“We kick it upstairs. Here, it goes right to Sir Basil, and I call it in to Admiral Greer. Usually a phone call over the secure phone.”
“Like the one upstairs?”
“Yep. Then we send it over by secure fax or, if it’s really hot, it goes by diplomatic courier out of the embassy, when we don’t want to trust the encryption systems.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Not since I’ve been here, but I don’t make those decisions. What the hell, the diplomatic bag goes over in eight or nine hours. Damned sight faster than it used to happen.”
“I thought that phone thingee upstairs was unbreakable?”
“Well, some things you do are nearly perfect, too, but you still take extra care with them, right? Same with us.”
“What would that be for? Theoretically speaking, that is.” She smiled at her cleverness.
“Babe, you know how to phrase a question. Let’s say we got something, oh, on their nuclear arsenal, something from an agent way the hell inside, and it’s really good stuff, but losing it might ID the agent for the opposition. That is what you send via the bag. The name of the game is protecting the source.”
“Because if they ID the guy—”
“He’s dead, maybe in a very unpleasant way. There’s a story that once they loaded a guy into a crematorium alive and then turned on the gas—and they made a film of it, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it.”
“Nobody does that anymore!” Cathy objected immediately.
“There’s a guy at Langley who claims to have seen the film. The poor bastard’s name was Popov, a GRU officer who worked for us. His bosses were very displeased with him.”
“You’re serious?” Cathy persisted.
“As a heart attack. Supposedly, they used to show the film to people in the GRU Academy as a warning about not crossing the line—it strikes me as bad psychology but, like I said, I’ve met a guy who says he saw the film. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons we try to protect our sources.”
“That’s a little hard to believe.”
“Oh, really? You mean, like a surgeon breaking for lunch and having a beer?”
“Well… yes.”
“It’s an imperfect world we live in, babe.” He’d let things go. She’d have all weekend to think things over, and he’d get some work done on his Halsey book.
BACK IN MOSCOW, fingers were flying. How u gonna tell Lan[gley], she asked.
N[ot] sure, he replied.
Cour[ier], she suggested. This could be re[ally] hot.
Ed nodded agreement. Rit[ter] will be exci[ted].
D[amn] st[raight], she agreed. Want m[e] 2 han[dle] the me[et]? she asked.
Y[our] Russian] is pre[etty] g[ood], he agreed.
This time she nodded. She spoke an elegant literary Russian reserved to the well-educated over here, Ed knew. The average Soviet couldn’t believe that a foreigner spoke his language that well. When walking the street or conversing with a shop clerk, she never let that skill slip, instead stumbling over complex phrases. To do otherwise would have been noticed at once, and so avoiding it was an important part of her cover, even more than her blond hair and American mannerisms. It would finger her immediately to their new agent.
When? she asked next.
Iv[an] sez tom[orrow]. Up 4 it? he responded.
She patted his hip and gave a cute, playful smile, which translated to bet your ass.
Foley loved his wife as fully as a man could, and part of that was his respect for her love of the game they both played. Paramount Central Casting could not have given him a better wife. They’d be making love tonight. The rule in boxing might be no sex before a fight, but for Mary Pat the rule was the reverse, and if the microphones In the walls noticed, well, fuck ’em, the Chief of Station Moscow thought, with a sly smile of his own.
“WHEN DO YOU leave, Bob?” Greer asked the DDO.
“Sunday. ANA to Tokyo, and from there on to Seoul.”
“Better you than me. I hate those long flights,” the DDI observed.
“Well, you try to sleep about half the way,” and Ritter was good at that. He had a conference scheduled with the KCIA, to go over things on both North Korea and the Chinese, both of which he was worried about—as were the Koreans. “Nothing much happening in my shop at the moment, anyway.”
“Smart of you to skip town while we have the President chewing my backside about the Pope,” Judge Moore thought aloud.
“Well, I’m sorry about that, Arthur,” Ritter retorted, with an ironic smile. “Mike Bostock will be handling things in my absence.” Both senior executives knew and liked Bostock, a career field spook and an expert on the Soviets and the Central Europeans. He was a little too much of a cowboy to be trusted on The Hill, though, which everyone thought was a pity. Cowboys had their uses—like Mary Pat Foley, for example.
“Still nothing out of the Politburo meeting?”
“Not yet, Arthur. Maybe they just talked about routine stuff. You know, they don’t always sit there and plan the next nuclear war.”
“No.” Greer chuckled. “They think we’re always doing that. Jesus, they’re a paranoid bunch.”
“Remember what Henry said: ‘Even paranoids have enemies.’ And that is our job,” Ritter reminded them.
“Still ruminating over your MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH plan, Robert?”
“Nothing specific yet. The in-house people I’ve talked to about it—damn it, Arthur, you tell our people to think outside of the box, and what do they do? They build a better box!”
“We don’t have many entrepreneur types here, remember. Government agency. Pay caps. Tends to militate against creative thinking. That’s what we’re for,” Judge Moore pointed out. “How do we change that?”
“We have a few people from the real world. Hell, I’ve got one on my team—he doesn’t know how to think inside the box.”
“Ryan?” Ritter asked.
“That’s one of them,” Jim Greer confirmed with a nod.
“He’s not one of us,” the DDO observed at once.
“Bob, you can’t have it both ways,” the DDI shot back. “Either you want a guy who thinks like one of our bureaucrats, or a guy who thinks creatively. Ryan knows the rules, he’s an ex-Marine who even knows how to think on his feet, and pretty soon he’s going to be a star analyst.” Greer paused. “He’s about the best young officer I’ve seen in a few years, and what your beef with him is, Robert, I do not understand.”
“Basil likes him,” Moore added to the conversation, “and Basil’s a hard man to fool.”
“Next time I see Jack, I’d like to let him know about RED DEATH.”
“Really?” Moore asked. “It’s way over his pay grade.”
“Arthur, he knows economics better than anyone I have in the DI. I didn’t put him in my economics section only because he’s too smart to be limited that way. Bob, if you want to wreck the Soviet Union—without a war—the only way to do it is to cripple their economy. Ryan made himself a pile of money because he knows all that stuff. I’m telling you, he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe he can figure a way to burn down a wheat field. Anyway, what does it hurt? Your project is entirely theoretical, isn’t it?”
“Well?” the DCI turned to Ritter. Greer was right, after all.
“Oh, what the hell, okay,” the DDO conceded the point. “Just so he doesn’t talk about this to The Washington Post. We don’t need that idea out in the open. Congress and the press would have a meltdown.”
“Jack, talk to the press?” Greer asked. “Not likely. He doesn’t curry favor with people, including us. He’s one guy I think we can trust. The whole Russian KGB doesn’t have enough hard currency to buy him off. That’s more than I can say for myself,” he joked.
“I’ll remember you said that, James,” Ritter promised, with a thin smile of his own. Such jokes were usually limited to the Seventh Floor at Langley.
A DEPARTMENT STORE was a department store anywhere in the world, and GUM was supposedly Moscow’s counterpart to Macy’s in New York. Theoretically, Ed Foley thought, walking in the main entrance. Just like the Soviet Union was theoretically a voluntary union of republics, and Russia theoretically had a constitution that existed over and above the will of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And there was theoretically an Easter Bunny, too, he thought, looking around.
They took the escalator to the second floor—the escalator was of the old sort, with thick wooden runners instead of the metal type which had long since taken over in the West. The fur department was over on the right, toward the back, and, on initial visual inspection, the selection there wasn’t all that shabby.
Best of all, so was Ivan, wearing the same clothes that he’d worn on the metro. Maybe his best suit? Foley wondered. If so, he’d better get his ass to a Western country as soon as possible.