Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [142]
"Smart of you to skip town while we have the President chewing my backside about the Pope," Judge Moore thought aloud.
"Well, I'm sorry about that, Arthur," Ritter retorted, with an ironic smile. "Mike Bostock will be handling things in my absence." Both senior executives knew and liked Bostock, a career field spook and an expert on the Soviets and the Central Europeans. He was a little too much of a cowboy to be trusted on The Hill, though, which everyone thought was a pity. Cowboys had their uses—like Mary Pat Foley, for example.
"Still nothing out of the Politburo meeting?"
"Not yet, Arthur. Maybe they just talked about routine stuff. You know, they don't always sit there and plan the next nuclear war."
"No." Greer chuckled. "They think we're always doing that. Jesus, they're a paranoid bunch."
"Remember what Henry said: 'Even paranoids have enemies.' And that is our job," Ritter reminded them.
"Still ruminating over your MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH plan, Robert?"
"Nothing specific yet. The in-house people I've talked to about it—damn it, Arthur, you tell our people to think outside of the box, and what do they do? They build a better box!"
"We don't have many entrepreneur types here, remember. Government agency. Pay caps. Tends to militate against creative thinking. That's what we're for," Judge Moore pointed out. "How do we change that?"
"We have a few people from the real world. Hell, I've got one on my team—he doesn't know how to think inside the box."
"Ryan?" Ritter asked.
"That's one of them," Jim Greer confirmed with a nod.
"He's not one of us," the DDO observed at once.
"Bob, you can't have it both ways," the DDI shot back. "Either you want a guy who thinks like one of our bureaucrats, or a guy who thinks creatively. Ryan knows the rules, he's an ex-Marine who even knows how to think on his feet, and pretty soon he's going to be a star analyst." Greer paused. "He's about the best young officer I've seen in a few years, and what your beef with him is, Robert, I do not understand."
"Basil likes him," Moore added to the conversation, "and Basil's a hard man to fool."
"Next time I see Jack, I'd like to let him know about RED DEATH."
"Really?" Moore asked. "It's way over his pay grade."
"Arthur, he knows economics better than anyone I have in the DI. I didn't put him in my economics section only because he's too smart to be limited that way. Bob, if you want to wreck the Soviet Union—without a war—the only way to do it is to cripple their economy. Ryan made himself a pile of money because he knows all that stuff. I'm telling you, he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe he can figure a way to burn down a wheat field. Anyway, what does it hurt? Your project is entirely theoretical, isn't it?"
"Well?" the DCI turned to Ritter. Greer was right, after all.
"Oh, what the hell, okay," the DDO conceded the point. "Just so he doesn't talk about this to The Washington Post. We don't need that idea out in the open. Congress and the press would have a meltdown."
"Jack, talk to the press?" Greer asked. "Not likely. He doesn't curry favor with people, including us. He's one guy I think we can trust. The whole Russian KGB doesn't have enough hard currency to buy him off. That's more than I can say for myself," he joked.
"I'll remember you said that, James," Ritter promised, with a thin smile of his own. Such jokes were usually limited to the Seventh Floor at Langley.
* * *
A DEPARTMENT STORE was a department store anywhere in the world, and GUM was supposedly Moscow's counterpart to Macy's in New York. Theoretically, Ed Foley thought, walking in the main entrance. Just like the Soviet Union was theoretically a voluntary union of republics, and Russia theoretically had a constitution that existed over and above the will of the Communist Party