Okay, but what—no, how—to work this one. Nigel was the Commercial Attaché at the Brit Embassy, right across the river from the Kremlin itself, a station that went back to the czars, and one that had supposedly pissed Stalin off royally, to see the Union Jack every morning from his office window. And the Brits had helped recruit, and had later run GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the agent who’d prevented World War III and, along the way, recruited CARDINAL, the brightest jewel in CIA’s crown. So if he had to trust anyone, it would have to be Nigel. Necessity was the mother of many things, and if the Rabbit came to grief, well, they’d know that SIS was penetrated. Again. He realized he’d have to apologize to Nigel just for thinking this way, but this was business, not personal.
Paranoia, Eddie, the COS told himself. You can’t suspect everybody.
The hell I can’t!
But, probably, he knew, Nigel Haydock thought the same thing about him. That was just how the game was played.
And if they got the Rabbit out, it was proof positive that Haydock was straight. No way in hell that Ivan would let this bunny skip town alive. He just knew too much.
Did Zaitzev have any idea at all of the danger he was walking into? He trusted CIA to get him and his family out of Dodge City alive…
But with all the information to which he had access, wasn’t he making an informed judgment?
Jesus, there were enough interlocking wheels in this to make a bicycle factory, weren’t there?
The tape ended, and Master Truck Robot—or whatever the hell his name was—transformed himself back into a truck and motored off to the sound of “Transformers, more than meets the eye…” It was sufficient to the moment that Eddie liked it. So, he’d arranged some quality time with his son and some good think time for himself—not a bad Sunday evening on the whole.
“SO, WHAT’S THE PLAN, Arthur?” Greer asked.
“Good question, James,” the DCI answered. They were watching TV in his den, the Orioles and the White Sox playing in Baltimore. Mike Flanagan was pitching, and looked to be on his way to another Cy Young Award, and the rookie shortstop the Orioles had just brought up was playing particularly well, and looked to have a big-league future. Both men were drinking beer and eating pretzels, as though they were real people enjoying a Sunday afternoon of America’s pastime. That was partly true.
“Basil will help. We can trust him,” Admiral Greer opined.
“Agreed. Whatever problems he had are a thing of the past, and he’ll compartmentalize it as tight as the Queen’s jewel box. But we’ll want one of our people involved at his end.”
“Who, do you suppose?”
“Not the COS London. Everybody knows who he is, even the cabdrivers.” There was no disputing that. The London Station Chief had been in the spook business for a very long time, and was more an administrator now than an active field officer. The same could be said of most of his people, for whom London was a sinecure job, and mainly a sunset posting for people looking forward to retirement. They were good men all, of course, just ready to hang up the spikes. “Whoever it is, he’ll have to go to Budapest, and he’ll have to be invisible.”
“So, somebody they don’t know.”
“Yep.” Moore nodded as he took a bite of his sandwich and reached for some chips. “He won’t have to do very much, just let the Brits know he’s there. Keep ’em honest, like.”
“Basil’s going to want to interview this guy.”
“No avoiding that,” Moore agreed. “And he’s entitled to dip his beak, too.” That was a line he had picked up as a judge on a rare organized-crime appeals case. He and his fellow jurists in Austin, Texas, had laughed about it for weeks, after rejecting the appeal, 5-0.
“We’ll want one of our people in for that, too.”
“Bet your bippy, James,” Moore agreed again.
“And better that our guy is based over there. Timing might get a little tough.”
“You bet.”
“How about Ryan?” Greer asked. “He’s way the hell under the radar. Nobody knows who he is—he’s one of mine, right? He doesn’t even look like a field officer.”
“His face has been in the papers,” Moore objected.
“You think KGB reads the society page? At most they might have noticed him as a rich wannabe writer, and if he has a file, it’s in some sub-basement at The Centre. That ought not to be a problem.”
“You think so?” Moore wondered. For sure, this would give Bob Ritter a bellyache. But that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. Bob had visions of taking over all CIA operations, and, good man that he was, he would never be DCI, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that Congress didn’t much like spooks with Napoleonic complexes. “Is he up to it?”
“The boy’s an ex-Marine and he knows how to think on his feet, remember?”
“He has paid his dues, James. He doesn’t take a leak sitting down,” the DCI conceded.
“And all he has to do is keep an eye on our friends, not play spook on enemy soil.”
“Bob will have a conniption fit.”
“It won’t hurt our purposes to keep Bob in his place, Arthur.” Especially, he didn’t add, if this works out. And work out it should. Once out of Moscow, it ought to be a fairly routine operation. Tense, of course, but routine.
“What if he screws things up?”
“Arthur, Jimmy Szell dropped the ball in Budapest, and he’s an experienced field officer. I know, probably not even his fault, probably just bad luck, but it proves the point. A lot of this racket is just luck. The Brits will be doing all the real work, and I’m sure Basil will pick a good team.”
Moore weighed the thought quietly. Ryan was very new at CIA, but he was a rising star. What helped was his adventure, not yet a year old, where twice he’d faced loaded guns and gotten it done anyway. One nice thing about the Marine Corps, they didn’t turn out many pussies. Ryan could think and act on his feet, and that was a nice thing to have in your pocket. Better yet, the Brits liked him. He’d seen the comments from Sir Basil Charleston on Ryan’s tenure at Century House—he was taking quite a liking to the young American analyst. So this was a chance to bring a new talent along, and though he wasn’t a graduate of The Farm, that didn’t mean he was a babe in the woods. Ryan had been through the woods, and he’d killed himself a couple of wolves along the way, hadn’t he?
“James, it’s a little outside the box, but I won’t say no for that reason. Okay, cut him loose. I hope your boy doesn’t wet his pants.”
“What did Foley call this operation?”
“BEATRIX, he said. You know, like Peter Rabbit.”
“Foley, that boy is going places, Arthur, and his wife, Mary Patricia, she is a real piece of work.”
“There we surely agree, James. She’d make a great rodeo rider, and he’d be a pretty good town marshal west of the Pecos,” the DCI said. He liked to see some of the young talent the Agency was producing. Where they all came from—well, they came from a lot of different places, but they all seemed to have the same fire in the belly that he’d had thirty years before, working with Hans Tofte. They weren’t terribly different from the Texas Rangers he’d learned to admire as a little boy—the smart, tough people who did what had to be done.
“How do we get the word to Basil?”
“I called Chip Bennett last night, told him to have his people gin up some one-timers. Ought to be at Langley this evening. We’ll fly them to London on the 747 tonight, and shoot some on from there to Moscow. So we’ll be able to communicate securely, if not conveniently.”
THAT, IN FACT, was just about done. A computer system used for taking down the dot-dash signals of International Morse Code was connected to a highly sensitive radio tuned to a frequency used by no human agency, transforming the garbage noise into Roman letters. One of the technicians at Fort Meade remarked along the way that the intergalactic noise they were copying down was the residual static produced by the Big Bang, for which Penzias and Miller had collected a Nobel Prize a few years before, and that was as random as things got—unless you could decode it to learn what God thought, which was beyond the skills even of NSA’s Z-division. A dot-matrix printer put the letters to carbon-paper sets—three copies of each, the original to the originators, and a copy each for CIA and NSA. They all contained enough letters to transcribe the first third of the Bible, and each page and each line were alphanumerically identified to make decryption possible. Three people separated the pages, made sure that the sets were properly arranged, and then slipped them into ring binders for some semblance of ease of use. Then two were handed off to an Air Force NCO, who drove the CIA copies off to Langley. The lead technician wondered what was so goddamned important to require such massive one-time pads, which NSA had long before gotten past with its institutional worship of electronic technology, but his was not—ever—to reason why, was it? Not at Fort Meade, Maryland, it wasn’t.