Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

That wasn’t much to go on, was it? Ryan asked himself. He found himself wishing for a cigarette. Such things helped his thinking process sometimes, but there’d be hell to pay if Cathy smelled smoke in their house. But chewing gum, even bubble gum, just didn’t cut it at times like this.

He needed Jim Greer. The Admiral often treated him like a surrogate son-his own son had been killed as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, Ryan had learned along the way-giving him the occasional chance to talk through a problem. But he wasn’t that close to Sir Basil Charleston, and Simon was too near to him in age, if not quite in experience. And this was not a problem to be kicked around alone. He wished he could discuss it with his wife-doctors, he knew, were pretty smart-but that wasn’t allowed, and, anyway, Cathy didn’t really know the situation well enough to understand the threats. No, she’d grown up in a more privileged environment, daughter of a millionaire stock-and-bonds trader, living in a large Park Avenue apartment, all the best schools, her own new car for her sixteenth birthday, and all the hazards of life held off well beyond arm’s length. Not Jack. His dad had been a cop, mostly a homicide investigator, and, while his father hadn’t brought work home, Jack had asked enough questions to understand that the real world could be a place of unpredictable danger and that some people just didn’t think like real people. They were called Bad Guys-and they could be pretty goddamned bad. He’d never lived without a conscience. Whether he’d picked that up in distant childhood or Catholic schools, or it had been part of his genetic makeup, Jack didn’t know. He did know that breaking the rules was rarely a good thing, but he also knew that the rules were a product of reason, and reason was paramount, and so the rules could be broken if you had a good-a very goddamned good-reason for doing so. That was called judgment, and the Marines, oddly enough, had nurtured that particular flower. You made an estimate of the situation and thought through the options, and then you acted. Sometimes you had to do it in a very big hurry-and that was why officers were paid more than sergeants, though you were always well advised to listen to your gunny if you had the time.

But Ryan had none of those things now, and that was the bad news. There was no immediately identifiable threat in view, and that was the good news. But now he was in an environment in which the threats were not always readily visible, and it was his job to find them out by piecing the available information together. But there wasn’t much of that now either. Just a possibility, which he had to apply to the minds of people he didn’t know and would never meet, except as paper documents written up by other people he didn’t know. It was like being the navigator on a ship in Christopher Columbus’s little fleet, thinking land might be out there, but not knowing where or when he might come upon it-and hoping to God it wouldn’t be at night, in a storm, and that the land would not appear as a barrier reef to rip the bottom of his ship out. His own life was not in danger, but, as he’d been compelled by professional obligation to treat the money of his clients as his own, so he had to regard the life of a man in potential danger as having the importance of the life of his own child.

And that was where the itch came from. He could call Admiral Greer, Ryan thought, but it wasn’t even seven in the morning in Washington yet, and he’d be doing his boss no favor by waking him up to the trilling sound of his home STU. Especially as he had nothing to tell, just a few things to ask. So he leaned back in his chair and stared at the green screen of his Apple monitor, looking for something that just wasn’t there.

ED FOLEY WROTE IN HIS OFFICE:

PRIORITY: FLASH

TO: DDO/CIA

CC: DCI, DDI

FROM: COS MOSCOW

SUBJECT: RABBIT

TEXT FOLLOWS:

WE HAVE A RABBIT, A HIGHLY PLACED WALK-IN, CLAIMS TO BE COMMO OFFICER IN KGB CENTRE, WITH INFORMATION OF INTEREST TO USG. ESTIMATION: HE IS TRUTHFUL. 5/5.

URGENTLY REQUEST AUTHORIZATION FOR IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION FROM REDLAND. PACKAGE INCLUDES RABBIT WIFE AND DAUGHTER (3).

5/5 PRIORITY REQUESTED.

ENDS

There, Foley thought, that’s concise enough. The shorter the better with messages like this one-it provided less opportunity for the opposition to work on the text and crack the cipher, in the event they got their hands on it.

But the only hands that would touch this one were CIA. He was betting a lot on this op-dispatch. 5/5 meant that the estimated importance of the information available, as well as its presumed accuracy and the priority for his proposed action, was class-5, the highest. He gave an identical evaluation for the accuracy of the subject. Four aces-not the sort of dispatch you sent out every day. It was the classification he’d give to a message from Oleg Penkovskiy, or from Agent CARDINAL himself, and that was about as hot a potato as they came. He thought for a moment, wondering if he was guessing correctly, but, over his career, Ed Foley had learned to go with his instincts. He’d also measured his own thoughts against those of his wife, and her instincts were just as finely tuned. Their Rabbit-the CIA term of art for a person wanting a fast ticket out of whatever bad place he found himself in-claimed a lot, but he gave every sign of being what he claimed: the possessor of some very hot information. That made him a conscience defector, and thus pretty reliable. If he were a plant, a false-flag, he would have asked for money, because that’s how KGB thought defectors thought-and CIA had never done anything to disabuse them of that notion.

So, it just felt right, though “feels right” isn’t something you send by Diplomatic Courier to the Seventh Floor. They’d have to play along with this. They had to trust him. He was Chief of Station in Moscow, the CIA’s top field posting, and with that came a truckload of credibility. They’d have to weigh it against whatever misgivings they were feeling. If a summit meeting were scheduled, then that might queer the deal, but the President had no such plans, nor did SecState. So there was nothing in the way of Langley approving some form of action-if they thought he was right. .

Foley didn’t even know why he was questioning himself. He was The Man in Moscow, and that, by God, was that. He lifted the phone and punched three buttons.

“Russell,” a voice said.

“Mike, this is Ed. I need you here.”

“Right.”

It took a minute and a half. The door opened.

“Yeah, Ed?”

“Something for the bag.”

Russell checked his watch. “Not much margin, guy.”

“It’s short. I’ll have to come down with you on this one.”

“Well, let’s get it on, then, bro.” Russell walked out the door, with Foley in pursuit. Fortunately, the corridor was empty, and his office was not far.

Russell sat down in his swivel chair and lit up his cipher machine. Foley handed the sheet over. Russell clipped it to a fixture right over the keyboard. “Short enough,” he said approvingly, and started typing. He was nearly as skillful as the Ambassador’s own secretary, and he finished the job in a minute, including some padding-sixteen surnames taken at random from the Prague telephone book. When the new page came out of the machine, Foley took it, folded it, tucked it in a manila envelope, and sealed it. Wax was dripped over the closure, and Foley handed the envelope back to Russell.