by Tom Clancy
“That’s nice, honey,” Ryan said from behind the FT. The Japanese 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 ambassador 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 bastard! 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 nonentity, saying that the Soviet Union was the center of evil in the world! That fucking 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 counter-intelligence 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 assumed 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 hell 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 citizenship, 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 god.
Is there a god? 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 God. 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 Kami’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?
Chapter 5.
Getting close
An Early Riser, Yuriy Vladimirovich was showered, shaved, dressed, and eating his breakfast before seven in the morning. For him it was bacon, three scrambled eggs, and thickly cut Russian bread with Danish butter. The coffee was German in origin, just like the kitchen appliances his apartment boasted. He had the morning Pravda, plus selected cuttings from Western newspapers, translated by KGB linguists, and some briefing material prepared in the early hours of the morning at The Centre and hand-delivered to his flat every morning at six. There was nothing really importan
t today, he saw, lighting his third cigarette and drinking his second cup of coffee. All routine. The American President hadn’t rattled his sabre the night before, which was an agreeable surprise. Perhaps he’d dozed off in front of the TV, as Brezhnev often did.
How much longer would Leonid continue to head the Politburo? Andropov wondered. Clearly the man would not retire. If he did, his children would suffer, and they enjoyed being the royal family of the Soviet Union too much to let their father do that. Corruption was never a pretty thing. Andropov did not suffer from it himself—indeed, that was one of his core beliefs. That was why the current situation was so frustrating. He would—he had to—save his country from the chaos into which it was falling. If I live long enough, and Brezhnev dies soon enough, that is. Leonid Ilyich was clearly in failing health. He’d managed to stop smoking—at the age of seventy-six, which, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself, was fairly impressive—but the man was in his dotage. His mind wandered. He had trouble remembering things. He occasionally dozed off at important meetings, to the dismay of his associates. But his grasp of power was a death-grip. He’d engineered the downfall of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev through a masterful series of political maneuvers, and nobody in Moscow forgot that tidbit of political history—a trick like that was unlikely to work on someone who’d engineered it himself. No one had even suggested to Leonid that he might wish to slow down—if not actually step slightly aside, then at least let others undertake some of his more administrative duties and allow him to concentrate his abilities on the really major questions. The American President was not all that much younger than Brezhnev, but he had lived a healthier life, or perhaps came from hardier peasant stock.
In his reflective moments, it struck Andropov as strange that he objected to this sort of corruption. He saw it precisely as such, but only rarely asked himself why he saw it so. In those moments, he actually did fall back on his Marxist beliefs, the very ones he’d discarded years ago, because even he had to fall back on some sort of ethos, and that was all he had. Stranger still, it was an area in which Marx and Christianity actually overlapped in their beliefs. Must have been an accident. After all, Karl Marx had been a Jew, not a Christian, and whatever religion he rejected or embraced ought to have been his own, not one foreign to him and his heritage. The KGB Chairman dismissed the entire line of thought with an annoyed shake of the head. He had enough on his professional plate, even as he finished what lay before him. There was a discreet knock on the door.
“Come,” Andropov called, knowing who it was by the sound.
“Your car is ready, Comrade Chairman,” the head of the security detail announced.
“Thank you, Vladimir Stepanovich.” He rose from the table, lifted his suit jacket, and shrugged into it for the trip to work.
This was a routine fourteen-minute drive through central Moscow. His ZIL automobile was entirely handmade, actually similar in appearance to the American Checker taxicab. It ran straight down the center of the expansive avenues, in a broad lane kept clear by officers of the Moscow Militia exclusively for senior political officials. They stood out there all day in the heat of summer and the punishing cold of winter, one cop every three blocks or so, making sure no one obstructed the way for longer than it took to make a crossing turn. It made the drive to work as convenient as taking a helicopter, and far easier on the nerves.
Moscow Centre, as KGB was known throughout the world of intelligence, was located in the former home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, and a mighty company it must have been to build such an edifice. Andropov’s car pulled through the gate into the inner courtyard, right up to the bronze doors, where his car door was yanked open, and he alit to the official salutes from uniformed Eighth Directorate men. Inside, he walked to the elevator, which was held for him, of course, and then rode to the top floor. His detail examined his face to ascertain his mood—as such men did all over the world—and, as usual, saw nothing: He guarded his feelings as closely as a professional cardplayer. On the top floor was a walk of perhaps fifteen meters to his secretary’s door. That was because Andropov’s office had no door of its own. Instead, there was a clothes dresser in the anteroom, and the entrance to his office lay within that. This chicanery dated back to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s own chief of clandestine services, who’d had a large and hardly unreasonable fear of assassination and had come up with this security measure, lest a commando team reach all the way into NKVD headquarters. Andropov found it theatrical, but it was something of a KGB tradition and, in its way, roundly entertaining for visitors—it had been around too long to be a secret from anyone able to get this far, in any case.
His schedule gave him fifteen free minutes at the beginning of the day to review the papers on his desk before the daily briefings began, followed by meetings that were scheduled days or even weeks in advance. Today it was almost all internal-security matters, though someone from the Party Secretariat was scheduled before lunch to discuss strictly political business. Oh, yes, that thing in Kiev, he remembered. Soon after becoming KGB Chairman, he’d found that Party affairs paled in importance next to the agreeably broad canvas he had here at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The charter of KGB, insofar as it had such a limitation, was to be the “Sword and Shield” of the Party. Hence its primary mission, theoretically, was to keep an eye on Soviet citizens who might not be as enthusiastic as they ought toward their own country’s government. Those Helsinki Watch people were becoming a major annoyance. The USSR had made an agreement in the Finnish capital seven years before, regarding the monitoring of human rights, and they evidently took it seriously. Worse, they had attracted the on-and-off attention of the Western news media. Reporters could be a huge nuisance, and you couldn’t rough them up the way you used to—not all of them, anyway. The capitalist world treated them like demigods, and expected everyone else to do the same, when everyone knew they were all spies of some kind. It was amusing to see how the American government overtly forbade its intelligence services from adopting journalistic covers. Every other spy service in the world did it. As if the Americans would follow their own lily-white laws, which had been passed only to make other countries feel good about having The New York Times snooping around their countries. It wasn’t even worth a dismissive snort. Preposterous. All foreign visitors in the Soviet Union were spies. Everyone knew it, and that was why his Second Chief Directorate, whose job was counterespionage, was so large a part of the KGB.
Well, the problem that had cost him an hour of sleep the night before wasn’t all that different, was it? Not when you got down to it. Yuriy Vladimirovich punched a button on his intercom.
“Yes, Comrade Chairman,” his secretary—a man, of course—answered immediately.
“Send Aleksey Nikolayi’ch in to see me.”
“At once, comrade.” It took four minutes by Andropov’s desk clock.
“Yes, Comrade Chairman.” Aleksey Nikolayevich Rozhdestvenskiy was a senior colonel in the First Chief—”Foreign”—Directorate, a very experienced field officer who’d served extensively in Western Europe, though never in the Western Hemisphere. A gifted field officer and runner-of-agents, he’d been bumped up to The Centre for his street-smart expertise and to act more or less as an in-house expert for Andropov to consult when he needed information on field operations. Not tall, not especially handsome, he was the sort of man who could turn invisible on any city street in the world, which partly explained his success in the field.
“Aleksey, I have a theoretical problem. You’ve worked in Italy, as I recall.”
“For three years in Station Rome, Comrade Chairman, yes, under Colonel Goderenko. He’s still there, as rezident.”
“A good man?” Andropov asked.
He gave an emphatic nod of the head. “A fine senior officer, yes, Comrade Chairman. He runs a good station. I learned much from him.”
“How well does he know the Vatican?”
That made Rozhdestvenskiy blink. “There is not much to be learned there. We d
o have some contacts, yes, but it has never been a matter of great emphasis. The Catholic Church is a difficult target to infiltrate, for the obvious reasons.”
“What about through the Orthodox Church?” Andropov asked.
“There are some contacts there, yes, and we have had some feedback, but rarely anything of value. More along the line of gossip and, even then, nothing we cannot get through other channels.”
“How good is security around the Pope?”
“Physical security?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked, wondering where this was going.
“Precisely,” the Chairman confirmed.
Rozhdestvenskiy felt his blood temperature drop a few degrees. “Comrade Chairman, the Pope does have some protection about him, mainly of the passive sort. His bodyguards are Swiss, in plainclothes—that comic-opera group that parades around in striped jumpsuits is mostly for show. They occasionally have to grab a believer overcome by his proximity to the head priest, that sort of thing. I am not even sure if they carry weapons, though I must assume that they do.”
“Very well. I want to know how difficult it might be to get physically close to the Pope. Do you have any ideas?”
Ah, Rozhdestvenskiy thought. “Personal knowledge? No, comrade. I visited Vatican City several times when I was in Rome. The art collection there, as you may imagine, is impressive, and my wife is interested in such things. I took her there perhaps half a dozen times. The area crawls with priests and nuns. I confess I never looked about for security provisions, but nothing was readily apparent, aside from what you’d expect—measures against thefts and vandalism, that sort of thing. There are the usual museum guards, whose main function seems to be to tell people where the lavatories are.
