jack asked, surprised.
“No, not this. It’s occasionally discussed with the opposition, but under strict rules.”
“You worry about leaks?” Jack asked, wondering. In America, there were select committees whose members were thoroughly briefed on what they could say and what they could not. The Agency did worry about leaks—they were politicians, after all—but he’d never heard of a serious one off The Hill. Those more often came from inside the Agency, and mainly from the Seventh Floor . . . or from the White House’s West Wing. That didn’t mean that CIA was comfortable with leaks of any kind, but at least these were more often than not sanctioned, and often they were disinformation with a political purpose behind them. It was probably the same here, especially since the local news media operated under controls that would have given The New York Times a serious conniption fit.
“One always wonders about them, Jack. So, anything new come in last night?”
“Nothing new on the Pope,” Ryan reported. “Our sources, such as they are, have run into a brick wall. Will you be turning your field spooks loose?”
“Yes, the PM made it clear to Basil that she wants more information. If something happens to His Holiness, well—”
“—she blows a head gasket, right?”
“You Americans do have a way with words, Jack. And your President?”
“He’ll be seriously pissed, and by that I do not mean hitting the booze. His dad was Catholic, and his mom raised him a Protestant, but he wouldn’t be real happy if the Pope so much as catches a late-summer cold.”
“You know, even if we turn some information, it is not at all certain that we’ll be able to do a thing with it.”
“I kinda figured that, but at least we can say something to his protective detail. We can do that much, and maybe he can change his schedule—no, he won’t. He’d rather take the bullet like a man. But maybe we can interfere somehow with what the Bad Guys are planning. You just can’t know until you have a few facts to rub together. But that’s not really our job, is it?”
Harding shook his head, as he stirred his morning tea. “No, the field officers feed it to us, and we try to determine what it means.”
“Frustrating?” Ryan wondered. Harding had been at the job much longer than he had.
“Frequently. I know the field officers sweat blood doing their jobs—and it can be physically dangerous to the ones who do not have a ‘legal’ cover—but we users of information can’t always see it from their perspective. As a result, they do not appreciate us as much as we appreciate them. I’ve met with a few of them over the years, and they are good chaps, but it’s a clash of cultures, Jack.”
The field guys are probably pretty good at analysis themselves, when you get down to it, Ryan thought. I wonder how often the analyst community really appreciates that? It was something for Ryan to slip into his mental do-not-forget file. The Agency was supposed to be one big happy team, after all. Of course it wasn’t, even at the Seventh Floor level.
“Anyway, we had this come in from East Germany.” Jack handed the folder across. “Some rumbles in their political hierarchy last week.”
“Those bloody Prussians,” Harding breathed, as he took it and flipped to the first page.
“Cheer up. The Russians don’t much like them either.”
“I don’t blame them a bit.”
ZAITZEV WAS DOING some hard thinking at his desk, as his brain worked on autopilot. He’d have to meet with his new American friend. There was danger involved, unless he could find a nice, anonymous place. The good news was that Moscow abounded with such places. The bad news was that the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB probably knew all of them. But if it was crowded enough, that didn’t matter.
What would he say?
What would he ask for?
What would he offer them?
Those were all good questions, weren’t they? The dangers would only increase. The best possible outcome would be for him to leave the Soviet Union permanently, with his wife and daughter.
Yes, that was what he’d ask for, and if the Americans said no, he’d just melt back into his accustomed reality, knowing that he’d tried. He had things they would want, and he’d make it clear to them that the price of that information was his escape.
Life in the West, he thought. All the decadent things the State preached to everyone who could read a newspaper or watch TV, all the awful things they talked about. The way America treated its minorities. They even showed pictures on TV of the slum areas—but they also showed automobiles. If America oppressed its blacks, why, then, did it allow them to purchase so many automobiles? Why did it permit them to riot in the streets? Had that sort of thing happened in the USSR, the government would have called in armed troops. So no, the state propaganda could not be entirely true, could it? And, besides, wasn’t he white? What did he care about some discontented blacks who could buy any car they wished? Like most Russians, he’d only seen black people on TV—his first r
eaction was to wonder if there really were such a thing as a chocolate man, but, yes, there were. KGB ran operations in Africa. But then he asked himself: Could he remember a KGB operation in America using a black agent? Not very many, perhaps one or two, and those had both been sergeants in the American army. If blacks were oppressed, how then did they get to become sergeants? In the Red Army, only the politically reliable were admitted to Sergeant School. So, one more lie uncovered—and that one only because he worked for KGB. What other lies was he being told? Why not leave? Why not ask the Americans for a ticket out?
But will they grant it? Zaitzev wondered.
Surely they would. He could tell them about all manner of KGB operations in the West. He had the names of officers and the code names of agents—traitors to the Western governments, people whom they would definitely wish to eliminate.
Was that being an accessory to murder? he asked himself.
No, it was not. Those persons were traitors, after all. And a traitor was a traitor. . . .
And what does that make you, Oleg Ivanovich? The little voice in his mind asked, just to torment him.
But he was strong enough now to shake it off with a simple movement of his head left and right. Traitor? No, he was preventing a murder, and that was an honorable thing. And he was an honorable man.
But he still had to figure a way to do it. He had to meet with an American spy and say what he wanted.
Where and how?
It would have to be a crowded place, where people could bump into each other so naturally that even a counterspy from the Second Chief Directorate would not be able to see what was happening or hear what was being said.
And suddenly he realized: His own wife worked in such a place.
So he’d write it down on another blank message form and transfer it on the metro as he’d already done twice. Then he’d see if the Americans really wanted to play his game. He was in the Chairman’s seat now, wasn’t he? He had something they wanted, and he controlled how they could get it, and he would make the rules in this game, and they would have to play by those rules. It was just that simple, wasn’t it?
Yes, he told himself.
Wasn’t this rich? He’d be doing something the KGB had always wanted to do, dictate terms to the American CIA.
Chairman for a day, the communicator told himself. The words had a delicious taste to them.
IN LONDON, Cathy watched as two local ophthalmic surgeons worked on one Ronald Smithson, a bricklayer with a tumor behind his right eye. The X-rays showed a mass about half the size of a golf ball, which had been so worrisome that Mr. Smithson had only waited five weeks for the procedure to be done. That was maybe thirty-three days longer than it would have been at Hopkins, but considerably faster than was usual over here.
The two Moorefields surgeons were Clive Hood and Geoffrey Phillips, both experienced senior residents. It was a fairly routine procedure. After exposing the tumor, a sliver was removed for freezing and dispatch to Pathology—they had a good histopathologist on duty and he would decide if the growth was benign or malignant. Cathy hoped for the former, as the malignant variety of this tumor could be troublesome for its victims. But the odds were heavily on the patient’s side, she thought. On visual examination it didn’t look terribly aggressive, and her eye was right about 85 percent of the time. It was bad science to tell herself that, and she knew it. It was almost superstition, but surgeons, like baseball players, knew about superstition. That was why they put their socks on the same way every morning—pantyhose, in her case—because they just fell into a pattern of living, and surgeons were creatures of habit, and they tended to translate those dumb personal habits into the outcome of their procedures. So, with the frozen section off to Pathology, it was just a matter of excising the pinkish-gray encapsulated mass. . . .
“What time is it, Geoffrey?” Dr. Hood asked.
“Quarter to one, Clive,” Dr. Phillips reported, checking the wall clock.
“How about we break for lunch, then?”
“Fine with me. I could use something to eat. We’ll need to call in another anesthesiologist to keep Mr. Smithson unconscious,” their gas-passer observed.
“Well, call and get one, Owen, would you?” Hood suggested.
“Righto,” Dr. Ellis agreed. He left his chair at the patient’s head and walked to the wall phone. He was back in seconds. “Two minutes.”
“Excellent. Where to, Geoffrey?” Hood asked.
“The Frog and Toad? They serve a fine bacon, lettuce, and tomato with chips.”
“Splendid,” Hood said.
Cathy Ryan, standing behind Dr. Phillips, kept her mouth shut behind the surgical mask, but her china-blue eyes had gone wide. They were leaving a patient unconscious on the table while they went to lunch? Who were these guys, witch doctors?
The backup anesthesiologist came in just then, all gowned up and ready to take over. “Anything I need to know, Owen?” he asked Ellis.
“Entirely routine,” the primary gas-passer replied. He pointed to the various instruments measuring the patient’s vital signs, and they were all in the dead center of normal values, Cathy saw. But even so . . .
Hood led them out to the dressing room, where the four medics shucked their greens and grabbed their coats, then left for the corridor and the steps down to street level. Cathy followed, not knowing what else to do.
“So, Caroline, how do you like London?” Hood asked pleasantly.
“We like it a lot,” she answered, still somewhat shell-shocked.
“And your children?”
“Well, we have a very nice nanny, a young lady from South Africa.”
“One of our more civilized local customs,” Phillips observed approvingly.
The pub was scarcely a block away, west on City Road. A table was quickly found. Hood immediately fished out a cigarette and lit it. He noticed Cathy’s disapproving look.
“Yes, Mrs. Ryan, I know it’s not healthy and bad form for a physician, but we are all entitled to one human weakness, aren’t we?”
“You’re seeking approval from the wrong person,” she responded.
“Ah, well, I’ll blow the smoke away from you, then.” Hood had himself a chuckle as the waiter came over. “What sort of beer do you have here?” he asked him.
It was good that he smoked, Cathy told herself. She had trouble handling more than one major shock at a time, but at least that one gave her fair warning. Hood and Phillips both decided on John Courage. Ellis preferred Tetley’s. Cathy opted for a Coca-Cola. The docs mainly talked shop, as physicians often do.
For her part, Caroline Ryan sat back in her wooden chair, observing three physicians enjoying beer, and, in one case, a smoke, while their blissfully unconscious patient was on nitrous oxide in Operating Room #3.
“So, how do we do things here? Differently from Johns Hopkins?” Hood asked, as he stubbed out his cigarette.
Cathy nearly gagged, but decided not to make any of the comments running around her brain. “Well, surgery is surgery. I’m surprised that you don’t have very many CAT scans. Same for MRI and PET scanners. How can you do without them? I mean, at home, for Mr. Smithson, I wouldn’t even think of going in without a good set of shots of the tumor.”
“She’s right, you know,” Hood thought, after a moment’s reflection. “Our bricklayer chum could have waited several months more if we’d had a better idea of the extent of the growth.”
“You wait that long for a hemangioma?” Cathy blurted out. “At home, we take them out immediately.” She didn’t have to add that these things hurt to have inside your skull. It caused a frontal protrusion of the eyeball itself, sometimes with blurring of vision—which was why Mr. Smithson had gone to this local doctor to begin with. He’d also reported god-awful headaches that must have driven him mad until they’d given him a codeine-based analgesic.
“Well, here things operate a little differently.”
Uh-huh. That must be a good way to practice medicine, by the hou
r instead of by the patient. Lunch arrived. The sandwich was okay—better than the hospital food she was accustomed to—but she still couldn’t get over these guys drinking beer! The local beer was about double the potency of American stuff, and they were drinking a full pint of it—sixteen ounces! What the hell was this?
“Ketchup for your chips, Cathy?” Ellis slid the bottle over. “Or should I say Lady Caroline? I hear that His Highness is your son’s godfather?”
“Well, sort of. He agreed to it—Jack asked him on the spur of the moment in the hospital at the Naval Academy. The real godparents are Robby and Sissy Jackson. Robby’s a Navy fighter pilot. Sissy plays concert piano.”
“Was that the black chap in the papers?”
“That’s right. Jack met him when they were both teachers at the Naval Academy, and they’re very close friends.”
“Quite so. So the news reports were correct? I mean—”
“I try not to think about it. The only good thing that happened that night was that Little Jack arrived.”
“I quite understand that, Cathy,” Ellis responded around his sandwich. “If the news accounts were accurate, it must have been a horrid evening.”
“It wasn’t fun.” She managed a smile. “The labor and delivery was the good part.”
The three Brits had a good laugh at that remark. All had kids, and all had been there for the deliveries, which were no more fun for British women than for American women. Half an hour later, they headed back to Moorefields. Hood smoked another cigarette along the way, though he had the good manners do stay downwind of his American colleague. Ten more minutes, and they were back in the OR. The pinch-hitting gas-passer reported that nothing untoward had taken place, and surgery resumed.
“Want me to assist now?” Cathy asked hopefully.
“No, thank you, Cathy,” Hood replied. “I have it,” he added, bending over his patient, who, being soundly asleep, wouldn’t smell the beer on his breath.
Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, thought to congratulate herself for not screaming her head off, but mostly she leaned in as closely as she could to make sure these two Englishmen didn’t screw up and remove the patient’s ear by mistake. Maybe the alcohol would help steady their hands, she told herself. But she had to concentrate to keep her own hands from trembling.
