The junior field officer arrived in London's Heathrow Terminal Four just before seven in the morning. He breezed through immigration and customs and headed out, where he saw his driver holding the usual sign card, this one in a false name, of course, since CIA spooks only used their real names when they had to. The driver's name was Leonard Watts. Watts drove an embassy Jaguar, and, since he had a diplomatic passport and tags on the car, he wasn't all that concerned with speed limits.
"How was the flight?"
"Fine. Slept most of the way."
"Well, welcome to the world of field operations," Watts told him. "The more sleep you get, the better."
"I suppose." It was his first overseas assignment, and not a very demanding one. "Here's the package." And his cover wasn't enhanced by the fact that he was traveling with only the courier package and a small bag that had spent the trip in the overhead bin, with a clean shirt, clean underwear, and shaving kit.
"Name's Len, by the way."
"Okay, I'm Pete Gatewood."
"First time in London?"
"Yeah," Gatewood answered, trying to get used to sitting in the left front seat without a steering wheel to protect him, and being driven by a NASCAR reject. "How long to get to the embassy?"
"Half hour." Watts concentrated on his driving. "What are you carrying?"
"Something for the COS, is all I know."
"Well, it isn't routine. They woke me up for it," Watts groused.
"Where have you worked?" Gatewood asked, hoping to get this maniac to slow down some.
"Oh, around. Bonn, Berlin, Prague. Getting ready to retire, back to Indiana. We got a football team to watch now."
"Yeah, and all the corn, too," Gatewood observed. He'd never been to Indiana, and had no particular wish to tour the farming state, which did, he reminded himself, turn out some fairly good basketball players.
Soon enough, or nearly so, they were passing a large green park on the left, and a few blocks after that, the green rectangle of Grosvenor Square. Watts stopped the car to let Gatewood out. He dodged around the "flower pots" designed to keep car bombers from getting too close to the concrete that surrounded the surpassingly ugly building, and walked it. The Marines inside checked his ID and made a call. Presently, a middle-aged woman came into the entrance foyer and led him to an elevator that took him to the third floor, just next door to the technical group that worked closely with the British GCHQ at Cheltenham. Gatewood walked into the proper corner office and saw a middle-aged man sitting at an oaken desk.
"You're Gatewood?"
"Yes, sir. You're…?"
"I'm Randy Silvestri. You have a package for me," the COS London announced.
"Yes, sir." Gatewood opened the zipper on his bag and pulled out the large manila envelope. He handed it over.
"Interested in what's in it?" Silvestri asked, eyeing the youngster.
"If it concerns me, I expect you'll tell me, sir."
The Station Chief nodded his approval. "Very good. Annie will take you downstairs for breakfast if you want, or you can catch a cab for your hotel. Got some Brit money?"
"A hundred pounds, sir, in tens and twenties."
"Okay, that'll handle your needs. Thanks, Gatewood."
"Yes, sir." And Gatewood left the office.
Silvestri ripped open the package after determining that the closure hadn't been disturbed beforehand. The flat ring binder had what looked like forty or fifty printed sheets of paper-all space-and-a-half random letters. So, a one-time-cipher pad-for Station Moscow, the cover note said. He'd have that couriered to Moscow on the noon British Airways flight. And two letters, one for Sir Basil, with hand delivery indicated. He'd have a car drive him to Century House after calling ahead. The other one was for that Ryan kid that Jim Greer liked so much, also for hand delivery via Basil's office. He wondered what was up. It had to be nontrivial for this sort of handling. He picked up his phone and hit speed-dial #5.
"This is Basil Charleston."
"Basil, it's Randy. Something just came in for you. Can I bring it over?"
A sound of shuffling papers. Basil would know this was important. "Say, ten o'clock, Randy?"
"Right. See you then." Silvestri sipped his coffee and estimated the time required. He could sit here for about an hour before heading over. Next he punched his intercom button.
"Yes, sir?"
"Annie, I have a package to be couriered to Moscow. We got a bagman on deck?"
"Yes, sir."
"Okay, could you take this down to him?"
"Yes, sir." CIA secretaries are not paid to be verbose.
"Good. Thanks." Silvestri hung up.
Jack and Cathy were on the train, passing through Elephant and Castle-and he'd still not learned how the damned place had gotten that name, Jack reminded himself. The weather looked threatening. England wasn't broad enough for a storm system to linger, Ryan thought. Maybe there was just a series of rain clouds coming across the Atlantic? In any case, between yesterday and today, his personal record of fair weather over here seemed to be ending. Too bad.
"Just glasses this week, babe?" he asked his wife, her head buried as usual in a medical journal.
"All week," she confirmed. Then she looked up. "It's not as exciting as surgery, but it's still important, you know."
"Cath, if you do it, it must be important."
"And you can't say what you'll be doing?"
"Not until I get to my desk." And probably not then, either. Whatever it was, it had doubtless been transmitted via secure printer or fax line overnight… unless it was something really important, and had been sent via courier. The time difference actually made that fairly convenient. The early 747 from Dulles usually got in between six and seven in the morning, and then it was forty minutes more to his desk. The government could work more efficiently than Federal Express when it wanted to. Another fifteen minutes of his Daily Telegraph and her NEJM and they parted company at Victoria. Cathy perversely took the tube. Ryan opted for a cab. It hustled past the Palace of Westminster, then hopped across the Thames. Ryan paid the four pounds fifty and added a healthy tip. Ten seconds later, he was inside.
"Good morning, Sir John," Bert Canderton called in greeting.
"Howdy, Sar-Major," Ryan said in reply, sliding his pass through the gate, then to the elevator and up to his floor.
Simon was already in his seat, going over message traffic. His eyes came up when Jack entered. "Morning, Jack."
"Hey, Simon. How was the weekend?"
"Didn't get any gardening done. Bloody rain."
"Anything interesting this morning?" He poured himself a cup of coffee. Simon's English Breakfast Tea wasn't bad for tea, but tea just didn't make it for Jack, at least not in the morning. They didn't have bear claws here, either, and Jack had neglected to get his croissant on the way in.
"Not yet, but something's coming in from America."
"What is it?"
"Basil didn't say, but when something comes in by hand on a Monday morning, it's usually interesting. Must be Soviet-related. He's told me to stand by for it."
"Well, might as well start the week with something interesting." Ryan sipped his coffee. It wasn't quite up to what Cathy made, but better than tea. "When's it coming in?"
"About ten. Your Station Chief, Silvestri, is driving it over."
Ryan had only met him once. He'd seemed competent enough, but you expected that of a COS, even one in a sunset posting.
"Nothing new from Moscow?"
"Just some new rumors about Brezhnev's health. It seems that stopping smoking did him precious little good," Harding said, lighting his pipe. "Nasty old bugger," the Brit analyst added.
"What about this stuff from Afghanistan?"
"Ivan's getting cleverer. Those Mi-24 helicopters seem to be rather effective. Bad news for the Afghans."
"How do you think that's going to play out?"
Harding shrugged. "It's a question of how many casualties Ivan is willing to take. They have the firepower they need to win, and so it's a matter of political will. Unfortunately for the Mujahideen, the leadership in Moscow doesn't trouble itself very much with casualties."
"Unless something changes the equation," Ryan thought out loud.
"Like what?"
"Like an effective surface-to-air missile to neutralize their helos. We have the Stinger. Never used it myself, but the write-up's pretty good."
"But can a mob of illiterate savages use a missile properly?" Harding asked dubiously. "A modern rifle, certainly. A machine gun, sure. But a missile?"
"The idea is to make a new weapon soldier-proof, Simon. You know, simple enough that you don't have to think while you're dodging bullets. There's not much time to think then, and you make the steps as short as you can. Like I said, I've never used that one, but I've played with anti-tank weapons, and they're pretty simple."
"Well, your government will have to decide to give them the SAMs, and they haven't yet. Hard for me to get overly excited about it. Yes, they are killing Russians, and I reckon that's good, but they are bloody savages."
And they killed a lot of Brits once, Ryan reminded himself, and Brit memories are as long as anyone else's. There was also the issue of having Stingers fall into Russian hands, which would not make the United States Air Force terribly happy. But that was well above his pay grade. There were some rumbles in Congress about it, though.
Jack settled into his seat, sipped his coffee, and read his message traffic. After that he'd get back to his real job of analyzing the Soviet economy. That would be like drafting a road map of a plateful of spaghetti.
Silvestri's job in London was not a secret. He'd been in the spook business too long, and while he hadn't been burned per se, the East Bloc had pretty much guessed which government agency he worked for by the end of his stay in Warsaw, where he'd run a very tight shop and winkled out a lot of good political intelligence. This was to be his final tour of duty-the same was true of most of his officers-and since he was respected by various allied services, he'd drawn the London posting, where his main job was interfacing with the British Secret Intelligence Service. So he had an embassy Daimler drive him over across the river.
He didn't even need a pass to get through security. Sir Basil himself was waiting for him at the entrance, where hands were cordially shaken before the trip upstairs.
"What's the news, Randy?"
"Well, I have a package for you, and one for that Ryan guy," Silvestri announced.
"Indeed. Should I call him in?"
The London COS had read the cover sheet and knew what was in the packages. "Sure, Bas, no problem. Harding, too, if you want."
Charleston lifted his phone and made the summons. The two analysts arrived in less than two minutes. They had all met at least once. Ryan, in fact, was the least familiar with the other American. Sir Basil pointed them to seats. He'd already ripped his envelope open. Silvestri handed Ryan his own message.
For his part, Jack was already thinking oh, shit. Something unusual was in the offing, and he'd learned not to trust new and different things at CIA.
"This is interesting," Charleston observed.
"Do I open this now?" Ryan asked. Silvestri nodded, so he took out his
Swiss Army Knife and sliced through the heavy manila paper. His message was only three pages, personally signed by Admiral Greer.
A Rabbit, he saw. He knew the terminology. Somebody wanted a ticket out of… Moscow… and CIA was providing it, with the help of SIS because Station Budapest was currently out of business…
"Tell Arthur that we will be pleased to assist, Randy. We will, I assume, get a chance to speak with him before you fly him off to London?"
"It's only fair, Bas," Silvestri confirmed. "How hard to pull this one off, you suppose?"
"Out of Budapest?" Charleston thought for a moment. "Not all that difficult, I should think. The Hungarians have a rather nasty secret-police organization, but the country as a whole is not devoutly Marxist-oh, this Rabbit says that KGB may have compromised your communications. That is what Langley is excited about."
"Damned straight, Basil. If that's a hole, we have to plug it up fast."
"This guy's in their MERCURY? Jesus Christ," Ryan breathed.
"You got that one right, sonny," Silvestri agreed.
"But what the hell am I going into the field for?" Jack demanded next. "I'm not a field officer."
"We need one of ours to keep an eye on things."
"I quite understand, Randy," Charleston observed, his head still down in his briefing papers. "And you want someone whom the opposition doesn't know?"
"So it seems."
"But why me?" Ryan persisted.
"Jack," Sir Basil soothed, "your only job will be to watch what happens. It's just pro forma."
"But what about my cover?"
"We'll give you a new diplomatic passport," C answered. "You will be quite safe. The Vienna Convention, you know."
"But… but… it'll be fake."
"They won't know that, dear boy."
"What about my akzint?" It was painfully obvious that his accent was an American's, not a Brit's.
"In Hungary?" Silvestri asked with a smile.
"Jack, with their bloody language, I seriously doubt they will notice the difference, and in any case, with your new documents, your person is quite inviolable."
"Relax, kid. It's better than your little girl's teddy bear. Trust me on that one, okay?" Silvestri assured him.
"And you'll have a security officer with you at all times," Charleston added.
Ryan had to sit back and take a breath. He couldn't allow himself to appear to be a wuss, not in front of these guys and not before Admiral Greer. "Okay, excuse me. It's just that I've never been in the field before. It's all kinda new to me." He hoped that was adequate backpedaling. "What exactly will I be doing, and how do I go about it?"
"We'll fly you into Budapest out of Heathrow. Our chaps will pick you up at the airport and take you to the embassy. You will sit it out there-a couple of days, I expect-and then watch how Andy gets your Rabbit out of Redland. Randy, how long would you expect?"
"To get this moving? End of the week, maybe a day or two longer," Silvestri thought. "The Rabbit will fly or take the train to Budapest, and your man will figure how to get him the hell out of Dodge City."
"Two or three days for that," Sir Basil estimated. "Mustn't be too quick."
"Okay, that keeps me away from home for four days. What's my cover story?"
"For your wife?" Charleston asked. "Tell her that you have to go to-oh, to Bonn, shall we say, on NATO business. Be vague on the time factor," he advised. He was inwardly amused to have to explain this to the Innocent American Abroad.
"Okay," Ryan conceded the point. Not like I have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter, is there?
Upon getting back to the embassy, Foley walked to Mike Barnes's office. Barnes was the Cultural Attache, the official expert on artsy-fartsy stuff. That was a major assignment in Moscow. The USSR had a fairly rich cultural life. The fact that the best part of it dated back to the czars didn't seem to matter to the current regime, probably, Foley thought, because all Great Russians wanted to appear kulturniy, and superior to Westerners, especially Americans, whose "culture" was far newer and far crasser than the country of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Barnes was a graduate of the Juilliard School and Cornell, and especially appreciated Russian music.
"Hey, Mike," Foley said in greeting.
"How's keeping the newsies happy?" Barnes asked.
"The usual. Hey, got a question for you."
"Shoot."
"Mary Pat and I are thinking about traveling some, maybe to Eastern Europe. Prague and like that. Any good music to be heard that way?"
"The Prague symphony hasn't opened up yet. But Jozsef Rozsa is in Berlin right now, and then he's going to Budapest."
"Who's he? I don't know the name," Foley said, as his heart nearly leapt out of his chest.
"Hungarian native, cousin of Miklos Rozsa, Hollywood composer-Ben Hur, and like that. Musical family, I guess. He's supposed to be excellent. The Hungarian State Railroad has four orchestras, believe it or not, and Jozsef is going to conduct number one. You can go there by train or fly, depends on how much time you have."
"Interesting," Foley thought aloud. Fascinating, he thought inside.
"You know, the Moscow State Orchestra opens up beginning of next month. They have a new conductor, guy named Anatoliy Sheymov. Haven't heard him yet, but he's supposed to be pretty good. I can get you tickets easy. Ivan likes to show off to us foreigners, and they really are world-class."
"Thanks, Mike, I'll think about it. Later, man." Foley took his leave.
And he smiled all the way back to his office.
"Bloody hell," Sir Basil observed, reading over the newest cable from Moscow. "What bloody genius came up with this idea?" he asked the air. Oh, he saw. The American officer, Edward Foley. How the hell will he make this come about? the Director General wondered.
He'd been about to leave for lunch at Westminster Palace across the river, and he couldn't break that one off. Well, it would be something to ruminate over with his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
"Lucky me," Ryan observed, back in his office.
"Jack, it will be less dangerous than crossing the street"-which could be a lively exercise in London.
"I can take care of myself, Simon," Ryan reminded his workmate. "But if I screw up, somebody else takes the fall."
"You'll not be responsible for any of that. You'll just be there to observe. I don't know Andy Hudson myself, but he has an excellent professional reputation."
"Great," Ryan commented. "Lunchtime, Simon, and I feel like a beer."
"Duke of Clarence all right?"
"Isn't that the guy who drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine?"
"Worse ways to go, Sir John," Harding observed.
"What is malmsey anyway?"
"Strong and sweet, rather like a Madeira. It now comes from those islands, in fact."
One more piece of trivia learned, Ryan thought, going to get his coat.
In Moscow, Zaitzev checked his personnel file. He'd accrued twelve days of vacation time. He and his family hadn't gotten a time slot at Sochi the previous summer-the KGB quota had been filled in July and August-and so they had gone without. It was easier to schedule a vacation with a preschool child, as in any other country-you got to run away from town whenever you wished. Svetlana was in state-provided day care, but missing a few days of blocks and crayons was a lot easier to arrange than a week or two of state primary school, which was frowned upon.
Upstairs, colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was going over the latest message from Colonel Bubovoy in Sofia, just brought in by courier. So the Bulgarian premier had agreed to Moscow's request with a decent lack of annoying questions. The Bulgars knew their place. The chief of state of a supposedly sovereign nation knew how to take his orders from a field-grade officer of Russia's Committee for State Security. Which was just as it should be, the colonel thought. And now Colonel Strokov of the Dirzhavna Sugurnost would be out picking his shooter, undoubtedly a Turk, and Operation -666 could go forward. He would report this to Chairman Andropov later in the day.
"Three human bodies?" Alan Kingshot asked in considerable surprise. He was Sir Basil's most senior field officer, a very experienced operator who'd worked the streets of every major European city, first as a "legal" officer and later as a headquarters troubleshooter, in his thirty-seven years of service to Queen and Country. "Some sort of switch, is it?"
"Yes. The chap who suggested it is a fan of MINCEMEAT, I imagine," Basil responded.
Operation MINCEMEAT was a World War II legend. It had been designed to give Germany the impression that the next major Allied operation would not be the planned Operation HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily, and so it had been decided to suggest to German intelligence that Corsica was the intended invasion target. To do this, the Germans were given the body of a dead alcoholic who'd been transformed after a death of dissipation into a major of the Royal Marines, putatively a planning officer for the fictitious operation to seize Corsica. The body had been dropped in the water off the Spanish coast by the submarine HMS Seraph, from which it had washed to shore, been duly picked up, delivered to the local police, autopsied, and the document case handcuffed to the cadaver's wrist handed over to the local Abwehr officer. He'd fired the papers off to Berlin, where they'd had the intended effect, moving several German divisions to an island with no more military significance than the fact that it was Napoleon's birthplace. The story was called The Man Who Never Was, the subject of a book and a movie, and further proof of the wretched performance of German intelligence, which couldn't tell the difference between the body of a dead drunk and that of a professional soldier.
"What else do we know? I mean," Kingshot pointed out, "what age and gender, sir?"
"Yes, and hair color and so forth. The manner of death will also be important. We do not know those things yet. So the initial question is a broad one: Is it possible to do this?"
"In the abstract, yes, but before we can go forward with it, I shall need a lot of specifics. As I said, height, weight, hair and eye color, gender to be sure. With that, we can go forward."
"Well, Alan, get thinking about it. Get me a specific list of what you need by tomorrow noon."
"What city will this be in?"
"Budapest probably."
"Well, that's something," the field spook thought aloud.
"Damned grisly business," Sir Basil muttered after his man left.
Andy Hudson was sitting in his office, relaxing after his Ploughman's Lunch in the embassy's pub, along with a pint of John Courage beer. Not a tall man, he had eighty-two parachute jumps under his belt, and had the bad knees to prove it. He'd been invalided out of active service eight years before, but because he liked a little excitement in his life, he'd opted to join the Secret Intelligence Service, and worked his way rapidly up the ladder mainly on the strength of his superior language skills. Here in Budapest, he needed those. The Hungarian language is known as Indo-Altaic to philologists. Its nearest European neighbor is Finnish and, after that, Mongolian. It has no relationship at all with any European language, except for some Christian names, which were conveyed when the Magyar people succumbed to Christianity, after killing off enough missionaries to become bored with doing so. Along the way, they'd also lost whatever warrior ethos they'd once had. The Hungarians were about the most un-warlike people on the continent.
But they were pretty good at intrigue, and, like any society, they had a criminal element-but theirs had mainly gone into the Communist Party and power apparat. The Secret Police here, the Allavedelmi Hatosag, could be as nasty as the Cheka had been under Iron Feliks himself. But nasty wasn't quite the same as efficient. It was as though they tried to make up for their inbred inefficiency by viciousness against those whom they blundered into catching. And their police were notoriously stupid-there was a Hungarian aphorism, "As stupid as six pairs of policeman's boots," which Hudson had largely found to be true. They weren't the Metropolitan Police, but Budapest wasn't London, either.
In fact, he found life pleasant here. Budapest was a surprisingly pretty city, very French in its architecture, and surprisingly casual for a communist capital. The food was remarkably good, even in the government-run worker canteens that dotted every street corner, where the fare was not elegant but tasty. Public transportation was adequate to his purposes, which were mainly political intelligence. He had a source-called PARADE-inside the Foreign Ministry who fed him very useful information about the Warsaw Pact and East Bloc politics in general, in return for cash, and not very much cash at that, so low were his expectations.
Like the rest of Central Europe, Budapest was an hour ahead of London. The embassy messenger knocked on Hudson's door, then reached in to toss an envelope onto his desk. Hudson set down his small cigar and lifted it. From London, he saw. Sir Basil himself…
Bloody hell, Hudson thought. His life was about to get a little bit more interesting.
"More details to follow," it ended. About right. You never knew it all until you had to do it. Sir Basil wasn't a bad chap to work for but, like most spymasters, he greatly enjoyed being clever, which was something never fully appreciated out in the field, where the worker bees had wasps to worry about. Hudson had a staff of three, including himself. Budapest wasn't a major station, and for him it was a way station until something more important opened up. As it was, he was young to be a Station Chief. Basil was giving him the chance to stretch his legs. That suited Hudson. Most Station Chiefs sat in their offices like spiders in their web, which looked dramatic but could actually be quite boring, since it involved writing endless reports. He ran field tasks himself. That ran the risk of his being burned, as Jim Szell had been-bloody awful luck, nothing more than that, Hudson had learned from a source named BOOT, who was right inside the AVH. But in the danger came the charm of the job. It was less dangerous than jumping out the back of a Lockheed Hercules with sixty pounds of weapons and rations strapped to your back. Also less dangerous than patrolling Belfast with Provos about. But it was the skills learned in the city streets of Ulster that gave him his street smarts as a spook. As with everything else in life, you took the bitter with the sweet. But better, he told himself, to take his bitter by the pint.
He had a rabbit coming out. That ought not to be difficult, though this rabbit had to be an important one, so much so that CIA was asking for assistance from "Six," and that didn't happen every day. Only when the bloody Yanks buggered things up, which was, Hudson thought, not too infrequent.
There was nothing for him to do as yet. He could not know what needed to be done until he had a lot more specifics, but in the abstract he knew how to get people out of Hungary. It wasn't all that hard. The Hungarians were insufficiently wedded to Marxism to be that serious an adversary. So, he sent off a "message received" dispatch to Century House and awaited further developments.
The british airways noon flight to Moscow was a Boeing 737 twin-engine jet. The flight took about four hours, depending on winds, which were fairly calm today. On arriving at Sheremetyevo Airport, the Diplomatic Courier walked out the forward door and breezed through immigration control on the strength of his canvas bag and diplomatic passport, then walked to the waiting embassy car for the drive into town. The courier had been there and done that many times, enough so that his driver and the embassy guards knew him by sight, and he knew his own way around the embassy. With his delivery made, he headed down to the canteen for a hot dog and a beer, and settled into his newest paperback book. It occurred to him that he needed to exercise some, since his job was entirely occupied with sitting down, in cars and mainly in airplanes. It couldn't be healthy, he thought.
Mike Russell looked over the monstrous one-time pad he'd been sent, hoping that he wouldn't have to use it all in one day. The sheer drudgery of transposing random letters was enough to drive a man mad, and there had to be an easier way. That was what his KH-7 encrypting machines were for, but Foley had suggested to him that the -7 was not fully secure, which thought outraged the professional in him. The KH-7 was the most sophisticated encryption machine ever made, easy to use, and utterly impossible-so he thought-to crack. He knew the design team of mathematicians who'd figured out the algorithms. The algebraic formulas used in the -7 were sufficiently over his head that he had to strain to see the bottom… But what one mathematician could make, another, in theory, could break, and the Russians had good ones. And from that fact came the nightmare: The communications that it was his job to protect were being read by the enemy.
And that just wouldn't do.
So, he had to use this pad for super-critical communications, inconvenient or not. It wasn't as though he had much of a social life in Moscow. Ordinary Russian citizens viewed his dark skin as an indication of some relationship with some tree-climbing African monkey, which was so offensive to Russell that he never talked about it to anyone, just let it generate rage in his heart, the sort of deep-soul anger that he'd felt for the Ku Klux Klan before the FBI had put those ignorant crackers out of business. Maybe they still hated him, but a steer could lust after a lot of things without being able to fuck them, and so it was with those bigoted idiots who'd forgotten that Ulysses Simpson Grant had defeated Bobby Lee, after all. They could hate all they wanted, but the prospect of Leavenworth Federal Pen kept them in their dark little holes. The Russians are just as bad, Russell thought, racist cocksuckers. But he had his books and his tape player for cool jazz, and the extra pay that came with this hardship post. And for now he'd show Ivan a signal he couldn't crack, and Foley would get his Rabbit out. He lifted his phone and dialed the proper numbers.
"Foley."
"Russell. Want to come down to my office for a minute?"
"On the way," the Station Chief replied. Four minutes. "What is it, Mike?" he asked, coming through the door.
Russell held up the ring binder. "Only three copies of this. Us, Langley, and Fort Meade. You want secure, my man, you got secure. Just try to keep the messages short, okay? This shit can really jack up my blood pressure."
"Okay, Mike. Shame there isn't a better way of doing that."
"Maybe someday. Ought to be a way to do it with a computer-you know, put the pad on a floppy disk. Maybe I'll write to Fort Meade about it," Russell thought. "This stuff can make you cross-eyed."
Better you than me, Foley couldn't say. "Okay, I'll have something for you later today."
"Right." Russell nodded. He didn't have to add that it would also be enciphered on his KH-7 and then super-encrypted with the pad. He hoped that Ivan would intercept the signal and give his cryptanalysts the document to work on. Thinking about those bastards going nuts over one of his signals was one of the things he liked to smile about. Fine, give their world-class math aces this stuff to fool with.
But there was no telling. If KGB had managed, for example, to plant a bug in the building, it would be powered not by an internal battery, but rather by microwave emanations from Our Lady of the Microchips across the street. He had two permanent staff people who roamed the embassy, searching for unexplained RF signals. Every so often, they found one and dug the bug out, but the last of those had been twenty months before. Now they said that the embassy was fully swept and fully clean. But nobody believed that. Ivan was just too clever. Russell wondered how Foley kept his identity a secret, but that was not his problem. Keeping the comms secure was hard enough.
Back in his office, Foley drafted his next signal to Langley, trying to keep it as short as possible to make it easy for Russell. It would surely open some eyes on the Seventh Floor. He hoped that the Brits hadn't gotten word on the idea to Washington yet. That would be seen as a major impropriety, and senior officials everywhere got their noses out of joint on trivial crap like that. But with some things you just didn't have time to run it through channels, and as a senior Station Chief, it was expected that he would show some initiative once in a while.
And along with initiative, maybe a little panache.
Foley checked his watch. He was wearing his reddest tie, and he was an hour and a half from taking the metro home, and the Rabbit needed to see him and the flag signal. A little voice was telling Foley to get BEATRIX moving as fast as practicable. Whether it was danger to the Rabbit or something else, he couldn't tell, but Foley was one to trust his instincts.