Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [275]
Some people shot from the hip, Sir Basil thought. Others shot from the heart. For all her outward toughness, the United Kingdom's Chief of Government was one of the latter.
"Yes, Prime Minister." The problem was that she didn't say how the hell he was supposed to do this. Well, he'd coordinate with Arthur at Langley. But for right now he had a mission that would be difficult at best. What exactly was he supposed to do, deploy a squadron of the Special Air Service to St. Peter's Square?
But you didn't say no to this Prime Minister, at least not in a 10 Downing Street conference room.
"Anything else this defector has told us?"
"Yes, ma'am. He has identified by code name a Soviet penetration agent, probably in Whitehall. The code name is MINISTER. When we get more information about the man in question, we'll have the Security Service root about after him."
"What does he give them?"
"Political and diplomatic intelligence, ma'am. Oleg tells us that it is high-level material, but he has not as yet given us information that would directly identify him."
"Interesting." It was not a new story. This one could be one of the Cambridge group that had been so valuable to the USSR back in the war years and then all the way into the 1960s, or perhaps a person recruited by them. Charleston had been instrumental in purging them out of SIS, but Whitehall wasn't quite his patch. "Do keep me posted on that." A casual order from her had the force of a granite slab hand-delivered from Mt. Sinai.
"Of course, Prime Minister."
"Would it be helpful if I spoke to the American President on this matter with the Pope?"
"Better to let CIA brief him first, I think. It wouldn't do to short-circuit their system. This defector was, after all, mainly an American operation, and it's Arthur's place to speak to him first."
"Yes, I suppose so. But when I do talk to him, I want him to know that we are taking it with the utmost seriousness, and that we expect him to take some substantive action."
"Prime Minister, I should think he will not take it lying down, as it were."
"I agree. He's such a good chap." The full story on America's covert support for the Falkland Islands War would not see the light of day for many years. America had to keep her fences with South America well mended, after all. But neither was the PM one to forget such assistance, covert or not.
"This BEATRIX operation, it was well executed?" she asked C.
"Flawlessly, ma'am," Charleston assured her. "Our people did everything exactly by the book."
"I trust you will look after those who carried it out."
"Most certainly, ma'am," C assured her.
"Good. Thank you for coming over, Sir Basil."
"A pleasure as always, Prime Minister." Charleston stood, thinking that that Ryan fellow would have called her his sort of broad. As, indeed, she was. But all the way back to Century House, he worried about the operation he now had to get under way. What, exactly, would he be doing about it? Figuring such things out, of course, was why he was so lavishly paid.
* * *
"HI, HONEY," Ryan said.
"Where are you?" Cathy asked at once.
"I can't say exactly, but I'm back in England. The thing I had to do on the continent—well, it developed into something I have to look after here."
"Can you come home and see us?"
"'Fraid not." One major problem was that, although his Chatham home was actually within driving distance, he wasn't confident enough yet to drive that far without crunching himself on a side road. "Everybody okay?"
"We're fine, except that you aren't here," Cathy responded, with an edge of anger/disappointment in her voice. One thing she was sure of: Wherever Jack had been, it sure as hell hadn't been Germany. But she couldn't say that over the phone. She understood the intelligence business that much.
"I'm sorry, babe. I can tell you that what I'm doing is pretty important, but that's all."
"I'm sure," she conceded. And she understood that