“So you know the rules about this. If anything breaks, you call me”—he handed over his card—”and nobody but me or one of my people is allowed to look at the inside. If that happens, the system self-destructs, of course. Won’t start a fire or anything, but it does stink some, ’cause of the plastic. Anyway, that’s it.” He broke down the box.
“You want a Coke or anything?”
“No, thanks. Gotta get home.” And with that, the communications expert walked back out the door to his car.
“What was that, Jack?” Cathy asked from the kitchen.
“My secure phone,” Jack explained, returning to his wife’s side.
“What’s that for?”
“So I can call home and talk to my boss.”
“Can’t you do that from the office?”
“There’s the time difference and, well, there are some things I can’t talk about there.”
“Secret-agent stuff,” she snorted.
“That’s right.” Just like the pistol he had in his closet. Cathy accepted the presence of his Remington shotgun with some equanimity—he used it for hunting, and she was prepared to tolerate that, since you could cook and eat the birds, and the shotgun was unloaded. But she was less comfortable with a pistol. And so, like civilized married people, they didn’t talk about it, so long as it was well out of Sally’s reach, and Sally knew that her father’s closet was off-limits. Ryan had gotten fond of his Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic, which was loaded with fourteen Federal hollow point cartridges and two spare magazines, plus tritium match sights and custom-made grips. If he ever needed a pistol again, this would be the one. He’d have to find a place to practice shooting, Ryan reminded himself. Maybe the nearby Royal Navy base had a range. Sir Basil could probably make a phone call and straighten it out. As an honorary knight, he didn’t own a sword, but a pistol was the modern equivalent, and it could be a useful tool on occasion.
So could a corkscrew. “Chianti?” Ryan asked.
Cathy turned. “Okay, I don’t have anything scheduled for tomorrow.”
“Cath, I’ve never understood what a glass or two of wine tonight would have to do with surgery tomorrow—it’s ten or twelve hours away.”
“Jack, you don’t mix alcohol with surgery,” she explained patiently. “Okay? You don’t drink and drive. You don’t drink and cut, either. Not ever. Not once.”
“Yes, doctor. So tomorrow you just set glasses prescriptions for people?”
“Uh-huh, simple day. How about you?”
“Nothing important. Same crap, different day.”
“I don’t know how you stand it.”
“Well, it’s interesting, secret crap, and you have to be a spook to understand it.”
“Right.” She poured the spaghetti sauce into a bowl. “Here.”
“I haven’t got the wine open yet.”
“So work faster.”
“Yes, Professor the Lady Ryan,” Jack responded, taking the bowl of sauce and setting it on the table. Then he pulled the cork out of the Chianti.
Sally was too big a girl for a high chair but still small enough for a booster seat, which she carried to the chair herself. Since the dinner was “pisgetty,” her father tucked the cloth napkin into her collar. The sauce would probably get to her pants anyway, but it would teach his little girl about napkins, and that, Cathy thought, was important. Then Ryan poured the wine. Sally didn’t ask for any. Her father had indulged her once (over his wife’s objections), and that had ended that. Sally got some Coca-Cola.
SVETLANA WAS ASLEEP, finally. She liked to stay up as long as she could, every night the same, or so it seemed, until she finally put her head down. She slept with a smile, her father saw, like a little angel, the sort that decorated Italian cathedrals in the travel books he used to read. The TV was on. Some World War II movie, it sounded like. They were all the same. The Germans attacked cruelly—well, occasionally there was a German character with something akin to humanity, usually a German communist, it would be revealed along the way, torn by conflicting loyalties to his class (working class, of course) and his country—and the Soviets resisted bravely, losing a lot of defiant men at first until turning the tide, usually outside Moscow in December 1941, at Stalingrad in January 1943, or the Kursk Bulge in the summer of 1943. There was always a heroic political officer, a courageous private soldier, a wise old sergeant, and a bright young junior officer. Toss in a grizzled general who wept quietly and alone for his men, then had to set his feelings aside and get the job done. There were about five different formulas, all of them variations of the same theme, and the only real difference was whether Stalin was seen as a wise, godlike ruler or simply wasn’t mentioned at all. That depended on when the film had been shot. Stalin had fallen out of fashion in the Soviet film industry about 1956, soon after Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had made his famous but then-secret speech revealing what a monster Stalin had been—something Soviet citizens still had trouble with, especially the cab-drivers, or so it seemed. Truth in his country was a rare commodity, and almost always one hard to swallow.
But Zaitzev wasn’t watching the movie now. Oleg Ivanovich sipped at his vodka, eyes focused on the TV screen, without seeing it. It had just struck him how huge a step he’d taken that afternoon on the metro. At the time, it had almost been a lark, like a child playing a prank, reaching into that American’s pocket like a sneak-thief, just to see if he could do it. No one had noticed. He’d been clever and careful about it, and even the American hadn’t noticed, or else he would have reacted.
So he’d just proven that he had the ability to… what? To do what? Oleg Ivan’ch asked himself with surprising intensity.
What the hell had he done on the metro coach? What had he been thinking about? Actually, he hadn’t really thought about it at all. It had just been some sort of foolish impulse… hadn’t it?
He shook his head and took another sip of his drink. He was a man of intelligence. He had a university degree. He was an excellent chess player. He had a job that required the highest security clearance, that paid well, and that had just put him at the bottom entry level of the nomenklatura. He was a person of importance—not much, but some. The KGB trusted him with knowledge about many things. The KGB had confidence in him… but…
But what? he asked himself. What came after the “but” part? His mind was wandering in directions he didn’t understand and could barely see…
The priest. It came down to that, didn’t it? Or did it? What was he thinking? Zaitzev asked himself. He didn’t really know if he was thinking anything at all. It was as though his hand had developed a mind of its own, taking action without the brain’s or the mind’s permission, leading off in a direction that he didn’t understand.
Yes, it had to be that damned priest. Was he bewitched? Was some outside force taking control of his body?
No! That is not possible! Zaitzev told himself. That was something from ancient tales, the sort of thing old women discussed—prattled about—over a boiling pot.
But why, then, did I put my hand in the American’s pocket? his mind demanded of itself, but there was no immediate answer.
Do you want to be apart of murder? some small voice asked. Are you willing to facilitate the murder of an innocent man?
Was he innocent? Zaitzev asked himself, taking another swallow. Not a single dispatch crossing his desk suggested otherwise. In fact, he could hardly remember any mention of this Father Karol in any KGB messages during the past couple years. Yes, they’d taken note of his trip back to Poland soon after being elected Pope, but what man didn’t go home after his promotion to see his friends and seek their approval of his new place in the world?
The Party was made up of men, too. And men made mistakes. He saw them every day, even from the skilled, highly trained officers of KGB, who were punished, or chided, or just remarked upon by their superiors in The Centre. Leonid Ilyich made mistakes. People chuckled about them over lunch often enough—or talked more quietly about the things his greedy children did, especially his daughter. Hers was a petty corruption, and while people talked about it, they usually spoke quietly. But he was thinking about a much larger and more dangerous kind of corruption.
Where did the legitimacy of the State come from? In the abstract, it came from the people, but the people had no say in things. The Party did, but only a small minority of the people were in the Party, and of those only a much smaller minority achieved anything resembling power. And so the legitimacy of his State resided atop what was by any logical measure … a fiction…