“Depends on who I’m going-fer, as they say. The car’s over this way.” He waved. It was parked fifty yards away.
“Constance sends her love. How is the family?” Sir Basil Charleston asked.
“Fine, thanks. How’s London?”
“Surely you haven’t forgotten our winters already.”
“No.” Jack laughed as he wrenched open the door. “I remember the beer, too.” A moment later both doors were closed and locked.
“They sweep the wheels every week,” Jack said. “How bad is it?”
“How bad? That’s what I came over here to find out. Something very odd is happening. You chaps had an op go wrong, didn’t you?”
“I can say yes to that, but the rest’ll have to come from the Judge. Sorry, but I was just cleared for part of it.”
“Recently, I’ll wager.”
“Yep.” Ryan shifted up as he took the turn off the airport road.
“Then let’s see if you can still put two and two together, Sir John.”
Jack smiled as he changed lanes to pass a truck. “I was doing the intelligence estimate on the arms talks when I broke into it. Now I’m supposed to be looking at Narmonov’s political vulnerability. Unless I’m wrong, that’s why you’ve flown over.”
“And unless I’m very far off the mark, your op has triggered something very serious indeed.”
“Vaneyev?”
“Correct.”
“Jesus.” Ryan turned briefly. “I hope you have some ideas, ’cause we sure as hell don’t.” He took the car to seventy-five. Fifteen minutes later he pulled into Langley. They parked in the underground garage and took the VIP elevator to the seventh floor.
“Hello, Arthur. It’s not often I have a knight chauffeur me about, even in London.” The head of SIS took a chair while Ryan summoned Moore’s department chiefs.
“Hi, Bas’,” Greer said on entering. Ritter just waved. It was his operation that had triggered this crisis. Ryan took the least comfortable chair available.
“I’d like to know exactly what went wrong,” Charleston said simply, not even waiting for the coffee to be passed around.
“An agent got arrested. A very well-placed agent.”
“Is that why the Foleys are flying out today?” Charles smiled. “I didn’t know who they were, but when two people get ejected from that delightful country, we generally assume—”
“We don’t know what went wrong yet,” Ritter said. “They should be landing at Frankfurt right about now, then ten more hours till we have them here for the debrief. They were working an agent who—”
“Who was an aide to Yazov—Colonel M. S. Filitov. We’ve deduced that much. How long have you had him?”
“It was one of your folks who recruited him for us,” Moore replied. “He was a colonel, too.”
“You don’t mean . . . Oleg Penkovskiy . . . ? Bloody hell!” Charleston was amazed for once, Ryan saw. It didn’t happen often. “That long?”
“That long,” Ritter said. “But the numbers caught up with us.”
“And the Vaneyeva woman we seconded to you for courier service was part of that—”
“Correct. She never came close to either end of the chain, by the way. We know that she was probably picked up, but she’s back at work. We haven’t checked her out yet, but—”
“We have. Bob. Our chap reported that she’d—changed somehow. He said it was hard to describe but impossible to miss. Like the hoary tales of brainwashing, Orwell and all that. He noted that she was free—or what passes for it over there—and related that to her father. Then we learned of something big in the Defense Ministry—that a senior aide to Yazov had been arrested.” Charleston paused to stir his coffee. “We have a source inside the Kremlin that we guard rather closely. We have learned that Chairman Gerasimov spent several hours with Alexandrov last week and under fairly unusual circumstances. This same source has warned us that Alexandrov has a considerable urge to sidetrack this perestroika business.
“Well, it’s clear, isn’t it?” Charleston asked rhetorically. It was quite clear to everyone. “Gerasimov has suborned a Politburo member thought to be loyal to Narmonov, at the very least compromised the support of the Defense Minister, and been spending a good deal of time with the man who wants Narmonov out. I’m afraid that your operation may have triggered something with the most unpleasant consequences.”
“There’s more,” the DCI said. “Our agent was getting us material on Soviet SDI research. Ivan may have made a breakthrough.”
“Marvelous,” Charleston observed. “A return to the bad old days, but this time the new version of the ‘missile gap’ is potentially quite real, I take it? I am awfully old to change my politics. Too bad. You know, of course, that there is a leak in your program?”
“Oh?” Moore asked with a poker face.
“Gerasimov told Alexandrov that. No details, unfortunately, except that KGB think it highly important.”
“We’ve had some warnings. It’s being looked at,” Moore said.
“Well, the technical matters can sort themselves out. They generally do. The political question, on the other hand, has created a bit of a bother with the PM. There’s trouble enough when we bring down a government that we wish to bring down, but to do so by accident . . .”
“We don’t like the consequences any more than you do, Basil,” Greer noted. “But there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it from this end.”
“You can accept their treaty terms,” Charleston suggested. “Then our friend Narmonov would have his position sufficiently strengthened that he might be able to tell Alexandrov to bugger off. That, in any case, is the unofficial position of Her Majesty’s government.”
And that’s the real purpose of your visit to us, Sir Basil, Ryan thought. It was time to say something:
“That means putting unreasonable restrictions on our SDI research and reducing our warhead inventory in the knowledge that the Russians are racing forward with their own program. I don’t think that’s a very good deal.”
“And a Soviet government headed by Gerasimov is?”
“And what if we end up with that anyway?” Ryan asked. “My estimate is already written. I recommend against additional concessions.”
“One can always change a written document,” Charleston pointed out.
“Sir, I have a rule. If something goes out with my name on the front, it says what I think, not what somebody else tells me to think,” Ryan said.
“Do remember, gentlemen, that I am a friend. What is likely to happen to the Soviet government would be a greater setback to the West than a temporary restriction on one of your defense programs.”
“The President won’t spring for it,” Greer said.
“He might have to,” Moore replied.
“There has to be another way,” Ryan observed.
“Not unless you can bring Gerasimov down.” It was Ritter this time. “We can’t offer any direct help to Narmonov. Even if we assume that he’d take a warning from us, which he probably wouldn’t, we’d be running an even greater risk by involving ourselves in their internal politics. If the rest of the Politburo got one whiff of that . . . I suppose it might start a little war.”
“But what if we can?” Ryan asked,
“What if we can what?” Ritter demanded.
17.
Conspiracy
“ANN” came back to Eve’s Leaves earlier than expected, the owner noted. With her usual smile, she selected a dress off the rack and took it to the dressing room. She was out by the full-length mirrors only a minute later, and accepted the customary compliments on how it looked rather more perfunctorily than usual. Again she paid cash, leaving with yet another engaging smile.
Out in the parking lot, things were a little different. Captain Bisyarina broke tradecraft by opening the capsule and reading the contents. That evoked a brief but nasty curse. The message was but a single sheet of notepaper. Bisyarina lit a cigarette with a butane lighter, then burned the paper in her car’s ashtray.
All that work wasted! And it was already in Moscow, was already being analyzed. She felt like a fool. It was doubly annoying that her agent had been completely honest, had forwarded what she’d thought was highly classified material, and on learning that it had been rendered invalid, had gotten that word out quickly. She would not even have the satisfaction of forwarding a small portion of the reprimand that she would surely get for wasting Moscow Center’s time.
Well, they warned me about this. It may be the first time, but it will not be the last. She drove home and dashed off her message.
The Ryans weren’t known for their attendance on the Washington cocktail circuit, but there were a few that they couldn’t avoid. The reception was intended to raise money for D.C. Children’s Hospital, and Jack’s wife was a friend of the chief of surgery. The evening’s entertainment was the big draw. A prominent jazz musician owed his granddaughter’s life to the hospital, and he was paying off that debt with a major benefit performance at the Kennedy Center. The reception was intended to give the D.C. elite a chance to meet him “up close and personal” and hear his sax in greater privacy. Actually, as with most “power” parties, it was really for the elite to see and be seen by one another, confirming their importance. As was true in most parts of the world, the elite felt the need to pay for the privilege. Jack understood the phenomenon, but felt that it made little sense. By eleven o’clock the elite of Washington had proved that they could talk just as inanely about just as little, and get just as drunk, as anyone else in the world. Cathy had held herself to one glass of white wine, however; Jack had won the toss tonight: he could drink and she had to drive. He’d indulged himself tonight, despite a few warning looks from his wife, and was basking in a mellow, philosophical glow that made him think he’d overdone the act a little bit—but then it wasn’t supposed to look like an act. He just hoped to God everything went as planned tonight.