Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“And that’s why you decided to leave?”

“KGB want kill innocent man, Ryan. I see plot grow. Andropov himself say do this. I handle the messages. How can man stop KGB?” he asked. “I cannot stop KGB, but I will not help KGB kill priest-he is innocent man, yes?”

Ryan’s eyes looked down at the floor. “Yes, Oleg Ivan’ch, he is.” Dear God in heaven . He checked his watch. He had to get this information out PDQ, but nobody was awake at Langley yet.

“BLOODY HELL,” Sir Basil Charleston said into his secure phone. “Is this reliable information, Alan?”

“Yes, sir, I believe it to be entirely truthful. Our Rabbit seems a decent chap, and a rather clever one. He seems to be motivated exclusively by his conscience.” Next, Kingshot told him about the first revelation of the morning, MINISTER.

“We need to get ‘five’ looking into that.” The British Security Service-once known as MI-5-was the counterespionage arm of their government. They’d need a little more specific information to run that putative traitor down, but they already had a starting point. Twenty years, was it? What a productive traitor that fellow had to be, Sir Basil thought. Time for him to see Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Charleston had spent years cleaning up his own shop, once a playground for the KGB. But no more, and never bloody again, the Knight Commander of the Bath swore to himself.

WHOM DO I TELL? Ryan wondered. Basil would doubtless call Langley-Jack would make sure of that, but Sir Basil was a supremely reliable guy. Next came a more difficult question: What the hell can I/we do about this?

Ryan lit another smoke to consider that one. It was more police work than intelligence work. .

And the central issue would be classification.

Yeah, that’s going to be the problem. If we tell anybody, the word will get out somehow, and then somebody will know we have the Rabbit-and guess what, Jack? The Rabbit is now more important to the CIA than the life of the Pope.

Oh, shit , Ryan thought. It was like a trick of jujitsu, like a sudden reversal of polarity on the dial of a compass. North was now south. Inside was now outside. And the needs of American intelligence might now supersede the life of the Bishop of Rome. His face must have betrayed what he was thinking.

“What is amiss, Ryan?” the Rabbit asked. It seemed to Jack a strange word for him to know.

“The information you just gave us. We’ve been worrying about the safety of the Pope for a couple of months, but we had no specific information to make us believe his life was actually at risk. Now you have given that information to us, and someone must decide what to do with it. Do you know anything at all about the operation?”

“No, almost nothing. In Sofia the action officer is the rezident , Colonel Bubovoy, Ilya Fedorovich. Senior colonel, he is-Ambassador, can I say? To Bulgarian DS. This Colonel Strokov, this name I know from old cases. He is officer assassin for DS. He do other things, too, yes, but when man need bullet, Strokov deliver bullet, yes?”

This struck Ryan as something from a bad movie, except that in the movies the big, bad CIA was the one with a special assassination department, like a cupboard with vampire bats inside. When the director needed somebody killed, he’d open the door, and one of the bats flew out and made its kill, then flew back docilely to the cupboard and hung upside down until the next man needed killing. Sure, Wilbur. Hollywood had everything figured out, except that government bureaucracies all ran on paper-nothing happened without a written order of some sort, because only a piece of white paper with black ink on it would cover somebody’s ass when things went bad-and if somebody really needed killing, someone inside the system had to sign the order, and who would sign that kind of order? That sort of thing became a permanent record of something bad, and so the signature blank would be bucked all the way to the Oval Office, and once there it just wasn’t the sort of paper that would find its way into the Presidential Library that memorialized the person known inside the security community as National Command Authority. And nobody in between would sign the order, because government employees never stuck their necks out-that wasn’t the way they were trained.

Except me , Ryan thought. But he wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood. He hadn’t even killed Sean Miller in very hot blood, and while that was a strange thing to be proud of, it beat the hell out of the alternative.

But Jack wasn’t afraid of sticking it out. The loss of his government pay-check would be a net profit for John Patrick Ryan. He could go back to teaching, perhaps at a nice private university that paid halfway decently, and he’d be able to dabble with the stock market on the side, something with which his current job interfered rather badly. .

What the hell am I going to do? The worst part of all was that Ryan considered himself to be a Catholic. Maybe he didn’t make it to mass every week. Maybe they’d never name a church after him, but, God damn it, the Pope was someone he was compelled by his lengthy education-Catholic schools all the way, including almost twelve years of Jesuits-to respect. And added to that was something equally important-the education he’d received at the gentle hands of the United States Marine Corps at Quantico’s Basic School. They’d taught him that when you saw something that needed doing, you damned well did it, and you hoped that your senior officers would bless it afterward, because decisive action had saved the day more than once in the history of the Corps. “It’s a lot easier to get forgiveness than permission” was what the major who’d taught that particular class had said, then added with a smile, “But don’t you people ever quote me on that.” You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience-but experience often came from bad decisions.

You’re over thirty now, Jack, and you’ve had experience that you never wanted to get, but be damned if you haven’t learned a hell of a lot from it . He would have been at least a captain by now, Jack thought. Maybe even a junior major, like Billy Tucker, who’d taught that class. Just then, Kingshot walked back into the room.

“Al, we have a problem,” Ryan told him.

“I know, Jack. I just told Sir Basil. He’s thinking about it.”

“You’re a field spook. What do you think?”

“Jack, this is well over my level of expertise and command.”

“You turn your brain off, Al?” Ryan asked sharply.

“Jack, we cannot compromise our source, can we?” Kingshot shot back. “That is the paramount consideration here and now.”

“Al, we know that somebody is going to try to whack the head of my church. We know his name, and Nick has a photo album on the fucker, remember?” Ryan took a deep breath before going on. “I am not going to sit here and do nothing about it,” Ryan concluded, entirely forgetting the presence of the Rabbit for the moment.

“You do nothing? I risk my life for this and you do nothing?” Zaitzev demanded, catching on to the rapid-fire English exchanged in front of him. His face showed both outrage and puzzlement.

Al Kingshot handled the answer. “That is not for us to say. We cannot compromise our source-you, Oleg. We must protect you as well.”

“Fuck!” Ryan stood and walked out of the room. But what the hell could he actually do? Jack asked himself. Then he went looking for the secure phone and dialed a number from memory.

“Murray,” a voice said after the STUs married up.

“Dan, it’s Jack.”

“Where you been? I called two nights ago and Cathy said you were in Germany on NATO business. I wanted to-” Ryan just cut him off.