Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [267]
What a productive traitor that fellow had to be, Sir Basil thought. Time for him to see Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Charleston had spent years cleaning up his own shop, once a playground for the KGB. But no more, and never bloody again, the Knight Commander of the Bath swore to himself.
* * *
WHOM DO I TELL? Ryan wondered. Basil would doubtless call Langley—Jack would make sure of that, but Sir Basil was a supremely reliable guy. Next came a more difficult question: What the hell can I/we do about this?
Ryan lit another smoke to consider that one. It was more police work than intelligence work…
And the central issue would be classification.
Yeah, that's going to be the problem. If we tell anybody, the word will get out somehow, and then somebody will know we have the Rabbit—and guess what, Jack? The Rabbit is now more important to the CIA than the life of the Pope.
Oh, shit, Ryan thought. It was like a trick of jujitsu, like a sudden reversal of polarity on the dial of a compass. North was now south. Inside was now outside. And the needs of American intelligence might now supersede the life of the Bishop of Rome. His face must have betrayed what he was thinking.
"What is amiss, Ryan?" the Rabbit asked. It seemed to Jack a strange word for him to know.
"The information you just gave us. We've been worrying about the safety of the Pope for a couple of months, but we had no specific information to make us believe his life was actually at risk. Now you have given that information to us, and someone must decide what to do with it. Do you know anything at all about the operation?"
"No, almost nothing. In Sofia the action officer is the rezident, Colonel Bubovoy, Ilya Fedorovich. Senior colonel, he is—Ambassador, can I say? To Bulgarian DS. This Colonel Strokov, this name I know from old cases. He is officer assassin for DS. He do other things, too, yes, but when man need bullet, Strokov deliver bullet, yes?"
This struck Ryan as something from a bad movie, except that in the movies the big, bad CIA was the one with a special assassination department, like a cupboard with vampire bats inside. When the director needed somebody killed, he'd open the door, and one of the bats flew out and made its kill, then flew back docilely to the cupboard and hung upside down until the next man needed killing. Sure, Wilbur. Hollywood had everything figured out, except that government bureaucracies all ran on paper—nothing happened without a written order of some sort, because only a piece of white paper with black ink on it would cover somebody's ass when things went bad—and if somebody really needed killing, someone inside the system had to sign the order, and who would sign that kind of order? That sort of thing became a permanent record of something bad, and so the signature blank would be bucked all the way to the Oval Office, and once there it just wasn't the sort of paper that would find its way into the Presidential Library that memorialized the person known inside the security community as National Command Authority. And nobody in between would sign the order, because government employees never stuck their necks out—that wasn't the way they were trained.
Except me, Ryan thought. But he wouldn't kill someone in cold blood. He hadn't even killed Sean Miller in very hot blood, and while that was a strange thing to be proud of, it beat the hell out of the alternative.
But Jack wasn't afraid of sticking it out. The loss of his government paycheck would be a net profit for John Patrick Ryan. He could go back to teaching, perhaps at a nice private university that paid halfway decently, and he'd be able to dabble with the stock market on the side, something with which his current job interfered rather badly…
What the hell am I going to do? The worst part of all was that Ryan considered himself to be