Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“How’s work?”

“I did glasses all day. Got some surgery tomorrow morning, though. Wait a minute, here’s Sally.”

“Hi, Daddy,” a new and small voice said.

“Hi, Sally. How are you?”

“Fine.” What kids always said.

“What did you do today?”

“Miss Margaret and I colored.”

“Anything good?”

“Yeah, cows and horses!” she reported with considerable enthusiasm. Sally especially liked pelicans and cows.

“Well, I need to talk to Mommy.”

“Okay.” And Sally would think of this as a deep and weighty conversation, as she went back to the Wizzerdaboz tape in the living room.

“And how’s the little guy?” Jack asked his wife.

“Chewing on his hands, mostly. He’s in the playpen right now, watching the TV.”

“He’s easier than Sally was at that age,” Jack observed with a smile.

“He’s not colicky, thank God,” Mrs. Dr. Ryan agreed.

“I miss you,” Jack said, rather forlornly. It was true. He did miss her.

“I miss you, too.”

“Gotta get back to work,” he said next.

“When will you be home?”

“Couple of days, I think.”

“Okay.” She had to surrender to that unhappy fact. “Call me.”

“Will do, babe.”

“Bye.”

“See you soon. Love ya.”

“I love you, too.”

“Bye.”

“Bye, Jack.”

Ryan put the phone back in the cradle and told himself that he wasn’t designed for this kind of life. Like his father before him, he wanted to sleep in the same bed as his wife-had his father ever slept away from home? Jack wondered. He couldn’t remember such a night. But Jack had chosen a line of work in which that was not always possible. It was supposed to have been. He was an analyst who worked at a desk and slept at home, but somehow it wasn’t working out that way, God damn it.

Dinner was beef Wellington with Yorkshire pudding. Mrs. Thompson could have been head chef at a good restaurant. Jack didn’t know where the beef came from, but it seemed more succulent than the usual grass-fed British sort. Either she got the meat in a special place-they still had specialty butcher shops over here-or she really knew how to tenderize it, and the Yorkshire pudding was positively ethereal. Toss in the French wine, and this dinner was just plain brilliant-an adjective popular in the U.K.

The Russians attacked the food rather as Georgiy Zhukov had attacked Berlin, with considerable gusto.

“Oleg Ivan’ch, I have to tell you,” Ryan admitted in a fit of honesty, “the food in America is not always of this quality.” He’d timed this for Mrs. Thompson’s appearance at the dining-room door. Jack turned to her. “Ma’am, if you ever need a recommendation as a chef, you just call me, okay?”

Emma had a very friendly smile. “Thank you, Sir John.”

“Seriously, ma’am, this is wonderful.”

“You’re very kind.”

Jack wondered if she’d like his steaks on the grill and Cathy’s spinach salad. The key was getting good corn-gorged Iowa beef, which wasn’t easy here, though he could try the Air Force commissary at Greenham Commons. .

It took nearly an hour to finish dinner, and the after-dinner drinks were excellent. They even served Starka vodka, in a gesture of additional hospitality to their Russian guests. Oleg, Jack saw, really gunned it down.

“Even the Politburo does not eat so well,” the Rabbit observed, as dinner broke up.

“Well, we raise good beef in Scotland. This was Aberdeen Angus,” Nick Thompson advised, as he collected the plates.

“Fed on corn?” Ryan asked. They didn’t have that much corn over here, did they?

“I do not know. The Japanese feed beer to their Kobe beef,” the former cop observed. “Perhaps they do that up in Scotland.”

“That would explain the quality,” Jack replied with a chuckle. “Oleg Ivan’ch, you must learn about British beer. It’s the best in the world.”

“Not American?” the Russian asked.

Ryan shook his head. “Nope. That’s one of the things they do better than us.”

“Truly?”

“Truly,” Kingshot confirmed. “But the Irish are quite good as well. I do love my Guinness, though it’s better in Dublin than in London.”

“Why waste the good stuff on you guys?” Jack asked.

“Once a bloody Irishman, always a bloody Irishman,” Kingshot observed.

“So, Oleg,” Ryan asked, lighting up an after-dinner smoke, “is there anything different we ought to be doing-to make you comfortable, I mean?”

“I have no complaints, but I expect CIA will not give me so fine a house as this one.”

“Oleg, I am a millionaire and don’t live in a house this nice,” Ryan confirmed with a laugh. “But your home in America will be more comfortable than your apartment in Moscow.”

“Will I get car?”

“Sure.”

“Wait how long?” Zaitzev asked.

“Wait for what? To buy a car?”

Zaitzev nodded.

“Oleg, you can pick from any of hundreds of car dealerships, pick the car you like, pay for it, and drive it home-we usually let our wives pick the color,” Jack added.

The Rabbit was incredulous. “So easy?”

“Yep. I used to drive a Volkswagen Rabbit, but I kinda like the Jaguar now. I might get one when I get home. Nice engine. Cathy likes it, but she might go back to a Porsche. She’s been driving them since she was a teenager. Of course, it’s not real practical with two kids,” Ryan added hopefully. He didn’t like the German two-seater that much. Mercedes seemed to him a much safer design.

“And buy house, also easy?”

“Depends. If you buy a new house, yes, it’s pretty easy. To buy a house that somebody already owns, first you have to meet the owner and make an offer, but the Agency will probably help you with that.”

“Where will we live?”

“Anywhere you want.” After we pick your brain clean, Ryan didn’t add. “There’s a saying in America: ‘It’s a free country.’ It’s also a big country. You can find a place you like and move there. A lot of defectors live in the Washington area. I don’t know why. I don’t much like it. The summers can be miserable.”

“Beastly hot,” Kingshot agreed. “And the humidity is awful.”

“You think it’s bad there, try Florida,” Jack suggested. “But a lot of people love it down there.”

“And travel from one part to another, no papers?” Zaitzev asked.

For a KGB puke, this guy doesn’t know shit , Jack thought. “No papers,” Ryan assured him. “We’ll get you an American Express card to make that easy.” Then he had to explain credit cards to the Rabbit. It took ten minutes, it was so alien a concept to a Soviet citizen. By the end, Zaitzev’s head was visibly swimming.

“You do have to pay the bill at the end of the month,” Kingshot warned him. “Some people forget that, and they can get into serious financial trouble as a result.”

C WAS IN HIS Belgravia townhouse, sipping some Louis XIII brandy and chatting with a friend. Sir George Hendley was a colleague of thirty years’ standing. By profession a solicitor, he’d worked closely with the British government for most of his life, often consulting quietly with the Security Service and the Foreign Office. He had a “Most Secret” clearance, plus one into compartmented information. He’d been a confidant of several prime ministers over the years, and was considered as reliable as the Queen herself. He thought it just came along with the Winchester school tie.

“The Pope, eh?”

“Yes, George,” Charleston confirmed. “The PM wants us to look into protecting the man. Trouble is, I haven’t a clue at the moment. We can’t contact the Vatican directly about it.”