Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (6 page)

He had to wait about ten minutes for the train, which arrived with little noise, being a cross between an American electric intercity train and a subway. His ticket was first class, which placed him in a small compartment. The windows went up and down if you pulled on a leather strap, and the compartment door hinged outward to let him exit directly instead of walking down the corridor. With that set of discoveries made, Ryan sat down and scanned the paper's front page. As in America, local politics covered about half of the sheet, and Ryan looked at two of the articles, figuring he might as well learn the local customs and beefs. The schedule said about forty minutes to Victoria Station. Not too bad, and much better than driving it, Dan Murray had told him. In addition, parking a car in London was even worse than it was in New York, wrong side of the street and all.

The ride on the train was agreeably smooth. The trains were evidently a government-run monopoly, and somebody spent money on the roadbeds. A conductor took his ticket with a smile—doubtless marking Jack as a Yank instantly—and moved on, leaving Ryan to his paper. The passing scenery soon overtook his interest. The countryside was green and lush. The Brits did love their lawns. The row houses here were smaller than those in his childhood neighborhood in Baltimore, with what looked like slate roofs, and Jesus, the streets were narrow here. You'd really have to pay attention while driving, lest you end up in someone's living room. That probably wouldn't sit well, even to Englishmen accustomed to dealing with the shortcomings of visiting Yanks.

It was a clear day, some white fluffy clouds aloft, and the sky a delightful blue. He'd never experienced rain over here. Yet they had to have it. Every third man on the street carried a furled umbrella. And a lot of them wore hats. Ryan hadn't done that since his time in the Marine Corps. England was just different enough from America to be dangerous, he decided. There were a lot of similarities, but the differences rose up and bit you on the ass when you least expected them. He'd have to be very careful with Sally crossing the street. At four and a half, she was just imprinted enough to look the wrong way at the wrong time. He'd seen his little girl in the hospital once, and that was, by God, enough for a lifetime.

He was rumbling through a city now, a thick one. The right-of-way was elevated. He looked around for recognizable landmarks. Was that St. Paul's Cathedral off to the right? If so, he'd be at Victoria soon. He folded his paper. Then the train slowed, and—yeah. Victoria Station. He opened the compartment door like a native and stepped out on the platform. The station was a series of steel arches with embedded glass panes, long since blackened by the stack gasses of steam trains long departed… But nobody had ever cleaned the glass. Or was it just air pollution that did it?

There was no telling. Jack followed the rest of the people to the brick wall that seemed to mark the station's waiting/arrival area. Sure enough, there were the usual collection of magazine stands and small stores. He could see the way out and found himself in the open air, fumbling in his pocket for his Chichester map of London. Westminster Bridge Road. It was too far to walk, so he hailed a cab.

From the cab, Ryan looked around, his head swiveling, just like the tourist he wasn't quite anymore. And there it was.

Century House, so named because it was 100 Westminster Bridge Road, was what Jack took to be a typical interwar structure of fair height and a stone facade that was… peeling off? The edifice was covered with an orange plastic netting that was manifestly intended to keep the facade from falling onto pedestrians. Oops. Maybe somebody was ripping through the building, looking for Russian bugs? Nobody had warned him about that at Langley. Just up the road was Westminster Bridge, and across that were the Houses of Parliament. Well, it was in a nice neighborhood, anyway. Jack trotted up the stone steps to the double door and made his way inside for all of ten feet, where he found an entry-control desk manned by someone in a sort of cop uniform.

“Can I help you, sir?” the guard asked. The Brits always said such things as though they really wanted to help you. Jack wondered if there might be a pistol just out of view. If not there, then not too far away. There had to be security here.

“Hi, I'm Jack Ryan. I'm starting work here.”

Instant smile and recognition: “Ah, Sir John. Welcome to Century House. Please let me call upstairs.” Which he did. “Someone's on his way down, sir. Please have a seat.”

Jack barely had a chance to feel the seat when someone familiar came through the revolving door.

“Jack!” he called out.

“Sir Basil.” Ryan rose to take his extended hand.

“Didn't expect you until tomorrow.”

“I'm letting Cathy get everything unpacked. She doesn't trust me to do it anyway.”

“Yes, we men do have our limitations, don't we?” Sir Basil Charleston was pushing fifty, tall and imperially thin, as the poet had once called it, with brown hair not yet going gray. His eyes were hazel and bright-looking, and he wore a suit that wasn't cheap, gray wool with a broad white pinstripe, looking to all the world like a very prosperous London merchant banker. In fact, his family had been in that line of work, but he'd found it confining, and opted instead to use his Cambridge education in the service of his country, first as a field intelligence officer, and later as an administrator. Jack knew that James Greer liked and respected him, as did Judge Moore. He'd met Charleston himself a year earlier, soon after being shot, then he'd learned that Sir Basil admired his invention of the Canary Trap, which had been his path to high-level notice at Langley. Basil had evidently used it to plug a few annoying leaks. “Come along, Jack. We need to get you properly outfitted.” He didn't mean Jack's suit, which was Savile Row and as expensive as his own. No, this meant a trip to personnel.

The presence of C, as the job title went, made it painless. They already had a set of Ryan's fingerprints from Langley, and it was mainly a matter of getting his picture taken and inserted in his pass-card, which would allow him through all the electronic gates, just like the ones at the CIA. They checked it through a dummy gate and saw that it worked. Then it was up in the executive elevator to Sir Basil's capacious corner office.

It was better than the long, narrow room that Judge Moore made do with. A decent view of the river and the Palace of Westminster. The DG waved Jack into a leather chair,

“So, any first impressions?” Charleston asked.

“Pretty painless so far. Cathy hasn't been to the hospital yet, but Bernie—her boss at Hopkins—says that the boss-doc there is a good guy.”

“Yes, Hammersmith has a good reputation, and Dr. Byrd is regarded as the best eye surgeon in Britain. Never met him, but I'm told he's a fine chap. Fisherman, loves to take salmon out of the rivers in Scotland, married, three sons, eldest is a lef tenant in the Coldstream Guards.”

“You had him checked out?” Jack asked incredulously.

“One cannot be too careful, Jack. Some of your distant cousins across the Irish Sea are not overly fond of you, you know.”

“Is that a problem?”

Charleston shook his head. “Most unlikely. When you helped to bring down the ULA, you probably saved a few lives in the PIRA. That's still sorting itself out, but that is mainly a job for the Security Service. We don't really have much business with them—at least nothing that will concern you directly.” Which led to Jack's next question.

“Yes, Sir Basil—what exactly is my job to be here?”

“Didn't James tell you?” Charleston asked.

“Not exactly. He likes his surprises, I've learned.”

“Well, the Joint Working Group mainly focuses on our Soviet friends. We have some good sources. So do your chaps. The idea is to share information in order to improve our overall picture.”

“Information. Not sources,” Ryan observed.

Charleston smiled understandingly. “One must protect those, as you know.”

Jack did know about that. In fact, he was allowed to know damned little about CIA's sources. Those were the most closely guarded secrets in the Agency, and doubtless here as well. Sources were real people, and a slip of the tongue would get them killed. Intelligence services valued sources more for their information than for their lives—the intelligence business was a business, after all—but sooner or later you started worrying about them and their families and their personal characteristics. Mainly booze, Ryan thought. Especially for the Russians. The ordinary Soviet citizen drank enough to qualify him as an alcoholic in America.

“No problem there, sir. I do not know the name or identity of one CIA source over there. Not one,” Ryan emphasized. It wasn't quite true. He hadn't been told, but you could guess a lot from the character of the information transmitted and the way he/she quoted people—they were usually “he,” but Ryan wondered about a few of the sources. It was an intriguing game that all analysts played, invariably in the confines of their own minds, though Ryan had speculated a few times with his personal boss, Admiral Jim Greer. Usually, the DDO had warned him not to speculate too loudly, but the way he'd blinked twice had told Ryan more than he'd wanted to convey. Well, they'd hired him for his analytical ability, Ryan knew. They didn't really want him to turn it off. When the information transmitted got a little kinky, it told you that something had happened to the source, like being caught, or going nuts. “The admiral is interested in one thing, though…”

“What's that?” the DG asked.

“Poland. It looks to us as though it's coming a little unglued, and we're wondering how far, how fast, and what it'll do—the effects, I mean.”

“So are we, Jack.” A thoughtful nod. People—especially reporters in their Fleet Street pubs—were speculating a lot about that. And reporters also had good sources, in some areas as good as his own. “What does James think?”

“It reminds both of us of something that happened in the 1930s.” Ryan leaned back in the chair and relaxed. “The United Auto Workers. When they organized Ford, there was trouble. Big time. Ford even hired thugs to work the union organizers over. I remember seeing photos of—who was it?” Jack paused for a moment's thought. “Walter Reuther? Something like that. It was in Life magazine back then. The thugs were talking to him and a few of his guys—the first few pictures show them smiling at each other like men do right before the gloves come off—and then a brawl started. You have to wonder about Ford's management—letting something like that happen in front of reporters is bad enough, but reporters with cameras? Damn, that's big-league dumb.”

“The Court of Public Opinion. Yes,” Charleston agreed. “It is quite real, and modern technology has made it even more so, and, yes, that is troubling to our friends across the wire. You know, this CNN news network that just started up on your side of the ocean. It just might change the world. Information has its own way of circulating. Rumors are bad enough. You cannot stop them, and they have a way of acquiring a life of their own—”

“But a picture really is worth a thousand words, isn't it?”

“I wonder who first said that. Whoever he was, he was no one's fool. It's even more true for a moving picture.”

“I presume we're using that…”

“Your chaps are reticent about doing so. I am less so. It's easy enough to have an embassy functionary have a pint with some reporter and maybe drop the odd hint in the course of a conversation. One thing about reporters, they are not ungracious if you give them the odd decent story.”

“At Langley, they hate the press, Sir Basil. And I do mean hate.”

“Rather backward of them. But, then, we can exercise more control over the press here than you can in America, I suppose. Still and all, it's not that hard to outsmart them, is it?”

“I've never tried. Admiral Greer says that talking to a reporter is like dancing with a rottweiler. You can't be sure if he's going to lick your face or rip your throat out.”

“They're not bad dogs at all, you know. You just need to train them properly.”

 Brits and their dogs,
Ryan reflected. They like their pets more than their kids. He didn't care for big dogs all that much. A Labrador like Ernie was different. Labs had a soft mouth. Sally really missed him.

“So, what's your take on Poland, Jack?”

“I think the pot's going to simmer until the lid slides off, and then when it boils over, there's going to be a hell of a mess. The Poles haven't really bought into communism all that well. Their army has chaplains, for Christ's sake. A lot of their farmers operate on a free-agent basis, selling hams and stuff. The most popular TV show over there is Kojak, they even show it on Sunday morning to draw people away from going to church. That shows two things. The people there like American culture, and the government is still afraid of the Catholic Church. The Polish government is unstable, and they know they're unstable. Allowing a little wiggle room is probably smart, at least in the short term, but the fundamental problem is that they operate a fundamentally unjust regime. Unjust countries are not stable, sir. However strong they appear, they're rotten underneath.”

Charleston nodded thoughtfully. “I briefed the PM just three days ago out at Chequers, and told her much the same thing.” The Director General paused for a moment, then decided. He lifted a file folder from the pile on his desk and handed it across.

The cover read MOST SECRET. So, Jack thought, now it starts. He wondered if Basil had learned to swim by falling into the Thames, and thought everyone should learn the same way.

Flipping the cover open, he saw that this information came from a source called WREN. He was clearly Polish, and by the look of the report, well placed, and what he said—

“Damn,” Ryan observed. “This is reliable?”

“Very much so. It's a five-five, Jack.” By that he meant that the source was rated 5 on a scale of 5 for reliability, and the importance of the information reported was graded the same way. “You're Catholic, I think.” He knew, of course. It was just the English way of talking.

“Jesuits at high school, Boston College, and Georgetown, plus the nuns at Saint Matthew's. I'd better be.”