Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [282]
"Any details?"
"'Fraid not. I think they sent me down here to work with you until somebody figures out the right thing to do. Looks to me like an attempt might be made Wednesday."
"The weekly appearance in the square?"
Jack nodded. "Yep." They were on the highway from the airport to Rome. The country looked odd to Ryan, but it took a minute to figure out why. Then he got it. The pitch of the roofs was different—shallower than what he was used to. They probably didn't get much snow here in winter. Otherwise the houses looked rather like sugar cubes, painted white to reject the heat of the Italian sun. Well, every country had its unique architecture.
"Wednesday, eh?"
"Yeah. We're also looking for a guy named Boris Strokov, colonel in the Bulgarian DS. Sounds like a professional killer."
Sharp concentrated on the road. "I've heard the name. Wasn't he a suspect in the Georgiy Markov killing?"
"That's the guy. They ought to be sending some photos of him."
"Courier on your flight," Sharp reported. "Taking a different way into the city."
"Any ideas on what the hell to do?"
"We'll get you settled at the embassy—my house, actually, two blocks away. It's rather nice. Then we'll drive down to Saint Peter's and look around, get a feel for things. I've been there to see the artwork and such—the Vatican art collection is on a par with the Queen's—but I've never worked there per se. Ever been to Rome?"
"Never."
"Very well, let's take a drive-about first instead, give you a quick feel for the place."
Rome seemed a remarkably disorganized place—but so did a street map of London, whose city fathers had evidently not been married to the city mothers. And Rome was older by a thousand years or so, built when the fastest thing going was a horse, and they were slower in real life than in a John Ford Western. Not many straight lines for the roads, and a meandering river in the middle. Everything looked old to Ryan—no, not old but old, as though dinosaurs had once walked the streets. That was a little hard to reconcile with the automobile traffic, of course.
"That's the Flavian Amphitheater. It was called the Coliseum because the Emperor Nero had built a large statue of himself right there"—Sharp pointed—"and the people took to calling the stadium by that name, rather to the annoyance of the Flavian family, which built the place out of proceeds from the Jewish rebellion that Josephus wrote about."
Jack had seen it on TV and in the movies, but that wasn't quite the same as driving past it. Men had built that with nothing more than sweat power and hemp ropes. Its shape was strangely reminiscent of Yankee Stadium in New York. But Babe Ruth had never spilled a guy's guts out in the Bronx. A lot of that had happened here. It was time for Ryan to make an admission.
"You know, if they ever invent a time machine, I think I might like to come back and see what it was like. Makes me a barbarian, doesn't it?"
"Just their version of rugby," Sharp said. "And the football here can be pretty tough."
"Soccer is a girl's game," Jack snorted.
"You are a barbarian, Sir John. Soccer," he explained in his best accent, "is a gentleman's game played by thugs, while rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen."
"I'll take your word for it. I just want to see the International Tribune. My baseball team's in the World Series, and I don't even know how it's going."
"Baseball? Oh, you mean rounders. Yes, that is a girl's game," Sharp announced.
"I've had this talk before. You Brits just don't understand."
"As you do not understand proper football, Sir John. In Italy it's even more a national passion than at home. They tend to play a fiery game, rather different from the Germans, for example, who play like great bloody machines."
It was like listening to the distinction between a curveball and a slider or a screwball and a forkball. Ryan wasn't all that good a baseball fan to be able to grasp all the distinctions; it depended on the TV announcer, who probably just made it up anyway. But he knew that there wasn't