Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [28]
"You will, of course, take his place when the time conies," Andropov offered as the promise of an alliance.
Alexandrov demurred, of course… or pretended to: "There are many good men in the Party Secretariat."
The Chairman of the Committee for State Security waved his hand dismissively. "You are the most senior and the most trusted."
Which Alexandrov well knew. "You are kind to say so, Yuriy. So, what will we do about this foolish Pole?"
And that, so baldly stated, would be the cost of the alliance. To get Alexandrov's support for the General Secretaryship, Andropov would have to make the ideologue's blanket a little thicker by… well, by doing something he was already thinking about anyway. That was painless, wasn't it?
The KGB Chairman adopted a clinical, businesslike tone of voice: "Misha, to undertake an operation of this sort is not a trivial or a simple exercise. It must be planned very carefully, prepared with the greatest caution and thoroughness, and then the Politburo must approve it with open eyes."
"You must have something in mind…"
"I have many things in mind, but a daydream is not a plan. To move forward requires some in-depth thinking and planning merely to see if such a thing is possible. One cautious step at a time," Andropov warned. "Even then, there are no guarantees or promises to be made. This is not something for a movie production. The real world, Misha, is complex." It was as close as he could come to telling Alexandrov not to stray too far from his sandbox of theories and toys and into the real world of blood and consequences.
"Well, you are a good Party man. You know what the stakes in this game are." With those words, Alexandrov told his host what was expected by the Secretariat. For Mikhail Yevgeniyevich, the Party and its beliefs were the State—and the KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party.
Oddly, Andropov realized, this Polish Pope surely felt the same about his beliefs and his view of the world. But those beliefs weren't, strictly speaking, an ideology, were they? Well, for these purposes, they might as well be, Yuriy Vladimirovich told himself.
"My people will look at this carefully. We cannot do the impossible, Misha, but—"
"But what is impossible for this agency of the Soviet state?" A rhetorical question with a bloody answer. And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized.
How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideology that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy. Surely he regarded both Russia and communism as enemies, one for nationalistic reasons, the other for reasons of his religious conviction… But did he fear that enemy?
No, probably not, Yuriy Vladimirovich admitted to himself. That made his task harder. His was an agency that needed fear to get its way. Fear was its source of power, and a man lacking fear was a man he could not manipulate…
But those whom he could not manipulate could always be killed. Who, after all, remembered much about Leon Trotsky?
"Few things are truly impossible. Merely difficult," the Chairman belatedly agreed.
"So, you will look into the possibilities?"
He nodded cautiously. "Yes, starting in the morning." And so the processes began.
CHAPTER 3
EXPLORATIONS
"WELL, JACK'S GOT HIS DESK in London," Greer told his colleagues on the Seventh Floor.
"Glad to hear it," Bob Ritter observed. "Think he knows what to