CHAPTER 2

VISIONS AND HORIZONS

CATHY ALMOST PANICKED at the thought of driving him to the train station. Seeing him walk to the left side of the car, she’d assumed, as any American would, that he’d be driving, and so she was visibly surprised when he tossed her the keys.

The pedals, she discovered, were the same as in an American car, because people all around the world were right-footed, even if those in England drove left-handed. The gear shift was in the center console, and so she had to use her left hand to shift. Backing out of the brick driveway was not terribly different from normal. Both instantly wondered if it was as hard for Brits to transform their driving to the right—in more ways than one—side of the road when they came to America, or hopped the ferry to France. Jack decided he’d ask somebody over a beer someday.

“Just remember, left is right, and right is left, and you drive on the wrong side of the road.”

“Okay,” she replied with annoyance. She knew she’d have to learn, and the rational part of her brain knew that this was as good a time as ever, even though now had a nasty way of appearing out of the ground like a guerrilla out of a spider hole. The way out of the mini-development took them past a one-story building that looked like it housed a doctor’s office, past the park with the swing set that had sold Jack on this particular house. Sally liked swings, and she’d surely meet and make new friends here. And Little Jack would get some sun there, too. In the summer, anyway.

“Turn left, babe. It’s a right turn here when you go left, you don’t cross traffic.”

“I know,” Dr. Caroline Ryan said, wondering why Jack hadn’t called for a cab. She still had a ton of work to do with the house, and didn’t need a driving lesson. Well, at least it seemed to be a nimble car, she found, giving it a kick that was answered by rapid acceleration. Not her old Porsche, though.

“Bottom of the hill, turn right.”

“Uh-huh.” Good, this would be simple. She’d have to find her way home, and she hated asking for directions. It came from being a surgeon, as in command of her world as a fighter pilot in his cockpit.... And, being a surgeon, she wasn’t allowed to panic, was she?

“Right here,” Jack told her. “Remember oncoming traffic.” There was none at the moment, but that would change, probably as soon as he got out of the car. He didn’t envy her attempt to learn local navigation solo, but the surest way to learn to swim was to jump in—assuming you didn’t drown. But the Brits were hospitable people, and if necessary some kind local driver would probably lead her all the way home.

The train station was about as impressive as a Bronx elevated platform, a smallish stone building with stairs and/or escalators that led down to the tracks. Ryan bought his ticket with cash, but noted a sign that offered books of commuter tickets for daily use. He picked up a copy of The Daily Telegraph. That would mark him to the locals as a conservative sort of person. Those of a more liberal bent chose The Guardian. He decided to pass on the tabloids that had naked women on the inside. Hell of a thing to see right after breakfast.

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

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

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

He was rumbling through a city now, a thick one. The right-of-way was elevated. He looked around for recognizable landmarks. Was that St. Paul’s Cathedral off to the right? If so, he’d be at Victoria soon. He folded his paper. Then the train slowed, and—yeah. Victoria Station. He opened the compartment door like a native and stepped out on the platform. The station was a series of steel arches with embedded glass panes, long since blackened by the stack gasses of steam trains long departed.... But nobody had ever cleaned the glass. Or was it just air pollution that did it? There was no telling. Jack followed the rest of the people to the brick wall that seemed to mark the station’s waiting/arrival area. Sure enough, there were the usual collection of magazine stands and small stores. He could see the way out and found himself in the open air, fumbling in his pocket for his Chichester map of London. Westminster Bridge Road. It was too far to walk, so he hailed a cab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jack!” he called out.

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

“Didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“So, any first impressions?” Charleston asked.

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

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

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

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

“Is that a problem?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Information. Not sources,” Ryan observed.

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

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

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

“What’s that?” the DG asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I presume we’re using that . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think of your new Pope?”

“First non-Italian in four centuries, maybe more: That’s saying something right there. When I heard the new one was Polish, I expected it to be Cardinal Wiszynski from Warsaw—guy’s got the brains of a genius and the cunning of a fox. This guy, I didn’t know beans about, but from what I’ve read since, he’s a very solid citizen. Good parish priest, good administrator, politically very astute . . .” Ryan paused. He was discussing the head of his church as though he were a political candidate, and he was damned sure there was more substance to him than that. This had to be a man of deep faith, with the sort of core convictions that an earthquake couldn’t budge or crack. He’d been chosen by other such men to be the leader and spokesman for the world’s largest church, which, by the way, also happened to be Ryan’s church. He’d be a man who didn’t fear much of anything, a man for whom a bullet was his get-out-of-jail-free card, a key to God’s own presence. And he’d be a man who felt God’s presence in everything he did. He was not someone you could scare, not someone you could turn away from what he deemed the right thing.

“If he wrote this letter, Sir Basil, it’s not a bluff. When was it delivered?”

“Less than four days ago. Our chap broke a rule getting it to us so quickly, but its importance is patently clear, is it not?”

Welcome to London, Jack, Ryan thought. He’d just fallen into the soup. A big pot, like they used to boil missionaries in the cartoons.

“Okay, it’s been forwarded to Moscow, right?”

“So our chap tells us. So, Sir John, what will Ivan have to say about this?” And with that question, Sir Basil Charleston lit the fire under Jack’s personal cauldron.

“That’s a multifaceted question,” Ryan said, dodging as artfully as the situation allowed.

It wasn’t very far: “He will say something,” Charleston observed, leveling his hazel eyes at Ryan.

“Okay, they won’t like it. They will see it as a threat. The questions are how seriously they will take it and how much credence they will attach to it. Stalin might have laughed it off . . . or maybe not. Stalin defined paranoia, didn’t he?” Ryan paused and looked out the windows. Was that a rain cloud blowing in? “No, Stalin would have acted somehow.”

“Think so?” Charleston was evaluating him, Jack knew. This was like the orals for his doctorate at Georgetown. Father Tim Riley’s rapier wit and needlepoint questions. Sir Basil was more civilized than the acerbic priest, but this exam was not going to be an easy one.

“Leon Trotsky was no threat to him. That assassination came from a combination of paranoia and pure meanness. It was a personal thing. Stalin made enemies, and he never forgot them. But the current Soviet leadership doesn’t have the guts to do the stuff he did.”

Charleston pointed out the plate glass window toward Westminster Bridge. “My lad, the Russians had the intestinal fortitude to kill a man right on that bridge, less than five years ago—”

“And got blamed for it,” Ryan reminded his host. It had been a combination of good luck and a very smart British doctor, and it hadn’t been worth a damn in saving the poor bastard’s life. They had identified the cause of death, though, and it hadn’t resulted from a street hood.

“Think they lost any sleep over that incident? I do not,” C assured him.

“Looks bad. They don’t do much of this anymore, not that I’ve heard about.”

“Only at home, I grant you that. But Poland is ‘home’ for them, well within their sphere of influence.”

“But the Pope lives in Rome, and that isn’t. It comes down to how scared they are, sir. Father Tim Riley at Georgetown, back when I got my doctorate, he said never to forget that wars are begun by frightened men. They fear war, but more than that, they fear what will happen if they don’t start one—or take equivalent action, I suppose. So, the real questions are, as I said, how seriously they will take the threat and how serious it will appear to them. On the former, yes, I don’t think this is a bluff. The Pope’s character, background, and personal courage—those are not things to be doubted. So the threat is a real one. The larger question is how to evaluate the magnitude of the threat to them. . . .”

“Go on,” the Director General ordered gently.

“If they’re smart enough to recognize it—yes, sir, in their position, I’d be concerned about it . . . maybe even a little frightened. As much as the Soviets think they’re a superpower—America’s equal and all that—deep down they know that their state is not really legitimate. Kissinger gave a lecture to us at Georgetown. . . .” Jack leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment to recapture the performance. “It was something he said near the end, talking about the character of the Russian leaders. Brezhnev was showing him around some official building or other in the Kremlin, where Nixon was going to come for his last summit meeting. He was lifting cloth covers off the statuary, showing how they’d taken the time to clean everything up in preparation for the visit. Why do that, I wondered at the time. I mean, sure, they have maids and maintenance people. Why make a point of showing it to Henry? It has to be a sense of inferiority, fundamental insecurity. We keep hearing that they’re ten feet tall, but I don’t think so, and the more I learn about them, the less formidable I think they are. The Admiral and I have argued this one back and forth for the last couple of months. They have a large military. Their intelligence services are first-rate. They are big. Big ugly bear, like Muhammad Ali used to say, but you know, Ali beat the bear twice, didn’t he?

“That’s a roundabout way of saying that, yes, sir, I think this letter will scare them. Question is, scare them enough to do something?” Ryan shook his head. “Possibly yes, but we have insufficient data at this time. If they decide to push that particular button, will we know beforehand?”

Charleston had been waiting for Ryan to turn the tables on him. “One can hope so, but it’s impossible to be sure.”

“In the year I’ve been at Langley, the impression I get is that our knowledge of the target is deep but narrow in some areas, shallow and broad in others. I’ve yet to meet somebody who feels comfortable analyzing them—well, that’s not exactly true. Some are comfortable, but their analyses are often—to me at least—unreliable. Like the stuff we get on their economy—”

“James lets you into that?” Basil was surprised.

“The Admiral sent me all around the barn the first couple of months. My first degree was economics from Boston College. I passed my CPA exam before I went away with the Marine Corps—certified public accountant. You call it something different over here. Then, after I left the Corps, I did okay in the stock-and-bond business before I finished up my doctorate and went into teaching.”

“Exactly how much did you make on Wall Street?”

“While I was at Merrill Lynch? Oh, between six and seven million. A lot of that was the Chicago and North Western Railroad. My uncle Mario—my mom’s brother—told me that the employees were going to buy out the stock and try to get the railroad profitable again. I took a look at it and liked what I saw. It paid off a net of twenty-three to one on my investment. I ought to have dropped more into it, but they taught me to be conservative at Merrill Lynch. Never worked in New York, by the way. I was in the Baltimore office. Anyway, the money’s still in stocks, and the market looks pretty healthy at the moment. I still dabble in it. You never know when you’re going to stumble across a winner, and it’s still an interesting hobby.”

“Indeed. If you see anything promising, do let me know.”

“No fees—but no guarantees, either,” Ryan joked.

“I’m not accustomed to those, Jack, not in this bloody business. I’m going to assign you to our Russian working group with Simon Harding. Oxford graduate, doctorate in Russian literature. You’ll see just about everything he sees—everything but source information—” Ryan stopped him with two raised hands.

“Sir Basil, I do not want to know that stuff. I don’t need it, and knowing it would keep me awake at night. Just so I see the raw. I prefer to do my own analysis. This Harding guy is smart?” Ryan asked with deliberate artlessness.

“Very much so. You’ve probably seen his product before. He did the personal evaluation on Yuriy Andropov we turned out two years ago.”

“I did read that. Yeah, that was good work. I figured he was a pshrink.”

“He’s read psychology, but not quite enough for a degree. Simon’s a clever lad. Wife is an artist, painter, lovely lady.”

“Right now?”

“Why not? I must get back to my work. Come, I’ll walk you down.”

It wasn’t far. Ryan immediately learned that he’d be sharing an office right here on the top floor. This came as a surprise. Getting to the Seventh Floor at Langley took years, and often meant climbing over bloody bodies. Somebody, Jack speculated, must have thought he was smart.

Simon Harding’s office was not overly impressive. The two windows overlooked the upriver side of the building, mainly two- and three-story brick structures of indeterminate occupancy. Harding himself was crowding forty, pale and fair-haired with china-blue eyes. He wore an unbuttoned vest—waistcoat locally—and a drab tie. His desk was covered with folders trimmed in striped tape, the universal coding for secret material.

“You must be Sir John,” Harding said, setting down his briar pipe.

“The name’s Jack,” Ryan corrected him. “I’m really not allowed to pretend I’m a knight. Besides, I don’t own a horse or a steel shirt.” Jack shook hands with his workmate. Harding had small, bony hands, but those blue eyes looked smart.

“Take good care of him, Simon.” Sir Basil immediately took his leave.

There was already a swivel chair in place at a suspiciously clean desk. Jack tried it out. The room was going to be a little crowded, but not too badly so. His desk phone had a scrambler under it for making secure calls, Ryan wondered if it worked as well as the STU he’d had at Langley. GCHQ out at Cheltenham worked closely with NSA, and maybe it was the same innards with a different plastic case. He’d have to keep reminding himself that he was in a foreign country. That ought not to be too hard, Ryan hoped. People did talk funny here: grahss, rahsberry and cahstle, for example, though the effect of American movies and global television was perverting the English language to the American version slowly but surely.

“Did Bas talk to you about the Pope?” Simon asked.

“Yeah. That letter could be a bombshell. He’s wondering how Ivan’s going to react to it.”

“We all are, Jack. You have any ideas?”

“I just told your boss, if Stalin was sitting there, he might want to shorten the Pope’s life, but that would be a hell of a big gamble.”

“The problem, I think, is that although they are rather collegial in their decision-making, Andropov is in the ascendancy, and he might be less reticent than the rest of them.”

Jack settled back in to his chair. “You know, my wife’s friends at Hopkins flew over there a couple of years ago. Mikhail Suslov had diabetic retinopathy of the eyes—he was also a high myope, very nearsighted—and they went over to fix it, and to teach some Russian docs how to do the procedure. Cathy was just a resident then. But Bernie Katz was on the fly team. He’s the director at Wilmer. Super eye surgeon, hell of a good guy. The Agency interviewed him and the others after they came back. Ever see that document?”

There was interest in his eyes now: “No. Is it any good?”

“One of the things I’ve learned being married to a doc is that I listen to what she says about people. I’d damned sure listen to Bernie. It’s worth reading. There’s a universal tendency for people to talk straight to surgeons and, like I said, docs are good for seeing things that most of us miss. They said Suslov was smart, courteous, businesslike, but underneath he was the sort of guy you wouldn’t trust with a gun in his hand—or more likely a knife. He really didn’t like the fact that he needed Americans to save his sight for him. It didn’t tickle his fancy that no Russians were able to do what he needed done. On the other hand, they said that the hospitality was Olympic-class once they did the job. So they’re not complete barbarians, which Bernie halfway expected—he’s Jewish, family from Poland, back when it belonged to the czar, I think. Want me to have the Agency send that one over?”

Harding waved a match over his pipe. “Yes, I would like to see that. The Russians—they’re a rum lot, you know. In some ways, wonderfully cultured. Russia is the last place in the world where a man can make a decent living as a poet. They revere their poets, and I rather admire that about them, but at the same time . . . you know, Stalin himself was reticent about going after artists—the writing sort, that is. I remember one chap who lived years longer than one would have expected.... Even so, he eventually died in the Gulag. So, their civilization has its limits.”

“You speak the language? I never learned it.”

The Brit analyst nodded. “It can be a wonderful language for literature, rather like Attic Greek. It lends itself to poetry, but it masks a capacity for barbarism that makes the blood run cold. They are a fairly predictable people in many ways, especially their political decisions, within limits. Their unpredictability lies in playing off their inherent conservatism against their dogmatic political outlook. Our friend Suslov is seriously ill, heart problems—from the diabetes, I suppose—but the chap behind him is Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov, equal parts Russian and Marxist, with the morals of Lavrenti Beria. He bloody hates the West. I expect he counseled Suslov—they are old, old friends—to accept blindness rather than submit to American physicians. And if this Katz chap is Jewish, you said? That would not have helped, either. Not an attractive chap at all. When Suslov departs—a few months, we think—he’ll be the new ideologue on the Politburo. He will back Yuriy Vladimirovich on anything he wishes to do, even if it means a physical attack on His Holiness.”

“You really think it could go that far?” Jack asked.

“Could it? Possibly, yes.”

“Okay, has this letter been sent to Langley?”

Harding nodded. “Your local Station Chief came over to collect it today. I would expect your chaps have their own sources, but there’s no sense taking chances.”

“Agreed. You know, if Ivan does anything that extreme, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

“Perhaps so, but they do not see things in the same way we do, Jack.”

“I know. Hard to make the full leap of imagination, however.”

“It does take time,” Simon agreed.

“Does reading their poetry help?” Ryan wondered. He’d only seen a little of it, and only in translation, which was not how one read poetry.

Harding shook his head. “Not really. That’s how some of them protest. The protests have to be sufficiently roundabout that the more obtuse of their readers can just enjoy the lyrical tribute to a particular girl’s figure without noticing the cry for freedom of expression. There must be a whole section of KGB that analyzes the poems for the hidden political content, to which no one pays particular attention until the Politburo members notice that the sexual content is a little too explicit. They are a bunch of prudes, you know. . . . How very odd of them to have that sort of morality and no other.”

“Well, one can hardly knock them for disapproving Debbie Does Dallas,” Ryan suggested.

Harding nearly choked on his pipe smoke. “Quite so. Not exactly King Lear, is it? They did produce Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pasternak.”

Jack hadn’t read any of them, but this didn’t seem the time to admit to it.

 

 

“HE SAID WHAT?” Alexandrov asked.

The outrage was predictable, but remarkably muted, Andropov thought. Perhaps he only raised his voice for a fuller audience, or more likely his subordinates over at the Party Secretariat building.

“Here is the letter, and the translation,” the KGB Chairman said, handing over the documents.

The chief-ideologue-in-waiting took the message forms and read them over slowly. He didn’t want his rage to miss a single nuance. Andropov waited, lighting a Marlboro as he did so. His guest didn’t touch the vodka that he’d poured, the Chairman noted.

“This holy man grows ambitious,” he said finally, setting the papers down on the coffee table.

“I would agree with that,” Yuriy observed.

Amazement in his voice: “Does he feel invulnerable? Does he not know that there are consequences for such threats?”

“My experts feel that his words are genuine, and, no, they believe he does not fear the possible consequences.”

“If martyrdom is what he wishes, perhaps we should accommodate him. . . .” The way his voice trailed off caused a chill even in Andropov’s cold blood. It was time for a warning. The problem with ideologues was that their theories did not always take reality into proper account, a fact to which they were mostly blind.

“Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, such actions are not to be undertaken lightly. There could be political consequences.”

“No, not great ones, Yuriy. Not great ones,” Alexandrov repeated himself. “But, yes, I agree, what we do in reply must be considered fully before we take the necessary action.”

“What does Comrade Suslov think? Have you consulted him?”

“Misha is very ill,” Alexandrov replied, without any great show of regret. That surprised Andropov. His guest owed much to his ailing senior, but these ideologues lived in their own little circumscribed world. “I fear his life is coming to its end.”

That part was not a surprise. You only had to look at him at the Politburo meetings. Suslov had the desperate look you saw on the face of a man who knew that his time was running out. He wanted to make the world right before he departed from it, but he also knew that such an act was beyond his capacity, a fact that had come to him as an unwelcome surprise. Did he finally grasp the reality that Marxism-Leninism was a false path? Andropov had come to that conclusion about five years before. But that wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about in the Kremlin, was it? And not with Alexandrov, either.

“He has been a good comrade these many years. If what you say is true, he will be sorely missed,” the KGB Chairman noted soberly, genuflecting to the altar of Marxist theory and its dying priest.

“That is so,” Alexandrov agreed, playing his role as his host did—as all Politburo members did, because it was expected . . . because it was necessary. Not because it was true, or even approximately so.

Like his guest, Yuriy Vladimirovich believed not because he believed, but because what he purported to believe was the source of the real thing: power. What, the Chairman wondered, would this man say next? Andropov needed him, and Alexandrov needed him as well, perhaps even more. Mikhail Yevgeniyevich did not have the personal power needed to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was respected for his theoretical knowledge, his devotion to the state religion that Marxism-Leninism had become, but no one who sat around the table thought him a proper candidate for leadership. But his support would be vital to whoever did have that ambition. As in medieval times, when the eldest son became the lord of the manor, and the second son became the bishop of the attendant diocese, so Alexandrov, like Suslov in his time, had to provide the spiritual—was that the proper word?—justification for his ascension to power. The system of checks and balances remained, just more perversely than before.

“You will, of course, take his place when the time comes,” Andropov offered as the promise of an alliance.

Alexandrov demurred, of course . . . or pretended to: “There are many good men in the Party Secretariat.”

The Chairman of the Committee for State Security waved his hand dismissively. “You are the most senior and the most trusted.”

Which Alexandrov well knew. “You are kind to say so, Yuriy. So, what will we do about this foolish Pole?”

And that, so baldly stated, would be the cost of the alliance. To get Alexandrov’s support for the General Secretaryship, Andropov would have to make the ideologue’s blanket a little thicker by . . . well, by doing something he was already thinking about anyway. That was painless, wasn’t it?

The KGB Chairman adopted a clinical, businesslike tone of voice: “Misha, to undertake an operation of this sort is not a trivial or a simple exercise. It must be planned very carefully, prepared with the greatest caution and thoroughness, and then the Politburo must approve it with open eyes.”

“You must have something in mind. . . .”

“I have many things in mind, but a daydream is not a plan. To move forward requires some in-depth thinking and planning merely to see if such a thing is possible. One cautious step at a time,” Andropov warned. “Even then, there are no guarantees or promises to be made. This is not something for a movie production. The real world, Misha, is complex.” It was as close as he could come to telling Alexandrov not to stray too far from his sandbox of theories and toys and into the real world of blood and consequences.

“Well, you are a good Party man. You know what the stakes in this game are.” With those words, Alexandrov told his host what was expected by the Secretariat. For Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, the Party and its beliefs were the State—and the KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party.

Oddly, Andropov realized, this Polish Pope surely felt the same about his beliefs and his view of the world. But those beliefs weren’t, strictly speaking, an ideology, were they? Well, for these purposes, they might as well be, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself.

“My people will look at this carefully. We cannot do the impossible, Misha, but—”

“But what is impossible for this agency of the Soviet state?” A rhetorical question with a bloody answer. And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized.

How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideology that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy. Surely he regarded both Russia and communism as enemies, one for nationalistic reasons, the other for reasons of his religious conviction.... But did he fear that enemy?

No, probably not, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself. That made his task harder. His was an agency that needed fear to get its way. Fear was its source of power, and a man lacking fear was a man he could not manipulate. . . .

But those whom he could not manipulate could always be killed. Who, after all, remembered much about Leon Trotsky?

“Few things are truly impossible. Merely difficult,” the Chairman belatedly agreed.

“So, you will look into the possibilities?”

He nodded cautiously. “Yes, starting in the morning.” And so the processes began.