Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“You wouldn’t live long enough to find out, Jack. They’re not the most forgiving people in the world, especially on espionage. You’re a lot safer whacking a cop right in front of the precinct station than playing spy.”

“And with us?”

“It’s amazing-how patriotic convicts are, that is. Spies do very hard time in the Federal prisons. Them and child molesters. They get a lot of attention from Bubba and his armed-robber friends-you know, honest crooks.”

“Yeah, my dad talked about that once in a while, how there’s a hierarchy in prison, and you don’t want to be on the bottom.

“Better to be a pitcher than a catcher.” Murray laughed.

It was time for a real question: “So, Dan, just how tight are you with the spook shops?”

Murray surveyed the horizon. “Oh, we get along pretty nicely” was all he was willing to say.

“You know, Dan,” Jack observed, “if there’s anything I’ve learned to worry about over here, it’s understatement.”

Murray liked that one. “Well, then you’re living in the wrong place, son. They all talk like that over here.”

“Yeah, especially in the spook shops.”

“Well, if we talked like everybody else, then the mystique would be gone, and people would understand how screwed up everything really is.” Murray had a sip and grinned broadly. “We couldn’t maintain the confidence of the people that way. I bet it’s the same with doctors and stockbrokers,” the FBI rep suggested.

“Every business has its own insiders language.” The supposed reason was that it offered more speedy and efficient communications to those inside the fold-but the truth of the matter, of course, was that it denied knowledge and/or access to outsiders. But that was really okay if you were one of the people on the inside.

THE BAD NEWS happened in Budapest, and it resulted from pure bad luck. The agent wasn’t even all that important. He provided information on the Hungarian Air Force, but that was an organization that no one took very seriously at best, along with the rest of the Hungarian military, which had rarely distinguished itself on the field of battle. Marxism-Leninism had never really taken firm root here anyway, but the state did have a hardworking, if not especially competent, intelligence/counterintelligence service, and not all of them were stupid. Some of them were even KGB-TRAINED, and if there was anything the Soviets knew, it was intelligence and counterintelligence. This officer, Andreas Morrisay, was just sitting, drinking his morning coffee in a shop on Andrassy Utca, when he saw someone make a mistake. He would not have caught it had he not been bored with his newspaper, but there it was. A Hungarian national-you could tell from his clothing-dropped something. It was about the size of a tin of pipe tobacco. He quickly bent down to pick it up, and then, remarkably enough, he stuck it to the underside of his table. And, Andreas saw, it didn’t fall off. It must have some sort of adhesive on the side. And that sort of thing was not only unusual, but also one of the things he’d been shown in a training film at the KGB Academy outside Moscow. It was a very simple and obsolete form of dead-drop, something used by enemy spies to transfer information. It was, Andreas thought, like walking unexpectedly into the cinema and watching a spy film and knowing what was happening just on pure instinct. His immediate reaction was to walk off to the men’s room, where there was a pay phone. There he dialed his office and spoke for less than thirty seconds. Next he made use of the men’s room, because this might take a while, and he was suddenly excited. No harm was done. The head office of his agency was only a half-dozen blocks away, and two of his coworkers came in, took their seats, and ordered their coffee, talking with apparent animation about something or other. Andreas was relatively new in his job-just two years-and he’d yet to catch anyone doing anything. But this was his day, the officer knew. He was looking at a spy. A Hungarian national who was working for some foreign power, and even if he were giving information to the Soviet KGB, he was committing a crime for which he could be arrested-though in that case, it would be cleared up quickly by the KGB liaison officer. After another ten minutes, the Hungarian rose and walked out, with one of the two other officers in trail.

What followed was, well, nothing, for more than an hour. Andreas ordered some strudel-every bit as tasty here as it was in Vienna, three hundred kilometers away, and this despite the Marxist government in the country, because the Hungarians loved their food, and Hungary was a productive agricultural country, despite the command economy imposed on the farmers to the east. Andreas lit up a string of cigarettes, read his newspaper, and just waited for something to happen.

Presently, it did. A man dressed a little too well to be a Hungarian citizen took his seat at the table next to his, lit a cigarette of his own, and read his newspaper.

Here it worked for Andreas that he was badly nearsighted. His glasses were so thick that it took a few seconds for anyone to see where his eyes were pointed, and he remembered his training enough not to allow his eyes to linger on any one spot more than a few brief seconds. Mainly he appeared to be reading his paper, like half a dozen others in this elegant little shop, which had somehow survived the Second World War. He watched the American-Andreas had it fixed in his mind that this one had to be an American-sip his own coffee and read his own paper, until he set his coffee cup down in the saucer, then reached into his hip pocket for a handkerchief, which he used to wipe his nose, and then replaced in the pocket. .

But first he retrieved the tobacco tin from under the table. It was a move so skillfully done that only a trained counterintelligence officer could have spotted it, but, Andreas told himself, that was exactly what he was. And it was his pride that generated his first and most costly mistake of the day.

The American finished his coffee and took his leave, with Andreas in close pursuit. The foreigner walked toward the underground station a block away and nearly made it. But not quite. He turned in surprise when he felt a hand on his upper arm.

“Could I see the tobacco tin that you took from the table?” Andreas said, politely, because this foreigner was probably, technically speaking, a diplomat.

“Excuse me?” the foreigner said, and his accent made him either British or American.

“The one in your pants pocket,” Andreas clarified.

“I do not know what you are talking about, and I have business to do.” The man started to walk away.

He didn’t get far. Andreas pulled out his pistol. It was a Czech Agrozet Model 50 and it effectively ended the conversation. But not quite.

“What is this? Who are you?”

“Papers.” Andreas held out his hand, keeping his pistol in close. “We already have your contact. You are,” he added, “under arrest.”

In the movies, the American would have drawn his own side arm and tried to make his escape down the twenty-eight steps into the ancient metro. But the American’s fear was that this guy had seen too many movies himself, and it might make him nervous enough to pull the trigger on his Czech piece-of-shit handgun. So he reached into his coat pocket, very slowly and deliberately, lest he scare the idiot, and withdrew his passport. It was a black one, the sort issued to diplomats, and instantly recognizable to lucky asses like this stupid, fucking Hunky. The American’s name was James Szell, and he was by ancestry Hungarian, one of the many minorities welcomed to the America of the previous century.

“I am an American diplomat, properly accredited to your government. You will take me to my embassy immediately.” Inwardly, Szell was seething. His face didn’t show it, of course, but his five years in the field had just come to a screeching halt. All this over a rookie second-rate agent furnishing second-rate information about a third-rate communist air force. Goddamn it!