Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [154]
"Not like New York or D.C."
"Not hardly. So, anything interesting shaking at Century House?" he asked.
"Not really. Mainly, I've been looking over old stuff, back-checking old analysis against newly developed data. Nothing worth writing home about—but I have to do that anyway. The Admiral is keeping me on a long leash, but it's still a leash."
"What do you think of our cousins?"
"Basil is pretty smart," Ryan observed. "But he's careful about what he shows me. That's fair, I suppose. He knows that I'm reporting back to Langley, and I really don't need to know much about sources… But I can make some guesses. 'Six' has gotta have some good people in Moscow." Ryan paused. "Damned if I'd ever play that game. Our prisons are pretty nasty. I don't even want to think about what the Russian ones are like."
"You wouldn't live long enough to find out, Jack. They're not the most forgiving people in the world, especially on espionage. You're a lot safer whacking a cop right in front of the precinct station than playing spy."
"And with us?"
"It's amazing—how patriotic convicts are, that is. Spies do very hard time in the Federal prisons. Them and child molesters. They get a lot of attention from Bubba and his armed-robber friends—you know, honest crooks."
"Yeah, my dad talked about that once in a while, how there's a hierarchy in prison, and you don't want to be on the bottom."
"Better to be a pitcher than a catcher." Murray laughed.
It was time for a real question: "So, Dan, just how tight are you with the spook shops?"
Murray surveyed the horizon. "Oh, we get along pretty nicely," was all he was willing to say.
"You know, Dan," Jack observed, "if there's anything I've learned to worry about over here, it's understatement."
Murray liked that one. "Well, then you're living in the wrong place, son. They all talk like that over here."
"Yeah, especially in the spook shops."
"Well, if we talked like everybody else, then the mystique would be gone, and people would understand how screwed up everything really is." Murray had a sip and grinned broadly. "We couldn't maintain the confidence of the people that way. I bet it's the same with doctors and stockbrokers," the FBI rep suggested.
"Every business has its own insiders language." The supposed reason was that it offered more speedy and efficient communications to those inside the fold—but the truth of the matter, of course, was that it denied knowledge and/or access to outsiders. But that was really okay if you were one of the people on the inside.
* * *
THE BAD NEWS happened in Budapest, and it resulted from pure bad luck. The agent wasn't even all that important. He provided information on the Hungarian Air Force, but that was an organization that no one took very seriously at best, along with the rest of the Hungarian military, which had rarely distinguished itself on the field of battle. Marxism-Leninism had never really taken firm root here anyway, but the state did have a hardworking, if not especially competent, intelligence/counterintelligence service, and not all of them were stupid. Some of them were even KGB-trained, and if there was anything the Soviets knew, it was intelligence and counterintelligence. This officer, Andreas Morrisay, was just sitting, drinking his morning coffee in a shop on Andrassy Utca, when he saw someone make a mistake. He would not have caught it had he not been bored with his newspaper, but there it was. A Hungarian national—you could tell from his clothing—dropped something. It was about the size of a tin of pipe tobacco. He quickly bent down to pick it up, and then, remarkably enough, he stuck it to the underside of his table. And, Andreas saw, it didn't fall off. It must have some sort of adhesive on the side. And that sort of thing was not only unusual, but also one of the things he'd been shown in a training film at the KGB Academy outside Moscow. It was a very simple and obsolete form of dead-drop, something used by enemy spies