“Want me to assist now?” Cathy asked hopefully.
“No, thank you, Cathy,” Hood replied. “I have it,” he added, bending over his patient, who, being soundly asleep, wouldn’t smell the beer on his breath.
Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, thought to congratulate herself for not screaming her head off, but mostly she leaned in as closely as she could to make sure these two Englishmen didn’t screw up and remove the patient’s ear by mistake. Maybe the alcohol would help steady their hands, she told herself. But she had to concentrate to keep her own hands from trembling.
THE CROWN AND CUSHION was a delightful, if typical, London pub. The sandwich was just fine, and Ryan enjoyed a pint of John Smith Ale while talking shop with Simon. He thought vaguely about serving beer at the CIA cafeteria, but that would never fly. Someone in Congress would find out and raise hell in front of the C-Span cameras, while enjoying a glass of Chardonnay with his lunch in the Capitol Building, of course, or something a little stronger in his office. The culture was just different here, and vive la difference, he thought, walking across Westminster Bridge Road toward Big Ben—the bell, not the bell tower, which was, in fact, St. Mary’s Bell Tower, tourist errors to the contrary. The Parliamentarians there had three or four pubs right there in the building, Ryan was sure. And they probably didn’t get any drunker than their American colleagues.
“You know, Simon, I think everyone’s worried about this.”
“It’s a pity he had to send that letter to Warsaw, isn’t it?”
“Could you expect him not to?” Ryan countered. “They are his people. It is his homeland, after all, isn’t it? It’s his parish the Russians are trying to stomp on.”
“That is the problem,” Harding agreed. “But the Russians will not change. Impasse.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. What’s the chance that the Russians will back off?”
“Absent a solid reason to, not a very great chance. Will your President try to warn them off?”
“Even if he could, he wouldn’t. Not on something like this, buddy.”
“So we have two sides. One is driven by what it deems to be the proper moral course of action—and the other by political necessity, by fear of not acting. As I said, Jack, it’s a bloody impasse.”
“Father Tim at Georgetown liked to say that wars are begun by frightened men. They’re afraid of the consequences of war, but they are more afraid of not fighting. Hell of a way to run a world,” Ryan thought out loud, opening the door for his friend.
“August 1914 as the model, I expect.”
“Right, but at least those guys all believed in God. The second go round was a little different in that respect. The players in that one—the Bad Guys, anyway—didn’t live under that particular constraint. Neither do the guys in Moscow. You know, there have to be some limits on our actions, or we can turn into monsters.”
“Tell that to the Politburo, Jack,” Harding suggested lightly.
“Yeah, Simon, sure.” Ryan headed off to the men’s room to dump some of his liquid lunch.
THE EVENING DIDN’T come quickly enough for either of the players. Ed Foley wondered what was coming next. There was no guarantee that this guy would follow up on what he’d started. He could always get cold feet—actually, it’d be rather a sensible thing for him to do. Treason was dangerous outside the U.S. Embassy. He was still wearing a green tie—the other one; he had only two—for luck, because he’d gotten to the point where luck counted. Whoever the guy was, just so he didn’t get cold feet.
Come on, Ivan, keep coming and we’ll give you the joint, Foley thought, trying to reach out with his mind. Lifetime ticket to Disney World, all the football games you can handle. Oleg Penkovskiy wanted to meet Kennedy and, yeah, we can probably swing that with the new President. Hell, we’ll even throw in a movie in the White House theater.
AND ACROSS TOWN, Mary Pat was thinking exactly the same thing. If this went one more step, she’d play a part in the opening drama. If this guy worked in the Russian MERCURY, and if he wanted a ticket out of Mother Russia, then she and Ed would have to figure a way to make that happen. There were ways, and they’d been used before, but they weren’t what you’d call “routine.” Soviet border security wasn’t exactly perfect, but it was pretty tight—tight enough to make you sweat playing with it, and though she had the sort of demeanor that often worked well while playing serious games, it didn’t make you feel comfortable. And so she started kicking some ideas around, just in her head, as she worked around the apartment and little Eddie took his afternoon nap, and the hours crept by, one lengthy second at a time.
ED FOLEY HADN’T sent any messages off to Langley yet. It wasn’t time. He had nothing substantive to report, and there was no sense getting Bob Ritter all excited over something that hadn’t developed yet. It happened often enough: People made approaches to CIA and then felt a chill inside their shoes and backed away. You couldn’t chase after them. More often than not, you didn’t even know who they were and, if you did, and if they decided not to play, the sensible thing for the other guy was to report you to KGB. That fingered you as a spook—rendering your value to your country as approximately zero—and covered his ass nicely as a loyal and vigilant Soviet citizen, doing his duty to the Motherland.
People didn’t realize that CIA almost never recruited its agents. No, those people came to you—sometimes cleverly, sometimes not. That left you open to be fooled by a false-flag operation. The American FBI was particularly good at that sort of play, and KGB’s Second Chief Directorate was known to use the gambit, too, just to identify spooks on the embassy staff, which was always something worth doing. If you knew who they were, you could follow them and watch them service their dead-drops, and then camp out on the drop site to see who else stopped off there. Then you had your traitor, who could lead you to other traitors, and with luck you could roll up a whole spy ring, which earned you a gold star—well, a nice red star—in your copybook. Counterespionage officers could make their whole careers on one such case, both in Russia and in America, and so they worked pretty hard at it. The Second Directorate people were numerous—supposedly, half of KGB’s personnel were in there—and they were smart, professional spooks with all sorts of resources, and the patience of a vulture circling over the Arizona desert, sniffing the air for the smell of a dead jackrabbit, then homing in to feast on the carcass.
But KGB was more dangerous than a vulture. A vulture didn’t actively hunt. Ed Foley could never be sure if he had a shadow as he traveled around Moscow. Oh, sure, he might spot one, but that could just be a deliberate effort to put a clumsy—or an exceedingly clever—officer on his tail to see if he’d try to shake him. All intelligence officers were trained in surveillance and countersurveillance, and the techniques were both universally valid and universally recognized, and so Foley never used them. Not ever. Not even once. It was too dangerous to be clever in this game, because you could never be clever enough. There were other countermoves to use when necessary, like the preplanned brush-pass known to every spook in the world, but very difficult to spot even so, because of its very simplicity. No, when that failed, it was usually because your agent got rattled. It was a lot harder to be an agent than a field officer. Foley had diplomatic cover. The Russians could have movie film of him buggering Andropov’s pet goat and not be able to do a thing about it. He was technically a diplomat, and protected by the Vienna Convention, which made his person inviolable—even in time of war, though things got a little dicier then. But that, Foley judged, was not a problem. He’d be fried like everyone else in Moscow then, and so would not be lonely in whatever afterlife spies inhabited.
He wrenched his mind away from the irrelevancies, entertaining though they might be. It came down to one thing: Would his friend Ivan take the next step, or would he just fade back into the woodwork, taking satisfaction that he’d managed to make the U.S. Embassy dance to his tune one cool Moscow morning? To find that out, you had to turn over the cards. Would it be blackjack, or just a pair of fours?
That’s why you got into this business, Ed, Foley reminded himself—the thrill of the chase. It sure as hell was a thrill, even if the game disappeared into the mists of the forest. It was more fun skinning the bear than smelling it.