The idea also had strategic implications. If they could get their Rabbit out unknown to the opposition, then they could make indefinite use of whatever he knew, and that possibility, if you could figure out how to make it happen, was very enticing indeed. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might be a needless complication—and if so, it could be discarded—but it was worth thinking about, if she could get Ed’s brain into it. She’d need his planning talents and his reality-checking ability, but the basic idea set her head abuzz. It would come down to available assets… And that would be the hard part. But “hard” didn’t mean “impossible.” And, for Mary Pat, “impossible” didn’t mean “impossible” either, did it? she asked herself.
Hell, no.
THE PAN AM FLIGHT rolled off on time, lurching across the lumpy taxiways of Sheremetyevo Airport, which was famous in the world of aviation for its roller-coaster paving. But the runways were adequate, and the big JT-9D Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines pushed the airframe to rotation speed, and the aircraft took flight. Tommy Cox, in seat 3-A, noted with a smile the usual reaction when an American airliner departed Moscow:
The passengers all cheered and/or applauded. There was no rule, and the flight crew didn’t encourage it. It just happened all on its own—that’s how impressed Americans were with Soviet hospitality. It appealed to Cox, who had no love for the people who’d supplied the machine guns that had splashed his Huey four times and, by the way, earned him a total of three Purple Heart medals, a miniature ribbon of which decorated the lapels of all his suitcoats, along with the two repeat stars. He looked out the window, watching the ground fall away to his left and, when he heard the welcome ding, fished out a Winston to light with his Zippo. It was a pity he couldn’t drink or sleep on these flights, but the movie was one he hadn’t seen, remarkably enough. In this job you learned to appreciate the small things. Twelve hours to New York, but a direct flight was better than having to stop over in Frankfurt or Heathrow. Such places were just an opportunity for him to drag this fucking canvas bag around, sometimes without benefit of a cart or trolley. Well, he had a full pack of smokes, and the dinner menu didn’t look too bad. And the government actually paid him to sit down for twelve hours, baby-sitting a piece of cheap luggage. It was better than flying his Huey around the Central Highlands. Cox was long past wondering what important information he transported in his bag. And if other people were that interested, that was their problem.
RYAN HAD GOTTEN a hot three pages done—not a very productive day, and he couldn’t claim that the artistry of his prose demanded a slow writing pace. His language was literate—he’d learned his grammar from priests and nuns for the most part, and his word mechanics were serviceable—but not particularly elegant. In his first book, Doomed Eagles, every bit of artistic language he’d attempted to put into his manuscript had been edited out, to his quiet and submissive fury. And so the few critics who had read and commented on his historical epic had faintly praised the quality of his analysis, but then tersely noted that it might be a good textbook for academic students of history, but not something on which a casual reader might wish to waste his money. And so the book had netted 7,865 copies sold—not much to show for two and a half years’ work, but that, Jack reminded himself, was just his first outing, and maybe a new publisher would get him an editor who was more an ally than an enemy. He could hope, after all.
But the damned thing would not get done until he did it, and three pages wasn’t much to show for a full day in his den. He was time-sharing his brain with another problem, and that wasn’t a useful productivity tool.
“How did it go?” Cathy asked, suddenly appearing at his shoulder.
“Not too bad,” he lied.
“Where are you up to?”
“May. Halsey is fighting off his skin disease.”
“Dermatitis? That can be nasty, even today,” Cathy noted. “It can drive the poor patients crazy.”
“Since when are you a dermatologist?”
“M.D., Jack, remember? I may not know it all, but I know most of it.”
“All that, and humble, too.” He made a face.
“Well, when you get a cold, don’t I take good care of you?”
“I suppose.” She did, actually. “How are the kids?”
“Fine. Sally had a good time on the swings, and she made a new friend, Geoffrey Froggatt. His father’s a solicitor.”
“Great. Isn’t there anything but lawyers around here?”
“Well, there’s a doctor and a spook,” Cathy pointed out. “Trouble is, I can’t tell people what you do, can I?”
“So what do you tell them?” Jack asked.
“That you work for the embassy.” Close enough.
“Another desk-sitting bureaucrat,” he grumped.
“Well, you want to go back to Merrill Lynch?”
“Ugh. Not in this lifetime.”
“Some people like making tons of money,” she pointed out.
“Only as a hobby, babe.” Were he to go back to trading, his father-in-law would gloat for a year. No, not in this lifetime. He’d served his time in hell, like a good Marine. “I have more important things to do.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t tell you,” he countered.
“I know that,” his wife responded, with a playful smile. “Well, at least it isn’t insider trading.”
Actually, it was, Ryan couldn’t say—the nastiest sort. Thousands of people working every day to find out things they weren’t supposed to know, and then taking action they weren’t supposed to take.
But both sides played that game—played it diligently—because it wasn’t about money. It was about life and death, and those games were as nasty as they got. But Cathy didn’t lose any sleep over the cancer tissue she consigned to the hospital incinerator and probably those cancer cells wanted to live, too, but that was just too damned bad, wasn’t it?
COLONEL BUBOVOY HAD the dispatch on his desk and read it. His hands didn’t shake, but he lit a cigarette to help his contemplation. So, the Politburo was willing to go forward with this. Leonid Ilyich himself had signed the letter to the Bulgarian Party chairman. He’d have the ambassador call Monday morning to set up the meeting, which ought not to take too long. The Bulgarians were lapdogs of the Soviet Union, but occasionally useful lapdogs. The Soviets had assisted in the murder of Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge in London—KGB had supplied the weapon, if you could call it that, an umbrella to deliver the poison-filled metal miniball to transfer the ricin, and so silence the annoying defector who’d talked too much on BBC World Service. That had been a while, and such debts had no expiration date, did they? Not at this level of statecraft. So Moscow was calling in the debt. Besides that, there was the agreement from 1964, when it had been agreed that DS would handle KGB’s wet work in the West. And Leonid Ilyich was promising to transfer a full battalion’s worth of the new version of the T-72 main-battle tank, which was always the sort of thing to make a communist chief of state feel better about his political security. And it was cheaper than the MiG-29s the Bulgarians were asking for. As though a Bulgarian pilot could handle such an aircraft—the Russian joke was that they had to tuck their mustaches into the flight helmet before closing the visor, Bubovoy reminded himself. Mustaches or not, the Bulgarians were regarded as the children of Russia—an attitude that went back to the czars. And, for the most part, they were obedient children, though like them they had little appreciation of right and wrong, so long as they weren’t caught. So he’d show proper respect for this chief of state and be received cordially as the messenger of a greater power, and the Chairman would hem and haw a little bit and then agree. It would be as stylized as a performance of ballet dancer Aleksander Gudonov, and just as predicable in its conclusion.
And then he’d meet with Boris Strokov and get an idea how quickly the operation might proceed. Boris Andreyevich would find the prospect exciting. This would be the biggest mission of his life, like playing in the Olympics, not so much daunting as exhilarating, and there was a sure promotion to be had for its successful completion—perhaps a new car for Strokov and/or a nice dacha outside Sofia. Or even both. And for myself? the KGB officer wondered. A promotion, certainly. General’s stars and a return to Moscow, a plush office at The Centre, a nice flat on Kutusovskiy Prospekt. Going back to Moscow appealed to the rezident, who’d spent a lot of years outside the borders of the Rodina. Enough, he thought. More than enough.