Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“I’ll remember you said that, James,” Ritter promised, with a thin smile of his own. Such jokes were usually limited to the Seventh Floor at Langley.

A DEPARTMENT STORE was a department store anywhere in the world, and GUM was supposedly Moscow’s counterpart to Macy’s in New York. Theoretically, Ed Foley thought, walking in the main entrance. Just like the Soviet Union was theoretically a voluntary union of republics, and Russia theoretically had a constitution that existed over and above the will of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And there was theoretically an Easter Bunny, too, he thought, looking around.

They took the escalator to the second floor-the escalator was of the old sort, with thick wooden runners instead of the metal type which had long since taken over in the West. The fur department was over on the right, toward the back, and, on initial visual inspection, the selection there wasn’t all that shabby.

Best of all, so was Ivan, wearing the same clothes that he’d worn on the metro. Maybe his best suit? Foley wondered. If so, he’d better get his ass to a Western country as soon as possible.

Other than the at-best-mediocre quality of the goods here, a department store was a department store, though here the departments were semi-independent shops. But their Ivan was smart. He’d suggested a meet in a part of the place where there would certainly be high-quality goods. For millennia, Russia had been a place of cold winters, a place where even the elephants had needed fur coats, and since 25 percent of the human blood supply goes to the brain, men needed hats. The decent fur hats were called shapkas, roughly tubular fur head coverings that had little in the way of precise shape, but did serve to keep the brain from freezing. The really good ones were made out of muskrat-mink and sable went only to the most expensive specialty stores, and those were mainly limited to well-to-do women, the wives and/or mistresses of Party bosses. But the noble muskrat, a swamp creature that smelled-well, the smell was taken out of the skin somehow, lest the wearer of the hat be mistaken for a tidal wetland garbage dump-had very fine fur or hair or whatever it was, and was a good insulator. So, fine, a rat with a high R rating. But that wasn’t the important part, was it?

Ed and Mary Pat could also communicate with their eyes, though the bandwidth was pretty narrow. The time of day helped. The winter hats had just been stocked in the store, and the fall weather didn’t have people racing to buy new ones yet. There was just one guy in a brown jacket, and Mary Pat moved in that direction, after shooing her husband away, as though to buy him something as a semi-surprise.

The man was shopping, just as she was, and he was in the hat department. He’s not a dummy, whoever he is, she thought.

“Excuse me,” she said in Russian.

“Yes?” His head turned. Mary Pat checked him out; he was in his early thirties, but looked older than that, as life in Russia tended to age people more rapidly, even more rapidly than New York City. Brown hair, brown eyes-rather smart-looking in the eyes. That was good.

“I am shopping for a winter hat for my husband, as you suggested,” she added in her very best Russian, “on the metro.”

He didn’t expect it to be a girl, Mrs. Foley saw at once. He blinked hard and looked at her, trying to square the perfect Russian with the fact that she had to be an American.

“On the metro?”

“That’s right. My husband thought it better that I should meet you, rather than he. So. .” She lifted a hat and riffled the fur, then turned to her new friend, as though asking his opinion. “So, what do you wish of us?”

“What do you mean?” he blurted back at her.

“You have approached an American and requested a meeting. Do you want to assist me in buying a hat for my husband?” she asked very quietly indeed.

“You are CIA?” he asked, his thought now back under semicontrol.

“My husband and I work for the American government, yes. And you work for KGB.”

“Yes,” he replied, “in communications, Central Communications.”

“Indeed?” She turned back to the gable and lifted another shapka. Holy shit, she thought, but was he telling the truth, or did he just want a cheap ticket to New York?

“Really? How can I be sure of that?”

“I say it is so,” he replied, surprised and slightly outraged that his honesty should come into question. Did this woman think he was risking his life as a lark? “Why do you talk to me?”

“The message blanks you passed on the metro did get my attention,” she said, holding up a dark brown hat and frowning, as though it were too dark.

“Madam, I work in the Eighth Chief Directorate.”

“Which department?”

“Simple communications processing. I am not part of the signals intelligence service. I am a communications officer. I transmit outgoing signals to the various rezidenturas, and when signals come to my desk from out in the field, I forward them to the proper recipients. As a result, I see many operational signals. Is that sufficient to your purpose?” He was at least playing the game properly, gesturing to the shapka and shaking his head, then pointing to another, its fur dyed a lighter brown, almost a blond color.

“I suppose it might be. What do you ask of us?”

“I have information of great importance-very great importance. In return for that information, I require passage to the West for myself, my wife, and my daughter.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Three years and seven months. Can you deliver what I require?”

That question shot a full pint of adrenaline into her bloodstream. She’d have to make this decision almost instantly, and with that decision she was committing the whole power of CIA onto a single case. Getting three people out of the Soviet Union was not going to be a picnic.

But this guy works in MERCURY, Mary Pat realized. He’d know things a hundred well-placed agents couldn’t get to. Ivan here was custodian of the Russian Crown Jewels, more valuable even than Brezhnev’s balls, and so-

“Yes, we can get you and your family out. How soon?”

“The information I have is very time-sensitive. As soon as you can arrange. I will not reveal my information until I am in the West, but I assure you the information is a matter of great importance-it is enough to force me into this action,” he added as an additional dangle.

Don’t overplay your hand, Ivan, she thought. An ego-driven agent would tell them he had the launch codes for the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, when he just had his mother’s recipe for borscht, and getting the bastard out would be a waste of resources that had to be used with the greatest care. But, against that possibility, Mary Pat had her eyes. She looked into this man’s soul, and saw that whatever he was, “liar” probably wasn’t among them.

“Yes, we can do this very quickly if necessary. We need to discuss place and methods. We cannot talk any longer here. I suggest a meeting place to discuss details.”

“That is simple,” Zaitzev replied, setting the place for the following morning.

You’re in a hurry. “What name do I call you?” she finally asked.

“Oleg Ivan’ch,” he answered automatically, then realized he’d spoken the truth, in a situation where dissimulation might have served him better.

“That is good. My name is Maria,” she replied. “So, which shapka would you recommend?”

“For your husband? This one, certainly,” Zaitzev said, handing over the dirty-blond one.

“Then I shall buy it. Thank you, comrade.” She fussed over the hat briefly, then walked off, checking the price tag, 180 rubles, more than a month’s pay for a Moscow worker. To effect the purchase, she handed the shapka over to one clerk, then walked to a cash register, where she paid her cash-the Soviets hadn’t discovered credit cards yet-and got a receipt in return, which she handed to the first clerk, who gave her the hat back.