“Isn’t there any way I can help?”
“Cathy, if you were cleared for this, maybe you could offer insights. But maybe not. You’re not a pshrink, and that’s the medical field that applies to this—how people respond to threats, what their motivations are, how they perceive reality, and how those perceptions determine their actions. I’ve been trying to get inside the heads of people I haven’t met to figure out what they’re going to do about something. I’ve been studying how they think for quite a while, even before I joined the Agency, but you know—”
“Yeah, it’s hard to look inside somebody’s brain. And you know what?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s harder with the sane ones than the crazy ones. People can think rationally and still do crazy things.”
“Because of their perceptions?”
She nodded. “Partially that, but partially because they’ve chosen to believe totally false things—for entirely rational reasons, but the things they believe in are still false.”
This struck Ryan as worth pursuing. “Okay. Tell me about… Josef Stalin, for instance. He killed a lot of people. Why?”
“Part of it was rational, and part of it was wild paranoia. When he saw a threat, he dealt with it decisively. But he tended to see threats that weren’t there or weren’t serious enough to merit deadly force. Stalin lived on the borderline between madness and normality, and he crossed back and forth like a guy on a bridge who couldn’t make up his mind about where he lived. In international affairs, he was supposed to be just as rational as everybody else, but he had a ruthless streak and nobody ever said ‘no’ to him. One of the docs at Hopkins wrote a book on the guy. I read it when I was in med school.”
“What did it say?”
Mrs. Dr. Ryan shrugged. “It wasn’t all that satisfactory. The current thinking is that it’s chemical imbalances in the brain that cause mental illness, not whether your dad slapped you around too much or you saw your mom in bed with a goat. But we can’t test Stalin’s blood chemistry now, can we?”
“Not hardly. I think they finally burned him up and put him in—where? I don’t remember,” Jack admitted. It wasn’t the Kremlin wall, was it? Or maybe they just buried the pine box instead of burning it all up. It wasn’t worth finding out, was it?
“It’s funny. A lot of historical figures did the stuff they did because they were mentally unstable. Today, we could fix them with lithium or other stuff we’ve learned about—mainly in the last thirty years or so—but back then, all they had was alcohol and iodine. Or maybe an exorcism,” she added, wondering if those were real.
“And Rasputin had a bad chemical imbalance, too?” Jack wondered aloud.
“Maybe. I don’t know much about that, except he was supposed to be a crazy kinda priest, wasn’t he?”
“Not a priest, some kinda mystic civilian. I suppose today he’d be a TV evangelist, right? Whatever he was, he brought down the House of Romanov—but they were pretty useless anyway.”
“And then Stalin took over?”
“Lenin first, then Stalin. Vladimir Ilyich checked out from strokes.”
“Hypertensive, maybe, or just cholesterol buildup and he clotted in the brain and that did him. And Stalin was worse, right?”
“Lenin was no day at the beach, but Stalin was pretty amazing—Tamerlane come back to the twentieth century, or maybe one of the Caesars. When the Romans reconquered a rebellious city, they killed everything there was, right down to the dogs.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but the Brits always spared the dogs. Too sentimental about them,” Jack added.
“Sally misses Ernie,” Cathy reminded him in female fashion—almost, but not totally irrelevant to the conversation. Ernie was their dog back home.
“So do I, but he’s going to have a lot of fun this fall—duck season soon. He’ll get to retrieve all the dead birds out of the water.”
Cathy shivered. She’d never hunted anything more alive than the hamburger at the local supermarket—but she carved up human beings with knives. Like that makes any sense, Ryan thought with a wry smile. But the world had no rule that required logic on its surface—not the last time he’d checked.
“Don’t worry, babe. Ernie will like it. Trust me.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“He loves to go swimming,” Jack pointed out, extending the needle. “So, what interesting eyeball problems at the hospital next week?”
“Just routine stuff—checking eyes and prescribing glasses all week.”
“No fun stuff, like cutting some poor bastard’s left eye in half and then sewing it back together?”
“That’s not a procedure,” she pointed out.
“Babe, I could never cut into a person’s eyeball with a knife without tossing my cookies—or maybe fainting.” The very thought of it made him shiver.
“Wimp” was all she had to say about that admission. She didn’t understand that this was a skill not covered in the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico, Virginia.
MARY PAT COULD feel that her husband was still awake, but it wasn’t a time to talk, even with their personal hand-jive technique. Instead she was thinking about operations—how to get the package out. Moscow would be too hard. Other parts of the Soviet Union were no easier, because Moscow Station didn’t have all that many assets it could use elsewhere in this vast country—intelligence operations tended to be centered in national capitals because that was where you could place “diplomats” who were truly wolves in sheep’s clothing. The obvious counter for that was to use your government capital just for strictly government-related administrative services, distanced from military and other sensitive affairs, but nobody would do that, for the simple reason that government big shots wanted all their functionaries within arm’s length so that they —the big shots—could enjoy their exercise of power. And that was what they all lived for, whether it was in Moscow, Hitler’s Berlin, or Washington, D.C.
So, if not out of Moscow, then where? There were only so many places the Rabbit was free to go. Nowhere west of the wire, as she thought of the Iron Curtain that had fallen across Europe in 1945. And there were few places where a man like him could plausibly want to go that were convenient to CIA. The beaches at Sochi, perhaps. Theoretically, the Navy could get a submarine there and make the snatch, but you couldn’t just whistle up a submarine, and the Navy would have a cow over that, just for having it asked of them.
That left the fraternal socialist states of Eastern Europe, which were about as exciting as tourist spots as central Mississippi in the summer: a good place to go if you got off on cotton plantations and blazing heat, but otherwise why bother? Poland was out. Warsaw had been rebuilt after the Wehrmacht’s harsh version of urban renewal, but Poland right now was a very tight place due to its internal political troubles, and the easiest exit point, Gdansk, was now as tightly guarded as the Russian-Polish border. It hadn’t helped that the Brits had arranged for the purloining of a new Russian T-72 main battle tank there. Mary Pat hoped the stolen tank was useful to somebody, but some idiot in London had bragged about it to the newspapers and the story had broken, ending Gdansk’s utility as a port of exit for the next few years. The DDR, perhaps? But few Russians cared a rat’s ass about Germany, and there was little there for them to want to see. Czechoslovakia? An interesting city supposedly, landmarked with imperial architecture, and a good cultural life. Their symphonies and ballet were almost on a class with the Russians’ own, and the art galleries were supposedly excellent. But the Czech-Austrian border was also very tightly guarded.
That left… Hungary.
Hungary, she thought. Budapest was also an old imperial city, once ruled sternly by the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty, conquered by the Russians in 1945 after a nasty, prolonged battle with the German SS, probably rebuilt to whatever former glory it had enjoyed a hundred years before. It was not enthusiastically communist, as they’d demonstrated in 1956, before being harshly put down by the Russians, at Khrushchev’s personal orders, and then under Andropov’s stewardship as USSR Ambassador reestablished as a happy socialist brotherhood, though one more loosely governed after the brief and bloody rebellion. The head rebels had all been hanged, shot, or otherwise disposed of. Forgiveness had never been a Marxist-Leninist virtue.
But a lot of Russians took the train to Budapest. It was the neighbor of Yugoslavia, the communist San Francisco, a place where Russians could not go without permission, but Hungary traded freely with Yugoslavia, and so Soviet citizens could purchase VCRs, Reebok running shoes, and Fogal pantyhose there. Typically, Russians went there with one suitcase full and two or three empty, and a shopping list for all their friends.
Soviets could travel there with reasonable freedom, because they had Comecon rubles, which all socialist countries were required to honor by the socialist Big Brother in Moscow. Budapest was, in fact, the boutique of the Eastern Bloc. You could even get X-rated tapes for the tape machines that were manufactured there—rip-offs of Japanese designs, reverse-engineered and made in their own fraternal socialist factories. The tapes were smuggled in from Yugoslavia and copied—everywhere, everything from The Sound of Music to Debbie Does Dallas. Budapest had decent art galleries and historical sites, good orchestras, and the food was supposed to be pretty good. An entirely plausible place for the Rabbit to go, with every ostensible intention of going back to his beloved Rodina.