Ryan had to agree. “Admiral Greer thinks so, too. Bob Ritter is pretty smart—maybe a little too smart, if you know what I mean—but he doesn’t have enough friends in Congress to get his empire expanded the way that he wants.”
Greer was the CIA’s chief analyst, Ritter the Ops director. The two were often at odds.
“They don’t trust Ritter like they do the DDL Carryover from the Church Committee mess ten years ago. You know, the Senate never seems to remember who ran those operations. They canonize the boss and crucify the troops who tried to follow his orders—though badly. Damn, was that a—” Murray searched for the word. “The Germans call it a schweinerei. No translation, exactly, but, you know, it just sounds like what it is.”
Jack grunted with amusement. “Yeah, better than fuckup.”
The CIA’s effort to assassinate Fidel Castro, which had been run out of the office of the Attorney General during the time of Camelot, had been right out of Woody Woodpecker, with a sprinkling of the Three Stooges: politicians trying to imitate James Bond, a character made up by a failed Brit spook. The movies just weren’t the real world, as Ryan had learned the hard way, first in London, and then in his own living room.
“So, Dan, how good are they really?”
“The Brits?” Murray led Ryan out onto the front lawn. The removers were vetted by SIS—but Murray was FBI. “Basil is world-class. That’s why he’s lasted so long. He was a brilliant field spook, and he was the first guy to get a bad vibe about Philby—and remember, Basil was just a rookie. He’s good at administration, one of the most agile thinkers I’ve ever come across. The local politicians on both sides of the aisle like him and trust him. That isn’t easy. Kinda like Hoover was for us once, but without the cult-of-personality thing. I like him. Good dude to work with. And Basil likes you a lot, Jack.”
“Why?” Ryan asked. “I haven’t done much of anything.”
“Bas has an eye for talent. He thinks you have the right stuff. He flat loved that thing you dreamed up last year to catch security leaks—the Canary Trap—and rescuing their next king didn’t exactly hurt, y’know? You’re going to be a popular boy down at Century House. If you live up to your billing, you might just have a future in the spook business.”
“Great.” Ryan still wasn’t entirely sure that was what he wanted to do, though. “Dan, I’m a stockbroker who turned into a history teacher, remember?”
“Jack, that’s behind you now. Look forward, will ya? You were pretty good picking stocks at Merrill Lynch, right?”
“I made a few bucks,” Ryan admitted. Actually, it was a lot of bucks, and his portfolio was still growing. People were getting fat on The Street back home.
“So, apply your brains to something really important,” Dan suggested. “I hate to tell you, Jack, but there aren’t that many smart people in the intelligence community. I know. I work there. A lot of drones, a lot of moderately smart people, but damned few stars, pal. You have the stuff to be a star. Jim Greer thinks so. So does Basil. You think outside the box. I do, too. That’s why I’m not chasing bank robbers in Riverside, Philadelphia, anymore. But I never made any million bucks playing the market.”
“Getting lucky doesn’t make you a great guy, Dan. Hell, Cathy’s dad, Joe, has made a lot more ‘n I ever will, and he’s an opinionated, overbearing son of a bitch.”
“Well, you made his daughter the wife of an honorary knight, didn’t you?”
Jack smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”
“That’ll open a lot of doors over here, Jack. The Brits do like their titles.” He paused. “Now—how about I drag you guys out for a pint? There’s a nice pub up the hill, The Gypsy Moth. This moving stuff’ll drive you crazy. It’s almost as bad as building a house.”
HIS OFFICE WAS in the first basement level of The Centre, a security measure that had never been explained to him, but it turned out there was an exact counterpart room in the headquarters of the Main Enemy. There, it was called MERCURY, messenger of the gods—very apt, if his nation acknowledged the concept of a god. The messages passed through the code and cipher clerks, came to his desk, and he examined them for content and code words, before routing them to the proper offices and officers for action; then, when the messages came back down, he routed things the other way. The traffic broke into a regular routine; mornings were usually inbound traffic and afternoons usually outbound. The tedious part was the encrypting, of course, since so many of the people out in the field used one-time pads unique to themselves—the single copies of those pads were located in the set of rooms to his right. The clerks in there transmitted and kept secrets ranging from the sex lives of Italian parliamentarians to the precise targeting hierarchy of American nuclear-strike plans.
Strangely, none of them talked about what they did or what they encrypted, inbound or outbound. The clerks were pretty mindless. Perhaps they were recruited with those psychological factors in mind—it would not have surprised him. This was an agency designed by geniuses for operation by robots. If someone could actually build such robots, he was sure they’d have them here, because you could trust machines not to diverge too greatly from their intended path.
Machines couldn’t think, however, and for his own job, thinking and remembering were useful things, if the agency was to function—and function it must. It was the shield and the sword of a state which needed both. And he was the postmaster of sorts; he had to remember what went where. He didn’t know everything that went on here, but he knew a lot more than most people in this building: operation names and locations, and, often enough, operational missions and taskings. He generally did not know the proper names and faces of field officers, but he knew their targets, knew the code names of their recruited agents, and, for the most part, knew what those agents were providing.
He’d been here, in this department, for nine and a half years. He’d started in 1973, just after graduating from Moscow State University with a degree in mathematics, and his highly disciplined mind had gotten him spotted early on by a KGB talent scout. He played a particularly fine game of chess, and that, he supposed, was where his trained memory came from, all that study of the games of the old grandmasters, so that in a given situation he’d know the next move. He’d actually thought of making chess his career, but though he’d studied hard, it wasn’t quite hard enough, it seemed. Boris Spassky, just a young player himself then, had annihilated him six games to none, with two desperate draws, and so ended his hopes of fame and fortune… and travel. He sighed at his desk. Travel. He’d studied his geography books, too, and in closing his eyes could see the images—mainly black-and-white: Venice’s Grand Canal, London’s Regent Street, Rio de Janeiro’s magnificent Copacabana beach, the face of Mt. Everest, which Hillary had climbed when he himself had just been learning to walk… all those places he would never get to see. Not him. Not a person with his access and his security clearances. No, KGB was very careful with such people. It trusted no one, a lesson that had been learned the hard way. What was it about his country that so many tried to escape from it? And yet so many millions had died fighting for the rodina… He’d been spared military service because of his mathematics and his chess potential, and then, he supposed, because of his recruitment to #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. Along with it came a nice flat, fully seventy-five square meters, in a recently finished building. Military rank, too—he’d become a senior captain within weeks of his majority, which, on the whole, wasn’t too bad. Even better, he’d just started getting paid now in certificate rubles, and so was able to shop in the “closed” stores for Western consumer goods—and, best of all, with shorter lines. His wife appreciated that. He’d soon be in the entry level of the nomenklatura, like a minor czarist prince, looking up the ladder and wondering how far he might climb. But unlike the czars, he was here not by blood but by merit—a fact that appealed to his manhood, Captain Zaitzev thought.
Yes, he’d earned his way here, and that was important. That’s why he was trusted with secrets, this one for example: an agent code-named CASSIUS, an American living in Washington; it seemed he had access to valuable political intelligence that was treasured by people on the fifth floor, and which was often seconded to experts in the U.S.-Canada Institute, which studied the tea leaves in America. Canada wasn’t very important to the KGB, except for its participation in the American air-defense systems, and because some of its senior politicians didn’t like their powerful southern neighbor, or so the rezident in Ottawa regularly told his superiors upstairs. Zaitzev wondered about that. The Poles might not love their eastern neighbor either, but the Poles mostly did what they were told—the Warsaw rezident had reported with unconcealed pleasure in his dispatch the previous month—as that union hothead had found out to his discomfort. “Counterrevolutionary scum” had been the term used by Colonel Igor Alekseyevich Tomachevskiy. The Colonel was thought to be a rising star, due for a posting to the West. That’s where the really good ones went.