All in all, Ed Foley thought, it was one hell of a game. And it kept him awake at night. Could the Russians tell that? Were there cameras in the walls? Wouldn’t that be perverse? But American technology wasn’t that advanced, so he was damned sure the Russians’ wasn’t. Probably. Foley reminded himself that there were smart people here, and a lot of them worked for KGB.
What amazed him was that his wife slept the sleep of the just, lying there next to him. She really was a better field spook than he was. She took to it like a seal to ocean water, chasing after her fish. But what about the sharks? He supposed it was normal for a man to worry about his wife, however capable she might be as a spook. That was just how men were programmed, as she was programmed to be a mother. Mary Pat looked like an angel to him in the dim light, the cute little sleep-smile she had, and the way her baby-fine blond hair always got messed up the instant she lay down on the pillow. To the Russians, she was a potential spy, but to Edward Foley she was his beloved wife, workmate, and mother of his child. It was so strange that people could be so many different things, depending on who looked at them, and yet all were true. With that philosophical thought—Christ, he did need sleep!—Ed Foley closed his eyes.
“SO, WHAT DID HE SAY?” Bob Ritter asked.
“He’s not terribly pleased,” Judge Moore replied, to nobody’s surprise.
“But he understands that there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. He’ll probably make a speech next week about the nobility of the workingman, especially the unionized sort.”
“Good,” Ritter grunted. “Let him tell the air-traffic controllers.” The DDO was the master of the cheap shot, though he had the good sense not to say such things in the wrong company.
“Where’s the speech?” the DDI asked.
“Chicago, next week. There’s a large ethnic Polish population there,” Moore explained. “He’ll talk about the shipyard workers, of course, and point out that he once headed his own union. I haven’t seen the speech yet, but I expect it will be mainly vanilla, with a few chocolate chips tossed in.”
“And the papers will say that he’s courting the blue-collar vote,” Jim Greer observed. Sophisticated as they purported to be, the newspapers didn’t catch on to much until you presented it to them with french fries and ketchup. They were masters of political discourse, but they didn’t know shit about how the real game was played until they were briefed-in, preferably with single-syllable words. “Will our Russian friends notice?”
“Perhaps. They have good people reading the tea leaves at the U.S.-Canada Institute. Maybe someone will drop a word en passant in a casual conversation over at Foggy Bottom that we look upon the Polish situation with some small degree of concern, since we have so many American citizens of Polish ancestry. Can’t take it much further than that at the moment,” Moore explained.
“So, we’re concerned about Poland, but not the Pope right now,” Ritter clarified the situation.
“We don’t know about that yet, do we?” the DCI asked rhetorically.
“Won’t they wonder why the Pope didn’t let us in on his threat…?”
“Probably not. The wording of the letter suggests a private communication.”
“Not so private that Warsaw didn’t forward it to Moscow,” Ritter objected.
“As my wife likes to say, that’s different,” Moore pointed out.
“You know, Arthur, sometimes this wheels-inside-of-other-wheels stuff gives me a headache,” Greer observed.
“The game has rules, James.”
“So does boxing, but those are a lot more straightforward.”
” ‘Protect yourself at all times,’ ” Ritter pointed out. “That’s Rule Number One here, too. Well, we don’t have any specific warnings yet, do we?” Heads shook wordlessly. No, they didn’t. “What else did he say, Arthur?”
“He wants us to find out if there’s any danger to His Holiness. If anything happens to him, our President is going to be seriously pissed.”
“Along with a billion or so Catholics,” Greer agreed.
“You suppose the Russians might contract the Northern Irish Protestants to do the hit?” Ritter asked, with a nasty smile. “They don’t like him either, remember. Something for Basil to look into.”
“Robert, that’s a little too far off the wall, I think,” Greer analyzed. “They hate communism almost as much as Catholicism, anyway.”
“Andropov doesn’t think that far outside the box,” Moore decided. “Nobody over there does. If he decides to take the Pope out, he’ll use his own assets and try to be clever about it. That’s how we’ll know if, God forbid, it goes that far. And if it looks as if he’s leaning that way, we’ll have to dissuade him from that notion.”
“It won’t get that far. The Politburo is too circumspect,” said the DDL “And it’s too unsubtle for them. It’s not the sort of thing a chess player does, and chess is still their national game.”
“Tell that to Leon Trotsky,” Ritter said sharply.
“That was personal. Stalin wanted to eat his liver with onions and gravy,” Greer replied. “That was pure personal hatred, and it achieved nothing on the political level.”
“Not the way Uncle Joe looked at it. He was genuinely afraid of Trotsky—”
“No, he wasn’t. Okay, you can say he was a paranoid bastard, but even he knew the difference between paranoia and genuine fear.” Greer knew that statement was a mistake the moment the words escaped his lips. He covered his tracks: “And even if he was afraid of the old goat, the current crop isn’t like that. They lack Stalin’s paranoia but, more to the point, they lack his decisiveness.”
“Jim, you’re wrong. The Warsaw Letter is a potentially dangerous threat to their political stability, and they will take that seriously.”
“Robert, I didn’t know you were that religious,” Moore joked.
“I’m not, and neither are they, but they will be worried about this. I think they will be worried a lot. Enough to take direct action? That I’m not sure of, but they will damned well think about it.”
“That remains to be seen,” Moore countered.
“Arthur, that is my assessment,” the DDO shot back, and with the A-word, it became serious, at least within the cloisters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“What changed your mind so quickly, Bob?” the Judge asked.
“The more I think about it, from their point of view, the more serious it starts to look.”
“You planning anything?”
That made Ritter a little uneasy. “It’s a little early to hit the Foleys with a major tasking, but I am going to send them a heads-up, at least to get them thinking about it.”
This was an operational question, on which the others typically deferred to Bob Ritter and his field-spook instincts. Taking information from an agent was often simpler and more routine than getting instructions to an agent. Since it was assumed that every employee of the Moscow embassy was followed on a regular or irregular basis, it was dangerous to make them do something that looked spookish. This was especially true for the Foleys—they were so new that they would be tightly covered. Ritter didn’t want them blown, for the usual reasons and for one other: His selection of this husband/wife team had been a daring play, and if it didn’t work, it would come back at him. A high-stakes poker player, Ritter didn’t like losing his chips any more than the next man. He had very high hopes for the Foleys. He didn’t want their potential blown two weeks into their assignment in Moscow.
The other two didn’t comment, which allowed Ritter to proceed, running his shop as he saw fit.
“You know,” Moore observed, with a lean-back into his chair, “here we are, the best and brightest, the best-informed members of this presidential administration, and we don’t know beans about a subject that may turn out to be of great importance.”
“True, Arthur,” Greer agreed. “But we don’t know with considerable authority. That’s more than anybody else can say, isn’t it?”
“Just what I needed to hear, James.” It meant that those outside this building were free to pontificate, but that these three men were not. No, they had to be cautious in everything they said, because people tended to view their opinions as facts—which, you learned up here on the Seventh Floor, they most certainly were not. If they were that good, they’d be doing something more profitable with their lives, like picking stocks.
RYAN SETTLED BACK into his easy chair with a copy of the Financial Times. Most people preferred to read it in the morning, but not Jack. Mornings were for general news, to prepare him for the workday at Century House—back home, he’d listened to news radio during the hour-or-so drive, since the intelligence business so often tracked the news. Here and now, he could relax with the financial stuff. This British paper wasn’t quite the same as The Wall Street Journal, but the different twist it put on things was interesting—it gave him a new slant on abstract problems, to which he could then apply his American-trained expertise. Besides, it helped to keep current. There were bound to be financial opportunities out here, waiting for people to harvest them. Finding a few would make this whole European adventure worth the time. He still regarded his CIA sojourn as a side trip in life, whose ultimate destination was too far off in the haze. He’d play his cards one at a time.