Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“It’s a little more complex than that, but you’ve caught the essentials,” Harding agreed. “The thing is, I have to find a way to produce ten double-spaced pages that say it.”

“Yeah, in bureaucratese.” Ryan had never quite mastered that language, which was one of the reasons Admiral Greer liked him so much.

“We have our procedures, Jack, and the PM-indeed, all of the Prime Ministers-like to have it in words they understand.”

“The Iron Lady understands the same language as a stevedore, I bet.”

“Only when she speaks those words, Sir John, not when others try to speak them to her.”

“I suppose. Okay,” Ryan had to concede the point. “What documents do we need?”

“We have an extensive dossier file on Alexandrov. I’ve already called down for it.”

So this day would be occupied with creative writing, Ryan decided. It would have been more interesting to look into their economy, but instead he’d have to help do a prospective, analytical obituary for a man whom nobody had liked, and who’d probably died intestate anyway.

THE PREPARATION WAS even easier than he’d hoped. Haydock had expected the Russians to be pleased, and, sure enough, one call to his contact in the Ministry of Transportation had done the trick. At ten the next morning, he, Paul Matthews, and a Times photographer would be at the Kiev station to do a story about Soviet state rail and how it compared to British Rail, which needed some help, most Englishmen thought, especially in upper management.

Matthews probably suspected that Haydock was a “six” person, but had never let on, since the spook had been so helpful feeding stories to him. It was the usual way of creating a friendly journalist-even taught at the SIS Academy-but it was officially denied to the American CIA. The United States Congress passes the most remarkable and absurd laws to hamstring its intelligence services, the Brit thought, though he was sure the official rules were broken on a daily basis by the people in the field. He’d violated a few of the much looser rules of his own mother service. And had never been caught, of course. Just as he had never been caught working agents on the streets of Moscow. .

“HI, TONY.” Ed Foley extended a friendly hand to the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. He wondered if Prince knew how much Ed despised him. But it probably went both ways. “What’s happening today?”

“Looking for a statement by the Ambassador on the death of Mikhail Suslov.”

Foley laughed. “How about he’s glad the nasty old cocksucker is dead?”

“Can I quote you on that?” Prince held up his scribble pad.

Time to back up. “Not exactly. I have no instructions in that matter, Tony, and the boss is tied up on other things at the moment. No time loose to see you until later afternoon, I’m afraid.”

“Well, I need something, Ed.”

“ ‘Mikhail Suslov was an important member of the Politburo, and an important ideological force in this country, and we regret his untimely passing.’ That good enough?”

“Your first quote was better and a lot more truthful,” the Times correspondent observed.

“You ever meet him?”

Prince nodded. “Couple of times, before and after the Hopkins docs worked on his eyes-”

“Is that for real? I mean, I heard a few stories about it, but nothing substantive.” Foley acted the words out.

Prince nodded again. “It was true enough. Glasses like Coke-bottle bottoms. Courtly gent, I thought. Well-mannered and all that, but there was a little ‘tough guy’ underneath. I guess he was the high priest of communism, like.”

“Oh, took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, did he?”

“You know, there was something of the aesthete about him, like he really was a priest of a sort,” Prince said, after a moment’s reflection.

“Think so?”

“Yeah, something otherworldly about the guy, like he could see things the rest of us couldn’t, like a priest or something. He sure enough believed in communism. Didn’t apologize for it, either.”

“Stalinist?” Foley asked.

“No, but thirty years ago he would have been. I can see him signing the order to kill somebody. Wouldn’t lose any sleep over it-not our Mishka.”

“Who’s going to replace him?”

“Not sure,” Prince admitted. “My contacts say they don’t know.”

“I thought he was tight with another Mike, that Alexandrov guy,” Foley offered, wondering if Prince’s contacts were as good as he thought they were. Fucking with Western reporters was a game for the Soviet leadership. It was different in Washington, where a reporter had power to use over politicians. That didn’t apply here. The Politburo members didn’t fear reporters at all-much the reverse, actually.

Prince’s contacts weren’t all that great: “Maybe, but I’m not sure. What’s the talk here?”

“Haven’t been to the lunch room yet, Tony. Haven’t heard the gossip yet,” Foley parried. You don’t really expect a tip from me, do you?

“Well, we’ll know by tomorrow or day after.”

But it would look good for you if you were the first reporter to make the prediction, and you want me to help you, right? Not is this lifetime, Foley thought, but then he had to reconsider. Prince would not be a particularly valuable friend, but perhaps a usable one, and it never made sense to make enemies for the fun of it. On the other hand, to be too helpful to the guy might suggest either that Foley was a spook or knew who the spooks were, and Tony Prince was one of those guys who liked to talk and tell people how smart he is. . No, it’s better for Prince to think I’m dumb, because he’ll tell everyone he knows how smart he is and how dumb I am.

The best cover of them all, he’d learned at The Farm, was to be thought a dullard, and while it was a little hurtful to his ego to play that game, it was helpful to the mission, and Ed Foley was a mission-oriented guy. So. . fuck Prince and what he thinks. I’m the guy in this city who makes a difference.

“Tell you what, I’ll ask around-see what people think.”

“Fair enough.” Not that I expected anything useful from you, Prince thought a little too loudly.

He was less skillful than he thought at concealing his feelings. He would never be a good poker player, the Chief of Station thought, seeing him out the door. He checked his watch. Lunchtime.

LIKE MOST EUROPEAN stations, Kiev’s was a pale yellow-just like a lot of old royal palaces, in fact, as if in the early nineteenth century there had been a continent-wide surplus of mustard, and some king or other had liked the color, and so everyone had painted his palace that way. It never happened in Britain, thank God, Haydock thought. The ceiling was glass set in iron frames to let the light in but, as in London, the glass was rarely, if ever, cleaned, and was instead coated with soot from long-gone steam engines and their coal-fired boiler fires.

But Russians were still Russians. They came to the platform carrying their cheap suitcases, and they were almost never alone, mostly in family groups, even if only one of them was leaving, so that proper goodbyes could be experienced, with passionate kisses, male-to-female, and male-to-male, which always struck the Englishman as peculiar. But it was a local custom, and all local customs were peculiar to visitors. The train to Kiev, Belgrade, and Budapest was scheduled to leave at 1:00 P.M. on the dot, and the Russian railroads, like the Moscow Metro, kept to a fairly precise schedule.

Just a few feet away, Paul Matthews was conversing with a representative of the Soviet state railway, talking about the motive power-it was all electric, since Comrade Lenin had decided to bring electricity and eliminate lice all across the USSR. The former, strangely, had proved easier than the latter.