“Jack, are you going to sleep? What if you miss the stop?”
“It’s a terminal,” her husband explained. “The train doesn’t just stop there; it ends there. Besides, never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
“Who ever told you that?”
“My gunny,” Jack said, from behind closed eyes.
“Who?”
“Gunnery Sergeant Phillip Tate, United States Marine Corps. He ran my platoon for me until I got killed in that chopper crash—ran it after I left, too, I suppose.” Ryan still sent him Christmas cards. Had Tate screwed up, that “killed” might not have been the limp joke he pretended it was. Tate and a Navy Hospital Corpsman Second Class named Michael Burns had stabilized Ryan’s back, at the very least preventing a permanent crippling injury. Burns got a Christmas card, too.
About ten minutes to Victoria, Ryan rubbed his eyes and sat up straight.
“Welcome back,” Cathy observed dryly.
“You’ll be doing it by the middle of next week.”
She snorted. “For an ex-Marine, you sure are lazy.”
“Honey, if there’s nothing to do, you might as well use the time productively.”
“I do.” She held up her copy of The Lancet.
“What have you been reading up on?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she replied. It was true. Ryan’s knowledge of biology was limited to the frog he’d disassembled in high school. Cathy had done that, too, but she’d probably put it together again and watched it hop back to its lily pad. She could also deal cards like a Vegas cardsharp, a talent that flat amazed her husband every time she demonstrated it. But she wasn’t worth a damn with a pistol. Most physicians probably weren’t, and here guns were regarded as unclean objects, even by the cops, some of whom were allowed to carry them. Funny country.
“How do I get to the hospital?” Cathy asked, as the train slowed for its last stop.
“Take a cab the first time. You can take the tube, too,” Jack suggested. “It’s a new city. Takes time to learn your way around.”
“How’s the neighborhood?” she asked. It came from growing up in New York and working in Baltimore’s inner city, where you did well to keep your eyes open.
“Damned sight better than the one around Hopkins. You won’t be seeing too much gunshot trauma in the ER. And the people are as nice as they can be. When they figure out that you’re an American, they practically give you the joint.”
“Well, they were nice to us in the grocery store yesterday,” Cathy allowed. “But, you know, they don’t have grape juice here.”
“My God, no civilization at all!” Jack exclaimed. “So get Sally some of the local bitter.”
“You moron!” she laughed. “Sally likes her grape juice, remember, and Hi-C cherry. All they have here is black-currant juice. I was afraid to buy it.”
“Yeah, and she’s going to learn to spell funny, too.” Jack didn’t worry about his little Sally. Kids were the most adaptable of creatures. Maybe she’d even learn the rules for cricket. If so, she could explain the incomprehensible game to her daddy.
“My God, everybody smokes here,” Cathy observed as they pulled into Victoria Station.
“Honey, think of it as a future income source for all the docs.”
“It’s an awful and a dumb way to die.”
“Yes, dear.” Whenever Jack smoked a cigarette, there was hell to pay in the Ryan house. One more cost of being married to a doc. She was right, of course, and Jack knew it, but everyone was entitled to at least one vice. Except Cathy. If she had one, she concealed it with great skill. The train slowed to a halt, allowing them to stand and open the compartment door.
They stepped out into the arriving rush of office workers. Just like Grand Central Terminal in New York, Jack thought, but not quite as crowded. London had a lot of stations, laid out like the legs of an octopus. The platform was agreeably wide, and the rush of people politer than New York would ever be. Rush hour was rush hour everywhere, but the English city had a patina of gentility that was hard not to like. Even Cathy would soon be admiring it. Ryan led his wife to the outside, where a rank of cabs waited. He walked her to the first one in line.
“Hammersmith Hospital,” he told the driver. Then he kissed his wife good-bye.
“See you tonight, Jack.” She always had a smile for him.
“Have a good one, babe.” And Ryan made his way to the other side of the building. Part of him hated the fact that Cathy had to work. His mom never had. His father, like all men of his generation, had figured that it was the man’s job to put food on the table. Emmet Ryan had liked the fact that his son had married a physician, but his chauvinistic attitude about a woman’s place had somehow or other carried over to his son despite the fact that Cathy made a lot more than Jack did, probably because ophthalmologists were more valuable to society than intelligence analysts. Or the marketplace thought so, anyway. Well, she couldn’t do what he did, and he couldn’t do what she did, and that was that.
At Century House, the uniformed security guard recognized him with a wave and a smile.
“Good morning, Sir John.”
“Hey, Bert.” Ryan slid his card into the slot. The light blinked green, and Jack transited the security gate. From there, it was just a few steps to the elevator.
Simon Harding was just arriving, too. The usual greeting: “Morning, Jack.”
“Hey,” Jack grunted in reply on the way to his desk. There was a manila envelope waiting for him. The cover tag said it had been messengered over from the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He ripped the top open to see that it was the report from Hopkins on Mikhail Suslov. Jack flipped through the pages and saw something he’d forgotten. Bernie Katz, ever the thorough doc, had evaluated Suslov’s diabetes as dangerously advanced, and predicted that his longevity was going to be limited.
“Here, Simon. Says here the head commie’s sicker than he looks.”
“Pity,” Harding observed, taking it as he fumbled with his pipe. “He’s not a very nice chap, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Next in Ryan’s pile were the morning briefing papers. They were labeled SECRET, which meant that the contents might not be in the newspapers for a day or two. It was interesting even so, because this document occasionally gave sources, and that sometimes told you if the information was good or not. Remarkably, not all the data received by the intelligence services was very reliable. A lot of it could be classified as gossip, because even important people inside the world’s government loops indulged in it. They were jealous and backbiting sons-of- bitches, like anyone else. Especially in Washington. Perhaps even more so in Moscow? He asked Harding.
“Oh, yes, very much so. Their society depends so much on status, and the backstabbing can be—well, Jack, you could say that it’s their national sport. I mean, we have it here as well, of course, but over there it can be remarkably vicious. Rather like it must have been in a medieval court, I imagine—people jockeying for position every bloody day. The infighting inside their major bureaucracies must be horrific.”
“And how does that affect this sort of information?”
“I often think I should have read psychology at Oxford. We have a number of psychiatrists on staff here—as I’m sure you do at Langley.”
“Oh, yeah. I know a few of the pshrinks. Mainly in my directorate, but some in S and T, too. We’re not as good at that as we ought to be.”
“How so, Jack?”
Ryan stretched in his chair. “A couple of months ago, I was talking to one of Cathy’s pals at Hopkins, his name’s Solomon, neuropsychiatrist. You’d have to understand Sol. He’s real smart—department chairman and all that. He doesn’t believe much in putting his patients on the couch and talking to them. He thinks most mental illness comes from chemical imbalances in the brain. They nearly chopped him out of the profession for that but, twenty years later, they all realized that he was right. Anyway, Sol told me that most politicians are like movie stars. They surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men and people to whisper nice shit into their ears—and a lot of them start believing it, because they want to believe it. It’s all a great big game to them, but a game where everything is process and damned little of it is product. They’re not like real people. They don’t do any real work, but they appear to. There’s a line in Advise and Consent: Washington is a town where you deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. If that’s true in Washington, then how much more must it be in Moscow? There, everything is politics. It’s all symbols, right? So the infighting and backstabbing must really be wild there. I figure that has to affect us in two ways. First, it means that a lot of the data we get is skewed, because the sources of the data either don’t know reality even when it jumps up and bites them on the ass, or they twist the data for their own ends as they process it and pass it on—whether consciously or unconsciously. Second, it means that even the people on the other side who need the data don’t know good from bad, so even if we can figure it out, we can’t predict what it means because they can’t decide for themselves what the hell to do with it—even if they know what the hell it is in the first place. We here have to analyze faulty information that will probably be incorrectly implemented by the people to whom it’s supposed to go. So, how the hell do we predict what they will do when they themselves don’t know the right thing to do?”