But those whom he could not manipulate could always be killed. Who, after all, remembered much about Leon Trotsky?
“Few things are truly impossible. Merely difficult,” the Chairman belatedly agreed.
“So, you will look into the possibilities?”
He nodded cautiously. “Yes, starting in the morning.” And so the processes began.
CHAPTER 3:
EXPLORATIONS
“WELL, JACK’S GOT HIS DESK in London,” Greer told his colleagues on the Seventh Floor.
“Glad to hear it,” Bob Ritter observed. “Think he knows what to do with it?”
“Bob, what is it with you and Ryan?” the DDI asked.
“Your fair-haired boy is moving up the ladder too fast. He’s going to fall off someday and it’s going to be a mess.”
“You want me to turn him into just one more ordinary desk-weenie?” James Greer had often enough fended off Ritter’s beefs about the size and consequent power of the Intelligence Directorate. “You have some burgeoning stars in your shop, too. This kid’s got possibilities, and I’m going to let him run until he hits the wall.”
“Yeah, I can hear the splat now” the DDO grumbled. “Okay, which one of the crown jewels does he want to hand over to our British cousins?”
“Nothing much. The appraisal of Mikhail Suslov that the doctors up at Johns Hopkins did when they flew over to fix his eyes.”
“They don’t have that already?” Judge Moore asked. It wasn’t as though it were a super-sensitive document.
“I guess they never asked. Hell, Suslov won’t be around much longer anyway, from what we’ve been seeing.”
The CIA had many ways to determine the health of senior Soviet officials. The most commonly used was photographs or, better yet, motion-picture coverage of the people in question. The Agency employed physicians—most often full professors at major medical schools—to look at the photos and diagnose their ills without getting within four thousand miles of them. It wasn’t good medicine, but it was better than nothing. Also, the American Ambassador, every time he went into the Kremlin, came back to the embassy and dictated his impressions of everything he saw, however small and insignificant it might seem. Often enough, people had lobbied for putting a physician in the post of ambassador, but it had never happened. More often, direct DO operations had been aimed at collecting urine samples of important foreign statesmen, since urine was a good diagnostic source of information. It made for some unusual plumbing arrangements at Blair House, across the street from the White House, where foreign dignitaries were often quartered, plus the odd attempt to break into doctors’ offices all over the world. And gossip, there was always gossip, especially over there. All of this came from the fact that a man’s health played a role in his thinking and decision-making. All three men in this office had joked about hiring a gypsy or two and observed, rightly, that it would have produced results no less accurate than they got from well-paid professional intelligence officers. At Fort Meade, Maryland, was yet another operation, code-named STARGATE, where the Agency employed people who were well to the left of gypsies; it had been started mainly because the Soviets also employed such people.
“How sick is he?” Moore asked.
“From what I saw three days ago, he won’t make Christmas. Acute coronary insufficiency, they say. We have a shot of him popping what looks like a nitroglycerine pill, not a good sign for Red Mike,” James Greer concluded with Suslov’s in-house nickname.
“And Alexandrov replaces him? Some bargain,” Ritter observed tersely. “I think the gypsies switched them at birth—another True Believer in the Great God Marx.”
“We can’t all be Baptists, Robert,” Arthur Moore pointed out.
“This came in two hours ago on the secure fax from London,” Greer said, passing the sheets around. He’d saved the best for last. “Might be important,” the DDI added.
Bob Ritter was a multilingual speed-reader: “Jesus!”
Judge Moore took his time. As a judge should, he thought. About twenty seconds later than the DDO. “My goodness.” A pause. “Nothing about this from our sources?”
Ritter shifted in his chair. “Takes time, Arthur, and the Foleys are still settling in.”
“I presume we’ll hear about this from CARDINAL.” They didn’t often invoke that agent’s code name. In the pantheon of CIA crown jewels, he was the Cullinan Diamond.
“We should, if Ustinov talks about it, as I expect he will. If they do something about it—”
“Will they, gentlemen?” the DCI asked. “They’ll sure as hell think about it,” Ritter opined at once. “It’s a big step to take, ” Greer thought more soberly. “You suppose His Holiness is courting it? Not too many men walk up to the tiger, open the cage door, and then make faces at him.”
“I’ll have to show this to the President tomorrow.” Moore paused for a moment’s thought. His weekly meeting at the White House was set for 10:00 the following morning. “The Papal Nuncio is out of town, isn’t he?” It turned out that the others didn’t know. He’d have to have that one checked out.
“What would you say to him, anyway?” This was Ritter. “You have to figure that the other guys in Rome tried to talk him out of this.”
“James?”
“Kinda takes us back to Nero, doesn’t it? It’s almost as though he’s threatening the Russians with his own death… Damn, do people really f think that way?”
“Forty years ago, you put your life on the line, James.” Greer had served his time on fleet boats in the Second World War, and often wore a miniature of his gold dolphins on the lapel of his suit coat.
“Arthur, I took my chances, along with everybody else on the boat. I did not tell Tojo where I was in a personal letter.”
“The man has some serious cojones, guys,” Ritter breathed. “We have seen this sort of thing before. Dr. King never took a step back in his life, did he?”
“And I suppose the KKK was as dangerous to him as the KGB is to the Pope,” Moore completed the thought. “Men of the cloth have a different way of looking at the world. It’s called ‘virtue,’ I think.” He sat forward. “Okay, when the President asks me about this—and for damned sure he will—what the hell do I tell him?”
“Our Russian friends might just decide that His Holiness has lived long enough,” Ritter answered.
“That’s a hell of a big and dangerous step to take,” Greer objected. “Not the sort of thing a committee does.”
“This committee might,” the DDO told the DDL
“There would be hell to pay, Bob. They know that. These men are chess players, not gamblers.”
“This letter backs them into a corner.” Ritter turned. “Judge, I think the Pope’s life might be in danger.”
“It’s much too early to say that,” Greer objected.
“Not when you remember who’s running KGB. Andropov is a Party man. What loyalty he has is to that institution, damned sure not to anything we would recognize as a principle. If this frightens, or merely worries them, they will think about it. The Pope has hurled down his gauntlet at their feet, gentlemen,” the Deputy Director (Operations) told the others. “They just might pick it up.”
“Has any Pope ever done this?” Moore asked.
“Resign his post? Not that I can remember,” Greer admitted. “I don’t even know if there’s a mechanism for this. I grant you it’s one hell of a gesture. We have to assume he means it. I don’t see this as a bluff.”
“No,” Judge Moore agreed. “It can’t be that.”
“He’s loyal to his people. He has to be. He was a parish priest once upon a time. He’s christened babies, officiated at weddings. He knows these people. Not as an amorphous mass—he’s been there to baptize and bury them. They are his people. He probably thinks of all Poland as his own parish. Will he be loyal to them, even at the peril of his life? How can he not be?” Ritter leaned forward. “It’s not just a question of personal courage. If he doesn’t do it, the Catholic Church loses face. No, guys, he’s serious as hell, and he isn’t bluffing. Question is, what the hell can we do about it?”
“Warn the Russians off?” Moore wondered aloud.
“No chance,” Ritter shot back. “You know better than that, Arthur. If they set up an operation, it’ll have more cutouts than anything the Mafia’s ever done. How good do you suppose security is around him?”
“Not a clue,” the DCI admitted. “I know the Swiss Guards exist, with their pretty uniforms and pikes… Didn’t they fight once?”
“I think so,” Greer observed. “Somebody tried to kill him, and they fought a rear-guard action while he skipped town. Most of them got killed, I think.”
“Now they mostly pose for pictures and tell people where the bathroom is, probably,” Ritter thought out loud. “But there has to be something to what they do. The Pope is too prominent a figure not to attract the odd nutcase. The Vatican is technically a sovereign state. It has to have some of the mechanisms of a country. I suppose we could warn them—”