Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [25]
"Indeed. If you see anything promising, do let me know."
"No fees—but no guarantees, either," Ryan joked.
"I'm not accustomed to those, Jack, not in this bloody business. I'm going to assign you to our Russian working group with Simon Harding. Oxford graduate, doctorate in Russian literature. You'll see just about everything he sees—everything but source information—" Ryan stopped him with two raised hands.
"Sir Basil, I do not want to know that stuff. I don't need it, and knowing it would keep me awake at night. Just so I see the raw. I prefer to do my own analysis. This Harding guy is smart?" Ryan asked with deliberate artlessness.
"Very much so. You've probably seen his product before. He did the personal evaluation on Yuriy Andropov we turned out two years ago."
"I did read that. Yeah, that was good work. I figured he was a pshrink."
"He's read psychology, but not quite enough for a degree. Simon's a clever lad. Wife is an artist, painter, lovely lady."
"Right now?"
"Why not? I must get back to my work. Come, I'll walk you down."
It wasn't far. Ryan immediately learned that he'd be sharing an office right here on the top floor. This came as a surprise. Getting to the Seventh Floor at Langley took years, and often meant climbing over bloody bodies. Somebody, Jack speculated, must have thought he was smart.
Simon Harding's office was not overly impressive. The two windows overlooked the upriver side of the building, mainly two- and three-story brick structures of indeterminate occupancy. Harding himself was crowding forty, pale and fair-haired with china-blue eyes. He wore an unbuttoned vest—waistcoat locally—and a drab tie. His desk was covered with folders trimmed in striped tape, the universal coding for secret material.
"You must be Sir John," Harding said, setting down his briar pipe.
"The name's Jack," Ryan corrected him. "I'm really not allowed to pretend I'm a knight. Besides, I don't own a horse or a steel shirt. " Jack shook hands with his workmate. Harding had small, bony hands, but those blue eyes looked smart.
"Take good care of him, Simon." Sir Basil immediately took his leave.
There was already a swivel chair in place at a suspiciously clean desk. Jack tried it out. The room was going to be a little crowded, but not too badly so. His desk phone had a scrambler under it for making secure calls, Ryan wondered if it worked as well as the STU he'd had at Langley. GCHQ out at Cheltenham worked closely with NSA, and maybe it was the same innards with a different plastic case. He'd have to keep reminding himself that he was in a foreign country. That ought not to be too hard, Ryan hoped. People did talk funny here: grahss, rahsberry and cahstle, for example, though the effect of American movies and global television was perverting the English language to the American version slowly but surely.
"Did Bas talk to you about the Pope?" Simon asked.
"Yeah. That letter could be a bombshell. He's wondering how Ivan's going to react to it."
"We all are, Jack. You have any ideas?"
"I just told your boss, if Stalin was sitting there, he might want to shorten the Pope's life, but that would be a hell of a big gamble."
"The problem, I think, is that although they are rather collegial in their decision-making, Andropov is in the ascendancy, and he might be less reticent than the rest of them."
Jack settled back in to his chair. "You know, my wife's friends at Hopkins flew over there a couple of years ago. Mikhail Suslov had diabetic retinopathy of the eyes—he was also a high myope, very nearsighted—and they went over to fix it, and to teach some