Foley found himself wondering what it was like, how the room looked. At Langley it was immense, the size of a parking garage, with no internal walls or dividers, so that everyone could see everyone else. There were seven drum-shaped cassette storage structures, named for Disney’s Seven Dwarfs; they even had TV cameras on the inside, should some lunatic try to get in there, though he’d almost certainly be killed by such an adventure, since the motorized retrievers turned powerfully and without warning. Besides, only the big mainframe computers—including the fastest and most powerful one, made by Cray Research—knew which cassette had which data and lay in which storage slot. The security there was unreal, multilayered, and checked on a daily—maybe an hourly—basis. The people who worked there were occasionally and randomly followed home from work, probably by the FBI, which was pretty good at such stuff, for a bunch of gumshoed cops. It must have been oppressive for the people who worked there, but if anyone had ever complained about it, those reports hadn’t come to Ed Foley. Marines had to run their three miles per day and undergo formal inspections, and CIA employees had to put up with the overpowering institutional paranoia, and that was just how things were. The polygraph was a particular pain in the ass, and the Agency even had psychiatrists who trained people in how to defeat them. He’d undergone such training, and so had his wife—and still CIA put them on the box at least once a year, whether to test their loyalty or to see if they still remembered their training, who could tell?
But did KGB do that as well? They’d be crazy not to, but he wasn’t sure if they had polygraph technology, and so… maybe, maybe not. There was so much about KGB that he and CIA didn’t know. Langley made a lot of SWAGs—stupid wild-ass guesses—mainly from people who said, “Well, we do it this way, and therefore they must, too,” which was total horseshit. No two people, and damned-sure no two countries, had ever done anything exactly the same way, and that was why Ed Foley deemed himself one of the best in this crazy business. He knew better. He never stopped looking. He never did anything the same way twice, except as a ruse, to give a false impression to someone else—especially Russians, who probably (almost certainly, he figured) suffered from the same bureaucratic disease that circumscribed minds at CIA.
Wh[at] if this g[uy] wants a tick[et] out? Mary Pat asked.
First class on Pan Am, her husband answered, as fast as his fingers could move, and he gets to screw the stew.
U R bad, Mary Patricia responded, with the gagging sound of a suppressed laugh. But she knew he was right. If this guy wanted to play spy, it might be smarter just to yank his ass out of the USSR and fly him to Washington, and toss in a lifetime pass to Disney World for after the debrief. A Russian would go into sensory overload in the Magic Kingdom, not to mention the newly opened Epcot Center. Coming out of Space Mountain, Ed had joked that CIA ought to rent the whole place for one day and take the Soviet Politburo around, let them ride every ride and gobble down the burgers and swill the Cokes, and then, on the way out, tell them, “This is what Americans do for fun. Unfortunately, we can’t show you the things we do when we’re serious.” And if that didn’t scare the piss out of them, nothing would. But it would scare the piss out of them, both Foleys were sure. They—even the important ones with access to everything KGB got out of the Main Enemy—even they were the most insular and provincial of people. For the most part, they really did believe the propaganda because they had nothing to measure it against, because they were as much victims of their system as the poor dumb muzhiks—peasants—driving the dump trucks.
But the Foleys didn’t live in a fantasy world.
So, w[e] d[o] what he says, then what? she asked next.
One step at a time, he replied, and she nodded in the darkness. Like having a baby, this couldn’t be rushed unless you wanted a funny-looking kid. It told Mary Pat that her husband wasn’t a total curmudgeon, though, and that elicited a kiss in the darkness.
ZAITZEV WASN’T COMMUNICATING with his wife. For him, right now, even a half liter of vodka couldn’t help him sleep. He’d made his request. Only tomorrow would he know for sure if he was dealing with someone able to help him. What he’d asked wasn’t entirely reasonable, but he didn’t have the time or the security to be reasonable. He was secure in the knowledge that even KGB couldn’t fake what he’d specified. Oh, sure, maybe they could get the Poles or the Romanians or some other socialist country to do it, but not the Americans. Even KGB had its limits.
So, again, he got to wait, but sleep didn’t come. Tomorrow he would not be a very happy comrade. He could feel the hangover coming already, like an earthquake trapped and contained inside his skull…
“HOW’D IT GO, SIMON?” Ryan asked.
“It could have been worse. The PM didn’t rip my head off. I told her that we only have what we have, and Basil backed me up. She wants more. She said that in my presence.”
“No surprise. Ever hear of a president who wanted less information, buddy?”
“Not recently,” Harding admitted. Ryan saw the stress bleeding off his workmate. Damned sure he’d have a beer at the pub before heading home. The Brit analyst loaded his pipe and lit it, taking a long pull.
“If it makes you feel any better, Langley doesn’t have any more than you guys do.”
“I know. She asked, and that’s what Basil said. Evidently, he talked to your Judge Moore before driving over.”
“So we’re all ignorant together.”
“Bloody comforting,” Simon Harding snorted.
It was far past going-home time. Ryan had waited to see what Simon would say about the meeting at 10 Downing Street, because Ryan was also here to gather intelligence on the Brits. They would understand, because that was the game they all played. He checked his watch.
“Well, I’ve got to boogie on home. See you tomorrow.”
“Sleep well,” Harding said, as Ryan headed out the door. Jack was reasonably sure that Simon would not. He knew what Harding made, as a mid-level civil servant, and it wasn’t quite enough for this stressful a day. But, he told himself out on the street, that’s Life in the Big City.
“WHAT DID YOU tell your people, Bob?” Judge Moore asked.
“Just what you told me, Arthur. The President wants to know. No feedback yet. Tell the Boss he’s going to have to be patient.”
“I said that. He was not overly pleased,” the DCI responded.
“Well, Judge, I can’t stop the rain from falling. We don’t have power over a lot of things, and time is one of them. He’s a big boy; he can understand that, can’t he?”
“Yes, Robert, but he likes to get what he needs. He’s worried about His Holiness, now that the Pope has kicked over the anthill—”
“Well, we think he has. The Russians might be smart enough to work through diplomatic channels and tell him to cool down and let things work out, and—”
“Bob, that wouldn’t work,” Admiral Greer put in. “He’s not the sort of guy you can warn off with lawyer talk, is he?”
“No,” Ritter admitted. This Pope was not a man to compromise on issues of great importance. He’d seen himself through all manner of unpleasantness, from Hitler’s Nazis to Stalin’s NKVD, and he’d kept his church together by circling the wagons, like settlers against Indian attacks in those old Western movies. He hadn’t managed to keep his church alive in Poland by giving in on important issues, had he? And, by holding his ground, he’d maintained enough moral and political strength to threaten the other of the world’s superpowers. No, this guy wasn’t going to fold under pressure.
Most men feared death and ruin. This one didn’t. The Russians would never understand why, but they would understand the respect it earned him. It was becoming clear to Bob Ritter and the other senior intelligence officers in this room that the one single response that would make sense to the Politburo was an attack on the Pope. And the Politburo had met today, though what they had discussed and concluded were frustratingly unknown.
“Bob, do we have any assets who can find out what they talked about in the Kremlin today?”
“We have a few, and they will be alerted in the next two days—or, if they come up with something important, they can decide to get the information on their own hook. If they become aware of something this hot, you’d expect them to figure it out on their own and get a packet of information out to their handlers,” Ritter told the DCI. “Hey, Arthur, I don’t like waiting and not knowing any more than you do, but we have to let this thing take its course. You know the dangers of a balls-to-the-wall alert to our agents as well as I do.”