Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [158]
But what in espionage ever made sense?
What did make sense was the necessity of getting this guy out. They had a Rabbit, and the Rabbit needed to run away from the Bear.
* * *
"YOU CAN'T SAY what's bothering you?" Cathy asked. "Nope."
"But it's important?"
"Yep." He nodded. "Yeah, it sure is, but the problem is that we don't know how serious."
"Something for me to worry about?"
"Well, no. It's not World War Three or anything like that. But I really can't talk about it."
"Why?"
"You know why—it's classified. You don't tell me about your patients, do you? That's because you have rules of ethics, and I have rules of classification." Smart as Cathy was, she still hadn't fully grasped that one yet.
"Isn't there any way I can help?"
"Cathy, if you were cleared for this, maybe you could offer insights. But maybe not. You're not a pshrink, and that's the medical field that applies to this—how people respond to threats, what their motivations are, how they perceive reality, and how those perceptions determine their actions. I've been trying to get inside the heads of people I haven't met to figure out what they're going to do about something. I've been studying how they think for quite a while, even before I joined the Agency, but you know—"
"Yeah, it's hard to look inside somebody's brain. And you know what?"
"What's that?"
"It's harder with the sane ones than the crazy ones. People can think rationally and still do crazy things."
"Because of their perceptions?"
She nodded. "Partially that, but partially because they've chosen to believe totally false things—for entirely rational reasons, but the things they believe in are still false."
This struck Ryan as worth pursuing. "Okay. Tell me about… Josef Stalin, for instance. He killed a lot of people. Why?"
"Part of it was rational, and part of it was wild paranoia. When he saw a threat, he dealt with it decisively. But he tended to see threats that weren't there or weren't serious enough to merit deadly force. Stalin lived on the borderline between madness and normality, and he crossed back and forth like a guy on a bridge who couldn't make up his mind about where he lived. In international affairs, he was supposed to be just as rational as everybody else, but he had a ruthless streak and nobody ever said 'no' to him. One of the docs at Hopkins wrote a book on the guy. I read it when I was in med school."
"What did it say?"
Mrs. Dr. Ryan shrugged. "It wasn't all that satisfactory. The current thinking is that it's chemical imbalances in the brain that cause mental illness, not whether your dad slapped you around too much or you saw your mom in bed with a goat. But we can't test Stalin's blood chemistry now, can we?"
"Not hardly. I think they finally burned him up and put him in—where? I don't remember," Jack admitted. It wasn't the Kremlin wall, was it? Or maybe they just buried the pine box instead of burning it all up. It wasn't worth finding out, was it?
"It's funny. A lot of historical figures did the stuff they did because they were mentally unstable. Today, we could fix them with lithium or other stuff we've learned about—mainly in the last thirty years or so—but back then, all they had was alcohol and iodine. Or maybe an exorcism," she added, wondering if those were real.
"And Rasputin had a bad chemical imbalance, too?" Jack wondered aloud.
"Maybe. I don't know much about that, except he was supposed to be a crazy kinda priest, wasn't he?"
"Not a priest, some kinda mystic civilian. I suppose today he'd be a TV evangelist, right? Whatever he was, he brought down the House of Romanov—but they were pretty useless anyway."
"And then Stalin took over?"
"Lenin first, then Stalin. Vladimir Ilyich checked out from strokes."
"Hypertensive, maybe, or just cholesterol buildup and he clotted in the brain and that did him. And Stalin was worse, right?"
"Lenin was no day at the beach, but Stalin was pretty amazing—Tamerlane come back to the twentieth century, or maybe one of the Caesars. When the Romans reconquered a rebellious city,