Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [126]
And all three of them did. That sort of thing had gotten Oleg Penkovskiy killed. The information he'd gotten out had probably averted a nuclear war—and had assisted in the recruitment of CIA's longest-lived agent-in-place, CARDINAL—but that hadn't done Penkovskiy much good. On his discovery, no less a figure than Khrushchev himself had demanded his blood—and gotten it.
"Yeah," Greer agreed, "and this isn't all that important in the great scheme of things, is it?"
"No," Judge Moore had to admit, though he didn't especially look forward to explaining that one to the President. But the new Boss did understand things once you made them clear. The really scary part was what the President might do if the Pope were to die unexpectedly. The Boss, too, was a man of principle, but also a man of emotions. It would be as enraging as waving the Soviet flag in front of a fighting bull. You couldn't let emotion get in the way of statecraft—it only called out more emotion, frequently the mourning of the newly dead. And the miracle of modern technology only served to make the number of such people all the larger. The DCI reproached himself for that thought. The new President was a thoughtful man. His emotions were the servant of his intellect, and his intellect was far larger than it was generally believed, especially by the media, who only saw the smile and the theatrical personality. But the media, like a lot of politicians, was a lot more comfortable dealing with appearances than reality. It was a lot less intellectually demanding, after all. Judge Moore looked at his principal subordinates. "Okay, but let's remember that it can be lonely facing him in the Oval Office when you don't have what he wants."
"I'm sure it is, Arthur," Ritter sympathized.
* * *
HE COULD STILL TURN BACK, Zaitzev told himself, as sleep still had not come. Next to him, Irina was breathing placidly in sleep. The sleep of the just, it was called. Not the sleeplessness of the traitor.
All he had to do was stop. That was all. He'd taken two small steps, but no more. The American might know his face, but that was easily fixed—take a different metro, walk onto a different carriage. He'd never see him again; their contact would be as broken as a water glass dropped to the floor, and his life would return to normal, and his conscience…
… would never trouble him again? He snorted. It was his conscience that had gotten him into this mess. No, that wasn't going to go away.
But the other side of that coin was perpetual worry and sleeplessness, and fear. He hadn't really tasted the fear yet. That would come, he was sure.
Treason had only one punishment. Death for the traitor, followed by ruin for his survivors. They'd be sent off to Siberia—to count trees, as the euphemism went. It was the Soviet hell, a place of eternal damnation, from which death was the only escape.
In fact, it was exactly what his conscience would do to him if he didn't follow through on his action, Zaitzev realized, finally losing his battle and sliding off into sleep.
* * *
A SECOND LATER, so it seemed to him, the alarm clock went off. At least, he hadn't been tormented with dreams. That was the only good news this morning. His head pounded, threatening to push his eyeballs out of their sockets. He staggered into the bathroom, where he splashed water onto his face and took three aspirin, which, he forlornly hoped, might ease his hangover in a few hours.
He couldn't face sausages for breakfast, since his stomach was also irritated, and so he settled for cereal and milk with some buttered bread on the side. He thought about coffee, but decided a glass of milk would be easier on his stomach.
"You drank too much last night," Irina told him.
"Yes, darling, I know that now," he managed to say, not unpleasantly. His condition wasn't her fault, and she was a good wife to him, and a good mother for Svetlana, his little zaichik. He knew that he'd survive this day. He just wouldn't like it much. Worst of all, he had to get going early, and this he did, shaving