Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Flowers in a junkyard,” Ryan suggested.

“Exactly, Jack. Very good.” Harding fished for his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match. “So, how do you like the beer?”

“Excellent, much better than at home.”

“I don’t know how you Americans can stomach it. But your beef is better than ours.”

“Corn-fed. Turns out better meat than grass does,” Ryan sighed. “I’m still getting used to life over here. Every time I start feeling comfortable, something hits me like a snake in high grass.”

“Well, you’ve had less than a week to get used to us.”

“My kids will be talking funny.”

“Civilized, Jack, civilized,” Harding observed with a good laugh. “You Yanks do ravage our language, you know.”

“Yeah, right.” Pretty soon he’d refer to baseball as “rounders,” which was a girls’ game over here. They didn’t know dick about a good fastball.

FOR HIS PART, Ed Foley found himself suddenly outraged by the bugs that he knew had to be in his apartment. Every time he made love to his wife, some KGB desk weenie was listening in. Probably a nice perverse diversion for their counterespionage spooks, but it was, by God, the Foleys’ love life, and was nothing sacred? He and Mary Pat had been briefed in on what to expect, and his wife had actually joked about it, on the flight over-you couldn’t bug airplanes. She’d called it a way of showing those barbarians how real people lived, and he’d laughed, but here and now it wasn’t so goddamned funny. It was like being an animal in the goddamned zoo, with people watching and laughing and pointing. Would KGB keep a log of how often he and his wife got it on? They might, he thought, looking for marital difficulties as a pretext for recruiting him or Mary Pat. Everyone did it. So, they’d have to make love regularly just to discourage that possibility, though playing a reverse false-flag did have interesting theoretical possibilities of its own. . No, the Station Chief decided, it’d be an unnecessary complication for their stay in Moscow, and being Chief of Station was already complex enough.

Only the ambassador, the defense attaché, and his own officers were allowed to know who he was. Ron Fielding was the overt COS, and his job was to wiggle like a good worm on the hook. When parking his car, he’d occasionally leave his sun visor down or rotated ninety degrees; sometimes he’d wear a flower in his buttonhole and take it out halfway down a block as though signalling someone or, best of all, he’d bump into people, simulating a brush-pass. That sort of thing could make the Second Chief Directorate counterspooks go nuts-race after innocent Muscovites, perhaps snatch a few up for interrogations, or put a squad of officers on the poor random bastard to watch everything he did. If nothing else, it forced KGB to waste assets on fool’s errands, chasing after phantom geese. Best of all, it persuaded them that Fielding was a clumsy Station Chief. It always made the other side feel good, and that was always a smart move for CIA. The game he played made other power moves look like a game of Chutes and Ladders.

But the fact that there were probably bugs in his bedroom pissed him off. And he couldn’t do the usual things to contravene them, like playing the radio and talking under it. No, he couldn’t act like a trained spook. He had to be dumb, and playing dumb required brains and discipline and the utmost thoroughness. Not a single mistake was allowed. That one mistake could get people killed, and Ed Foley had a conscience. It was a dangerous thing for a field spook to have, but it was impossible not to have. You had to care about your agents, those foreign nationals who worked for you and fed you information. All-well, nearly all-had problems. The big one here was alcoholism. He expected every agent he ran into to be a boozer. Some were quite mad. Most were people who wanted to get even-with their bosses, with the system, with the country, with communism, with their spouses, with the whole perverse world. Some, a very few, might be genuinely attractive people. But Foley would not pick them. They would pick him. And he’d have to play the cards he was dealt. The rules of this game were hard and damned harsh. His life was safe. Oh, sure, he might get a little roughed up-or Mary Pat-but they both had diplomatic passports, and to seriously mess with him meant that somewhere in America some Soviet diplomat of fairly high rank might get a rough time at the hands of some street thugs-who might or might not be trained law-enforcement personnel. Diplomats didn’t like such things, and so it was avoided; in fact, the Russians played by the rules more faithfully than the Americans did. So he and his wife were safe, but their agents, if and when blown, would get less mercy than a mouse would get from a particularly sadistic cat. There was still torture here, still interrogations that lasted into long hours. Due process of law was whatever the government at the time felt like it was. And the appeals process was limited to whether or not the shooter’s pistol was loaded. So he had to treat his agents, whether drunks, whores, or felons, like his own children, changing their diapers, getting them a bedtime glass of water, and wiping their noses.

All in all, Ed Foley thought, it was one hell of a game. And it kept him awake at night. Could the Russians tell that? Were there cameras in the walls? Wouldn’t that be perverse? But American technology wasn’t that advanced, so he was damned sure the Russians’ wasn’t. Probably. Foley reminded himself that there were smart people here, and a lot of them worked for KGB.

What amazed him was that his wife slept the sleep of the just, lying there next to him. She really was a better field spook than he was. She took to it like a seal to ocean water, chasing after her fish. But what about the sharks? He supposed it was normal for a man to worry about his wife, however capable she might be as a spook. That was just how men were programmed, as she was programmed to be a mother. Mary Pat looked like an angel to him in the dim light, the cute little sleep-smile she had, and the way her baby-fine blond hair always got messed up the instant she lay down on the pillow. To the Russians, she was a potential spy, but to Edward Foley she was his beloved wife, workmate, and mother of his child. It was so strange that people could be so many different things, depending on who looked at them, and yet all were true. With that philosophical thought-Christ, he did need sleep! — Ed Foley closed his eyes.

“SO, WHAT DID HE SAY?” Bob Ritter asked.

“He’s not terribly pleased,” Judge Moore replied, to nobody’s surprise. “But he understands that there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. He’ll probably make a speech next week about the nobility of the workingman, especially the unionized sort.”

“Good,” Ritter grunted. “Let him tell the air-traffic controllers.” The DDO was the master of the cheap shot, though he had the good sense not to say such things in the wrong company.

“Where’s the speech?” the DDI asked.

“Chicago, next week. There’s a large ethnic Polish population there,” Moore explained. “He’ll talk about the shipyard workers, of course, and point out that he once headed his own union. I haven’t seen the speech yet, but I expect it will be mainly vanilla, with a few chocolate chips tossed in.”

“And the papers will say that he’s courting the blue-collar vote,” Jim Greer observed. Sophisticated as they purported to be, the newspapers didn’t catch on to much until you presented it to them with french fries and ketchup. They were masters of political discourse, but they didn’t know shit about how the real game was played until they were briefed-in, preferably with single-syllable words. “Will our Russian friends notice?”