“Very well. So, what are the chances for success in this operation you propose?”
“About fifty-fifty, my people tell me. We will use a Bulgarian officer to set it up, but for security reasons the assassin will have to be a Turk…”
“A black-ass Muslim?” Alexandrov asked sharply.
“Misha, whoever it is will almost certainly be apprehended—dead, according to our plan. It is impossible to expect a clean getaway in such a mission. Thus, we cannot use one of our own. The nature of the mission places constraints upon us. Ideally, we would use a trained sniper—from Spetsnaz, for example—from three hundred meters, but that would mark the assassination as a killing done by a nation-state. No, this must appear to be the act of a single madman, as the Americans have them. You know, even with all the evidence the Americans had, some fools over there still blamed Kennedy on us or Castro. No, the evidence we leave must be a clear sign that we were not involved. That limits our operational methods. I think this is the best plan we can come up with.”
“How closely have you studied it?” Alexandrov asked, taking a swallow.
“It has been closely held. Operations like this must be. Security must be airtight, Mikhail Yevgeniyevich.”
The Party man conceded the point: “I suppose that is so, Yuriy—but the risk of failure…”
“Misha, in every aspect of life, there is risk. The important thing is that the operation not be tied to us. That we can assure with certainty. If nothing else, a serious wound will at least lessen Karol’s ardor for making trouble for us, will it not?”
“It should—”
“And half a chance of failure means half a chance of total success,” Andropov reminded his guest.
“Then I will support you. Leonid Ilyich will go along as well. That will carry the day. How long after that to get things moving?”
“A month or so, perhaps six weeks.”
“That quickly?” Party matters rarely sped along that well.
“What is the point of taking such, such—’executive action,’ isn’t that what the Americans call it?—if it is to take so long? If it is to be done, better that it should be done quickly, so as to forestall further political intrigue by this man.”
“Who will replace him?”
“Some Italian, I suppose. His selection was a major aberration. Perhaps his death will encourage the Romans to go back to their old habits,” Andropov suggested. It generated a laugh from his guest.
“Yes, they are so predictable, these religious fanatics.”
“So tomorrow I will float the mission, and you will support me?” Andropov wanted that one very clear.
“Yes, Yuriy Vladimirovich. You will have my support. And you will support me for Suslov’s full voting seat at the table.”
“Tomorrow, comrade,” Andropov promised.
CHAPTER 12:
HANDOFF
THIS TIME, the alarm clock worked, and woke them both. Ed Foley rose and headed for the bathroom, quickly made way for his wife, then headed to Eddie’s room to shake him loose while Mary Pat started breakfast. Their son immediately switched on the TV and got the morning exercise show that every city in the world seemed to have, starring, as everywhere in the world, a woman of impressive physique—she looked capable of waltzing through the Army’s Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Because he had seen the Lynda Carter series at home on cable, Eddie called her Worker-Womannnnnn! Mary Pat was of the opinion that the Russian’s blond hair came out of a bottle, while Ed thought it hurt just to watch the things she did. With no decent paper or sports page to read, however, he had little choice in the matter, and semi-vegetated in front of the TV while his son giggled through the end of the wake-up-and-sweat program. It was done live, the Chief of Station saw. So, whoever this broad was, she had to wake up at four in the morning, and so this was probably her morning workout as well. Well, then, at least it was honest. Her husband must have been a Red Army paratrooper, and she could probably beat the shit out of him, Ed Foley thought, waiting for the morning news.
That started at 6:30. The trick was to watch it and then try to figure out what was really happening in the world—just like at home, the CIA officer thought, with an early-morning grumble. Well, he’d have the Early Bird at the embassy for that, sent by secure fax from Washington for the senior embassy staffers. For an American citizen, living in Moscow was like being on a desert island. At least they had a satellite dish at the embassy so they could download CNN and other programming. It made them feel like real people—almost.
Breakfast was breakfast. Little Eddie liked Frosted Flakes—the milk was from Finland, because his mother didn’t trust the local grocery store, and the foreigners-only store was convenient to the compound. Ed and Mary Pat didn’t talk much over breakfast, in deference to the bugs that littered their walls. They never talked at home about important matters, except via hand code—and never in front of their son, because little kids were incapable of keeping secrets of any kind. In any case, their KGB surveillance people were probably bored with the Foleys by now, which they’d both worked hard at, inserting just enough randomness in their behavior to make them look like Americans. But a considered amount. Not too much. They’d planned it out carefully and thoroughly at Langley, with the help of a tame KGB Second Chief Directorate defector.
Mary Pat had her husband’s clothes all laid out on the bed, including the green tie to go with his brown suit. Like the President, Ed looked good in brown, his wife thought. Ed would wear a raincoat again, and he would keep it unbuttoned and loose around his body should another message be passed, and his senses would be thoroughly sandpapered all day.
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked Mary Pat in the living room.
“The usual. I might get together with Penny after lunch.”
“Oh? Well, say hello for me. Maybe we can get together for dinner later this week.”
“Good idea,” his wife said. “Maybe they can explain rugby to me.”
“It’s like football, honey, just the rules are a little goofy,” the Station Chief explained. “Well, off to keep the reporters happy.”
“Right!” Mary Pat laughed, working her eyes at the walls. “That guy from the Boston Globe is such an ass.”
Outside, the morning was pleasant enough—just a hint of cool air to suggest the approach of autumn. Foley walked off toward the station, waving at the gate guard. The guy on morning duty actually smiled once in a while. He’d clearly been around foreigners too much, or had been trained to do so by KGB. His uniform was that of the Moscow Militia—the city police—but Foley thought he looked a little too intelligent for that. Muscovites thought of their police as a rather low form of life, and such an agency would not attract the brightest of people.
The couple blocks to the metro station passed quickly. Crossing the streets was reasonably safe here—far more so than in New York—because private cars were pretty rare. And it was a good thing. Russian drivers made the Italians look prudent and orderly. The guys driving the ubiquitous dump trucks must all have been former tank crewmen, judging by their road manners. He picked up his copy of Pravda at the kiosk and took the escalator down to the platform. A man of the strictest habits, he arrived at the station at exactly the same time every morning, then checked the clock hanging from the ceiling to make sure. The subway trains ran on an inhumanly precise schedule, and he walked aboard at exactly 7:43 A.M. He hadn’t looked over his shoulder. It was too far into his residency in Moscow to rubberneck like a new tourist, and that, he figured, would make his KGB shadow think that his American subject was about as interesting as the kasha that Russians liked for breakfast along with the dreadful local coffee. Quality control was something the Soviets reserved for their nuclear weapons and space program, though Foley had doubts about those, based on what he’d seen in this city, where only the metro seemed to work properly. Such a strange combination of casual-klutz and Germanlike precision they were. You could tell how well things worked over here by what they were used for, and intelligence operations had the highest priority of all, lest the Soviets’ enemies find out not what they had, but what they didn’t have. Foley had agent CARDINAL to tell him and America what the Soviet Union had in the military realm. Generally, it was good stuff to learn, but that was mainly because the more you learned, the less you had to worry. No, it was political intelligence that counted most here because, as backward as they were, they were still big enough to cause trouble if you couldn’t counter them early on. Langley was very worried about the Pope at the moment. He’d evidently done something that might be embarrassing to the Russians. And Ivan didn’t like being embarrassed in the political field any more than American politicians—just that Ivan didn’t go running off to The Washington Post to get even. Ritter and Moore were very concerned about what Ivan might do—and even more worried about what Yuriy Andropov might do. Ed Foley didn’t have a feel for that particular Russian. Like most in CIA, he knew the guy only by his face, name, and his evident liver problems—that information had leaked out through a means the Station Chief didn’t know. Maybe the Brits… if you could trust the Brits, Ed cautioned himself. He had to trust them, but something kept making the hackles on his neck get nervous about them. Well, they probably had doubts about CIA. Such a crazy game this was. He scanned the front page. Nothing surprising, though the piece on the Warsaw Pact was a little interesting. They still worried about NATO. Maybe they really did worry about having the German army come east again. They were certainly paranoid enough… Paranoia had probably been invented in Russia. Maybe Freud discovered it on a trip here, he mused, lifting his eyes for a pair tracking him… no, none, he decided. Was it possible that the KGB wasn’t tracking him? Well, possible, yes, but likely, no. If they had a guy—more likely a team—shadowing him, the coverage would be expert—but why put expert—but why put expert coverage on the Press Attaché? Foley sighed to himself. Was he too much of a worrier, or not paranoid enough? And how did you tell the difference? Or might he have exposed himself to a false-flag operation by wearing a green tie? How the hell do you tell?