This struck Ryan as something from a bad movie, except that in the movies the big, bad CIA was the one with a special assassination department, like a cupboard with vampire bats inside. When the director needed somebody killed, he’d open the door, and one of the bats flew out and made its kill, then flew back docilely to the cupboard and hung upside down until the next man needed killing. Sure, Wilbur. Hollywood had everything figured out, except that government bureaucracies all ran on paper—nothing happened without a written order of some sort, because only a piece of white paper with black ink on it would cover somebody’s ass when things went bad—and if somebody really needed killing, someone inside the system had to sign the order, and who would sign that kind of order? That sort of thing became a permanent record of something bad, and so the signature blank would be bucked all the way to the Oval Office, and once there it just wasn’t the sort of paper that would find its way into the Presidential Library that memorialized the person known inside the security community as National Command Authority. And nobody in between would sign the order, because government employees never stuck their necks out—that wasn’t the way they were trained.
Except me, Ryan thought. But he wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood. He hadn’t even killed Sean Miller in very hot blood, and while that was a strange thing to be proud of, it beat the hell out of the alternative.
But Jack wasn’t afraid of sticking it out. The loss of his government paycheck would be a net profit for John Patrick Ryan. He could go back to teaching, perhaps at a nice private university that paid halfway decently, and he’d be able to dabble with the stock market on the side, something with which his current job interfered rather badly…
What the hell am I going to do? The worst part of all was that Ryan considered himself to be a Catholic. Maybe he didn’t make it to mass every week. Maybe they’d never name a church after him, but, God damn it, the Pope was someone he was compelled by his lengthy education—Catholic schools all the way, including almost twelve years of Jesuits—to respect. And added to that was something equally important—the education he’d received at the gentle hands of the United States Marine Corps at Quantico’s Basic School. They’d taught him that when you saw something that needed doing, you damned well did it, and you hoped that your senior officers would bless it afterward, because decisive action had saved the day more than once in the history of the Corps. “It’s a lot easier to get forgiveness than permission” was what the major who’d taught that particular class had said, then added with a smile, “But don’t you people ever quote me on that.” You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience—but experience often came from bad decisions.
You’re over thirty now, Jack, and you’ve had experience that you never wanted to get, but be damned if you haven’t learned a hell of a lot from it. He would have been at least a captain by now, Jack thought. Maybe even a junior major, like Billy Tucker, who’d taught that class. Just then, Kingshot walked back into the room.
“Al, we have a problem,” Ryan told him.
“I know, Jack. I just told Sir Basil. He’s thinking about it.”
“You’re a field spook. What do you think?”
“Jack, this is well over my level of expertise and command.”
“You turn your brain off, Al?” Ryan asked sharply.
“Jack, we cannot compromise our source, can we?” Kingshot shot back. “That is the paramount consideration here and now.”
“Al, we know that somebody is going to try to whack the head of my church. We know his name, and Nick has a photo album on the fucker, remember?” Ryan took a deep breath before going on. “I am not going to sit here and do nothing about it,” Ryan concluded, entirely forgetting the presence of the Rabbit for the moment.
“You do nothing? I risk my life for this and you do nothing?” Zaitzev demanded, catching on to the rapid-fire English exchanged in front of him. His face showed both outrage and puzzlement.
Al Kingshot handled the answer. “That is not for us to say. We cannot compromise our source—you, Oleg. We must protect you as well.”
“Fuck!” Ryan stood and walked out of the room. But what the hell could he actually do? Jack asked himself. Then he went looking for the secure phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Murray,” a voice said after the STUs married up.
“Dan, it’s Jack.”
“Where you been? I called two nights ago and Cathy said you were in Germany on NATO business. I wanted to—” Ryan just cut him off.
“Stick it, Dan. I was somewhere else doing something else. Listen up. I need some information and I need it in a hurry,” Jack announced, lapsing briefly back into the voice of an officer of Marines.
“Shoot,” Murray replied.
“I need to know the Pope’s schedule for the next week or so.” It was Friday. Ryan hoped the Bishop of Rome didn’t have anything hopping for the weekend.
“What?” The FBI official’s voice communicated predictable puzzlement.
“You heard me.”
“What the hell for?”
“Can’t tell you—oh, shit,” Ryan swore, and then went on. “Dan, we have reason to believe there’s a contract out on the Pope.”
“Who?” Murray asked.
“It ain’t the Knights of Columbus,” was all Ryan felt comfortable saying.
“Shit, Jack. Are you serious?”
“What the hell do you think?” Ryan demanded.
“Okay, okay. Let me make some phone calls. What exactly am I free to say?”
That question stopped Ryan cold in his tracks. Think, boy, think. “Okay, you’re a private citizen and a friend of yours is going to Rome and he wants to eyeball His Holiness. You want to know what’s the best way to accomplish that mission. Fair enough?”
“What’s Langley say about this?”
“Dan, frankly, I don’t care a rat’s ass right now, okay? Please, get me that information. I’ll call back in an hour. Okay?”
“Roger that, Jack. One hour.” Murray hung up. Ryan knew he could trust Murray. He was himself a Jesuit product, like so many FBI agents, in his case a Boston College alum, just like Ryan, and so whatever additional loyalties he had would work in Ryan’s favor. Breathing a little easier, Ryan returned to the ducal library.
“Whom did you call, Jack?” Kingshot asked.
“Dan Murray at the embassy, the FBI rep. You ought to know him.”
“The Legal Attaché—yes, I do. Okay, what did you ask?”
“The Pope’s schedule for the coming week.”
“But we don’t know anything yet,” Kingshot objected.
“Does that make you feel any better, Al?” Jack inquired delicately.
“You did not compro—”
“Compromise our source? You think I’m that stupid?”
The Brit spook nodded to the logic of the moment. “Very well. No harm done, I expect.”
The next hour of the first interview returned to routine things. Zaitzev fleshed out for the Brits what he knew about MINISTER. It was sufficiently juicy to give them a good start on IDing the guy. It was immediately clear that Kingshot wanted his hide on the barn door. There was no telling how much good information KGB was getting from him—it was definitely a him, Zaitzev made clear, and “him” was probably a senior civil servant in Whitehall, and soon his residence would be provided by Her Majesty’s Government for the indefinite future—”at the Queen’s pleasure” was the official phrase. But Jack had more pressing concerns. At 2:20 in the afternoon, he went back to the STU in the next room.
“Dan, it’s Jack.”
The Legal Attaché spoke without preamble. “He has a busy week ahead, the embassy in Rome tells me, but the Pope is always in the open on Wednesday afternoons. He parades around in his white jeep in St. Peter’s Square, right in front of the cathedral, for the people to see him and take his blessing. It’s an open car, and, if you want to pop a cap, that sounds to me like a good time to try—unless they have a shooter infiltrated all the way inside. Maybe a cleaning man, plumber, electrician, hard to say, but you have to assume that the inside staff is pretty loyal, and that people keep an eye on them.”
Sure, Jack thought, but those are the guys best suited to do something like this. Only the people you trust can really fuck you. Damn. The best people to look into this were with the Secret Service, but he didn’t know anybody in there, and even if he did, getting them into the Vatican bureaucracy—the world’s oldest—would require divine intervention.
“Thanks, pal. I owe you one.”
“Semper fi, bud. Will you be able to tell me more? This sounds like a major case you’re working on.”