Red Rabbit jr-9

by Tom Clancy

  The Station Chief’s mind, of course, was on the Rabbit, and now it returned to his wife’s suggestion of getting the package out without KGB’s knowing they were gone. It was during the Transformers tape that it came back to him. You couldn’t have a murder without a body, but with a body you damned sure had a murder. But what if the body wasn’t the right one?

  The essence of magic, he’d once heard Doug Henning say, was controlling the perception of the audience. If you could determine what they saw, then you could also dictate what they thought they saw, and from that precisely what they would remember seeing, and what they would then tell others. The key to that was in giving them something that they expected to see, even if it was unbelievable. People—even intelligent people—believed all manner of impossible things. It was sure as hell true in Moscow, where the rulers of this vast and powerful country believed in a political philosophy as out of tune with contemporary reality as the Divine Right of Kings. More to the point, they knew it was a false philosophy, and yet they commanded themselves to believe it as though it were Holy Scripture written in gold ink by God’s own hand. So these people could be fooled. They worked pretty hard to fool themselves, after all.

  Okay, how to fool them? Foley asked himself. Give the other guy something he expected to see, and he’d see it, whether it was really there or not. They wanted the Sovs to believe that the Rabbit and his family had… not skipped town, but had… died?

  Dead people, so Captain Kidd had supposedly said, tell no tales. And neither did the wrong dead people.

  The Brits did this once in World War II, didn’t they? Foley wondered. Yes, he’d read the book in high school, and even then, at Fordham Prep, the operational concept had impressed him. Operation MINCEMEAT, it had been called. That concept had been very elegant indeed, as it had involved making the opposition feel smart, and people everywhere loved to feel smart…

  Especially the dumb ones, Foley reminded himself. And the German intelligence services in World War II hadn’t been worth the powder to blow them to hell. They were so inept that the Germans would have been better advised to do without them entirely—Hitler’s astrologer would have been just as good, and probably a lot cheaper in the long run.

  But the Russians, on the other hand, were pretty damned smart—smart enough that you wanted to be very careful playing head games with them, but not so smart that if they found something they expected to find, they would toss it in the trash can and go looking for what they didn’t expect. No, that was just human nature, and even the New Soviet Man they kept trying to build was subject to human nature, much as the Soviet government tried to breed it out of him.

  So, how would we go about that? he wondered quietly, as on the television a diesel truck-tractor changed into a two-legged robot, the better to fight off the forces of evil—whoever they were…

  Oh. Yeah. It was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? You just had to give them what they needed to see to prove that the Rabbit and his little hutch-mates were dead, to give them what dead people always left behind. That would be a major complication, but not so vast of one as to be impossible to arrange. But they’d need assistance. That thought did not make Ed Foley feel secure. In his line of work, you trusted yourself more than you trusted anyone or anything else—and after that, maybe, others of your own organization, but as few of them as possible. After that, when it became necessary to trust people in some other organization, you really gritted your teeth. Okay, sure, on his pre-mission brief at Langley, he’d been told that Nigel Haydock could be relied upon as a very tame—and very able—Brit, and a pretty good field spook working for a closely allied service, and, okay, sure, he liked the look of the guy, and, okay, sure, they’d hit it off fairly well. But, God damn it, he wasn’t Agency. But Ritter had told him that, in a pinch, Haydock could be relied upon for a helping hand, and the Rabbit himself had told him that Brit comms hadn’t been cracked yet, and he had to trust the Rabbit to be an honest player. Foley’s life wasn’t riding on that, but damned sure his career was.

  Okay, but what—no, how—to work this one. Nigel was the Commercial Attaché at the Brit Embassy, right across the river from the Kremlin itself, a station that went back to the czars, and one that had supposedly pissed Stalin off royally, to see the Union Jack every morning from his office window. And the Brits had helped recruit, and had later run GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the agent who’d prevented World War III and, along the way, recruited CARDINAL, the brightest jewel in CIA’s crown. So if he had to trust anyone, it would have to be Nigel. Necessity was the mother of many things, and if the Rabbit came to grief, well, they’d know that SIS was penetrated. Again. He realized he’d have to apologize to Nigel just for thinking this way, but this was business, not personal.

  Paranoia, Eddie, the COS told himself. You can’t suspect everybody.

  The hell I can’t!

  But, probably, he knew, Nigel Haydock thought the same thing about him. That was just how the game was played.

  And if they got the Rabbit out, it was proof positive that Haydock was straight. No way in hell that Ivan would let this bunny skip town alive. He just knew too much.

  Did Zaitzev have any idea at all of the danger he was walking into? He trusted CIA to get him and his family out of Dodge City alive…

  But with all the information to which he had access, wasn’t he making an informed judgment?

  Jesus, there were enough interlocking wheels in this to make a bicycle factory, weren’t there?

  The tape ended, and Master Truck Robot—or whatever the hell his name was—transformed himself back into a truck and motored off to the sound of “Transformers, more than meets the eye…” It was sufficient to the moment that Eddie liked it. So, he’d arranged some quality time with his son and some good think time for himself—not a bad Sunday evening on the whole.

  * * *

  “So, what’s the plan, Arthur?” Greer asked.

  “Good question, James,” the DCI answered. They were watching TV in his den, the Orioles and the White Sox playing in Baltimore. Mike Flanagan was pitching, and looked to be on his way to another Cy Young Award, and the rookie shortstop the Orioles had just brought up was playing particularly well, and looked to have a big-league future. Both men were drinking beer and eating pretzels, as though they were real people enjoying a Sunday afternoon of America’s pastime. That was partly true.

  “Basil will help. We can trust him,” Admiral Greer opined.

  “Agreed. Whatever problems he had are a thing of the past, and he’ll compartmentalize it as tight as the Queen’s jewel box. But we’ll want one of our people involved at his end.”

  “Who, do you suppose?”

  “Not the COS London. Everybody knows who he is, even the cabdrivers.” There was no disputing that. The London Station Chief had been in the spook business for a very long time, and was more an administrator now than an active field officer. The same could be said of most of his people, for whom London was a sinecure job, and mainly a sunset posting for people looking forward to retirement. They were good men all, of course, just ready to hang up the spikes. “Whoever it is, he’ll have to go to Budapest, and he’ll have to be invisible.”

  “So, somebody they don’t know.”

  “Yep.” Moore nodded as he took a bite of his sandwich and reached for some chips. “He won’t have to do very much, just let the Brits know he’s there. Keep ‘em honest, like.”

  “Basil’s going to want to interview this guy.”

  “No avoiding that,” Moore agreed. “And he’s entitled to dip his beak, too.” That was a line he had picked up as a judge on a rare organized-crime appeals case. He and his fellow jurists in Austin, Texas, had laughed about it for weeks, after rejecting the appeal, 5-0.

  “We’ll want one of our people in for that, too.”

  “Bet your bippy, James,” Moore agreed again.

  “And better that our guy is based over there. Timing might get a little tough.”

  “You bet.”<
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  “How about Ryan?” Greer asked. “He’s way the hell under the radar. Nobody knows who he is—he’s one of mine, right? He doesn’t even look like a field officer.”

  “His face has been in the papers,” Moore objected.

  “You think KGB reads the society page? At most they might have noticed him as a rich wannabe writer, and if he has a file, it’s in some sub-basement at The Centre. That ought not to be a problem.”

  “You think so?” Moore wondered. For sure, this would give Bob Ritter a bellyache. But that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. Bob had visions of taking over all CIA operations, and, good man that he was, he would never be DCI, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that Congress didn’t much like spooks with Napoleonic complexes. “Is he up to it?”

  “The boy’s an ex-Marine and he knows how to think on his feet, remember?”

  “He has paid his dues, James. He doesn’t take a leak sitting down,” the DCI conceded.

  “And all he has to do is keep an eye on our friends, not play spook on enemy soil.”

  “Bob will have a conniption fit.”

  “It won’t hurt our purposes to keep Bob in his place, Arthur.” Especially, he didn’t add, if this works out. And work out it should. Once out of Moscow, it ought to be a fairly routine operation. Tense, of course, but routine.

  “What if he screws things up?”

  “Arthur, Jimmy Szell dropped the ball in Budapest, and he’s an experienced field officer. I know, probably not even his fault, probably just bad luck, but it proves the point. A lot of this racket is just luck. The Brits will be doing all the real work, and I’m sure Basil will pick a good team.”

  Moore weighed the thought quietly. Ryan was very new at CIA, but he was a rising star. What helped was his adventure, not yet a year old, where twice he’d faced loaded guns and gotten it done anyway. One nice thing about the Marine Corps, they didn’t turn out many pussies. Ryan could think and act on his feet, and that was a nice thing to have in your pocket. Better yet, the Brits liked him. He’d seen the comments from Sir Basil Charleston on Ryan’s tenure at Century House—he was taking quite a liking to the young American analyst. So this was a chance to bring a new talent along, and though he wasn’t a graduate of The Farm, that didn’t mean he was a babe in the woods. Ryan had been through the woods, and he’d killed himself a couple of wolves along the way, hadn’t he?

  “James, it’s a little outside the box, but I won’t say no for that reason. Okay, cut him loose. I hope your boy doesn’t wet his pants.”

  “What did Foley call this operation?”

  “BEATRIX, he said. You know, like Peter Rabbit.”

  “Foley, that boy is going places, Arthur, and his wife, Mary Patricia, she is a real piece of work.”

  “There we surely agree, James. She’d make a great rodeo rider, and he’d be a pretty good town marshal west of the Pecos,” the DCI said. He liked to see some of the young talent the Agency was producing. Where they all came from—well, they came from a lot of different places, but they all seemed to have the same fire in the belly that he’d had thirty years before, working with Hans Tofte. They weren’t terribly different from the Texas Rangers he’d learned to admire as a little boy—the smart, tough people who did what had to be done.

  “How do we get the word to Basil?”

  “I called Chip Bennett last night, told him to have his people gin up some one-timers. Ought to be at Langley this evening. We’ll fly them to London on the 747 tonight, and shoot some on from there to Moscow. So we’ll be able to communicate securely, if not conveniently.”

  * * *

  That, in fact, was just about done. A computer system used for taking down the dot-dash signals of International Morse Code was connected to a highly sensitive radio tuned to a frequency used by no human agency, transforming the garbage noise into Roman letters. One of the technicians at Fort Meade remarked along the way that the intergalactic noise they were copying down was the residual static produced by the Big Bang, for which Penzias and Miller had collected a Nobel Prize a few years before, and that was as random as things got—unless you could decode it to learn what God thought, which was beyond the skills even of NSA’s Z-division. A dot-matrix printer put the letters to carbon-paper sets—three copies of each, the original to the originators, and a copy each for CIA and NSA. They all contained enough letters to transcribe the first third of the Bible, and each page and each line were alphanumerically identified to make decryption possible. Three people separated the pages, made sure that the sets were properly arranged, and then slipped them into ring binders for some semblance of ease of use. Then two were handed off to an Air Force NCO, who drove the CIA copies off to Langley. The lead technician wondered what was so goddamned important to require such massive one-time pads, which NSA had long before gotten past with its institutional worship of electronic technology, but his was not—ever—to reason why, was it? Not at Fort Meade, Maryland, it wasn’t.

  * * *

  Ryan was watching TV, trying to get used to the British sitcoms. He’d grown to like British humor—they’d invented Benny Hill, after all. That guy had to be mentally disabled to do some of the things he did—but the regular series TV took a little getting used to. The signals were just different, and though he spoke English as well as any American, the nuances here—exaggerated, of course, on TV—had a subtle dimension that occasionally slipped by him. But not his wife, Jack observed. His wife was laughing hard enough to gag, and at things he barely comprehended. Then came the trilling note of his STU in his upstairs den. He trotted upstairs to get it. It wouldn’t be a wrong number. Whoever had set his number up—British Telecom, a semiprivate corporation that did exactly what the government told it to do—would have chosen a number so far off the numerical trail that only an infant could dial his secure phone by mistake.

  “Ryan,” he said, after his phone mated up with the one at the other end.

  “Jack, Greer here. How’s Sunday evening in Jolly Old England?”

  “It rained today. I didn’t get to cut the grass,” Ryan reported. He didn’t mind much. He hated cutting grass, having learned as a child that however much you sliced it down, the goddamned stuff just grew back in a few days to look scraggly again.

  “Well, here the Orioles are leading the White Sox five-two after six innings. I think your team looks good for the pennant.”

  “Who in the National League?”

  “If I had to bet, I’d say the Phillies all the way, my boy.”

  “I got a buck says you’re wrong, sir. My O’s look good from here.” Which isn’t there, damn it. Since losing the Colts, he’d transferred his loyalty to baseball. The game was more interesting, tactically speaking, though lacking the manly combat of NFL football. “So, what’s happening in Washington on a Sunday afternoon, sir?”

  “Just wanted to give you a heads-up. There’s a signal on its way to London that’s going to involve you. New tasking. It’ll take maybe three or four days.”

  “Okay.” It perked his interest, but he’d have to see what it was before he got overly excited about it. Probably some new analysis that they wanted him for. Those were usually economics, because the Admiral liked his way of working through the numbers games. “Important?”

  “Well, we’re interested in what you can do with it” was all the DDI wanted to say.

  This guy must teach foxes how to outsmart dogs and horses. Good thing he wasn’t a Brit. The local aristocracy would shoot him for ruining their steeplechases, Ryan told himself. “Okay, sir, I’ll be looking for it. I don’t suppose you can give me a play-by-play?” he asked with a little hope in his voice.

  “That new shortstop—Ripken, is it?—just doubled down the left-field line, drove in run number six, one out, bottom of the seventh.”

  “Thank you for that, sir. It beats Fawlty Towers.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s what they call a comedy over here, Admiral. It’s funny if you c
an understand it.”

  “Brief me in next time I come over,” the DDI suggested.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Family okay?”

  “We’re all just fine, sir, thank you for asking.”

  “Okay. Have a good one. See ya.”

  “What was that?” Cathy asked in the living room.

  “The boss. He’s sending me something to work on.”

  “What exactly?” She never stopped trying.

  “He didn’t say, just a heads-up that I have something new to play with.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what it was?”

  “The Admiral likes his surprises.”

  “Hmph” was her response.

  * * *

  The courier settled into his first-class seat. The package in his carry-on bag was tucked under the seat in front, and he had a collection of magazines to read. Since he was covert, not an official diplomatic courier, he could pretend to be a real person, a disguise that he’d shed at Heathrow’s Terminal Four immigration desk, there to catch an embassy car for the ride into Grosvenor Square. Mainly he looked forward to a nice pub and some Brit beer before he flew back home in a day and a half. It was a waste of talent and training for the newly hatched field officer, but everyone had to pay his dues, and this, for a guy fresh out of The Farm, was just that. He consoled himself with the thought that whatever it was, it had to be a little bit important. Sure, Wilbur. If it were all that important, he’d be on the Concorde.