Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [123]
"Tell him it's a joke, but it's an important one."
"Right." Corso nodded. "Anything I need to know?"
"Not right now."
Corso blinked. Okay, this was sensitive if the COS wasn't sharing information, but that wasn't so unusual, was it? Corso reflected. In CIA, you often didn't know what your own team was doing. He didn't know Foley all that well, but he knew enough to respect him.
"Okay, I'll go see him now."
"Thanks, Dom."
"How's the boy like Moscow?" the field officer asked his boss on the way out the door.
"He's adjusting. Be better when he can skate some. He really likes hockey."
"Well, he's in the right town for that."
"Ain't that the truth." Foley gathered his papers and stood. "Let's get this one done, Dom."
"Right now, Ed. See you tomorrow."
CHAPTER 14
DANGER SIGNAL
IF THERE IS ANYTHING CONSTANT in the business of espionage, it is a persistent lack of sleep for the players. That comes from stress, and stress is always the handmaiden of spooks. When sleep was slow in coming for Ed and Mary Pat Foley, they could at least talk with their hands in bed.
He's re[al as] h[ell], b[aby], Foley told his wife under the covers.
Y[ep], she agreed. Have w[e] ev[er] had a g[uy] fr[om] that far in [side]? she wondered.
N[o] way Jose, he replied.
Lan[gley] will flip.
B[ig]-time, her husband agreed. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs, full count, and the pitcher had hung a curveball right over Main Street, and he was about to stroke it over the Scoreboard. Assuming we don't fuck it all up, Foley warned himself.
Want me to get inv[olved]? she wondered next.
Need to wait n s[ee].
A sigh told him, Yeah, I know. Even for them, patience came hard. Foley could see that curveball, hanging right over the middle of the plate, just about belt-high, and the Louisville Slugger was tight in his hands: his eyes were locked on the ball so tight that he could see the stitches turning as it approached—and this one was going out of the park, going down-fuckin'-town. He'd show Reggie Jackson who was the hitter on this playground…
If he didn't fuck it up, he thought again. But Ed Foley had done this kind of operation in Tehran, had developed an agent in the revolutionary community, and had been the only field officer in the station to get a feel for how bad it was for the Shah, and that series of reports had lit up his star at Langley and made him one of Bob Ritter's varsity.
And he was going to take this one deep, too.
At Langley, MERCURY was the one place that everyone was afraid of—everybody knew that an employee there under foreign control could damned near bring the whole building down. That was why they all went "on the box" twice a year, polygraphed by the best examiners FBI had—they didn't even trust CIA's own polygraph experts for that tasking. A bad field officer or a bad senior analyst could burn agents and missions, and that was bad for everyone involved—but a leaker in MERCURY would be like turning a female KGB officer loose on Fifth Avenue with an American Express Gold Card. She'd be able to get anything her heart desired. Hell, the KGB might even pay a million bucks for such a source. It would bust the Russian exchequer, but they would cash in one of Nikolay II’s Fabergé eggs, and be glad for it. Everyone knew there had to be a KGB counterpart office to MERCURY, but nobody in any intelligence service had ever bagged a Russian national from there.
Foley found himself wondering what it was like, how the room looked. At Langley it was immense, the size of a parking garage, with no internal walls or dividers, so that everyone could see everyone else. There were seven drum-shaped cassette storage structures, named for Disney's Seven Dwarfs; they even had TV cameras on the inside, should some lunatic try to get in there, though he'd almost certainly be killed by such an adventure, since the motorized retrievers turned powerfully and without warning. Besides, only the big mainframe computers—including the fastest and most powerful one, made by Cray Research—knew which