Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

But the damned thing would not get done until he did it, and three pages wasn’t much to show for a full day in his den. He was time-sharing his brain with another problem, and that wasn’t a useful productivity tool.

“How did it go?” Cathy asked, suddenly appearing at his shoulder.

“Not too bad,” he lied.

“Where are you up to?”

“May. Halsey is fighting off his skin disease.”

“Dermatitis? That can be nasty, even today,” Cathy noted. “It can drive the poor patients crazy.”

“Since when are you a dermatologist?”

“M.D., Jack, remember? I may not know it all, but I know most of it.”

“All that, and humble, too.” He made a face.

“Well, when you get a cold, don’t I take good care of you?”

“I suppose.” She did, actually. “How are the kids?”

“Fine. Sally had a good time on the swings, and she made a new friend, Geoffrey Froggatt. His father’s a solicitor.”

“Great. Isn’t there anything but lawyers around here?”

“Well, there’s a doctor and a spook,” Cathy pointed out. “Trouble is, I can’t tell people what you do, can I?”

“So what do you tell them?” Jack asked.

“That you work for the embassy.” Close enough.

“Another desk-sitting bureaucrat,” he grumped.

“Well, you want to go back to Merrill Lynch?”

“Ugh. Not in this lifetime.”

“Some people like making tons of money,” she pointed out.

“Only as a hobby, babe.” Were he to go back to trading, his father-in-law would gloat for a year. No, not in this lifetime. He’d served his time in hell, like a good Marine. “I have more important things to do.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t tell you,” he countered.

“I know that,” his wife responded, with a playful smile. “Well, at least it isn’t insider trading.”

Actually, it was, Ryan couldn’t say-the nastiest sort. Thousands of people working every day to find out things they weren’t supposed to know, and then taking action they weren’t supposed to take.

But both sides played that game-played it diligently-because it wasn’t about money. It was about life and death, and those games were as nasty as they got. But Cathy didn’t lose any sleep over the cancer tissue she consigned to the hospital incinerator and probably those cancer cells wanted to live, too, but that was just too damned bad, wasn’t it?

COLONEL BUBOVOY HAD the dispatch on his desk and read it. His hands didn’t shake, but he lit a cigarette to help his contemplation. So, the Politburo was willing to go forward with this. Leonid Ilyich himself had signed the letter to the Bulgarian Party chairman. He’d have the ambassador call Monday morning to set up the meeting, which ought not to take too long. The Bulgarians were lapdogs of the Soviet Union, but occasionally useful lapdogs. The Soviets had assisted in the murder of Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge in London-KGB had supplied the weapon, if you could call it that, an umbrella to deliver the poison-filled metal miniball to transfer the ricin, and so silence the annoying defector who’d talked too much on BBC World Service. That had been a while, and such debts had no expiration date, did they? Not at this level of statecraft. So Moscow was calling in the debt. Besides that, there was the agreement from 1964, when it had been agreed that DS would handle KGB’s wet work in the West. And Leonid Ilyich was promising to transfer a full battalion’s worth of the new version of the T-72 main-battle tank, which was always the sort of thing to make a communist chief of state feel better about his political security. And it was cheaper than the MiG-29s the Bulgarians were asking for. As though a Bulgarian pilot could handle such an aircraft-the Russian joke was that they had to tuck their mustaches into the flight helmet before closing the visor, Bubovoy reminded himself. Mustaches or not, the Bulgarians were regarded as the children of Russia-an attitude that went back to the czars. And, for the most part, they were obedient children, though like them they had little appreciation of right and wrong, so long as they weren’t caught. So he’d show proper respect for this chief of state and be received cordially as the messenger of a greater power, and the Chairman would hem and haw a little bit and then agree. It would be as stylized as a performance of ballet dancer Aleksander Gudonov, and just as predicable in its conclusion.

And then he’d meet with Boris Strokov and get an idea how quickly the operation might proceed. Boris Andreyevich would find the prospect exciting. This would be the biggest mission of his life, like playing in the Olympics, not so much daunting as exhilarating, and there was a sure promotion to be had for its successful completion-perhaps a new car for Strokov and/or a nice dacha outside Sofia. Or even both. And for myself? the KGB officer wondered. A promotion, certainly. General’s stars and a return to Moscow, a plush office at The Centre, a nice flat on Kutusovskiy Prospekt. Going back to Moscow appealed to the rezident, who’d spent a lot of years outside the borders of the Rodina. Enough, he thought. More than enough.

“WHERE’S THE COURIER?” Mary Pat asked, vacuuming the living room rug.

“Over Norway by now,” her husband thought out loud.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Oh?” Ed asked with no small degree of trepidation.

“What if we can get the Rabbit out and they don’t know?”

“How the hell do we do that?” her husband asked, in surprise. What was she thinking about now? “Getting him and his family out in the first place won’t exactly be easy.”

She told him the idea she’d evolved in her tricky little head, and an original one it was.

Trust you to come up with something like that, he thought, with a neutral expression. But then he started thinking about it. “Complicated,” the Chief of Station observed tersely.

“But doable,” she countered.

“Honey, that’s a big thought.” But he was thinking about it, Mary Pat saw in his eyes.

“Yeah, but if we can pull it off, what a coup,” she said, getting under the sofa. Eddie slid himself closer to the TV so that he could hear what the Transformer robots were saying. A good sign. If Eddie couldn’t hear, then neither would the KGB microphones.

“It’s worth thinking about,” Ed conceded. “But doing it-damn.”

“Well, they pay us to be creative, don’t they?”

“No way in hell we could pull that one off here”-not without involving a whole lot of assets, some of whom might not be entirely reliable, which was, of course, their greatest fear, and one they couldn’t easily defend against. That was one of the problems in the spook business. If the counterspies in KGB ID’d one of their assets, they were very often clever about how they handled it. They could, for example, have a little chat with the guy and tell him to keep operating, and then, maybe, he’d live to the end of the year. Their agents were trained to give a danger-wave-off signal, but who was to say that the agent would do it? It demanded a lot from the supposed dedication of their assets, more than some-most-of them would probably give.

“So, there are other places they can go. Eastern Europe, for example. Get them out that way,” she suggested.

“I suppose it’s possible,” he conceded again. “But the mission here is to get them out, not score style points from the East German judge.”

“I know, but think about it. If we can get him away from Moscow, that gives us a lot more flexibility in our options, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, honey. It also means communications problems.” And that meant the risk of screwing everything up. The KISS principle-“keep it simple, stupid”-was as much a part of the CIA ethos as the trench coat and fedora hat that people used in bad movies. Too many cooks fucked up the soup.