Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

THE ALARM CLOCK’S deliberately annoying buzz caused Foley’s eyes to snap open, and he rolled over to switch it off. Then he jerked himself out of bed and into the bathroom. He suddenly missed his house in Virginia. It had more than one bathroom-two and a half, in fact, which allowed some degree of flexibility should an emergency occur. Little Eddie got up when summoned, then almost immediately sat on the floor in front of the TV set and called out “Worker-womannnn!” when the exercise show came on. That generated a smile from his mom and dad. Even the KGB guys on the other end of the bug wires probably had a little chuckle at that.

“Anything important planned for the office today?” Mary Pat asked in the kitchen.

“Well, ought to be the usual weekend traffic from Washington. I have to run over to the Brit Embassy before lunch.”

“Oh? What for?” his wife asked.

“I want to stop over and see Nigel Haydock about a couple of things,” he told her, as she set the bacon frying. Mary Pat always did bacon and eggs on the day of important spook work. He wondered if their KGB listeners would ever tumble to that. Probably not. Nobody was that thorough, and American eating habits probably interested them only insofar as foreigners usually ate better than Russians.

“Well, say hello for me.”

“Right.” He yawned and took a sip of coffee.

“We need to have them over-maybe next weekend?”

“Works for me. Roast beef and the usual?”

“Yeah, I’ll try to get some frozen corn on the cob.” Russians grew corn you could buy in the open farmers’ markets, and it was okay, but it wasn’t the Silver Queen that they’d come to love in Virginia. So they usually settled for the frozen corn the Air Force flew in from Rhein-Main, along with the Chicago Red hot dogs that they served in the embassy canteen and all the other tastes of home that became so important on a posting like this one. It was probably just as true in Paris, Ed thought. Breakfast went quickly, and half an hour later, he was almost dressed.

“Which tie today, honey?”

“Well, in Russia, you should wear red once in a while,” she said, handing the tie over with a wink, along with the lucky silver tie bar.

“Um-hmm,” he agreed, looking in the mirror to snug it into his collar. “Well, here is Edward Foley, Senior, foreign-service officer.”

“Works for me, honey.” She kissed him, a little loudly.

“Bye, Daddy,” Junior said as his father headed for the door. A high five instead of a kiss. He’d gotten a little too old for the sissy stuff.

The rest of the trip was stultifyingly routine. Walk to the metro. Buy his paper at the kiosk and catch the exact same train for the same five-kopeck fare, because if he caught the same one going home, so as to be marked by KGB as a creature of strict routine, then he had to mirror-image morning and afternoon habits. At the embassy, he entered his office and waited for Mike Russell to bring in the morning message traffic. More than usual, he saw at once, flipping through the messages and checking the headers.

“Anything about what we talked about?” the communications officer asked, lingering for a moment.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Foley replied. “Got you a little torqued?”

“Ed, getting secure stuff in and out is my only job, y’know?”

“Look at it from my side, Mike. If they tumble to me, I’m as useless as tits on a boarhog. Not to mention the guys who get killed because of it.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” Russell paused. “I just can’t believe they can crack my systems, Ed. Like you said, you’d be losing people left and right.”

“I want to agree with you, but we can’t be too careful, can we?”

“Roger that, man. I catch anybody dicking around in my shop, they won’t live long enough to talk to the FBI,” he promised darkly.

“Don’t get too carried away.”

“Ed, when I was in Vietnam, nonsecure signals got soldiers killed. That’s as important as things get, y’know?”

“If I hear anything, I’ll make sure you know about it, Mike.”

“Okay.” Russell headed out, not quite trailing smoke out of his ears.

Foley organized his message traffic-it was addressed to the Chief of Station, of course, not to anyone’s name-and started reading through it. There was still concern about KGB and the Pope, but, aside from the Rabbit, he had nothing new to report, and it was only hope that told him the Flopsy had anything to report on that subject. A lot of interest in last week’s Politburo meeting, but for that he’d have to wait for his sources to report in. Questions about Leonid Brezhnev’s health, but while they knew the names of his physicians-a whole team of them-none of them talked to CIA directly. You could see the picture on TV and know that Leonid Ilyich wasn’t going to be running the marathon in the next Olympics. But people like that could linger for years, good news and bad news. Brezhnev wasn’t going to be doing anything new and different, but, as he became increasingly irrational, there was no telling what dumbass things he might try-damned sure he wasn’t going to be pulling out of Afghanistan. He didn’t care a rap about the lives of young Russian soldiers, not when he heard Death’s footsteps approaching his own door. The succession was of interest to CIA, but it was fairly settled that Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov would be the next guy at the seat at the head of the table, absent a sudden death or a major foot put wrong in a political sense. Andropov was too canny a political operator for that, however. No, he was the current czarevich, and that was that. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be too vigorous-and he wouldn’t if the stories about his liver disease were true. Every time Foley saw him on Russian TV, he looked for the yellow tinge on his skin that announced that particular ailment-but makeup could hide that, if they used makeup on their political chieftains. . Hmm, how to check that? he wondered. Something to send back to the Science and Technology Directorate at Langley, maybe.

ZAITZEV TOOK HIS SEAT, after relieving Kolya Dobrik, and looked over his message traffic. He decided to memorize as much as possible, and so he took a little longer than usual forwarding the messages to their end-recipients. There was one from Agent CASSIUS again, routed for political-intelligence people upstairs, and also at the U.S.-Canada Institute, where the academicians read the tea leaves for The Centre as a backup. There was one from NEPTUNE, requesting money for the agent who was giving KGB such good communications intelligence. NEPTUNE suggested the sea, didn’t it? Zaitzev searched his memory for previous signals from that source. Wasn’t it mainly about the American navy? And he was the reason he worried about American signals security. Surely KGB was paying him a huge amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars in American cash, something KGB had a problem getting ahold of-it was far easier for the Soviet Union to pay in diamonds, since it could mine for diamonds in eastern Siberia. They’d paid some Americans in diamonds, but they’d been caught by the vigilant American FBI, and KGB had never tried to negotiate their release. . so much for loyalty. The Americans tried to do that, he knew, but most of the time the people they tried to get out had already been executed-a thought that stopped his thoughts cold in their tracks.

But there was no turning back now, and CIA was competent enough that KGB feared it, and didn’t that mean that he was in good hands?

Then he remembered one other thing he had to do today. In his drawer was a pad of contact reports. Mary had suggested he report their meeting, and so he did. He described her as pretty, in her late twenties or early thirties, mother of a fairly nice little son, and none too bright- very American in mannerisms, he wrote-with modest language skills, good vocabulary but poor syntax and pronunciation, which made her Russian understandable but stilted. He didn’t make an evaluation of her likelihood to be an intelligence officer, which, he figured, was the smart thing to do. After fifteen minutes of writing, he walked it over to the department security officer.