Tom Clancy: Red Rabbit

The man hesitated, and surely his mind was running at the speed of light through various options. There were drills for what to do when someone had a gun in one’s back, and he’d even practiced them in his intelligence academy, but here, now, twenty years later, with a real pistol against his spine, those lessons with play guns seemed a very distant thing, and could he bat the gun away so fast to keep it from destroying a kidney? Probably not. And so, his right hand came back just as he’d just been told. .

Ryan jumped at the sound of one-two-three pistol shots, not fifteen feet away. It was the sort of moment in which the world stops its turning, hearts and lungs stop functioning, and every mind has an instant of total clarity. Jack’s eyes were drawn to the sound. There was the Holy Father, and on his snow-white cassock was a spot of red, the size of a half-dollar, in the chest, and on his handsome face was the shock of something too fast for him yet to feel the pain, but his body was already collapsing, slumping and turning to the left, folding into itself as he started to go down.

It required all of Ryan’s discipline not to squeeze the trigger. His left hand snatched the pistol out of his subject’s hand.

“Stand still, you motherfucker. Don’t take a step, don’t turn, don’t do anything. Tom!” he called loudly.

“Sparrow, they have him, they have the gunman. The gunman is down on the pavement, must be ten people on him. The Pope took two, possibly three, hits.”

The reaction of the crowd was almost binary in character. Those closest to the shooter jumped on him like cats on a single unlucky mouse, and whoever the shooter was, he was invisible under a mound of tourists, perhaps ten feet from where Ryan, Sharp, and Strokov stood. The people immediately around Ryan were drawing away-rather slowly, actually. .

“Jack, let’s get our friend away from here, shall we?” And the three men moved into the escape arch, as Ryan had come to think of it.

“Sharp to all. We have Strokov with us. Leave the area separately and rendezvous at the embassy.”

A minute later, they were in Sharp’s official Bentley. Ryan got in back with the Bulgarian.

Strokov was clearly feeling better about things now. “What is this? I am member of Bulgarian embassy and-”

“We’ll remember you said that, old man. For now, you are a guest of Her Britannic Majesty’s government. Now, be a good chap and sit still, or my friend will kill you.”

“Interesting tool of diplomacy, this.” Ryan lifted the gun he’d taken from Strokov-East Bloc issue, with a large and awkward can-type silencer screwed on the business end. Sure as hell he’d been planning to shoot somebody.

But whom? Suddenly, Ryan wasn’t sure.

“Tom?”

“Yes, Jack?”

“Something was more wrong than we thought.”

“I think you’re right,” Sharp agreed. “But we have someone to clear that up for us.”

The drive back to the embassy illustrated what had been to Ryan a hidden talent. The Bentley had an immensely powerful engine, and Sharp knew how to use it, exploding away from the Vatican like a drag-racing top fuel eliminator. The car screeched to a halt in the small parking lot next to the embassy, and the three of them went in through a side door, and from there to the basement. With Ryan covering, Sharp handcuffed the Bulgarian and sat him in a wooden chair.

“Colonel Strokov, you must answer for Georgiy Markov,” Sharp told him. “We’ve been after you for some years now.”

Strokov’s eyes went as wide as doorknobs. As fast as the Bentley had gone, Tom Sharp’s mind had been driving faster still.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we have these photos of you leaving Heathrow Airport after killing our good friend on Westminster Bridge. The Yard was onto you, old boy, but you left minutes before they got permission to arrest you. That’s your bad luck. So, now, it was our job to arrest you. You will find us rather less civilized than the Yard, Colonel. You murdered a man on British soil. Her Majesty the Queen does not approve of that sort of thing, Colonel.”

“But-”

“Why are we bothering to talk with this bastard, Tom?” Ryan asked, catching on. “We have our orders, don’t we?”

“Patience, Jack, patience. He’s not going anywhere at the moment, is he?”

“I want to have a phone to call my embassy,” Strokov said-rather weakly, Ryan thought.

“Next he’ll want a lawyer,” Sharp observed humorously. “Well, in London you could have a solicitor to assist you, but we are not in London, are we, old boy?”

“And we are not Scotland Yard,” Jack added, taking his lead from Sharp. “I should have just done him at the church, Tom.”

Sharp shook his head. “Too noisy. Better we just let him. . disappear, Jack. I’m sure Georgiy would understand.”

It was clear from Strokov’s face that he was not accustomed to having men discuss his own fate in the way that he had so often determined for himself the fates of others. It was easier to be brave, he was finding, when he was the fellow holding the gun.

“Well, I wasn’t going to kill him, Tom, just sever his spine below the waist. You know, put him in a wheelchair the rest of his life, make him as incontinent as a baby. How loyal you suppose his government will be to him?”

Sharp nearly gagged on the thought. “Loyal, the Dirzhavna Sugurnost ? Please, Jack. Be serious. They’d just put him in a hospital, probably a mental hospital, and they’ll wipe his ass once or twice a day if he’s lucky.”

That one went through the hoop, Ryan saw. None of the East Bloc services were big on loyalty-down, even to those who’d shown a lot of loyalty-up. And Strokov knew it. No, once you screwed the pooch, you were in very deep shit, and your friends evaporated like the morning mist-and somehow Strokov didn’t strike Ryan as one who had all that many friends anyway. Even in his own service he’d be like an attack dog-valuable, perhaps, but not loved or trusted around the kids.

“In any case, while Boris and I discuss the future, you have a flight to catch,” Sharp told him. It was just as well. Ryan was running out of impromptu lines. “Give my regards to Sir Basil, will you?”

“You bet, Tommy.” Ryan left the room and took a deep breath. Mick King and the rest were waiting out there for him. Someone at Sharp’s official residence had packed his bags, and there was an embassy minibus waiting to take them all to the airport. There, a British Airways Boeing 737 was waiting, and they caught it just in time, all with first-class tickets. Ryan was next to King for the flight.

“What the hell,” Jack asked, “are we going to do with him?”

“Strokov? Good question,” Mick replied. “Are you sure you want to know the answer?”

ON THE TWO-HOUR FLIGHTback to Heathrow, Ryan availed himself of three miniatures of single-malt scotch, mainly because it was the only hard stuff they had. Somehow, his fear of flying receded into the background-it helped that the flight was so smooth that the aircraft might as well have been sitting still on the ground, but Ryan also had a head full of other thoughts.

“What went wrong, Mick?” Ryan asked over the Alps.

“What went wrong was that our friend Strokov wasn’t planning to do the assassination himself. He got someone else to do the actual shooting.”

“Then why was he carrying a pistol with a silencer on the front end?”

“You want a guess? I’d wager he was hoping to kill the assassin himself and then blend into the crowd and make his escape. You can’t read everyone’s mind, Jack,” King added.