Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [68]
"Okay, fine, we try to arrange a soft landing."
"Bloody decent of you, Jack."
CHAPTER 7
SIMMERING
ED FOLEYS JOB as Press Attaché was not overly demanding in terms of the time required to stroke the local American correspondents and occasionally others. "Others" included reporters purportedly from Pravda and other Russian publications. Foley assumed that all of them were KGB officers or stringers—there was no difference between the two since KGB routinely used journalistic covers for its field officers. As a result, most Soviet reporters in America as often as not had an FBI agent or two in close attendance, at least when the FBI had agents to spare for the task, which wasn't all that often. Reporters and field intelligence officers had virtually identical functions.
He'd just been pinged hard by a Pravda guy named Pavel Kuritsyn, who was either a professional spook or sure as hell had read a lot of spy novels. Since it was easier to act dumb than smart, he'd fumbled through his Russian, smiling with apparent pride at how well he'd mastered the complex language. For his part, Kuritsyn had advised the American to watch Russian TV, the quicker to master the mother tongue. Foley had then drafted a contact report for the CIA files, noting that this Pavel Yevgeniyevich Kuritsyn smelled like a Second Chief Directorate boy who was checking him out, and opining that he thought he'd passed the test. You couldn't be sure, of course. For all he knew, the Russians did employ people who read minds. Foley knew that they'd experimented in almost everything, even something called remote viewing, which to his professional mind was a step down from gypsy fortune-tellers—but which had gotten the Agency to start a program of its own, much to Foley's disgust. For Ed Foley, if you couldn't hold it, then it wasn't real. But there was no telling what those pantywaists in the Directorate of Intelligence would try, just to bypass what the DO people—the real spooks in CIA—had to do every goddamned day.
It was enough that Ivan had eyes, and Christ knew how many ears, in the embassy, though the building was regularly swept by electronics experts. (Once they'd even succeeded in planting a bug in the ambassador's own office.) Just across the street was a former church that was used by KGB. In the U.S. Embassy, it was known as Our Lady of the Microchips, because the structure was full of microwave transmitters aimed at the embassy, their function being to interfere with all the listening devices that Station Moscow used to tap in to Soviet phone and radio systems. The amount of radiation that came in flirted with dangerous-to-your-health levels, and as a result the embassy was protected with metal sheeting in the drywall, which reflected a lot of it right back at the people across the street. The game had rules, and the Russians pretty much played within them, but the rules often didn't make a hell of a lot of sense. There had been quiet protests to the local natives about the microwaves, but these were invariably met with shrugs of "Who, us?" And that was as far as it usually went. The embassy doc said he wasn't worried—but his office was in the basement, shielded from the radiation by stone and dirt. Some people said you could cook a hot dog by putting it on the east-facing windowsills.
Two people who did know about Ed Foley were the ambassador and the Defense Attaché. The former was Ernest Fuller. Fuller looked like an illustration from a book about patricians: tall, slim, with a regal mane of white hair. In fact, he'd grown up on an Iowa hog farm, gotten a scholarship to Northwestern University, and then a law degree, which had taken him to corporate boardrooms, where he finally ended up as CEO of a major auto company. Along the way, he'd served three years in the U.S. Navy in World War II on the light cruiser USS Boise during the Guadalcanal campaign. He was regarded as a serious player and a gifted amateur by the embassy's FSOs.
The Defense Attaché was Brigadier General George Dalton. By profession an