“Yeah, babe. Just gotta get you a surfboard and a nice beach, maybe the Banzai Pipeline.”
“Oh, Ed, that’s just so tubular. And Banzai Beach is in Hawaii, dummy.” A quick gear change. “The flag go up wrong?”
“Yep. The TV cameras didn’t show anyone on the street paying particular attention to it. But you could see it from a block away, and the security cameras don’t look that far out. We’ll see if our friend drops a message in my pocket on the ride home tonight.”
“What did the Marines say?” she asked.
“They asked why, but Dom didn’t tell them anything. Hell, he doesn’t know either, does he?”
“He’s a good spook, Dominic is,” Mary Pat judged.
“Ritter likes him. Oh,” Foley remembered. He fished a message out of his drawer and handed it across.
“Shit,” his wife breathed, scanning it quickly. “The Pope? Those motherfuckers want to kill the Pope?” Mary Pat didn’t always talk like a California blonde.
“Well, there’s no information to suggest that directly, but, if they want to, we’re supposed to find out.”
“Sounds like a job for WOODCUTTER,” who was their man in the Party Secretariat.
“Or maybe CARDINAL?” Ed wondered.
“We haven’t flagged him yet,” MP pointed out, but it would soon be time to check in with him. They checked his apartment every night for the light-and-blinds combination in his living room. His apartment was agreeably close to their own, and the ratline was well established, beginning with a piece of paper tape on a lamppost. Setting that flag signal was MP’s job. She’d already walked Little Eddie by it half a dozen times. “Is this a job for him?” she asked.
“The President wants to know,” her husband pointed out.
“Yeah.” But CARDINAL was their most important agent-in-place, and not one to be alerted unless it was really critical. CARDINAL would also know to get something like this out on his own if he became aware of it. “I’d hold off on that unless Ritter says different.”
“Agreed,” Ed Foley conceded. If Mary Pat advised caution, then caution was justified. After all, she was the one who enjoyed taking risks and betting her skill against the house odds. But that didn’t mean that his wife was a reckless player, either. “I’ll sit on that one for a while.”
“Be nice to see what your new contact will do next.”
“Bet your cute little tushy, babe. Want to meet the Ambassador?”
“I suppose it’s time,” she agreed.
“SO, RECOVER FROM yesterday?” Ryan asked Harding. It was the first time he’d beaten his workmate into the office.
“Yes, I suppose I have.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t met the President yet, myself. And I’m not exactly looking forward to the experience. Like Mark Twain said about the guy who got himself tarred and feathered, if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon have missed it.”
Harding managed a brief laugh. “Precisely, Jack. One does go a little weak in the knees.”
“Is she as tough as they say?”
“I’m not sure I’d want to play rugger against her. She’s also very, very bright. Doesn’t miss a thing, and asks bloody good questions.”
“Well, answering them is what they pay us for, Simon,” Ryan pointed out. There was no sense being afraid of people who were only doing their job as well, and who needed good information to do it properly.
“And her, too, Jack. She has to do questions in Parliament.”
“On this sort of thing?” Jack asked, surprised.
“No, not this. It’s occasionally discussed with the opposition, but under strict rules.”
“You worry about leaks?” Jack asked, wondering. In America, there were select committees whose members were thoroughly briefed on what they could say and what they could not. The Agency did worry about leaks—they were politicians, after all—but he’d never heard of a serious one off The Hill. Those more often came from inside the Agency, and mainly from the Seventh Floor… or from the White House’s West Wing. That didn’t mean that CIA was comfortable with leaks of any kind, but at least these were more often than not sanctioned, and often they were disinformation with a political purpose behind them. It was probably the same here, especially since the local news media operated under controls that would have given The New York Times a serious conniption fit.
“One always wonders about them, Jack. So, anything new come in last night?”
“Nothing new on the Pope,” Ryan reported. “Our sources, such as they are, have run into a brick wall. Will you be turning your field spooks loose?”
“Yes, the PM made it clear to Basil that she wants more information. If something happens to His Holiness, well—”
“—she blows a head gasket, right?”
“You Americans do have a way with words, Jack. And your President?”
“He’ll be seriously pissed, and by that I do not mean hitting the booze. His dad was Catholic, and his mom raised him a Protestant, but he wouldn’t be real happy if the Pope so much as catches a late-summer cold.”
“You know, even if we turn some information, it is not at all certain that we’ll be able to do a thing with it.”
“I kinda figured that, but at least we can say something to his protective detail. We can do that much, and maybe he can change his schedule—no, he won’t. He’d rather take the bullet like a man. But maybe we can interfere somehow with what the Bad Guys are planning. You just can’t know until you have a few facts to rub together. But that’s not really our job, is it?”
Harding shook his head, as he stirred his morning tea. “No, the field officers feed it to us, and we try to determine what it means.”
“Frustrating?” Ryan wondered. Harding had been at the job much longer than he had.
“Frequently. I know the field officers sweat blood doing their jobs—and it can be physically dangerous to the ones who do not have a ‘legal’ cover—but we users of information can’t always see it from their perspective. As a result, they do not appreciate us as much as we appreciate them. I’ve met with a few of them over the years, and they are good chaps, but it’s a clash of cultures, Jack.”
The field guys are probably pretty good at analysis themselves, when you get down to it, Ryan thought. I wonder how often the analyst community really appreciates that? It was something for Ryan to slip into his mental do-not-forget file. The Agency was supposed to be one big happy team, after all. Of course it wasn’t, even at the Seventh Floor level.
“Anyway, we had this come in from East Germany.” Jack handed the folder across. “Some rumbles in their political hierarchy last week.”
“Those bloody Prussians,” Harding breathed, as he took it and flipped to the first page.
“Cheer up. The Russians don’t much like them either.”
“I don’t blame them a bit.”
ZAITZEV WAS DOING some hard thinking at his desk, as his brain worked on autopilot. He’d have to meet with his new American friend. There was danger involved, unless he could find a nice, anonymous place. The good news was that Moscow abounded with such places. The bad news was that the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB probably knew all of them. But if it was crowded enough, that didn’t matter.
What would he say?
What would he ask for?
What would he offer them?
Those were all good questions, weren’t they? The dangers would only increase. The best possible outcome would be for him to leave the Soviet Union permanently, with his wife and daughter.
Yes, that was what he’d ask for, and if the Americans said no, he’d just melt back into his accustomed reality, knowing that he’d tried. He had things they would want, and he’d make it clear to them that the price of that information was his escape.
Life in the West, he thought. All the decadent things the State preached to everyone who could read a newspaper or watch TV, all the awful things they talked about. The way America treated its minorities. They even showed pictures on TV of the slum areas—but they also showed automobiles. If America oppressed its blacks, why, then, did it allow them to purchase so many automobiles? Why did it permit them to riot in the streets? Had that sort of thing happened in the USSR, the government would have called in armed troops. So no, the state propaganda could not be entirely true, could it? And, besides, wasn’t he white? What did he care about some discontented blacks who could buy any car they wished? Like most Russians, he’d only seen black people on TV—his first reaction was to wonder if there really were such a thing as a chocolate man, but, yes, there were. KGB ran operations in Africa. But then he asked himself: Could he remember a KGB operation in America using a black agent? Not very many, perhaps one or two, and those had both been sergeants in the American army. If blacks were oppressed, how then did they get to become sergeants? In the Red Army, only the politically reliable were admitted to Sergeant School. So, one more lie uncovered—and that one only because he worked for KGB. What other lies was he being told? Why not leave? Why not ask the Americans for a ticket out?