There was no telling. Jack followed the rest of the people to the brick wall that seemed to mark the station’s waiting/arrival area. Sure enough, there were the usual collection of magazine stands and small stores. He could see the way out and found himself in the open air, fumbling in his pocket for his Chichester map of London. Westminster Bridge Road. It was too far to walk, so he hailed a cab.
From the cab, Ryan looked around, his head swiveling, just like the tourist he wasn’t quite anymore. And there it was.
Century House, so named because it was 100 Westminster Bridge Road, was what Jack took to be a typical interwar structure of fair height and a stone facade that was… peeling off? The edifice was covered with an orange plastic netting that was manifestly intended to keep the facade from falling onto pedestrians. Oops. Maybe somebody was ripping through the building, looking for Russian bugs? Nobody had warned him about that at Langley. Just up the road was Westminster Bridge, and across that were the Houses of Parliament. Well, it was in a nice neighborhood, anyway. Jack trotted up the stone steps to the double door and made his way inside for all of ten feet, where he found an entry-control desk manned by someone in a sort of cop uniform.
“Can I help you, sir?” the guard asked. The Brits always said such things as though they really wanted to help you. Jack wondered if there might be a pistol just out of view. If not there, then not too far away. There had to be security here.
“Hi, I’m Jack Ryan. I’m starting work here.”
Instant smile and recognition: “Ah, Sir John. Welcome to Century House. Please let me call upstairs.” Which he did. “Someone’s on his way down, sir. Please have a seat.”
Jack barely had a chance to feel the seat when someone familiar came through the revolving door.
“Jack!” he called out.
“Sir Basil.” Ryan rose to take his extended hand.
“Didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”
“I’m letting Cathy get everything unpacked. She doesn’t trust me to do it anyway.”
“Yes, we men do have our limitations, don’t we?” Sir Basil Charleston was pushing fifty, tall and imperially thin, as the poet had once called it, with brown hair not yet going gray. His eyes were hazel and bright-looking, and he wore a suit that wasn’t cheap, gray wool with a broad white pinstripe, looking to all the world like a very prosperous London merchant banker. In fact, his family had been in that line of work, but he’d found it confining, and opted instead to use his Cambridge education in the service of his country, first as a field intelligence officer, and later as an administrator. Jack knew that James Greer liked and respected him, as did Judge Moore. He’d met Charleston himself a year earlier, soon after being shot, then he’d learned that Sir Basil admired his invention of the Canary Trap, which had been his path to high-level notice at Langley. Basil had evidently used it to plug a few annoying leaks. “Come along, Jack. We need to get you properly outfitted.” He didn’t mean Jack’s suit, which was Savile Row and as expensive as his own. No, this meant a trip to personnel.
The presence of C, as the job title went, made it painless. They already had a set of Ryan’s fingerprints from Langley, and it was mainly a matter of getting his picture taken and inserted in his pass-card, which would allow him through all the electronic gates, just like the ones at the CIA. They checked it through a dummy gate and saw that it worked. Then it was up in the executive elevator to Sir Basil’s capacious corner office.
It was better than the long, narrow room that Judge Moore made do with. A decent view of the river and the Palace of Westminster. The DG waved Jack into a leather chair,
“So, any first impressions?” Charleston asked.
“Pretty painless so far. Cathy hasn’t been to the hospital yet, but Bernie—her boss at Hopkins—says that the boss-doc there is a good guy.”
“Yes, Hammersmith has a good reputation, and Dr. Byrd is regarded as the best eye surgeon in Britain. Never met him, but I’m told he’s a fine chap. Fisherman, loves to take salmon out of the rivers in Scotland, married, three sons, eldest is a leftenant in the Coldstream Guards.”
“You had him checked out?” Jack asked incredulously.
“One cannot be too careful, Jack. Some of your distant cousins across the Irish Sea are not overly fond of you, you know.”
“Is that a problem?”
Charleston shook his head. “Most unlikely. When you helped to bring down the ULA, you probably saved a few lives in the PIRA. That’s still sorting itself out, but that is mainly a job for the Security Service. We don’t really have much business with them—at least nothing that will concern you directly.” Which led to Jack’s next question.
“Yes, Sir Basil—what exactly is my job to be here?”
“Didn’t James tell you?” Charleston asked.
“Not exactly. He likes his surprises, I’ve learned.”
“Well, the Joint Working Group mainly focuses on our Soviet friends. We have some good sources. So do your chaps. The idea is to share information in order to improve our overall picture.”
“Information. Not sources,” Ryan observed.
Charleston smiled understandingly. “One must protect those, as you know.”
Jack did know about that. In fact, he was allowed to know damned little about CIA’s sources. Those were the most closely guarded secrets in the Agency, and doubtless here as well. Sources were real people, and a slip of the tongue would get them killed. Intelligence services valued sources more for their information than for their lives—the intelligence business was a business, after all—but sooner or later you started worrying about them and their families and their personal characteristics. Mainly booze, Ryan thought. Especially for the Russians. The ordinary Soviet citizen drank enough to qualify him as an alcoholic in America.
“No problem there, sir. I do not know the name or identity of one CIA source over there. Not one,” Ryan emphasized. It wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t been told, but you could guess a lot from the character of the information transmitted and the way he/she quoted people—they were usually “he,” but Ryan wondered about a few of the sources. It was an intriguing game that all analysts played, invariably in the confines of their own minds, though Ryan had speculated a few times with his personal boss, Admiral Jim Greer. Usually, the DDO had warned him not to speculate too loudly, but the way he’d blinked twice had told Ryan more than he’d wanted to convey. Well, they’d hired him for his analytical ability, Ryan knew. They didn’t really want him to turn it off. When the information transmitted got a little kinky, it told you that something had happened to the source, like being caught, or going nuts. “The admiral is interested in one thing, though…”
“What’s that?” the DG asked.
“Poland. It looks to us as though it’s coming a little unglued, and we’re wondering how far, how fast, and what it’ll do—the effects, I mean.”
“So are we, Jack.” A thoughtful nod. People—especially reporters in their Fleet Street pubs—were speculating a lot about that. And reporters also had good sources, in some areas as good as his own. “What does James think?”
“It reminds both of us of something that happened in the 1930s.” Ryan leaned back in the chair and relaxed. “The United Auto Workers. When they organized Ford, there was trouble. Big time. Ford even hired thugs to work the union organizers over. I remember seeing photos of—who was it?” Jack paused for a moment’s thought. “Walter Reuther? Something like that. It was in Life magazine back then. The thugs were talking to him and a few of his guys—the first few pictures show them smiling at each other like men do right before the gloves come off—and then a brawl started. You have to wonder about Ford’s management—letting something like that happen in front of reporters is bad enough, but reporters with cameras? Damn, that’s big-league dumb.”
“The Court of Public Opinion. Yes,” Charleston agreed. “It is quite real, and modern technology has made it even more so, and, yes, that is troubling to our friends across the wire. You know, this CNN news network that just started up on your side of the ocean. It just might change the world. Information has its own way of circulating. Rumors are bad enough. You cannot stop them, and they have a way of acquiring a life of their own—”
“But a picture really is worth a thousand words, isn’t it?”
“I wonder who first said that. Whoever he was, he was no one’s fool. It’s even more true for a moving picture.”
“I presume we’re using that…”