Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [269]
"Whom did you call, Jack?" Kingshot asked.
"Dan Murray at the embassy, the FBI rep. You ought to know him."
"The Legal Attaché—yes, I do. Okay, what did you ask?"
"The Pope's schedule for the coming week."
"But we don't know anything yet," Kingshot objected.
"Does that make you feel any better, Al?" Jack inquired delicately.
"You did not compro—"
"Compromise our source? You think I'm that stupid?"
The Brit spook nodded to the logic of the moment. "Very well. No harm done, I expect."
The next hour of the first interview returned to routine things. Zaitzev fleshed out for the Brits what he knew about MINISTER. It was sufficiently juicy to give them a good start on IDing the guy. It was immediately clear that Kingshot wanted his hide on the barn door. There was no telling how much good information KGB was getting from him—it was definitely a him, Zaitzev made clear, and "him" was probably a senior civil servant in Whitehall, and soon his residence would be provided by Her Majesty's Government for the indefinite future—"at the Queen's pleasure" was the official phrase. But Jack had more pressing concerns. At 2:20 in the afternoon, he went back to the STU in the next room.
"Dan, it's Jack."
The Legal Attaché spoke without preamble. "He has a busy week ahead, the embassy in Rome tells me, but the Pope is always in the open on Wednesday afternoons. He parades around in his white jeep in St. Peter's Square, right in front of the cathedral, for the people to see him and take his blessing. It's an open car, and, if you want to pop a cap, that sounds to me like a good time to try—unless they have a shooter infiltrated all the way inside. Maybe a cleaning man, plumber, electrician, hard to say, but you have to assume that the inside staff is pretty loyal, and that people keep an eye on them."
Sure, Jack thought, but those are the guys best suited to do something like this. Only the people you trust can really fuck you. Damn. The best people to look into this were with the Secret Service, but he didn't know anybody in there, and even if he did, getting them into the Vatican bureaucracy—the world's oldest—would require divine intervention.
"Thanks, pal. I owe you one."
"Semper fi, bud. Will you be able to tell me more? This sounds like a major case you're working on."
"Probably not, but it's not for me to say, Dan. Gotta run. Later, man." Ryan hung up and reentered the library.
The sun was over the yardarm, and a wine bottle had just appeared, a French white from the Loire Valley, probably a nice old one. There was dust on the bottle. It had been there for a while, and the cellar downstairs would not be stocked with Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose.
"Zaitzev here has all manner of good information on this MINISTER chap." Just a matter of dredging it up, Kingshot didn't add. But tomorrow they'd have skilled psychologists sitting in, using their pshrink skills to massage his memories—maybe even hypnosis. Ryan didn't know if that actually worked or not; though some police forces believed in the technique, a lot of defense lawyers foamed at the mouth over it, and Jack didn't know who was right on that issue. On the whole, it was a shame that the Rabbit wasn't able to come out with photos taken of KGB files, but it would have been asking a lot to request that the guy place his neck not so much on the block as inside the guillotine head-holder and shout for the operator to come over. And so far, Zaitzev had impressed Ryan with his memory.
Might he be a plant, a false defector sent West to give the Agency and others false information? It was possible, but the proof of that pudding would lie in the quality of the agents he identified to the Western counter-intelligence services. If MINISTER was really giving out good information, the quality of it would tell the Security Service if he were that