Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

Your mind sure is wandering, Foley, the Chief of Station told himself. Another half hour. He’d leave the embassy on time and catch the metro, with his topcoat open and loose around him, and just wait and see. He headed off to the men’s room. Occasionally, his bladder got as excited as his intellect.

ACROSS TOWN, Zaitzev took his time. He’d be able to write on only one message blank-throwing one away in plain view was too dangerous, the burn bag could not be trusted, and he could hardly light one up in his ashtray-and so he mentally composed his message, then rethought the words, then rethought them again, and again, and again.

The process took him more than an hour in full, and then he was able to write it up surreptitiously, fold it, and tuck it into his cigarette pack.

LITTLE EDDIE SLID his favorite Transformers tape into the VCR. Mary Pat watched idly, behind her son’s rapt attention on the living room floor. Then it hit her.

That’s what I am, she realized. I transform myself from ditsy blonde housewife to CIA spy. And I do it seamlessly. The thought appealed to her. She was giving the Soviet Bear a peptic ulcer, hopefully a bleeding one that wouldn’t be fixed by drinking milk and taking Rolaids. In another forty minutes, Ed will find out if his new friend really wants to play and, if he wants to play, I’ll have to work the agent. I’ll hold his hand and lead him along and take his information and send it off to Langley.

What will he give us? she wondered. Something nice and juicy? Does he work in their communications center, or does he just have access to a blank message pad? Probably a lot of those in The Centre. . well, maybe, depending on their security procedures. Those would be pretty stringent. Only a very few people would be trusted with KGB signals. .

And that was the worm dangling on the hook, she knew, watching a Kenworth diesel tractor turn into a two-legged robot. This Christmas, they’d have to start buying those toys. She wondered if Little Eddie would need help transforming them.

THE TIME CAME. Ed would leave the embassy door exactly on time, which would be a comfort to his shadow, if any. If there was, he’d notice a green tie again, and think that the earlier one was not all that unusual-not unusual enough to be any sort of signal for an agent he might be working. Even the KGB couldn’t think every embassy employee was a spook, Foley told himself. Despite the paranoia that was pandemic in the Soviet Union, even they knew the rules of the game, and his friend from the The New York Times had probably told his own contacts that Foley was a dumb son of a bitch who hadn’t even made it as a police reporter in the Big Apple, where the busy police made that field about as difficult as watching TV on a weekend. The best possible cover for a spook was to be too dumb, and what better person to set it up for him than that arrogant ass, Anthony -never just plain Tony-Prince.

Out on the street, the air was cool with approaching autumn. Ed wondered if the Russian winter was all it was cracked up to be. If so, you could always dress for cold weather. It was heat that Foley detested, though he remembered playing stickball out on the streets, and the sprinklers on the tops of some of the fire hydrants. The innocence of youth was far behind him. A damned far way behind, the chief of station reflected, checking his watch as he entered the metro station. As before, the efficiency of the metro worked for him, and he entered the usual subway car.

THERE, ZAITZEV THOUGHT, maneuvering that way. His American friend was doing everything exactly as before, reading his paper, his right hand on the grab rail, his raincoat hanging loose around him. . and in a minute or two, he was standing next to him.

FOLEY’S PERIPHERAL VISION was still working, The shape was there, dressed exactly as before. Okay, Ivan, make your transfer. . Be careful, boy, be very careful, his mind said, knowing that this sort of thing was going to be too dangerous to sustain. No, they’d have to set up a dead-drop somewhere convenient. But first they’d have to do a meet, and he’d let Mary Pat handle that one for him, probably. She just had a better disguise. .

ZAITZEV WAITED UNTIL the train slowed. Bodies shifted as it did so, and he reached quickly in and out of the offered pocket. Then he turned away, slowly, not so far as to be obvious, just a natural motion easily explained by the movement of the metro car.

YES! WELL DONE, IVAN. Every fiber of his being wanted to turn and eyeball the guy, but the rules didn’t allow that. If there was a shadow in the car, those people noticed that sort of thing, and it wasn’t Ed Foley’s job to be noticed. So he waited patiently for his subway stop, and this time he turned right, away from Ivan, and made his way off the car, onto the platform, and up to the cool air on the street.

He didn’t reach into his pocket. Instead, he walked all the way home, as normal as a sunset on a clear day, into the elevator, not reaching in even then, because there could well be a video camera in the ceiling.

Not until he got into his flat did Foley pull out the message blank. This time it was anything but blank, covered with black ink letters-as before, written in English. Whoever Ivan was, Foley reflected, he was educated, and that was very good news, wasn’t it?

“Hi, Ed.” A kiss for the microphones. “Anything interesting happen at work?”

“The usual crap. What’s for dinner?”

“Fish,” she answered, looking at the paper in her husband’s hand and giving an immediate thumbs-up.

Bingo! They both thought. They had an agent. A no-shit spy in KGB. Working for them.

THEY DID WHAT?”Jack asked.

“They broke for lunch in the middle of surgery and went to a pub and had a beer each!” Cathy replied, repeating herself.

“Well, so did I.”

“You weren’t doing surgery! ”

“What would happen if you did that at home?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Cathy said. “You’d probably lose your license to practice medicine-after Bernie amputated your fucking hands with a chain saw!”

That got Jack’s attention. Cathy didn’t talk like that.

“No shit?”

“I had a bacon, lettuce, and tom-AH-to sandwich with chips-that’s french fries for us dumb colonials. I had a Coke, by the way.”

“Glad to hear it, doctor.” Ryan walked over to give his wife a kiss. She appeared to need it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she went on. “Oh, maybe out in Bumfuck, Montana, they do stuff like that, but not in a real hospital.”

“Cathy, settle down. You’re talking like a stevedore.”

“Or maybe a foulmouthed ex-Marine.” She finally managed a smile. “Jack, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Those two eye cutters are technically senior to me, but if they ever tried that sort of shit at home, they’d be finished. They wouldn’t even let them work on dogs.”

“Is the patient okay?”

“Oh, yeah. The frozen section came back cold as ice-totally benign, not malignant-and we took out the growth and closed him back up. He’ll be just fine-four or five days for recovery. No impairment to his sight, no more headaches, but those two bozos operated on him with booze in their systems!”

“No harm, no foul, babe,” he suggested, lamely.

“Jack, it isn’t supposed to be that way.”

“So report them to your friend Byrd.”