Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [23]
Charleston nodded thoughtfully. "I briefed the PM just three days ago out at Chequers, and told her much the same thing." The Director General paused for a moment, then decided. He lifted a file folder from the pile on his desk and handed it across.
The cover read MOST SECRET. So, Jack thought, now it starts. He wondered if Basil had learned to swim by falling into the Thames, and thought everyone should learn the same way.
Flipping the cover open, he saw that this information came from a source called WREN. He was clearly Polish, and by the look of the report, well placed, and what he said—
"Damn," Ryan observed. "This is reliable?"
"Very much so. It's a five-five, Jack." By that he meant that the source was rated 5 on a scale of 5 for reliability, and the importance of the information reported was graded the same way. "You're Catholic, I think." He knew, of course. It was just the English way of talking.
"Jesuits at high school, Boston College, and Georgetown, plus the nuns at Saint Matthew's. I'd better be."
"What do you think of your new Pope?"
"First non-Italian in four centuries, maybe more: That's saying something right there. When I heard the new one was Polish, I expected it to be Cardinal Wiszynski from Warsaw—guy's got the brains of a genius and the cunning of a fox. This guy, I didn't know beans about, but from what I've read since, he's a very solid citizen. Good parish priest, good administrator, politically very astute…" Ryan paused. He was discussing the head of his church as though he were a political candidate, and he was damned sure there was more substance to him than that. This had to be a man of deep faith, with the sort of core convictions that an earthquake couldn't budge or crack. He'd been chosen by other such men to be the leader and spokesman for the world's largest church, which, by the way, also happened to be Ryan's church. He'd be a man who didn't fear much of anything, a man for whom a bullet was his get-out-of-jail-free card, a key to God's own presence. And he'd be a man who felt God's presence in everything he did. He was not someone you could scare, not someone you could turn away from what he deemed the right thing.
"If he wrote this letter, Sir Basil, it's not a bluff. When was it delivered?"
"Less than four days ago. Our chap broke a rule getting it to us so quickly, but its importance is patently clear, is it not?"
Welcome to London, Jack, Ryan thought. He'd just fallen into the soup. A big pot, like they used to boil missionaries in the cartoons.
"Okay, it's been forwarded to Moscow, right?"
"So our chap tells us. So, Sir John, what will Ivan have to say about this?" And with that question, Sir Basil Charleston lit the fire under Jack's personal cauldron.
"That's a multifaceted question," Ryan said, dodging as artfully as the situation allowed.
It wasn't very far: "He will say something," Charleston observed, leveling his hazel eyes at Ryan.
"Okay, they won't like it. They will see it as a threat. The questions are how seriously they will take it and how much credence they will attach to it. Stalin might have laughed it off… or maybe not. Stalin defined paranoia, didn't he?" Ryan paused and looked out the windows. Was that a rain cloud blowing in? "No, Stalin would have acted somehow."
"Think so?" Charleston was evaluating him, Jack knew. This was like the orals for his doctorate at Georgetown. Father Tim Riley's rapier wit and needlepoint questions. Sir Basil was more civilized than the acerbic priest, but this exam was not going to be an easy one.
"Leon Trotsky was no threat to him. That assassination came from a combination of paranoia and pure meanness. It was a personal thing. Stalin made enemies, and he never forgot them. But the current Soviet leadership doesn't have the guts to do the stuff he did."
Charleston pointed out the plate glass window toward Westminster Bridge. "My lad, the Russians had the intestinal fortitude to kill a man right on that bridge, less than five years ago—"
"And got blamed for it," Ryan reminded his host. It had been a combination