Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [141]
"We kick it upstairs. Here, it goes right to Sir Basil, and I call it in to Admiral Greer. Usually a phone call over the secure phone."
"Like the one upstairs?"
"Yep. Then we send it over by secure fax or, if it's really hot, it goes by diplomatic courier out of the embassy, when we don't want to trust the encryption systems."
"How often does that happen?"
"Not since I've been here, but I don't make those decisions. What the hell, the diplomatic bag goes over in eight or nine hours. Damned sight faster than it used to happen."
"I thought that phone thingee upstairs was unbreakable?"
"Well, some things you do are nearly perfect, too, but you still take extra care with them, right? Same with us."
"What would that be for? Theoretically speaking, that is." She smiled at her cleverness.
"Babe, you know how to phrase a question. Let's say we got something, oh, on their nuclear arsenal, something from an agent way the hell inside, and it's really good stuff, but losing it might ID the agent for the opposition. That is what you send via the bag. The name of the game is protecting the source."
"Because if they ID the guy—"
"He's dead, maybe in a very unpleasant way. There's a story that once they loaded a guy into a crematorium alive and then turned on the gas—and they made a film of it, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it."
"Nobody does that anymore!" Cathy objected immediately.
"There's a guy at Langley who claims to have seen the film. The poor bastard's name was Popov, a GRU officer who worked for us. His bosses were very displeased with him."
"You're serious?" Cathy persisted.
"As a heart attack. Supposedly, they used to show the film to people in the GRU Academy as a warning about not crossing the line—it strikes me as bad psychology but, like I said, I've met a guy who says he saw the film. Anyway, that's one of the reasons we try to protect our sources."
"That's a little hard to believe."
"Oh, really? You mean, like a surgeon breaking for lunch and having a beer?"
"Well… yes."
"It's an imperfect world we live in, babe." He'd let things go. She'd have all weekend to think things over, and he'd get some work done on his Halsey book.
* * *
BACK IN MOSCOW, fingers were flying. How u gonna tell Lan[gley], she asked.
N[ot] sure, he replied.
Cour[ier], she suggested. This could be re[ally] hot.
Ed nodded agreement. Rit[ter] will be exci[ted].
D[amn] st[raight], she agreed. Want m[e] 2 han[dle] the me[et]? she asked.
Y[our] Russian] is pre[etty] g[ood], he agreed.
This time she nodded. She spoke an elegant literary Russian reserved to the well-educated over here, Ed knew. The average Soviet couldn't believe that a foreigner spoke his language that well. When walking the street or conversing with a shop clerk, she never let that skill slip, instead stumbling over complex phrases. To do otherwise would have been noticed at once, and so avoiding it was an important part of her cover, even more than her blond hair and American mannerisms. It would finger her immediately to their new agent.
When? she asked next.
Iv[an] sez tom[orrow]. Up 4 it? he responded.
She patted his hip and gave a cute, playful smile, which translated to bet your ass.
Foley loved his wife as fully as a man could, and part of that was his respect for her love of the game they both played. Paramount Central Casting could not have given him a better wife. They'd be making love tonight. The rule in boxing might be no sex before a fight, but for Mary Pat the rule was the reverse, and if the microphones in the walls noticed, well, fuck 'em, the Chief of Station Moscow thought, with a sly smile of his own.
* * *
"WHEN DO YOU leave, Bob?" Greer asked the DDO.
"Sunday. ANA to Tokyo, and from there on to Seoul."
"Better you than me. I hate those long flights," the DDI observed.
"Well, you try to sleep about half the