Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [27]
"Well, one can hardly knock them for disapproving Debbie Does Dallas," Ryan suggested.
Harding nearly choked on his pipe smoke. "Quite so. Not exactly King Lear, is it? They did produce Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pasternak."
Jack hadn't read any of them, but this didn't seem the time to admit to it.
"HE SAID WHAT!" Alexandrov asked.
The outrage was predictable, but remarkably muted, Andropov thought. Perhaps he only raised his voice for a fuller audience, or more likely his subordinates over at the Party Secretariat building.
"Here is the letter, and the translation," the KGB Chairman said, handing over the documents.
The chief-ideologue-in-waiting took the message forms and read them over slowly. He didn't want his rage to miss a single nuance. Andropov waited, lighting a Marlboro as he did so. His guest didn't touch the vodka that he'd poured, the Chairman noted.
"This holy man grows ambitious," he said finally, setting the papers down on the coffee table.
"I would agree with that," Yuriy observed.
Amazement in his voice: "Does he feel invulnerable? Does he not know that there are consequences for such threats?"
"My experts feel that his words are genuine, and, no, they believe he does not fear the possible consequences."
"If martyrdom is what he wishes, perhaps we should accommodate him…" The way his voice trailed off caused a chill even in Andropov's cold blood. It was time for a warning. The problem with ideologues was that their theories did not always take reality into proper account, a fact to which they were mostly blind.
"Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, such actions are not to be undertaken lightly. There could be political consequences."
"No, not great ones, Yuriy. Not great ones," Alexandrov repeated himself. "But, yes, I agree, what we do in reply must be considered fully before we take the necessary action."
"What does Comrade Suslov think? Have you consulted him?"
"Misha is very ill," Alexandrov replied, without any great show of regret. That surprised Andropov. His guest owed much to his ailing senior, but these ideologues lived in their own little circumscribed world. "I fear his life is coming to its end."
That part was not a surprise. You only had to look at him at the Politburo meetings. Suslov had the desperate look you saw on the face of a man who knew that his time was running out. He wanted to make the world right before he departed from it, but he also knew that such an act was beyond his capacity, a fact that had come to him as an unwelcome surprise. Did he finally grasp the reality that Marxism-Leninism was a false path? Andropov had come to that conclusion about five years before. But that wasn't the sort of thing one talked about in the Kremlin, was it? And not with Alexandrov, either.
"He has been a good comrade these many years. If what you say is true, he will be sorely missed," the KGB Chairman noted soberly, genuflecting to the altar of Marxist theory and its dying priest.
"That is so," Alexandrov agreed, playing his role as his host did—as all Politburo members did, because it was expected… because it was necessary. Not because it was true, or even approximately so.
Like his guest, Yuriy Vladimirovich believed not because he believed, but because what he purported to believe was the source of the real thing: power. What, the Chairman wondered, would this man say next? Andropov needed him, and Alexandrov needed him as well, perhaps even more. Mikhail Yevgeniyevich did not have the personal power needed to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was respected for his theoretical knowledge, his devotion to the state religion that Marxism-Leninism had become, but no one who sat around the table thought him a proper candidate for leadership. But his support would be vital to whoever did have that ambition. As in medieval times, when the eldest son became the lord of the manor, and the second son became the bishop of the attendant diocese, so Alexandrov,