“WHERE’S THE COURIER?” Mary Pat asked, vacuuming the living room rug.
“Over Norway by now,” her husband thought out loud.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Oh?” Ed asked with no small degree of trepidation.
“What if we can get the Rabbit out and they don’t know?”
“How the hell do we do that?” her husband asked, in surprise. What was she thinking about now? “Getting him and his family out in the first place won’t exactly be easy.”
She told him the idea she’d evolved in her tricky little head, and an original one it was.
Trust you to come up with something like that, he thought, with a neutral expression. But then he started thinking about it. “Complicated,” the Chief of Station observed tersely.
“But doable,” she countered.
“Honey, that’s a big thought.” But he was thinking about it, Mary Pat saw in his eyes.
“Yeah, but if we can pull it off, what a coup,” she said, getting under the sofa. Eddie slid himself closer to the TV so that he could hear what the Transformer robots were saying. A good sign. If Eddie couldn’t hear, then neither would the KGB microphones.
“It’s worth thinking about,” Ed conceded. “But doing it—damn.”
“Well, they pay us to be creative, don’t they?”
“No way in hell we could pull that one off here”—not without involving a whole lot of assets, some of whom might not be entirely reliable, which was, of course, their greatest fear, and one they couldn’t easily defend against. That was one of the problems in the spook business. If the counterspies in KGB ID’d one of their assets, they were very often clever about how they handled it. They could, for example, have a little chat with the guy and tell him to keep operating, and then, maybe, he’d live to the end of the year. Their agents were trained to give a danger-wave-off signal, but who was to say that the agent would do it? It demanded a lot from the supposed dedication of their assets, more than some—most—of them would probably give.
“So, there are other places they can go. Eastern Europe, for example. Get them out that way,” she suggested.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he conceded again. “But the mission here is to get them out, not score style points from the East German judge.”
“I know, but think about it. If we can get him away from Moscow, that gives us a lot more flexibility in our options, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, honey. It also means communications problems.” And that meant the risk of screwing everything up. The KISS principle—”keep it simple, stupid”—was as much a part of the CIA ethos as the trench coat and fedora hat that people used in bad movies. Too many cooks fucked up the soup.
Yet what she’d suggested had real merit. Getting the Rabbit out in a way that made the Soviets think him dead would mean that they’d take no precautions. It would be like sending Captain Kirk into KGB headquarters by transporter—and invisible—and extracting him without anyone knowing he’d been there, along with tons of hot information. It would be as close to the perfect play as anything that had ever happened. Hell, Ed thought, as perfect a play as never happened in the real world. He reflected for a moment that he was blessed to have a wife as creative in her work as she was in bed.
And that was pretty damned good.
Mary Pat saw her husband’s face, and she knew how to read his mind. He was a cautious player, but she’d pushed a very sensitive button, and he was smart enough to see the merit in it. Her idea was a complication… but maybe not that great of one. Getting the package out of Moscow would be no day at the beach under the best of circumstances. The hard part would be in crossing the Finnish border—it was always Finland, and everyone knew it. There were ways to do it, and it mostly involved trick cars with hidden passenger accommodations. The Russians had trouble countering that tactic, because if the driver of the car had diplomatic credentials, then international convention limited their search options. Any diplomat who wanted to make fast money could make a small pile by smuggling drugs—and some did, she was sure, and few of them ever got caught. With a get-out-of-jail-free card, you could accomplish a lot. But even that was not an entirely free pass. If the Soviets knew this guy was missing, then rules might get broken because the data inside his head was so valuable. The other side of the diplomatic-rules violation was that it would result only in a protest, muddled up by the public disclosure that an accredited foreign diplomat was spying—and if some of their diplomats got roughed up in the process, well, the Soviets had been known to sacrifice large numbers of military forces for a political end and just think of it as a price of doing business. For the information the Rabbit had, they’d gladly shed blood—including some of their own. Mary Pat wondered how well this guy understood the danger he was in, and how formidable the forces were arrayed against him. What it came down to was whether or not the Sovs knew something was afoot. If not, their routine surveillance procedures, no matter how thorough, were predictable. If alerted, however, they could put the entire city of Moscow under lockdown.
But everything they did in the CIA’s Clandestine Service was done carefully, and there were backup procedures for when things went wrong, as well as other measures, some desperate, that had proven to be effective when you put them in play. You just tried to avoid doing that.
“Finishing up,” she warned her husband.
“Okay, Mary Pat, you have me thinking.” And with that his formidable mind started sifting through ideas. Sometimes he needs a little push, Mary Pat thought, but once you had him going in the right direction, he was like George Patton with the bit in his teeth. She wondered how much sleeping Ed would be doing tonight. Well, she’d be able to tell, wouldn’t she?
BASIL LIKES YOU, Murray said. The womenfolk were in the kitchen. Jack and Dan were out in the garden, pretending to inspect the roses.
“Really?”
“Yeah, a lot.”
“Damned if I know why,” Ryan said. “I haven’t turned much work out yet.”
“Your roomie reports to him about you every day. Simon Harding is a comer, in case nobody told you. That’s why he went with Bas to Number Ten.”
“Dan, I thought you were Bureau, not Agency,” Jack noted, wondering just how far the Legal Attaché spread himself.
“Well, the guys down the hall are pals, and I interface with the local spooks some.” The guys down the hall was Dan’s way of saying CIA people. Yet again Jack wondered just which branch of the government Murray actually belonged to. But everything about him said “cop” to one who knew what to look for. Was this some elaborate kind of disguise, too? No, not possible. Dan had been the personal troubleshooter for Emil Jacobs, the quiet, competent FBI Director, and that was far too elaborate for a government cover. Besides, Murray didn’t run agents in London, did he?
Did he? Nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Ryan hated that aspect of his CIA job, but he had to admit that it kept his mind fully awake. Even drinking a beer in his backyard.
“Well, nice to hear, I suppose.”
“Basil’s hard to impress, my boy. But he and Judge Moore like each other. Jim Greer, too. Basil just plain loves his analytical ability.”
“He’s pretty smart,” Ryan agreed. “I’ve learned a lot from him.”
“He’s making you one of his stars.”
“Really?” It didn’t always seem that way to Ryan.
“Haven’t you noticed how quick he’s moving you up? Like you were a professor from Harvard or something, fella.”
“Boston College and Georgetown, remember?”
“Yeah, well, us Jesuit products run the world—we’re just humble about it. They don’t teach ‘humble’ at Harvard.”
For sure they don’t encourage their graduates to do anything as plebeian as police work, Ryan thought. He remembered the Harvard kids in Boston, many of whom thought they owned the world—because daddy had bought it for them. Ryan preferred to make the purchase himself, doubtless because of his working-class background. But Cathy wasn’t like those upper-class snots, and she had been born with a golden spoon in her mouth. Of course, nobody was ever disgraced to point to his son or daughter the doctor, and certainly not to a graduate of Johns Hopkins. Maybe Joe Muller wasn’t so bad a guy after all, Ryan thought briefly. He’d helped raise a pretty good daughter. Too bad he was an overbearing asshole to his son-in-law.
“So, you like it at Century House?”
“Better than Langley. Too much like a monastery out there. At least in London you live in a city. You can step out for a beer or do some shopping over lunch.”