And that was where the itch came from. He could call Admiral Greer, Ryan thought, but it wasn’t even seven in the morning in Washington yet, and he’d be doing his boss no favor by waking him up to the trilling sound of his home STU. Especially as he had nothing to tell, just a few things to ask. So he leaned back in his chair and stared at the green screen of his Apple monitor, looking for something that just wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 17:
FLASH TRAFFIC
ED FOLEY WROTE IN HIS OFFICE:
PRIORITY: FLASH
TO: DDO/CIA
CC: DCI, DDI
FROM: COS MOSCOW
SUBJECT: RABBIT
TEXT FOLLOWS:
WE HAVE A RABBIT, A HIGHLY PLACED WALK-IN, CLAIMS TO BE COMMO OFFICER IN KGB CENTRE, WITH INFORMATION OF INTEREST TO USG. ESTIMATION: HE IS TRUTHFUL. 5/5. URGENTLY REQUEST AUTHORIZATION FOR IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION FROM REDLAND. PACKAGE INCLUDES RABBIT WIFE AND DAUGHTER (3). 5/5 PRIORITY REQUESTED. ENDS
There, Foley thought, that’s concise enough. The shorter the better with messages like this one—it provided less opportunity for the opposition to work on the text and crack the cipher, in the event they got their hands on it.
But the only hands that would touch this one were CIA. He was betting a lot on this op-dispatch. 5/5 meant that the estimated importance of the information available, as well as its presumed accuracy and the priority for his proposed action, was class-5, the highest. He gave an identical evaluation for the accuracy of the subject. Four aces—not the sort of dispatch you sent out every day. It was the classification he’d give to a message from Oleg Penkovskiy, or from Agent CARDINAL himself, and that was about as hot a potato as they came. He thought for a moment, wondering if he was guessing correctly, but, over his career, Ed Foley had learned to go with his instincts. He’d also measured his own thoughts against those of his wife, and her instincts were just as finely tuned. Their Rabbit—the CIA term of art for a person wanting a fast ticket out of whatever bad place he found himself in—claimed a lot, but he gave every sign of being what he claimed: the possessor of some very hot information. That made him a conscience defector, and thus pretty reliable. If he were a plant, a false-flag, he would have asked for money, because that’s how KGB thought defectors thought—and CIA had never done anything to disabuse them of that notion.
So, it just felt right, though “feels right” isn’t something you send by Diplomatic Courier to the Seventh Floor. They’d have to play along with this. They had to trust him. He was Chief of Station in Moscow, the CIA’s top field posting, and with that came a truckload of credibility. They’d have to weigh it against whatever misgivings they were feeling. If a summit meeting were scheduled, then that might queer the deal, but the President had no such plans, nor did SecState. So there was nothing in the way of Langley approving some form of action—if they thought he was right…
Foley didn’t even know why he was questioning himself. He was The Man in Moscow, and that, by God, was that. He lifted the phone and punched three buttons.
“Russell,” a voice said.
“Mike, this is Ed. I need you here.”
“Right.”
It took a minute and a half. The door opened.
“Yeah, Ed?”
“Something for the bag.”
Russell checked his watch. “Not much margin, guy.”
“It’s short. I’ll have to come down with you on this one.”
“Well, let’s get it on, then, bro.” Russell walked out the door, with Foley in pursuit. Fortunately, the corridor was empty, and his office was not far.
Russell sat down in his swivel chair and lit up his cipher machine. Foley handed the sheet over. Russell clipped it to a fixture right over the keyboard. “Short enough,” he said approvingly, and started typing. He was nearly as skillful as the Ambassador’s own secretary, and he finished the job in a minute, including some padding—sixteen surnames taken at random from the Prague telephone book. When the new page came out of the machine, Foley took it, folded it, tucked it in a manila envelope, and sealed it. Wax was dripped over the closure, and Foley handed the envelope back to Russell.
“Back in five, Ed,” the communications officer said on his way out the door. He took the elevator down to the first floor. The diplomatic courier was there. His name was Tommy Cox, a former Army warrant officer/helicopter pilot who’d been shot down four times in the Central Highlands as part of the First Cavalry Division, and a man who had only the most negative feelings for his country’s adversaries. The Diplomatic Bag was a canvas carry-on-type bag that would be handcuffed to his wrist during transit. He was already booked on a Pan Am 747 direct flight to New York’s Kennedy International, a flight of eleven hours, during which he would neither drink nor sleep, though he did have three paperback mysteries to read along the way. He’d be leaving the embassy in an official car in ten minutes, and his diplomatic credentials meant he wouldn’t be troubled with security or immigration procedures. The Russians were actually fairly cordial about that, though they probably drooled over the chance of seeing what was inside the canvas bag. For sure, it wasn’t Russian perfume or pantyhose for a friend in New York or Washington.
“Good flight, Tommy.”
Cox nodded. “Roger that, Mike.”
Russell headed back to Foley’s office topside. “Okay, it’s in the bag. Flight leaves in an hour and ten minutes, man.”
“Good.”
“Is a Rabbit what I think it is?”
“Can’t say, Mike,” Foley pointed out.
“Yeah, I know, Ed. Excuse my question.” Russell wasn’t one to break the rules, though he had as much curiosity as the next man. And he knew what a Rabbit was, of course. He’d spent his entire life inside the black world in one capacity or another, and the jargon wasn’t all that hard to pick up. But the black world had walls, and that was that.
Foley took his copy of the message, tucked it in his office safe, and set both the combination and the alarm. Then he headed down to the embassy cafeteria, where a TV was tuned in to ESPN. There he learned that his Yankees had lost another one—three straight, and in a pennant race! Is there no fairness in the world? he grumbled.
MARY PAT WAS doing housework, which was boring, but a good opportunity for her to put her brain in neutral while her imagination ran wild. Okay, she’d be meeting Oleg Ivanovich again. It would be up to her to figure a way to get the “package”—yet another CIA term of art, meaning the material or person(s) to be taken out of the country—to a safe place. There were many ways to do such a thing. They were all dangerous, but she and Ed and other CIA field spooks were trained to do dangerous things. Moscow was a city of millions, and in such an environment three people on the move were just part of the background noise, like one single leaf falling in an autumn forest, one more buffalo in the herd in Yellowstone National Park, one more car on the L.A. Freeway during rush hour. That wasn’t hard, was it?
Well, actually, it was. In the Soviet Union, every aspect of personal life was subject to control. As applied to America, sure, the package was just one more car on the L.A. Freeway, but going to Las Vegas meant crossing a state line, and you had to have a reason for that. Nothing was easy here in the sense that everything was easy in America.
And there was something else…
It would be better, Mary Pat thought, that the Russians didn’t know he was gone. After all, it was not a murder if there wasn’t a corpse to let every one know that somebody had died. And it wasn’t a defection unless they knew that one of their citizens had turned up somewhere else—where he wasn’t supposed to be. So, how much the better… was it possible…? she wondered.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? But how to make it happen? It was something to speculate on while she vacuumed the living room rug. And, oh, by the way, vacuuming would invalidate whatever bugs the Russians had implanted in the walls… And so she stopped at once. Why waste that chance? She and Ed could communicate with their hands, but the bandwidth was like maple syrup in January.
She wondered if Ed would go for this. He might, she thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d think up. Ed, for all his skills, wasn’t a cowboy. Though he had his talents, and good ones they were, he was more a bomber pilot than a fighter pilot. But Mary Pat thought like Chuck Yeager in the X-1, like Pete Conrad in the lunar module. She was just better at thinking long-ball.