Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [43]
"Where's the speech?" the DDI asked.
"Chicago, next week. There's a large ethnic Polish population there," Moore explained. "He'll talk about the shipyard workers, of course, and point out that he once headed his own union. I haven't seen the speech yet, but I expect it will be mainly vanilla, with a few chocolate chips tossed in."
"And the papers will say that he's courting the blue-collar vote," Jim Greer observed. Sophisticated as they purported to be, the newspapers didn't catch on to much until you presented it to them with french fries and ketchup. They were masters of political discourse, but they didn't know shit about how the real game was played until they were briefed-in, preferably with single-syllable words. "Will our Russian friends notice?"
"Perhaps. They have good people reading the tea leaves at the U.S.-Canada Institute. Maybe someone will drop a word en passant in a casual conversation over at Foggy Bottom that we look upon the Polish situation with some small degree of concern, since we have so many American citizens of Polish ancestry. Can't take it much further than that at the moment," Moore explained.
"So, we're concerned about Poland, but not the Pope right now," Ritter clarified the situation.
"We don't know about that yet, do we?" the DCI asked rhetorically.
"Won't they wonder why the Pope didn't let us in on his threat…?"
"Probably not. The wording of the letter suggests a private communication."
"Not so private that Warsaw didn't forward it to Moscow," Ritter objected.
"As my wife likes to say, that's different," Moore pointed out.
"You know, Arthur, sometimes this wheels-inside-of-other-wheels stuff gives me a headache," Greer observed.
"The game has rules, James."
"So does boxing, but those are a lot more straightforward."
" 'Protect yourself at all times,' " Ritter pointed out. "That's Rule Number One here, too. Well, we don't have any specific warnings yet, do we?" Heads shook wordlessly. No, they didn't. "What else did he say, Arthur?"
"He wants us to find out if there's any danger to His Holiness. If anything happens to him, our President is going to be seriously pissed."
"Along with a billion or so Catholics," Greer agreed.
"You suppose the Russians might contract the Northern Irish Protestants to do the hit?" Ritter asked, with a nasty smile. "They don't like him either, remember. Something for Basil to look into."
"Robert, that's a little too far off the wall, I think," Greer analyzed. "They hate communism almost as much as Catholicism, anyway."
"Andropov doesn't think that far outside the box," Moore decided. "Nobody over there does. If he decides to take the Pope out, he'll use his own assets and try to be clever about it. That's how we'll know if, God forbid, it goes that far. And if it looks as if he's leaning that way, we'll have to dissuade him from that notion."
"It won't get that far. The Politburo is too circumspect," said the DDL "And it's too unsubtle for them. It's not the sort of thing a chess player does, and chess is still their national game."
"Tell that to Leon Trotsky," Ritter said sharply.
"That was personal. Stalin wanted to eat his liver with onions and gravy," Greer replied. "That was pure personal hatred, and it achieved nothing on the political level."
"Not the way Uncle Joe looked at it. He was genuinely afraid of Trotsky—"
"No, he wasn't. Okay, you can say he was a paranoid bastard, but even he knew the difference between paranoia and genuine fear." Greer knew that statement was a mistake the moment the words escaped his lips. He covered his tracks: "And even if he was afraid of the old goat, the current crop isn't like that. They lack Stalin's paranoia but, more to the point, they lack his decisiveness."
"Jim, you're wrong. The Warsaw Letter is a potentially dangerous threat to their political stability, and they will take that seriously."
"Robert, I didn't know you were that religious," Moore joked.
"I'm not, and neither are they, but they will be worried