Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (86 page)

“Halfway home, probably. The Air Force is flying them over,” Ritter told them. “ETA at Andrews is about eleven-forty, they told me.”

THERE WERE WINDOWS in the front office, Ryan found out, and the flight crew was friendly enough. He was even able to talk a little about baseball. The Orioles had just one more game to win to finish the Phillies off, he was pleased and surprised to learn. The flight crew didn't even hint at asking why they were driving him back to America. They'd done it too many times and, besides, they never got good answers anyway. Aft, the Rabbit Family was sound asleep, a feat Ryan had not yet managed to accomplish.

“How long?” he asked the pilot.

“Well, that's Labrador there.” He pointed. “Call it three hours more, and we'll be feet-dry almost all the way. Why don't you get some sleep, sir?”

“I don't sleep in the air,” Jack admitted.

“Don't feel too bad, sir. Neither do we,” the copilot told him. And that was good news, on reflection, Jack thought.

SIR BASIL CHARLESTON was having his own meeting with his Chief of Government at the moment. Neither in America nor in the U.K. did reporters write stories about when and why the chiefs of the various intelligence services met with their political masters.

“So, tell me about this Strokov fellow,” she ordered.

“Not a very pleasant chap,” C replied. “We reckon he was there to kill the actual shooter. He had a suppressed weapon to eliminate the noise. So, it would appear that the idea was to kill His Holiness and leave a dead assassin behind. Dead men still tell no tales, you see, Prime Minister. But perhaps this one will, after all. The Italian police must be chatting with him right now, I would imagine. He is a Turkish national, and I'll wager he had a criminal record, and/or experience in smuggling things into Bulgaria.”

“So, it was the Russians who were behind this?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am. That seems virtually certain. Tom Sharp is talking to Strokov in Rome. We'll see how loyal he is to his masters.”

“What will we do with him?” the PM asked. The answer was in the form of another question that she would have to answer. She did.

IT DID NOT occur to Strokov that when Sharp invoked the names of Aleksey Nikolay'ch Rozhdestvenskiy and Ilya Fedorovich Bubovoy, his own fate was sealed. He was merely dumbfounded that the British Secret Intelligence Service had the KGB so thoroughly penetrated. Sharp saw no reason to disabuse him of that notion. Shocked beyond his capacity to react intelligently, Strokov forgot all of his training and started singing. His duet with Sharp lasted two and a half hours, all of it on tape.

RYAN WAS MORE on autopilot than the Boeing was before it touched down at Runway Zero-One Right at Andrews Air Force Base. He'd been on the go for what? Twenty-two hours? Something like that. Something more easily done as a Marine second lieutenant (age twenty-two) than as a married father of two (age thirty -two) who'd had a fairly stressful day. He was also feeling his liquor somewhat.

There were two cars waiting at the bottom of the steps—Andrews had yet to install a jetway. He and Zaitzev took the first. Mrs. Rabbit and the Bunny took the second. Two minutes after that, they were on Suitland Parkway, heading into D.C. Ryan drew the task of explaining what they were passing along the way. Unlike his arrival in England, Zaitzev was not under the impression that this might be a maskirovka. And the detour past the Capitol Building ended whatever lingering suspicions he might have had. George Lucas on his best day could not have faked this scenery. The cars crossed the Potomac and went north of the George Washington Parkway, finally taking the marked exit to Langley.

“So, this is the home of the Main Enemy,” the Rabbit said.

“I just think of it as the place I used to work.”

“Used to?”

“Didn't you know? I'm stationed back in England now,” Jack told him.

The whole debriefing team was under the canopy by the main entrance. Ryan knew only one of them, Mark Radner, a Russian scholar from Dartmouth who got called down for some special work—one of the people who liked working for CIA, but not full-time. Ryan was now able to understand that. When the car stopped, he got out first and went to James Greer.

“You've had a busy couple of days, my boy.”

“Tell me about it, Admiral.”

“How was it in Rome?”

“First, tell me about the Pope,” Jack shot back.

“He came through surgery okay. He's critical, but we asked Charlie Weathers up at Harvard about that, and he said not to worry. People that age who come through surgery are always classified as being in critical condition—probably just a way to drive the bill up. Unless something unusual crops up, he'll probably be fine. Charlie says they grow good cutters in Rome. His Holiness ought to be home in three to four weeks, Charlie says. They won't rush it with a guy his age.”

“Thank God. Sir, when I had that Strokov bastard I thought we'd done it, y'know? Then when I heard the shots—Jesus, what a moment that was, Admiral.”

Greer nodded. “I can imagine. But the good guys won this one. Oh, your Orioles took the series from Philly. Game just ended twenty minutes ago. That new shortstop you have, Ripken, looks to me like he's going places.”

“Ryan.” Judge Moore came over next. “Well done, son.” Another handshake.

“Thank you, Director.”

“Nice going, Ryan,” Ritter said next. “Sure you wouldn't like to try our training course at the Farm?” The handshake was surprisingly cordial. Ritter must have had a drink or two in the office, Jack surmised.

“Sir, right now, I'd be just as happy to go back to teaching history.”

“It's more fun to make it, boy. Remember that.”

The party moved inside, past the memorial on the right-side wall to the dead officers, many of whose names were still secret, then left to the executive elevator. The Rabbit family went its own way. There were hotel-like accommodations for VIP visitors and back-from-overseas field officers on the sixth floor, and evidently the CIA was bedding them down there. Jack followed the senior executives to the Judge's office.

“How good is our new Rabbit?” Moore asked.

“Well, sure as hell he gave us good information on the Pope, Judge,” Ryan answered in considerable surprise. “And the Brits sound pretty happy with what he's told them about that Agent MINISTER. I'm kinda curious who this CASSIUS guy is.”

“And NEPTUNE,” Greer added. The Navy needed secure communications to survive in the modern world, and James Greer still had blue suits in his closet.

“Any other thoughts?” This was Moore again.

“Has anyone thought about how desperate the Russians are? I mean, sure, the Pope was—I guess he still is—a political threat of some sort to them, but, damn it, this was not a rational operation, was it?” Jack asked. “Looks to me as though they're a lot more desperate than we usually think. We ought to be able to exploit that.” The mixture of alcohol and fatigue made it easier than usual for Ryan to speak his mind, and he'd been chewing on this idea for about twelve hours.

“How?” Ritter asked, reminding himself that Ryan was something of a whiz at economics.

“I'll tell you one thing for sure: The Catholic Church is not going to be very happy. Lots of Catholics in Eastern Europe, guys. That is a capability we need to think about using. If we approach the Church intelligently, they might just cooperate with us. The Church is big on forgiveness, sure, but you're supposed to go to confession first.”

Moore raised an eyebrow.

“The other thing is, I've been studying their economy. It's very shaky, a lot more than our people think it is, Admiral,” Jack said, turning to his immediate boss.

“What do you mean?”

“Sir, the stuff our guys are looking at, it's the official economics reports that come into Moscow, right?”

“We work pretty hard to get it, too,” Moore confirmed.

“Director, why do we think it's true?” Ryan asked. “Just because the Politburo gets it? We know they lie to us, and they lie to their own people. What if they lie to themselves? If I were an examiner for the SEC, I think I could put a whole lot of guys in Allenwood Federal Prison. What they say they have doesn't jibe with what we can identify them as actually having. Their economy is teetering, and if that goes bad, even a little bit, the whole shebang comes down.”

“How could we exploit that?” Ritter asked. His own blue-team analysis had said something very similar four days earlier, but even Judge Moore didn't know that.

“Where do they get their hard currency—I mean, what do they get it from?”

“Oil.” Greer answered the question. The Russians exported as much oil as the Saudis.

“And who controls the world price of oil?”

“OPEC?”

“And who,” Ryan went on, “controls OPEC?”

“The Saudis.”

“Aren't they our friends?” Jack concluded. “Look at the USSR as a takeover target, like we did at Merrill Lynch. The assets are worth a lot more than the parent corporation, because it's so badly run. This isn't hard stuff to figure out.” Even by a guy exhausted by a long day, five thousand miles of air travel, and a little too much booze, he didn't add. There were a lot of smart people at CIA, but they thought too much like government workers, and not enough like Americans. “Don't we have anybody who thinks outside the box?”

“Bob?” Moore asked.

Ritter was warming to the young analyst by the minute. “Ryan, you ever read Edgar Allan Poe?”

“In high school,” Ryan replied in some small confusion.

“How about a story called 'The Masque of the Red Death?”

“Something about a plague coming in to ruin the party, wasn't it?”

“Get some rest. Before you fly back to London tomorrow, you're going to get briefed in on something.”

“Sleep sounds like a plan, gentlemen. Where do I crash for the night?” he asked, letting them know, if they hadn't already guessed, that he was ready to collapse.

“We have a place for you at the Marriott up the road. You're all checked in. There's a car waiting at the entrance for you. Go on, now,” Moore told him.

“Maybe he's not so dumb after all,” Ritter speculated.

“Robert, it's nice to see that you're strong enough to change,” Greer smilingly observed as he reached for Moore's own office bottle of expensive bourbon whiskey. It was time to celebrate.

THE FOLLOWING DAY in Il Tempo, a morning newspaper in Rome, was a story about a man found dead in a car of an apparent heart attack. It would be a little time before the body was identified and it was finally determined that he was a Bulgarian tourist who'd evidently come to the end of his life quite unexpectedly. How clear his conscience had been was not apparent from physical examination.