“Boston College, second year. The Jesuits make you spend a semester on it,” Ryan confirmed, taking a long sip. “Whether you want to or not.”
“Well, communism is metaphysics applied ruthlessly to the real world, and when things don’t fit, it’s the fault of the square sods who don’t fit into their round bloody holes. That can be rather hard on the poor sods, you see. And so, Joe Stalin murdered roughly twenty million of them, partly because of political theory, partly because of his own mental illness and bloody-mindedness. That insane bugger defined paranoia. One pays a price for being ruled by a madman with a twisted book of rules, you see.”
“But how faithful is the current political leadership to Marxist theory?”
A thoughtful nod. “That’s the question, Jack. The answer is, we don’t bloody know. They all claim to be true believers, but are they?” Harding paused for a contemplative sip of his own. “Only when it suits them, I think. But that depends on who one is talking about. Suslov, for example, believes totally—but the rest of them? To some greater or lesser extent, they do and they don’t. I suppose you can characterize them as people who used to go to church every Sunday, then fell away from the habit. Part of them still believes, but some greater or lesser part does not. What they do believe in is the fact that the state religion is the source of their power and status. And so, for all the common folk out there, they must appear to believe, because believing is the only thing that gives them that power and status.”
“Intellectual inertia?” Ryan wondered aloud.
“Exactly, Jack. Newton’s first law of motion.”
Part of Ryan wanted to object to the discourse. The world had to make more sense than that. But did it? What rule said that it had to? he asked himself. And who enforced such rules? And was it expressed that simply? What Harding had just explained in less than two hundred words purported to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures, strategic weapons of incomprehensible power, and millions of people whose uniforms denoted enmity that demanded aggression and death in time of war or near-war.
But the world was about ideas, good and bad, and the conflict between this one and Ryan’s own defined the reality in which Ryan worked, defined the belief system of the people who’d tried to kill him and his family. And that was as real as it had to be, wasn’t it? No, there was no rule that compelled the world to make sense. People decided on their own what made sense and what did not. So, was everything about the world a matter of perception? Was it all a thing of the mind? What was reality?
But that was the question behind all of metaphysics. When Ryan had studied it at Boston College, it had been so purely theoretical that it seemed to have no attachment at all to reality. It had been a lot for Ryan to absorb at age nineteen, and, he realized, just as much to absorb at age thirty-two. But here the marks were often recorded in human blood, not on a report card.
“Christ, Simon. You know, it would be a lot easier if they did believe in God.”
“Then, Jack, it would be just another religious war, and those are bloody affairs, too, you may recall. Think of it as the crusades, one version of God against another. Those wars were quite nasty enough. The true believers in Moscow think that they are riding the wave of history, that they are bringing perfection to the human condition. It must drive them mad when they see that their country can scarcely feed itself, and so they try to ignore it—but it is difficult to ignore an empty belly, isn’t it? So they blame it all on us and on ‘wreckers’—traitors and saboteurs—in their own country. Those are the people they imprison or kill.” Harding shrugged. “Personally, I regard them as infidels, believers in a false god. It’s just easier that way. I’ve studied their political theology, but that has limited value because, as I said, so many of them do not really believe in the substance of their system. Sometimes they think like tribal Russians, whose outlook on the world has always been skewed by our standards. Russian history is such a muddle that studying it has its own limits in terms of Western logic. They’re xenophobes of a very high order, always have been—but for fairly reasonable historical causes. They’ve always had threats from both east and west. The Mongols, for example, have been as far west as the Baltic, and the Germans and French have hammered on the gates of Moscow. As we say, they’re a rum lot. One thing I do know is that no sane man wants them as masters. A pity, really. They have so many marvelous poets and composers.”
“Flowers in a junkyard,” Ryan suggested.
“Exactly, Jack. Very good.” Harding fished for his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match. “So, how do you like the beer?”
“Excellent, much better than at home.”
“I don’t know how you Americans can stomach it. But your beef is better than ours.”
“Corn-fed. Turns out better meat than grass does,” Ryan sighed. “I’m still getting used to life over here. Every time I start feeling comfortable, something hits me like a snake in high grass.”
“Well, you’ve had less than a week to get used to us.”
“My kids will be talking funny.”
“Civilized, Jack, civilized,” Harding observed with a good laugh. “You Yanks do ravage our language, you know.”
“Yeah, right.” Pretty soon he’d refer to baseball as “rounders,” which was a girls’ game over here. They didn’t know dick about a good fastball.
FOR HIS PART, Ed Foley found himself suddenly outraged by the bugs that he knew had to be in his apartment. Every time he made love to his wife, some KGB desk weenie was listening in. Probably a nice perverse diversion for their counterespionage spooks, but it was, by God, the Foleys’ love life, and was nothing sacred? He and Mary Pat had been briefed in on what to expect, and his wife had actually joked about it, on the flight over—you couldn’t bug airplanes. She’d called it a way of showing those barbarians how real people lived, and he’d laughed, but here and now it wasn’t so goddamned funny. It was like being an animal in the goddamned zoo, with people watching and laughing and pointing. Would KGB keep a log of how often he and his wife got it on? They might, he thought, looking for marital difficulties as a pretext for recruiting him or Mary Pat. Everyone did it. So, they’d have to make love regularly just to discourage that possibility, though playing a reverse false-flag did have interesting theoretical possibilities of its own… No, the Station Chief decided, it’d be an unnecessary complication for their stay in Moscow, and being Chief of Station was already complex enough.
Only the ambassador, the defense attaché, and his own officers were allowed to know who he was. Ron Fielding was the overt COS, and his job was to wiggle like a good worm on the hook. When parking his car, he’d occasionally leave his sun visor down or rotated ninety degrees; sometimes he’d wear a flower in his buttonhole and take it out halfway down a block as though signaling someone or, best of all, he’d bump into people, simulating a brush-pass. That sort of thing could make the Second Chief Directorate counterspooks go nuts—race after innocent Muscovites, perhaps snatch a few up for interrogations, or put a squad of officers on the poor random bastard to watch everything he did. If nothing else, it forced KGB to waste assets on fool’s errands, chasing after phantom geese. Best of all, it persuaded them that Fielding was a clumsy Station Chief. It always made the other side feel good, and that was always a smart move for CIA. The game he played made other power moves look like a game of Chutes and Ladders.
But the fact that there were probably bugs in his bedroom pissed him off. And he couldn’t do the usual things to contravene them, like playing the radio and talking under it. No, he couldn’t act like a trained spook. He had to be dumb, and playing dumb required brains and discipline and the utmost thoroughness. Not a single mistake was allowed. That one mistake could get people killed, and Ed Foley had a conscience. It was a dangerous thing for a field spook to have, but it was impossible not to have. You had to care about your agents, those foreign nationals who worked for you and fed you information. All—well, nearly all—had problems. The big one here was alcoholism. He expected every agent he ran into to be a boozer. Some were quite mad. Most were people who “wanted to get even—with their bosses, with the system, with the country, with communism, with their spouses, with the whole perverse world. Some, a very few, might be genuinely attractive people. But Foley would not pick them. They would pick him. And he’d have to play the cards he was dealt. The rules of this game were hard and damned harsh. His life was safe. Oh, sure, he might get a little roughed up—or Mary Pat—but they both had diplomatic passports, and to seriously mess with him meant that somewhere in America some Soviet diplomat of fairly high rank might get a rough time at the hands of some street thugs—who might or might not be trained law-enforcement personnel. Diplomats didn’t like such things, and so it was avoided; in fact, the Russians played by the rules more faithfully than the Americans did. So he and his wife were safe, but their agents, if and when blown, would get less mercy than a mouse would get from a particularly sadistic cat. There was still torture here, still interrogations that lasted into long hours. Due process of law was whatever the government at the time felt like it was. And the appeals process was limited to whether or not the shooter’s pistol was loaded. So he had to treat his agents, whether drunks, whores, or felons, like his own children, changing their diapers, getting them a bedtime glass of water, and wiping their noses.