“Robert,” the DCI said, “it sounds to me like you’ve got something rattling up your sleeve.”
Ritter thought for a few seconds before going on. “Yes, Arthur, I do. I’ve been thinking about this since they brought me in from the field eleven years ago. I haven’t written a single word of it down.” He didn’t have to explain why. Congress could subpoena any piece of paper in the building—well, almost any piece—but not something carried only in a man’s mind. But perhaps this was the time to set it down. “What is the Soviets’ fondest wish?”
“To bring us down,” Moore answered. That didn’t exactly require a Nobel-class intellect.
“Okay, what is our fondest wish?”
Greer took that one. “We aren’t allowed to think in those terms. We want to find a modus vivendi with them.” That was what The New York Times said, anyway, and wasn’t that the voice of the nation? “Okay, Bob. Spit it out.”
“How do we attack them?” Ritter asked. “And by that I mean nail the bastards right where they live, hurt them—”
“Bring them down?” Moore asked.
“Why the hell not?” Ritter demanded.
“Is it possible?” the DCI asked, interested that Ritter was thinking along such lines.
“Well, Arthur, if they can aim that big a gun at us, why can’t we do it to them?” Ritter had the bit in his teeth now. “They send money into political groups in our country to try and make it hard on our political process. They have antinuclear demonstrations all across Europe, calling to eliminate our Theater Nuclear Weapons while they rebuild theirs. We can’t even leak what we know about that to the media—”
“And if we did, the media wouldn’t print it,” Moore observed. After all, the media didn’t like nuclear weapons either, though it was willing to tolerate Soviet weapons because they, for one reason or another, were not destabilizing. What Ritter really wanted to do, he feared, was to see if the Soviets had influence on the American mass media. But even if it did, such an investigation would bear only poisoned fruit. The media held on to their vision of its integrity and balance as a miser held his hoard. But they knew without having the evidence that KGB did have some power over the American media, because it was so easy to establish and exercise. Flatter them, let them in on supposed secrets, and then become a trusted source. But did the Soviets know how dangerous a game that could be? The American news media did have a few core beliefs, and tampering with them was like tinkering with a live bomb. One wrong move could be expensive. No one in this Seventh-Floor office was under much illusion about the genius of the Russian intelligence service. It had skilled people, certainly, and trained them thoroughly and well, but KGB also had its weaknesses. Like the society it served, KGB applied a political template to reality, and largely ignored the information that didn’t match up with the holes. And so, after months, even years, of painstaking planning and preparation, they often had operations go bad because one of their officers had decided that life in the land of the enemy wasn’t quite so bad as it was portrayed. The cure for a lie was always the truth. It just had a way of smacking you in the face, and the smarter you were, the worse it hurt.
“That’s not important,” Ritter said, surprising both his colleagues.
“Okay, keep going,” Moore ordered.
“What we need to do is examine their vulnerabilities and attack them—with the objective of destabilizing their entire country.”
“That’s a very tall order, Robert,” Moore observed.
“You take an ambition pill, Bob?” Greer asked, intrigued even so. “Our political masters will blanch at that large an objective.”
“Oh, I know.” Ritter held up his hands. “Oh, no, we mustn’t hurt them. They might nuke us. Come on, they’re a hell of a lot less likely to lash out than we are. People, they are afraid of us, a lot more than we are of them.
They are afraid of Poland, for Christ’s sake. Why? Because there’s a disease in Poland that their own people might catch. It’s called rising expectations. And rising expectations are the one thing they can’t satisfy. Their economy is as stagnant as stump water. If we give them a little push…”
“‘All we have to do is kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse,’ ” Moore quoted. “That’s been said before, but Adolf had himself a nasty little surprise when the snow started falling.”
“He was an idiot who didn’t read his Machiavelli,” Ritter retorted. “First, you conquer ’em, then you murder ’em. Why give them warning?”
“Whereas our current adversaries could have taught old Niccolo a lesson or two,” Greer agreed. “Okay, Bob, exactly what do you propose?”
“A systematic examination of Soviet weaknesses with an eye to exploitation. In simplest terms, we investigate the possible shape of a plan to cause great discomfort to our enemy.”
“Hell, we ought to be doing that all the time anyway,” Moore said, agreeing at once with the concept. “James?”
“I have no problem with it. I can get a team together in my shop to toss some ideas together.”
“Not the usual suspects,” the DDO urged. “We’ll never get anything useful from the regular crew. It’s time to think way the hell outside the usual box.”
Greer thought about that for a moment, then nodded agreement. “Okay, I’ll do the picking. Special project. Pick a name for it?”
“How about INFECTION?” Ritter asked.
“And if it turns into an operation, call it PLAGUE?” the DDI asked with a laugh.
Moore shared in the chuckle. “No, I’ve got it. MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Something from Poe sounds about right to me.”
“This is really about having the DO take over the DI, isn’t it?” Greer thought aloud.
It wasn’t a serious undertaking yet, just an interesting academic exercise, the same way a corporate trader might look into the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of a company he might want to take over… and then, if the circumstances justified, break it up for parts. No, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the center of their professional world, the Bobby Lee to their Army of the Potomac, the New York Yankees to their Boston Red Sox. Defeating them, however attractive a dream it might be, was little more than that, a dream.
Even so, Judge Arthur Moore approved of that sort of thinking. If man’s reach didn’t exceed his grasp, then what the hell was heaven for?
APPROACHING TWENTY-THREE hours in Moscow, Andropov was enjoying a cigarette—an American Marlboro, in fact—and sipping at his vodka, the premium Starka brand, which was brown like American bourbon. On the record player was another American product, an LP of Louis Armstrong on the trumpet, blowing some superb New Orleans jazz. Like many Russians, the Chairman of the KGB regarded blacks as little more than monkey cannibals, but the ones in America had invented their own fine art form. He knew that he ought to have been a devotee of Borodin or one of the other classical Russian composers, but there was just something about the vitality of American jazz that rang some sort of bell in his mind. But the music was merely an aid for thinking. Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov had heavy brows over his brown eyes and a lantern jaw suggestive of another ethnic origin, but his mind was entirely Russian, which meant part Byzantine, part Tartar, part Mongol, and all focused on achieving his own goals. Of these he had many, but above all: He wanted to be the leader of his country. Someone had to save it, and he knew exactly how much it needed saving. One of the advantages of being Chairman of the Committee for State Security was that few things were secret from him, and this in a society that was replete with lies, where lies were indeed the highest of art forms. This was especially true of the Soviet economy. The command-driven structure of that flaccid colossus meant that every factory—and every factory manager—had a production goal that both it and he had to meet. The goals might or might not be realistic. That didn’t matter. What did matter was that their enforcement was draconian. Not as draconian as they’d once been, of course. In the 1930s and ’40s, failure to meet the goal set forth in The Plan could mean death right here in this very building, because those who failed to meet The Plan were “wreckers,” saboteurs, enemies of the state, traitors in a nation where state treason was a crime worse than any other, and so demanded a penalty worse than any other, usually a .44-caliber bullet from one of the old Smith & Wesson revolvers the czars had purchased from America.
As a result, factory managers had learned that if they couldn’t meet The Plan’s expectations in fact, they’d do so on paper, thus prolonging both their lives and the perks of their office. The facts of their failure were usually lost in the elephantine bureaucracy that had been inherited from the czars and then nurtured to further growth under Marxism-Leninism. His own agency had a lot of that same tendency, Andropov knew. He could say something, even thunder out the words, but that didn’t mean that any real result had to happen. Sometimes it did—indeed, fairly often of late, because Yuriy Vladimirovich kept his own personal notes and would follow up a week or so later. And, gradually, his agency was learning to change.