Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [56]
"Little Jack sleeps well for five months."
"Maybe it's the jet lag," Ryan thought out loud, though Cathy had said that infants didn't suffer from it. Jack had trouble swallowing that. In any case, the little bastard—Cathy snarled at Jack whenever he said that—hadn't gone to sleep until half past ten the previous night. That was harder on Cathy than on Jack. He could sleep through the noise. She couldn't. "Almost time, honey," Jack called.
"I know, Jack," came the retort. Then she appeared, carrying their son, with Sally following in her yellow bunny-rabbit sleeper. "Hey, little girl." Ryan went over to lift his daughter for a hug and kiss. Sally smiled back and rewarded her daddy with a ferocious hug. How children could wake up in such a good humor was a perverse mystery to him. Maybe it was some important bonding instinct, to make sure their parents looked after them, like when they smiled at mommy and daddy sporadically from their first moment. Clever little critters, babies.
"Jack, put a bottle on," Cathy said, heading with the little guy to the changing table.
"Roger that, doc," the intelligence analyst responded dutifully, doubling back into the kitchen for a bottle of the junk he'd mixed up the previous night—that was man's work, Cathy had made clear to him during Sally's infancy. Like moving furniture and taking out the garbage, the household tasks for which men were genetically prepared.
It was like cleaning a rifle to a soldier: unscrew the top, reverse the nipple, place bottle in pot with four to five inches of water, turn on stove, and wait a few minutes.
That would be Miss Margaret's task, however. Jack saw the taxi outside the window, just pulling onto the parking pad.
"Car's here, babe."
"Okay," was the resigned response. Cathy didn't like leaving her kids for work. Well, probably no mother did. Jack watched her head into the half-bath to wash her hands, then emerge to put on the suit coat that went with her gray outfit—even gray cloth-covered flat shoes. She wanted to make a good first impression. A kiss for Sally, and one for the little guy, and she headed for the door, which Jack held open for her.
The taxi was an ordinary Land Rover saloon car—only London required the classic English taxi for public livery, though some of the older ones found their way into the hinterland. Ryan had arranged the morning pickup the previous day. The driver was one Edward Beaverton, and he seemed awfully chipper for a man who had to work before 7:00 A.M.
"Howdy," Jack said. "Ed, this is my wife. She's the good-looking Dr. Ryan."
"Good morning, mum," the driver said. "You're a surgeon, I understand."
"That's right, ophthalmic—"
Her husband cut her off: "She cuts up eyeballs and sews them back together. You should watch, Eddie, it's fascinating to see how she does it."
The driver shuddered. "Thank you, sir, but, no, thank you."
"Jack just says that to make people throw up," Cathy told the driver. "Besides, he's too much of a wuss to come watch any real surgery."
"And properly so, mum. Much better to cause surgery than to attend it."
"Excuse me?"
"You're a former Marine?"
"That's right. And you?"
"I was in the Parachute Regiment. That's what they taught us: Better to inflict harm on the other bloke than to suffer it yourself."
"Most Marines would agree with that one, pal," Ryan agreed with a chuckle.
"That's not what they taught us at Hopkins," Cathy sniffed.
* * *
IT WAS AN hour later in Rome. Colonel Goderenko, titularly the Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, had about two hours per day of diplomatic duties, but most of his time was taken up by his job as rezident, or Chief of Station for the KGB. It was a busy posting. Rome was a major information nexus for NATO, a city in which one could obtain all manner of political and military intelligence, and that was his main professional concern. He and his