The bounce-back signal arrived after midnight in Moscow, where it was printed up and walked to Mike Russell's desk by the night communications officer and promptly forgotten. Due to the eight-hour time difference from Washington, this was often the busiest time for inbound signals, and that one was just another piece of paper with gibberish on it, one which he was not allowed to decrypt.
As Mary Pat had expected, Ed hadn't gotten any sleep to speak of, but had done his best not to roll around too much, lest he disturb his wife. Doubts were also part of the espionage game. Was Oleg Ivan'ch a false-flag, some random attempt from the: KGB on which he'd bitten down a little too fast and a little too hard? Had the Soviets just gone fishing at random and landed a big blue marlin on the first try? Did KGB play such games? Not according to his lengthy mission briefing at Langley. They'd played similar games in the past, but those had been targeted deliberately toward people whom they knew to be players, from whom they could get a line on other agents just by following them around to check out drop sites-
But you didn't play it this way. You didn't ask for a ticket out on the first go-round unless you really wanted something specific, like the neutralization of a particular target-and that couldn't be it. He and Mary Pat hadn't done much of anything yet. Hell, only a handful of people at the embassy knew who and what he was. He hadn't recruited new agents yet, nor worked any existing ones. That wasn't, strictly speaking, his job. The Chief of Station wasn't supposed to work the field. He was supposed to direct and supervise those who did, like Dom Corso and Mary Pat and the rest of his small but expert crew.
And if Ivan knew who he was, why tip its hand so quickly-it would only tell CIA more than it knew now, or could easily learn. You didn't play the spy game that way.
Okay, what if the Rabbit was a throwaway, whose job it was to ID Foley and then give over useless or false information-what if the whole job had as its objective nothing more than to ID the COS Moscow? But they couldn't have targeted him without knowing who he.was, could they? Even KGB didn't have the assets to shotgun such a mission and ping on every embassy staffer-it was way too clumsy and was certain to alert embassy personnel to something very strange under way.
No, KGB was too professional for that.
So they couldn't target him without knowing, and if they knew, they'd want to hide that information, lest they alert CIA to a source or method that they'd be far better advised to conceal.
So Oleg Ivanovich couldn't be a false-flag, and that was that.
So, he had to be the real thing. Didn't he?
For all his intelligence and experience, Foley could not come up with a construct that made the Rabbit anything but the genuine item. The problem was that it made little sense.
But what in espionage ever made sense?
What did make sense was the necessity of getting this guy out. They had a Rabbit, and the Rabbit needed to run away from the Bear.
"You can't say what's bothering you?" Cathy asked. "Nope."
"But it's important?"
"Yep." He nodded. "Yeah, it sure is, but the problem is that we don't know how serious."
"Something for me to worry about?"
"Well, no. It's not World War Three or anything like that. But I really can't talk about it."
"Why?"
"You know why-it's classified. You don't tell me about your patients, do you? That's because you have rules of ethics, and I have rules of classification." Smart as Cathy was, she still hadn't fully grasped that one yet.
"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.
That's the beginning of a plan, Mary Pat thought. That was also enough lost sleep for one night.
"So, what happened?" the Ambassador asked.
"An AVH spook was having coffee one table away from where my agent made a drop," Szell explained in the Ambassador's private office. It was located on the top floor, in the corner-in fact, in the quarters once occupied by Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his lengthy residency at the U.S. Embassy. A beloved figure both in the eyes of the American staffers and the Hungarian people, he'd been imprisoned by the Nazis, released by the arriving Red Army, and promptly returned to prison for not being enthusiastic enough over the advent of the New Faith of Russia, though, technically, he'd been imprisoned on the far-fetched charges of being a raging royalist who wished to return the House of Hapsburg to imperial rule. The local communists hadn't been overly strong on creative writing. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, the Hapsburgs had been about as popular in Budapest as a bargeload of plague rats.
"Why were you doing it, Jim?" Ambassador Peter "Spike" Ericsson asked. He'd have to reply to the venomous, but entirely predictable, communique that had arrived with the Station Chief, which was now sitting in the center of his desk.
"Bob Taylor's wife-she's pregnant, remember?-had some plumbing problems, and they flew 'em both off to Second Army General Hospital up at Kaiserslauten to get checked out."
Ericsson grunted. "Yeah, I forgot."
"Anyway, the short version is, I blew it," Szell had to admit. It just wasn't his way to cover things up. It would cause a major hiccup in his CIA career, but that couldn't be helped. Damned sure it was a lot rougher right now for that poor clumsy bastard who'd screwed up the transfer. The Hungarian State Security Authority-Allavedelmi Hatosag, or AVH-officers who'd interrogated him evidently hadn't had a good gloat in some time, and had made a point of telling him how easily he'd been bagged. Fucking amateurs, Szell raged. But the end of the game was that he was now PNG'd, declared persona non grata by the Hungarian government, and requested to leave the country in forty-eight hours-preferably, with his tail tucked firmly between his legs.
"Sorry to lose you, Bob, but there's nothing much I can do."
"And I'm pretty useless to the team now anyway. I know." Szell let out a long and frustrated breath. He'd been here long enough to set up a pretty good little spy shop, providing fairly good political and military information-none of it overly important, because Hungary was not an overly important country, but you just never knew when something of interest would happen, even in Lesotho-which might well be his next posting, Szell reflected. He'd have to buy some sunblock and a nice bush jacket… At least he'd get to catch the World Series back at home.
But for now, Station Budapest was out of business. Not that Langley would really miss it, Szell consoled himself.
The signal about this would go to Foggy Bottom via embassy telex-encrypted, of course. Ambassador Ericsson drafted his reply to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, rejecting out of hand the absurd allegation that James Szell, Second Secretary to the Embassy of the United States of America, had done anything inconsistent with his diplomatic status, and lodging an official protest in the name of the U.S. Department of State. Perhaps in the next week, Washington would send some Hungarian diplomat back-whether he was a sheep or a goat would be decided in Washington. Ericsson thought it would be a sheep. Why let on that the FBI had ID'd a goat, after all? Better to let the goat continue to munch away in whatever garden it had invaded-under close observation. And so the game went on. The Ambassador thought it a stupid game, but every member of his staff played it with greater or lesser enthusiasm.
The message about Szell, it turned out, was sufficiently under the radar so that when it was forwarded to CIA headquarters, it was tucked into routine traffic as not worthy of interfering with the DCI's weekend-Judge Moore got a morning brief every single day anyway, of course, and this item would wait until 8:00 A.M. Sunday, the watch officers collectively decided, because judges liked an orderly life. And Budapest wasn't all that important in the Great Scheme of Things, was it?
Sunday morning in Moscow was much the same as Sunday morning everywhere else, albeit with fewer people getting dressed up for church. That was true for Ed and Mary Pat, also. A Catholic priest celebrated mass at the U.S. Embassy on Sunday mornings, but most of the time they didn't make it-though they were both Catholic enough to feel guilt for their slothful transgressions. They both told themselves that their guilt was mitigated by the fact that they were both doing God's own work right in the center of the land of the heathen. So the plan for today was to take Eddie for a walk in the park, where he might meet some kids to play with. At least, that was Eddie's mission brief. Ed rolled out of bed and headed to the bathroom first, followed by his wife and then by little Eddie. No morning paper, and the Sunday TV programming was every bit as bad as it was the rest of the week. So they actually had to talk over breakfast, something many Americans find hard to do. Their son was still young and impressionable enough to find Moscow interesting, though nearly all of his friends were Americans or Brits: inmates, like his entire family, in the compound/ghetto, guarded by MGB or KGB-opinions were divided on that question, but everyone knew it made little real difference.
The meeting was set for 11:00. Oleg Ivan'ch would be easy to spot-as would she, Mary Pat knew. Like a peacock among crows, her husband liked to say (even though the peacock was actually a male bird). She decided to play it down today. No makeup, just casually brushed-out hair, jeans, and a pullover shirt. She couldn't change her figure very much-the local aesthetic preferred women of her height to be about ten kilograms heavier. Diet, she supposed. Or maybe when you had food available in what was largely a hungry country, you ate it. Maybe the fat layer you acquired made the winters more comfortable? Whatever, the level of fashion for the average Russian female was like something from a Dead End Kids movie. You could tell the wives of important people easily, because their clothes looked almost middle-class, as opposed to the more normal Appalachia class of dress. But that was grossly unfair to the people of Appalachia, Mary Pat decided.
"You coming, Ed?" she asked after breakfast.
"No, honey. I'll clean up the kitchen and get into this new book I got last week."
"The truck driver did it," she offered. "I've read that guy before."
"Thanks a bunch," her husband grumbled.
And with that, she checked her watch and headed out. The park was just three of the long blocks to the east. She waved to the gate guard-definitely KGB, she thought-and headed to the left, holding little Eddie's hand. The traffic on the street was minimal by American standards, and it was definitely getting cooler out. She was glad she'd dressed her son in a long-sleeve shirt. A turn to look down at him revealed no obvious tail. There could, of course, be binoculars in the apartments across the street, but somehow she thought not. She'd pretty well established herself as a dumb American blonde, and just about everyone bought it. Even Ed's press contacts thought her dumber than him-and they thought him to be an ass-which could not have suited her any better. Those chattering blackbirds repeated everything she and Ed said to one another, until the word was as uniformly spread as the icing on one of her cakes. It all got back to KGB as quickly as any rumor could go-damned near the speed of light in that community, because reporters did intellectual incest as a way of life-and the Russians listened to them and put everything in their voluminous dossiers until it became something that "everybody knows." A good field officer always used others to build his or her cover. Such a cover was random-sounding-just as real life always was-and that made it plausible, even to a professional spook.
The park was about as bleak as everything else in Moscow. A few trees, some badly trodden grass. Almost as though KGB had had all the parks trimmed to make them bad contact points. That it would also limit places for young Muscovites to rendezvous and trade some kisses probably would not have troubled the consciences at The Centre, which were probably about the Pontius Pilate level on a reflective day.
And there was the Rabbit, a hundred meters or so away, nicely located, near some play items that would appeal to a three-year-old-or a four-year-old. Walking closer, she saw again that Russians doted on their little ones, and, in this case, maybe a little more-the Rabbit was KGB, and so he had access to better consumer goods than the average Russian, which, like a good parent in any land, he lavished on his little girl. That was a good sign for his character, Mary Pat decided. Maybe she could even like this guy, an unexpected gift for a field officer. So many agents were screwed up as badly as a South Bronx street mugger. He didn't observe her approach any more than to turn and scan the area in boredom, as men walking their children did. The two Americans headed the right way in what would surely appear to be a random act.
"Eddie, there's a little girl you can say hello to. Try out your Russian on her," his mommy suggested.
"Okay!" and he raced off in the manner of toddlers. Little Eddie ran right up to her and said "Hello."
"Hello."
"My name is Eddie."
"My name is Svetlana Olegovna. Where do you live?"
"That way." Eddie pointed back to the foreigners' ghetto.
"That is your son?" the Rabbit asked.
"Yes, Eddie Junior. Edward Edwardovich to you."
"So," Oleg Ivan'ch said next, without amusement, "is he also CIA?"
"Not exactly." Almost theatrically, she extended her hand to him. She had to protect him, just in case cameras were about. "I am Mary Patricia Foley."
"I see. Does your husband like his shapka?"
"Actually, he does. You have good taste in furs."
"Many Russians do." Then he switched gears. It was time to go back to business. "Have you decided that you can help me or not?"
"Yes, Oleg Ivan'ch, we can. Your daughter is darling. Her name is Svetlana?"
The communications officer nodded. "Yes, that is my little zaichik."
The irony of that was positively eerie. Their Rabbit called his little girl his bunny. It generated a brilliant smile. "So, Oleg, how do we get you to America?"
"You ask me this?" he asked with no small degree of incredulity.
"Well, we need some information. Your hobbies and interests, for example, and your wife's."
"I play chess. More than anything else, I read books on old chess matches. My wife is more classically educated than I. She loves music-classical music, not the trash you make in America."
"Any particular composer?"
He shook his head. "Any of the classical composers, Bach, Mozart, Brahms-I do not know all of the names. It is Irina's passion. She studied piano as a child, but wasn't quite good enough to get official state training. That is her greatest regret, and we do not have a piano for her to practice on," he added, knowing that he had to give her this kind of information to assist in her efforts to save him and his family. "What else do you require?"
"Do any of you have any health problems-medications, for example?" They were speaking in Russian again, and Oleg noted her elegant language skills.
"No, we are all quite healthy. My Svetlana has been through all the usual childhood diseases, but without complications of any sort."
"Good." That simplifies a lot of things, Mary Pat thought. "She's a lovely little girl. You must be very proud of her."
"But will she like life in the West?" he worried aloud.
"Oleg Ivan'ch, no child has ever had reason to dislike life in America."
"And how does your little Edward like things in the Soviet Union?"
"He misses his friends, of course, but right before we came over, we took him to Disney World. He still talks a lot about that."
Then came a surprise: "Disney World? What is that?"
"It is a large commercial business made for the pleasure of children-and for adults who remember their childhood. It's in Florida," she added.
"I've never heard of it."
"You will find it remarkable and most enjoyable. More so for your daughter." She paused. "What does your wife think of your plans?"
"Irina knows nothing of this," Zaitzev said, surprising the hell out of his American interlocutor.
"What did you say?" Are you out of your fucking mind? MP wondered at once.
"Irina is a good wife to me. She will do what I tell her to do." Russian male chauvinism was of the aggressive variety.
"Oleg Ivan'ch, that is most dangerous for you. You must know that."
"The danger to me is being caught by KGB. If that happens, I am a dead man, and so is someone else," he added, thinking a further dangle was in his interest.
"Why are you leaving? What convinced you that it is necessary?" she had to ask.
"KGB is planning to kill a man who does not deserve to die."
"Who?" And she had to ask that one, too.
"That I will tell you when I am in the West."
"That is a fair response," she had to say in reply. Playing a little cagey, aren't we?
"One other thing," he added.
"Yes?"
"Be very careful what items you transmit to your headquarters. There is reason to believe your communications are compromised. You should use one-time pads, as we do at The Centre. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"All communications about you were first encrypted and then dispatched by Diplomatic Bag to Washington." When she said that, the relief on his face was real, much as he tried to hide it. And the Rabbit had just told her something of very great importance. "Are we penetrated?"
"That, also, is something I will discuss only in the West."
Oh, shit, Mary Pat thought. They have a mole somewhere, and he might be in the White House Rose Garden for all we know. Oh, shit…
"Very well, we will take the utmost security with your case," she promised. But that meant that there'd be a two-day minimum turnaround time for important signals. It was back to World War One procedures with this guy. Ritter would just love that. "Can you tell me what methods might be safe?"
"The British changed their cipher machines about four months ago. We have as yet had no success in cracking them. That I know. Exactly which of your signals are compromised, I do not know, but I do know that some are fully penetrated. Please keep this in mind."
"That I will do, Oleg Ivan'ch." This guy had information that CIA needed-big-time. Cracked communications were the most dangerous things that could happen to any covert agency. Wars had been won and lost over such things as that. The Russians lacked American computer technology, but they did have some of the world's finest mathematicians, and the brain between a person's ears was the most dangerous instrument of all, and a damned site more competent that the ones that sat on a desk or a floor. Did Mike Russell have any of the old one-time pads at the embassy? CIA had used them once upon a time, but their cumbersome nature had caused them to be discarded. NSA told everybody who'd listen that on his best day, Seymour Cray couldn't brute-force their ciphers, even with his brand-new CRAY-2 supercomputer on amphetamines. If they were wrong, it could hurt America in ways too vast to comprehend. But there were many cipher systems, and those who cracked one could not necessarily crack another. Or so everybody said… but communications security was not her area of expertise. Even she had to trust someone and something once in a while. But this was like being shot in the back by the starting gun in a hundred-meter race and having to run for the tape anyway. Damn.
"It is an inconvenience, but we will do what is necessary to protect you. You want to be taken out soon."
"This week would be very helpful-not so much for my needs as for the needs of a man whose life is in danger."
"I see," she said, not quite seeing. This guy might be laying a line on her, but if so, he was doing it like a real pro, and she wasn't getting that signal from this guy. No, he didn't read like an experienced field spook. He was a player, but not her kind of player.
"Very well. When you get to work tomorrow, make a contact report," she told him.
That one surprised him: "Are you serious?"
"Of course. Tell your supervisor that you met an American, the wife of a minor embassy official. Describe me and my son-"
"And tell them you are a pretty but shallow American female who has a handsome and polite little boy," he surmised. "And your Russian needs a little work, shall we say?"
"You learn quickly, Oleg Ivan'ch. I bet you play a good game of chess."
"Not good enough. I will never be a Grand Master."
"We all have our limitations, but in America you will find them far more distant than they are in the Soviet Union."
"By the end of the week?"
"When my husband wears his bright red tie, you set the time and place for a meeting. Possibly by tomorrow afternoon you will get your signal, and we will make the arrangements."
"Good day to you, then. Where did you learn your Russian?"
"My grandfather was equerry to Aleksey Nikolayevich Romanov," she explained. "In my childhood, he told me many stories about the young man and his untimely death."
"So, your hatred for the Soviet Union runs deep, eh?"
"Only for your government, Oleg. Not for the people of this country. I would see you free."
"Someday, perhaps, but not soon."
"History, Oleg Ivan'ch, is made not of a few big things but of many small things." That was one of her core beliefs. Again, for the cameras that might be there or not, she shook his hand and called her son. They walked around the park for another hour before heading back home for lunch.
But for lunch instead they all drove to the embassy, talking on the way about nothing more sensitive than the admirably clear weather. Once there, they all had hot dogs in the embassy canteen, and then Eddie went to the day-care room. Ed and Mary Pat went to his office.
"He said what?" the Chief of Station snapped.
"He said his wife-named Irina, by the way-doesn't know his plans," Mary Pat repeated.
"Son of a bitch!" her husband observed at once.
"Well, it does simplify some of our exposure. At least she can't let anything slip." His wife was always the optimist, Ed saw.
"Yeah, baby, until we try to make the exfiltration, and she decides not to go anywhere."
"He says she'll do what he says. You know, the men here like to rule the roost."
"That wouldn't work with you," the Chief of Station pointed out. For several reasons, not the least of which was that her balls were every bit as big as his.
"I'm not Russian, Eddie."
"Okay, what else did he say?"
"He doesn't trust our comms. He thinks some of our systems are compromised."
"Jesus!" He paused. "Any other good news?"
"The reason he's skipping town is that KGB wants to kill somebody who, he says, doesn't deserve to be killed."
"Did he say who?"
"Not until he breathes free air. But there is good news. His wife is a classical music buff. We need to find a good conductor in Hungary."
"Hungary?"
"I was thinking last night. Best place to get him out from. That's Jimmy Szell's station, isn't it?"
"Yeah." They both knew Szell from time at The Farm, CIA's training installation in Tidewater, Virginia, off Interstate 64, a few miles from Colonial Williamsburg. "I always thought he deserved something bigger." Ed took a second to think. "So, out of Hungary via Yugoslavia, you're thinking?"
"I always knew you were smart."
"Okay…" His eyes fixed on a blank part of the wall while his brain went to work. "Okay, we can make that work."
"Your flag signal's a red tie on the metro. Then he slips you the meeting arrangement, we do that, and the Rabbit skips out of town, along with Mrs. Rabbit and the Bunny-oh, you'll love this, he already calls his daughter zaichik."
"Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail?" Ed exercised his sense of humor.
"I like that. Call it Operation BEATRIX," she suggested. Both of them had read Mrs. Potter's Peter Rabbit as kids. Who hadn't?
"The problem's going to be getting Langley's approval. If we can't use normal comm channels, coordinating everything is going to be a major pain in the ass."
"They never told us at The Farm that this job was easy. So remember what John Clark told us. Be flexible."
"Yeah, like linguine." He let out a long breath. "With the communications limitations, it essentially means we plan it and run it out of this office, with no help from the Home Office."
"Ed, that's the way it's supposed to be anyway. All Langley does is tell us we can't do what we want to do"-which was, after all, the function of every home office in every business in the world.
"Whose comms can we trust?"
"The Rabbit says the Brits just set up a new system they can't crack-yet, anyway. Do we have any one-time pads left here?"
The COS shook his head. "Not that I know of." Foley lifted his phone and punched the right numbers. "Mike? You're in today? Want to come over here? Thanks."
Russell arrived in a couple minutes. "Hey, Ed-hello, Mary. What are you doing in the shop today?"
"Got a question."
"Okay."
"Got any one-timers left?"
"Why do you ask?"
"We just like the extra security," she replied. The studiedly casual reply didn't work.
"You telling me my systems aren't secure?" Russell asked in well-hidden alarm.
"There is reason to believe some of our encryption systems are not fully secure, Mike," Ed told the embassy Communications Officer.
"Shit," he breathed, then turned with some embarrassment. "Oh, sorry, Mary."
She smiled. "It's okay, Mike. I don't know what the word means, but I've heard it spoken before." The joke didn't quite get to Russell. The previous revelation was too earthshaking for him to see much humor at the moment.
"What can you tell me about that?"
"Not a thing, Mike," the Station Chief said.
"But you think it's solid?"
"Regrettably, yes."
"Okay, back in my safe I do have a few old pads, eight or nine years old. I never got rid of them-you just never know, y'know?"
"Michael, you're a good man." Ed nodded his approval.
"They're good for maybe ten dispatches of about a hundred words each-assuming they still have matching pads at Fort Meade, but the guys I report to don't throw much away. They will have to dig them out of some file drawer, though."
"How hard to use them?"
"I hate the goddamned things. You know why. Damn it, guys, the new STRIPE cipher is just a year old. The new Brit system is an adaptation of it. I know the team in Z-Division who developed it. I'm talking 128-bit keying, plus a daily key that's unique to the individual machines. No way in hell you can crack that."
"Unless they have an agent-in-place at Fort Meade, Mike," Ed pointed out.
"Then let me get my hands on him, and I'll skin the motherfucker alive with my Buck hunting knife." The very thought had jacked up his blood pressure enough that he didn't apologize to the lady present for his vulgarity. This black man had killed and skinned his share of white-tailed deer, but he still had a hankering to convert a bear into a rug, and a big ol' Russian brown bear would suit him just fine. "Okay, I can't tell The Fort about this?"
"Not with STRIPE you can't," Foley answered.
"Well, when you hear a big, angry shout from the West, you'll know what it is."
"Better you don't discuss this with anybody right now, Mike," Mary Pat thought out loud. "They'll find out soon enough through other channels."
That told Russell that the Rabbit signal he'd dispatched the other day was about somebody they wanted to get out in a hurry, and now he figured he knew why. Their Rabbit was a communications specialist, and damned sure when you got one of those, you got him the hell on the first train out of Dodge. Soon enough meant right the hell now, or as close to it as you could arrange.
"Okay, get me your signal. I'll encrypt it on my STRIPE machine and then one-time-pad it. If they're reading my signals"-he managed not to shudder-"will that tell them anything?"
"You tell me," Ed Foley replied.
Russell thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, it shouldn't. Even when you can crack the other guy's systems, you never get more than a third of the traffic. The systems are too complex for that-unless the other guy's agent-in-place is reading the cleartext on the far end. Ain't no defense against that, least not from my point of view."
And that was the other very scary thought. It was, after all, the same game they played and the same objective they were constantly trying to achieve. Get a guy all the way inside who could get the all-the-way-inside information back out. Like their agent CARDINAL, a word they never spoke aloud. But that was the game they'd chosen and, while they knew the other side was pretty good, they figured that they were better. And that was the name of that tune.
"Okay, Mike. Our friend believes in one-time pads. I guess everybody does."
"Ivan sure as hell does, but it must drive their troops crazy, having to go through every signal one letter at a time."
"Ever work the penetration side?" Ed Foley asked him.
Russell shook his head at once. "Not smart enough. Good thing, too. A lot of those guys end up in rubber rooms cutting out paper dolls with blunted scissors. Hey, I know a lot of the guys in Z-Division. The boss guy there just turned down the chair in math at Cal Tech. He's pretty smart," Russell estimated. "Damned sight smarter than I'll ever be. Ed Popadopolous's-his name is Greek-father used to run a restaurant up in Boston. Ask me if I want his job."
"No, eh?"
"Not even if they threw in Pat Cleveland as a fringe benefit." And that was one fine-looking lady, Ed Foley knew. Mike Russell really did need a woman in his life…
"Okay, I'll get you a dispatch in about an hour. Okay?"
"Cool." Russell headed out.
"Well, I think we rattled his cage pretty hard," MP thought aloud.
"Admiral Bennett at Fort Meade ain't going to be real happy either. I got a signal to draft."
"Okay, I'll see how Eddie's doing with his crayons." And Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley took her leave as well.
Judge Arthur moore's morning briefing normally happened at 7:30 in the morning, except on Sunday, when he slept late, and so it took place at 9:00. His wife even recognized the knock of the National Intelligence Officer who delivered the daily intelligence news, always in the private study of his Great Falls house, which was swept weekly by the Agency's best debugging expert.
The world had been relatively quiet the previous day-even communists liked to relax on weekends, he'd learned on taking the job.
"Anything else, Tommy?" the Judge asked.
"Some bad news from Budapest," the NIO answered. "Our Station Chief, James Szell, got burned by the opposition making a pickup. Details unknown, but he got himself PNG'd by the Hungarian government. His principal deputy, Robert Taylor, is out of the country on personal business. So Station Budapest is out of business for the moment."
"How bad is that?" Not too bad, the DCI thought.
"Not a major tragedy. Nothing much seems to happen in Hungary. Their military is pretty much a minor player in the Warsaw Pact, and their foreign policy, aside from the things they do in their immediate neighborhood, is just a mirror image of Moscow's. The station's been passing us a fair amount of military information, but the Pentagon doesn't worry too much about it. Their army doesn't train enough to be a threat to much of anybody, and the Soviets regard them as unreliable," the NIO concluded.
"Is Szell somebody to screw up?" Moore asked. He vaguely remembered meeting the guy at an Agency get-together.
"Actually, Jimmy is well regarded. As I said, sir, we don't have any details yet. He'll probably be home by the end of the week."
"Okay. That does it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Nothing new on the Pope?"
"Not a word, sir, but it'll take time for our people to shake all their trees."
"That's what Ritter says."
It took foley almost an hour to write up his dispatch. It had to be short but comprehensive, and that taxed his writing ability. Then he walked it down to Mike Russell's office. He sat there and watched a grumbling chief communications officer one-time-pad the words one goddamned letter at a time, pad it with more Czech surnames, then super-encrypt on his STRIPE encryption machine. With that done, it went on the secure fax machine, which, of course, encrypted the text one more time, but in a graphics fashion rather than an alphanumeric one. The fax encryption was relatively simple, but since the opposition-which was assumed to monitor the embassy's satellite transmitter-could not tell if the signal was graphics or text, that was just one more hoop for their decryption people to jump through. The signal went up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down to different downlinks, one at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, another at Sunnyvale, California, and, of course, one at Fort Meade, Maryland, to which the other stations sent their "take" via secure fiber-optic landlines.
The communications people at Fort Meade were all uniformed non-comms, and when one of them, an Air Force E-5, ran it through his decoding machine, he was surprised to see the notation that said the super-encryption was on a one-time pad, NHG-1329.
"Where the hell is that?" he asked his watch supervisor, a Navy senior chief.
"Damn," the chief commented. "I haven't seen one of those in a long time." He had to open a three-ring binder and root through it until he found the storage site inside the big communications vault at the far corner of the room. That was guarded by an armed Marine staff sergeant whose sense of humor, like that of all the Marines who worked here, had been surgically removed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center prior to his assignment to Fort Meade.
"Hey, Sarge, gotta go inside for something," he told the jarhead.
"You gotta see the Major first," the sergeant informed him. And so the senior chief walked to the desk of the USAF major who was sitting at his desk, reading the morning paper.
"Morning, Major. I need to get something out of the vault."
"What's that, Chief?"
"A one-time pad, NHG-1329."
"We still have any of them?" the major asked in some surprise.
"Well, sir, if not, you can use this to start a fire on your grill with." He handed the dispatch over.
The Air Force officer inspected it. "Tell me about it. Okay." He scribbled an authorization on a pad in the corner of his desk. "Give this to the Marine."
"Aye aye, sir." The senior chief walked back to the vault, leaving the Air Force puke to wonder why the squids always talked so funny.
"Here you go, Sam," the chief said, handing over the form.
The Marine unlocked the swinging door, and the senior chief headed inside. The box the pad was in wasn't locked, presumably because anyone who could get past the seven layers of security required to get to this point was probably as trustworthy as the President's wife.
The one-time pad was a small-ring binder. The Navy chief signed for it on the way out, then went back to his desk. The Air Force sergeant joined him, and together they went through the cumbersome procedure of decrypting the dispatch.
"Damn," the young NCO observed about two-thirds of the way through. "Do we tell anybody about that?"
"That's above our pay grade, sonny. I expect the DCI will let the right people know. And forget you ever heard that," he added. But neither really would, and both knew it. With all the wickets they had to pass through to be here, the idea that their signal systems were not secure was rather like hearing that their mother was turning tricks on Sixteenth Street in DC.
"Yeah, Chief, sure," the young wing-wiper replied. "How do we deliver this one?"
"I think a courier, sonny. You want to whistle one up?"
"Aye aye, sir." The USAF sergeant took his leave with a smile.
The courier was an Army staff sergeant, driving a tan Army Plymouth Reliant, who took the sealed envelope, tucked it into the attache case on his front seat, and drove down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to the D.C. Beltway, and west on that to the George Washington Parkway, the first right off of which was CIA. At that point, the dispatch-whatever the hell it was, he didn't know-ceased being his responsibility.
The address on the envelope sent it to the Seventh Floor. Like many government agencies, CIA never really slept. On the top floor was Tom Ridley, a carded National Intelligence Officer, and the very one who handled Judge Moore's weekend briefings. It took him about three seconds to see that this one had to go to the judge right now. He lifted his STU secure phone and hit speed-dial button 1.
"This is Arthur Moore," a voice said presently.
"Judge, Tom Ridley here. Something just came in."
"Something" means it was really something.
"Now?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you come out here?"
"Yes, sir."
"Jim Greer, too?"
"Yes, sir, and probably Mr. Bostock also."
That made it interesting. "Okay, call them and then come on out." Ridley could almost hear the Goddamn it, don't I ever get a day off! at the other end before the line went dead. It took another few minutes to call the two other senior Agency officials, and then Ridley went down to his car for the drive out, pausing only to make three Xerox copies.
It was lunchtime in Great Falls. Mrs. Moore, ever the perfect hostess, had lunch meats and soft drinks set out for her unexpected guests before retiring to her sitting room upstairs.
"What is it, Tommy?" Moore asked. He liked the newly appointed NIO. A graduate of Marquette University, he was a Russian expert and had been one of Greer's star analysts before fleeting up to his present post. Soon he'd be one of the guys who always accompanied the President on Air Force One.
"This came in late this morning via Fort Meade," Ridley said, handing out the copies.
Mike Bostock was the fastest reader of the group: "Oh, Lord."
"This will make Chip Bennett happy," James Greer predicted.
"Yeah, like a trip to the dentist," Moore observed last of all. "Okay, people, what does this tell us?"
Bostock took it first. "It means we want this Rabbit in our hutch in one big hurry, gentlemen."
"Through Budapest?" Moore asked, remembering his morning brief.
"Uh-oh," Bostock observed.
"Okay." Moore leaned forward. "Let's get our thinking organized. First, how important is this information?"
James Greer took it. "He says KGB's going to kill somebody who doesn't deserve it. That kinda suggests the Pope, doesn't it?"
"More importantly, he says our communications systems might be compromised," Bostock pointed out. "That's the hottest thing I see in this signal, James."
"Okay, in either case, we want this guy on our side of the wire, correct?"
"Judge, you can bet your bench on that," the Deputy DDO shot back. "As quickly as we can make it happen."
"Can we use our own assets to accomplish it?" Moore asked next.
"It won't be easy. Budapest has been burned down."
"Does that change the importance of getting his cute little cottontail out of Redland?" the DCI asked.
"Nope." Bostock shook his head.
"Okay, if we can't do it ourselves, do we call in a marker?"
"The Brits, you mean?" Greer asked.
"We've used them before. We have good relations with them, and Basil does like to generate debts with us," Moore reminded them. "Mike, can you live with that?" he asked Bostock.
A decisive nod. "Yes, sir. But it might be nice to have one of our people around to keep an eye on things. Basil can't object to that."
"Okay, we need to decide which of our assets we can send. Next," Moore went on, "how fast?"
"How does tonight grab you, Arthur?" Greer observed to general amusement. "The way I read this, Foley's willing to run the operation out of his own office, and he's pretty hot to trot, too. Foley's a good boy. I think we let him run with it. Budapest is probably a good exit point for our Rabbit."
"Concur," Mike Bostock agreed. "It's a place a KGB officer can get to, like on vacation, and just disappear."
"They'll know he's gone pretty fast," Moore thought out loud.
"They knew when Arkady Shevchenko skipped, too. So what? He still gave us good information, didn't he?" Bostock pointed out. He'd helped oversee that operation, which had really been ramrodded by the FBI in New York City.
"Okay. What do we send back to Foley?" Moore asked.
"One word: 'Approved.' " Bostock always backed his field officers.
Moore looked around the room. "Objections? Anybody?" Heads just shook.
"Okay, Tommy. Back to Langley. Send that to Foley."
"Yes, sir." The NIO stood and walked out. One nice thing about Judge Moore. When you needed a decision, you might not like what you got, but you always got it.