Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

Harding shook his head, as he stirred his morning tea. “No, the field officers feed it to us, and we try to determine what it means.”

“Frustrating?” Ryan wondered. Harding had been at the job much longer than he had.

“Frequently. I know the field officers sweat blood doing their jobs-and it can be physically dangerous to the ones who do not have a ‘legal’ cover-but we users of information can’t always see it from their perspective. As a result, they do not appreciate us as much as we appreciate them. I’ve met with a few of them over the years, and they are good chaps, but it’s a clash of cultures, Jack.”

The field guys are probably pretty good at analysis themselves, when you get down to it, Ryan thought. I wonder how often the analyst community really appreciates that? It was something for Ryan to slip into his mental do-not-forget file. The Agency was supposed to be one big happy team, after all. Of course it wasn’t, even at the Seventh Floor level.

“Anyway, we had this come in from East Germany.” Jack handed the folder across. “Some rumbles in their political hierarchy last week.”

“Those bloody Prussians,” Harding breathed, as he took it and flipped to the first page.

“Cheer up. The Russians don’t much like them either.”

“I don’t blame them a bit.”

ZAITZEV WAS DOING some hard thinking at his desk, as his brain worked on autopilot. He’d have to meet with his new American friend. There was danger involved, unless he could find a nice, anonymous place. The good news was that Moscow abounded with such places. The bad news was that the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB probably knew all of them. But if it was crowded enough, that didn’t matter.

What would he say?

What would he ask for?

What would he offer them?

Those were all good questions, weren’t they? The dangers would only increase. The best possible outcome would be for him to leave the Soviet Union permanently, with his wife and daughter.

Yes, that was what he’d ask for, and if the Americans said no, he’d just melt back into his accustomed reality, knowing that he’d tried. He had things they would want, and he’d make it clear to them that the price of that information was his escape.

Life in the West, he thought. All the decadent things the State preached to everyone who could read a newspaper or watch TV, all the awful things they talked about. The way America treated its minorities. They even showed pictures on TV of the slum areas-but they also showed automobiles. If America oppressed its blacks, why, then, did it allow them to purchase so many automobiles? Why did it permit them to riot in the streets? Had that sort of thing happened in the USSR, the government would have called in armed troops. So no, the state propaganda could not be entirely true, could it? And, besides, wasn’t he white? What did he care about some discontented blacks who could buy any car they wished? Like most Russians, he’d only seen black people on TV-his first reaction was to wonder if there really were such a thing as a chocolate man, but, yes, there were. KGB ran operations in Africa. But then he asked himself: Could he remember a KGB operation in America using a black agent? Not very many, perhaps one or two, and those had both been sergeants in the American army. If blacks were oppressed, how then did they get to become sergeants? In the Red Army, only the politically reliable were admitted to Sergeant School. So, one more lie uncovered-and that one only because he worked for KGB. What other lies was he being told? Why not leave? Why not ask the Americans for a ticket out?

But will they grant it? Zaitzev wondered.

Surely they would. He could tell them about all manner of KGB operations in the West. He had the names of officers and the code names of agents-traitors to the Western governments, people whom they would definitely wish to eliminate.

Was that being an accessory to murder? he asked himself.

No, it was not. Those persons were traitors , after all. And a traitor was a traitor. .

And what does that make you, Oleg Ivanovich? The little voice in his mind asked, just to torment him.

But he was strong enough now to shake it off with a simple movement of his head left and right. Traitor? No, he was preventing a murder, and that was an honorable thing. And he was an honorable man.

But he still had to figure a way to do it. He had to meet with an American spy and say what he wanted.

Where and how?

It would have to be a crowded place, where people could bump into each other so naturally that even a counterspy from the Second Chief Directorate would not be able to see what was happening or hear what was being said.

And suddenly he realized: His own wife worked in such a place.

So he’d write it down on another blank message form and transfer it on the metro as he’d already done twice. Then he’d see if the Americans really wanted to play his game. He was in the Chairman’s seat now, wasn’t he? He had something they wanted, and he controlled how they could get it, and he would make the rules in this game, and they would have to play by those rules. It was just that simple, wasn’t it?

Yes, he told himself.

Wasn’t this rich? He’d be doing something the KGB had always wanted to do, dictate terms to the American CIA.

Chairman for a day, the communicator told himself. The words had a delicious taste to them.

IN LONDON, Cathy watched as two local ophthalmic surgeons worked on one Ronald Smithson, a bricklayer with a tumor behind his right eye. The X-rays showed a mass about half the size of a golf ball, which had been so worrisome that Mr. Smithson had only waited five weeks for the procedure to be done. That was maybe thirty-three days longer than it would have been at Hopkins, but considerably faster than was usual over here.

The two Moorefields surgeons were Clive Hood and Geoffrey Phillips, both experienced senior residents. It was a fairly routine procedure. After exposing the tumor, a sliver was removed for freezing and dispatch to Pathology-they had a good histopathologist on duty and he would decide if the growth was benign or malignant. Cathy hoped for the former, as the malignant variety of this tumor could be troublesome for its victims. But the odds were heavily on the patient’s side, she thought. On visual examination it didn’t look terribly aggressive, and her eye was right about 85 percent of the time. It was bad science to tell herself that, and she knew it. It was almost superstition, but surgeons, like baseball players, knew about superstition. That was why they put their socks on the same way every morning-pantyhose, in her case-because they just fell into a pattern of living, and surgeons were creatures of habit, and they tended to translate those dumb personal habits into the outcome of their procedures. So, with the frozen section off to Pathology, it was just a matter of excising the pinkish-gray encapsulated mass. .

“What time is it, Geoffrey?” Dr. Hood asked.

“Quarter to one, Clive,” Dr. Phillips reported, checking the wall clock.

“How about we break for lunch, then?”

“Fine with me. I could use something to eat. We’ll need to call in another anesthesiologist to keep Mr. Smithson unconscious,” their gas-passer observed.

“Well, call and get one, Owen, would you?” Hood suggested.

“Righto,” Dr. Ellis agreed. He left his chair at the patient’s head and walked to the wall phone. He was back in seconds. “Two minutes.”

“Excellent. Where to, Geoffrey?” Hood asked.

“The Frog and Toad? They serve a fine bacon, lettuce, and tomato with chips.”

“Splendid,” Hood said.