Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [273]
"What kind of shape is Station Rome in?" Greer asked Ritter.
"The Chief of Station is Rick Nolfi. Good guy, but he retires in three months. Rome's his sunset post. He asked for it. His wife, Anne, likes Italy. Six officers there, mainly working on NATO stuff—two pretty experienced, four rookies," Ritter reported. "But before we get them alerted we need to think this threat through, and a little Presidential guidance won't hurt. The problem is, how the hell do we tell people about this in such a way as not to compromise the source? Guys," Ritter pointed out, "if we went to all the trouble of concealing the defection, it doesn't make much sense to broadcast the information we get from him out to the four winds, y'know?"
"That is the problem," Moore was forced to agree.
"The Pope doubtless has a protective detail," Ritter went on. "But they can't have the same latitude that the Secret Service does, can they? And we don't know how secure they are."
* * *
"IT'S THE OLD STORY," Ryan was saying at the same time in Manchester. "If we use the information too freely, we compromise the source and lose all of its utility. But if we don't use it for fear of compromising it, then we might as well not have the fucking source to begin with." Jack finished off his wine and poured another glass. "There's a book on this, you know."
"What's that?"
"Double-Edged Secrets. A guy named Jasper Holmes wrote it. He was a U.S. Navy crippie in World War Two, worked signals intelligence in FRUPAC with Joe Rochefort and his bunch. It's a pretty good book on how the intelligence business works down where the rubber meets the road."
Kingshot made a mental note to look that book up. Zaitzev was out on the lawn—a very plush one—with his wife and daughter at the moment. Mrs. Thompson wanted to take them all shopping. They had to have their private time—their bedroom suite was thoroughly bugged, of course, complete to a white-noise filter in the bathroom—and keeping the wife and kid happy was crucial to the entire operation.
"Well, Jack, whatever the opposition has planned, it will take time for them to set it up. The bureaucracies over there are even more moribund than ours, you know."
"KGB, too, Al?" Ryan wondered. "I think that's the one part of their system that actually works, and Yuriy Andropov isn't known for his patience, is he? Hell, he was their ambassador in Budapest in 1956, remember? The Russians worked pretty decisively back then, didn't they?"
"That was a serious political threat to their entire system," Kingshot pointed out.
"And the Pope isn't?" Ryan fired back.
"You have me there," the field spook admitted.
"Wednesday. That's what Dan told me. He's all the way in the open every Wednesday. Okay, the Pope can appear at that porch he uses to give blessings and stuff, and a halfway good man with a rifle can pop him doing that, but a man with a rifle is too visible to even a casual observer, and a rifle says 'military' to people, and 'military' says 'government' to everybody. But those probably aren't scheduled very far in advance—at least they're irregular, but every damned Wednesday afternoon he hops in his jeep and parades around the Piazza San Pietro right in the middle of the assembled multitude, Al, and that's pistol range." Ryan sat back in his chair and took another sip of the French white.
"I am not sure I'd want to fire a pistol at that close a range."
"Al, once upon a time they got a guy to do Leon Trotsky with an ice axe—engagement range maybe two feet," Ryan reminded him. "Sure, different situation now, but since when have the Russians been reticent about risking their troops—and this will be that Bulgarian bastard, remember? Your guy called him an expert killer. It's amazing what a real expert can do. I saw a gunnery