Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Stick it, Dan. I was somewhere else doing something else. Listen up. I need some information and I need it in a hurry,” Jack announced, lapsing briefly back into the voice of an officer of Marines.

“Shoot,” Murray replied.

“I need to know the Pope’s schedule for the next week or so.” It was Friday. Ryan hoped the Bishop of Rome didn’t have anything hopping for the weekend.

“What?” The FBI official’s voice communicated predictable puzzlement.

“You heard me.”

“What the hell for?”

“Can’t tell you-oh, shit,” Ryan swore, and then went on. “Dan, we have reason to believe there’s a contract out on the Pope.”

“Who?” Murray asked.

“It ain’t the Knights of Columbus,” was all Ryan felt comfortable saying.

“Shit, Jack. Are you serious?”

“What the hell do you think?” Ryan demanded.

“Okay, okay. Let me make some phone calls. What exactly am I free to say?”

That question stopped Ryan cold in his tracks. Think, boy, think . “Okay, you’re a private citizen and a friend of yours is going to Rome and he wants to eyeball His Holiness. You want to know what’s the best way to accomplish that mission. Fair enough?”

“What’s Langley say about this?”

“Dan, frankly, I don’t care a rat’s ass right now, okay? Please, get me that information. I’ll call back in an hour. Okay?”

“Roger that, Jack. One hour.” Murray hung up. Ryan knew he could trust Murray. He was himself a Jesuit product, like so many FBI agents, in his case a Boston College alum, just like Ryan, and so whatever additional loyalties he had would work in Ryan’s favor. Breathing a little easier, Ryan returned to the ducal library.

“Whom did you call, Jack?” Kingshot asked.

“Dan Murray at the embassy, the FBI rep. You ought to know him.”

“The Legal Attaché-yes, I do. Okay, what did you ask?”

“The Pope’s schedule for the coming week.”

“But we don’t know anything yet,” Kingshot objected.

“Does that make you feel any better, Al?” Jack inquired delicately.

“You did not compro-”

“Compromise our source? You think I’m that stupid?”

The Brit spook nodded to the logic of the moment. “Very well. No harm done, I expect.”

The next hour of the first interview returned to routine things. Zaitzev fleshed out for the Brits what he knew about MINISTER. It was sufficiently juicy to give them a good start on IDing the guy. It was immediately clear that Kingshot wanted his hide on the barn door. There was no telling how much good information KGB was getting from him-it was definitely a him, Zaitzev made clear, and “him” was probably a senior civil servant in Whitehall, and soon his residence would be provided by Her Majesty’s Government for the indefinite future-“at the Queen’s pleasure” was the official phrase. But Jack had more pressing concerns. At 2:20 in the afternoon, he went back to the STU in the next room.

“Dan, it’s Jack.”

The Legal Attaché spoke without preamble. “He has a busy week ahead, the embassy in Rome tells me, but the Pope is always in the open on Wednesday afternoons. He parades around in his white jeep in St. Peter’s Square, right in front of the cathedral, for the people to see him and take his blessing. It’s an open car, and, if you want to pop a cap, that sounds to me like a good time to try-unless they have a shooter infiltrated all the way inside. Maybe a cleaning man, plumber, electrician, hard to say, but you have to assume that the inside staff is pretty loyal, and that people keep an eye on them.”

Sure , Jack thought, but those are the guys best suited to do something like this. Only the people you trust can really duck you. Damn. The best people to look into this were with the Secret Service, but he didn’t know anybody in there, and even if he did, getting them into the Vatican bureaucracy-the world’s oldest-would require divine intervention.

“Thanks, pal. I owe you one.”

“ Semper fi, bud. Will you be able to tell me more? This sounds like a major case you’re working on.”

“Probably not, but it’s not for me to say, Dan. Gotta run. Later, man.” Ryan hung up and reentered the library.

The sun was over the yardarm, and a wine bottle had just appeared, a French white from the Loire Valley, probably a nice old one. There was dust on the bottle. It had been there for a while, and the cellar downstairs would not be stocked with Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose.

“Zaitzev here has all manner of good information on this MINISTER chap.” Just a matter of dredging it up, Kingshot didn’t add. But tomorrow they’d have skilled psychologists sitting in, using their pshrink skills to massage his memories-maybe even hypnosis. Ryan didn’t know if that actually worked or not; though some police forces believed in the technique, a lot of defense lawyers foamed at the mouth over it, and Jack didn’t know who was right on that issue. On the whole, it was a shame that the Rabbit wasn’t able to come out with photos taken of KGB files, but it would have been asking a lot to request that the guy place his neck not so much on the block as inside the guillotine head-holder and shout for the operator to come over. And so far, Zaitzev had impressed Ryan with his memory.

Might he be a plant, a false defector sent West to give the Agency and others false information? It was possible, but the proof of that pudding would lie in the quality of the agents he identified to the Western counterintelligence services. If MINISTER was really giving out good information, the quality of it would tell the Security Service if he were that valuable an agent. The Russians were never the least bit loyal to their agents-they’d never , not once, tried to bargain for an American or British traitor rotting away in prison, as America had often done, sometimes successfully. No, the Russians considered them expendable assets, and such assets were. . expended, with little more than a covert decoration that would never be worn by its “honored” recipient. It struck Ryan as very strange. The KGB was the most professional of services in so many ways-didn’t they know that showing loyalty to an agent would help make other agents willing to take greater chances? Perhaps it was a case of national philosophy overruling common sense. A lot of that went on in the USSR.

By 4:00 local time, Jack could be sure that somebody would be at work at Langley. He asked one more question of the Rabbit.

“Oleg Ivan’ch, do you know if KGB can crack our secure phone systems?”

“I think not. I am not sure, but I know that we have an agent in Washington-code name CRICKET-whom we have asked to get information on your STU telephones for us. As yet he has not been able to provide what our communications people wish. We are afraid that you can read our telephone traffic, however, and so we mainly avoid using telephones for important traffic.”

“Thanks.” And Ryan went back to the STU in the next room. The next number was another he had memorized.

“This is James Greer.”

“Admiral, this is Jack.”

“I am told the Rabbit is in his new hutch,” the DDI said by way of a greeting.

“That is correct, sir, and the good news is that he believes our comms are secure, including this one. The earlier fears appear to have been exaggerated or misinterpreted.”

“Is there bad news?” the DDI asked warily.

“Yes, sir. Yuriy Andropov wants to kill the Pope.”

“How reliable is that assertion?” James Greer asked at once.

“Sir, that’s the reason he skipped. I’ll have chapter and verse to you in a day or two at most, but it’s official, there is a no-shit KGB operation to assassinate the Bishop of Rome. We even have the operation designator. You will want to let the Judge in on that, and probably NCA will want to know as well.”