“Patience is the hardest of the virtues to acquire, James, and the higher you get, the more you need the bastard. For me, this is like sitting on the bench, waiting for the lawyers to get to the damned point. It can take forever, especially when you know what the fools are going to say,” Moore admitted. He’d also been there and done that, out in the field. But so much of that job was composed of waiting, too. No man controlled his fate, a knowledge that came late in life. You just tried to muddle along from one point to another, making as few mistakes as possible.
“Tell the President about this one yet?”
Moore shook his head. “No sense getting him overly excited. If he thinks this guy has information that he doesn’t have—hell, why disappoint him? We do enough of that here, don’t we?”
“Arthur, we never have enough information, and the more we get, the more we appreciate what we need and don’t have.”
“James, my boy, neither one of us is educated to be a philosopher.”
“Comes with the gray hair, Arthur.” Then Mike Bostock walked in.
“Couple more days and BEATRIX goes into the history books,” he announced with a smile.
“Mike, where the hell did you learn to believe in Santa Claus?” the DCI asked.
“Judge, it’s like this: We got us a defector who’s defecting right now. We have a good team to get him out of Redland. You trust your troops to do the job you send them out to do.”
“But they’re not all our troops,” Greer pointed out.
“Basil runs a good shop, Admiral. You know that.”
“True,” Greer admitted.
“So, you just wait to see what’s under the Christmas tree, Mike?” Moore asked.
“I sent Santa my letter, and Santa always delivers. Everybody knows that.” He was beaming at the possibilities. “What are we going to do with him when he arrives?”
“The farmhouse out at Winchester, I imagine,” Moore thought out loud. “Give him a nice place to depressurize—let him travel around some on day trips.”
“What stipend?” Greer inquired.
“Depends,” Moore said. He was the one who controlled that out of the Agency’s black budget. “If it’s good information… oh, as much as a million, I imagine. And a nice place to work after we tickle all of it out of him.”
“Where, I wonder?” Bostock put in.
“Oh, we let him decide that.”
It was both a simple and a complex process. The arriving Rabbit family would have to learn English. New identities. They’d need new names, for starters, probably make them Norwegian immigrants to explain away the accents. CIA had the power to admit a total of one hundred new citizens every year through the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and they’d never used them all up). The Rabbits would need a set of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses—probably driving lessons beforehand, maybe for both, certainly for the wife—from the Commonwealth of Virginia. (The Agency had a cordial relationship with the state government. Richmond never asked too many questions.)
Then came the psychological help for people who’d walked away from everything they’d ever known and had to find their footing in a new and grossly different country. The Agency had a Columbia University professor of psychology on retainer to handle that. Then they’d get some older defectors to hand-walk them through the transition. None of this was ever easy on the new immigrants. For Russians, America was like a toy store for a child who’d never known such a thing as a toy store existed—it was overwhelming in every respect, with virtually no common points of comparison, almost like a different planet. They had to make it as comfortable for the defectors as possible. First, for the information, and second, to make sure they didn’t want to go back—it would be almost certain death, at least for the husband, but it had happened before, so strong was the call of home for every man.
“If he likes a cold climate, send him to Minneapolis-Saint Paul,” Greer suggested. “But, gentlemen, we are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.”
“James, you are always the voice of sober counsel,” the DCI observed with a smile.
“Somebody has to be. The eggs haven’t hatched yet, people. Then we count the chicks.”
And what if he doesn’t know squat? Moore thought. What if he’s just a guy who wants a ticket out?
God damn this business! the DCI completed the thought.
“Well, Basil will keep us posted, and we have your boy Ryan looking out for our interests.”
“That’s great news, Judge. Basil must be laughing into his beer about that.”
“He’s a good boy, Mike. Don’t underestimate him. Those who did are in Maryland State Penitentiary now, waiting for the appeals process to play out,” Greer said, in defense of his protégé.
“Well, yeah, he was a Marine once,” Bostock conceded. “What do I tell Bob when he calls in?”
“Nothing,” the DCI said at once. “Until we find out from the Rabbit what part of our comms are compromised, we are careful what goes out on a wire. Clear?”
Bostock nodded his head like a first-grader. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ve had S and T go over our phone lines. They say they’re clean. Chip Bennett is still raising hell and running in circles at Fort Meade.” Moore didn’t have to say that this alleged claim from the Rabbit was the scariest revelation to Washington since Pearl Harbor. But maybe they’d be able to turn it around on Ivan. Hope sprang eternal at Langley, just like everywhere else. It was unlikely that the Russians knew anything his Directorate of Science and Technology didn’t, but you had to pay to see the cards.
RYAN WAS QUIETLY packing his things. Cathy was better at it, but he didn’t know what he’d need. How did one pack for being secret-agent man? Business suit. His old Marine utilities? (He still had them, butter bar on the collar and all.) Nice leather shoes? Sneaks? That, he thought, sounded appropriate. He ended up deciding on a middle-of-the-road suit and two pairs of walking shoes, one semiformal, one informal. And it all had to fit in one bag—for that, an L.L. Bean canvas two-suiter that was easy to carry and fairly anonymous. He left his passport in the desk drawer. Sir Basil would be giving him a nice new British one, another diplomatic or fuck-you passport. Probably a new name to go with it. Damn, Jack thought, a new name to remember and respond to. He was used to having only one.
One nice thing about Merrill Lynch: You always knew who the hell you were. Sure, Jack’s mind went on, let the whole damned world know you were a flunky of Joe Muller. Not in this lifetime. Any opinionated asshole could make money, and his father-in-law was one of them.
“Finished?” Cathy asked from behind him.
“Just about, babe,” Jack answered.
“It’s not dangerous, what you’re doing, is it?”
“I don’t expect it to be, babe.” But Jack couldn’t lie, and his uncertainty conveyed just enough.
“Where are you going?”
“I told you, remember, Germany.” Uh-oh. She caught me again.
“Some NATO thing?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“What do you do in London, Jack? Century House, that’s intelligence stuff, and—”
“Cathy, I’ve told you before. I’m an analyst. I go over information from various sources, and I try to figure out what it means, and I write reports for people to read. You know, it’s not all that different from what I did at Merrill Lynch. My job is to look at information and figure out what it really means. They think I’m good at it.”
“But nothing with guns?” Half a question and half an observation. Jack supposed it was from her work in the Emergency Room at Hopkins. As a group, doctors didn’t much care for firearms, except the ones who liked hunting birds in the fall. She didn’t like the Remington shotgun in his closet, unloaded, and she liked the Browning Hi-Power hidden on the shelf in his closet, loaded, even less.
“Honey, no, no guns, not at all. I’m not that kind of spook.”
“Okay,” she semi-conceded. She didn’t believe him completely, but she knew he couldn’t say what he was doing any more than she could discuss her patients with him. In that understanding came her frustration. “Just so you’re not away too long.”
“Babe, you know I hate being away from you. I can’t even sleep worth a damn unless you’re next to me.”
“So take me with you?”
“So you can go shopping in Germany? For what? Dirndls for Sally?”
“Well, she likes the Heidi movies.” It was a weak offering.
“Nice try, babe. Wish you could, but you can’t.”
“Oh, damn,” Lady Ryan observed.
“We live in an imperfect world, babe.”
She especially hated that aphorism of his, and her reply was an un-grammatical grunt. But, really, there was no reply she could make.