Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [77]
And yet, what was KGB but an agency that lived on betrayal? How many hundreds—thousands—of dispatches had he read about just that? Those were Westerners—Americans, Britons, Germans, Frenchmen—all used by KGB to find out things that his country wanted to know—and they were all traitors to their mother countries, weren't they? They did it mainly for money. He'd seen a lot of those messages, too, discussions between The Centre and the rezidenturas discussing the amounts of payment. He knew that The Centre was always niggardly with the money it paid out, which was to be expected. The agents wanted American dollars, British pounds sterling, Swiss francs. And cash, real paper money—they always wanted to be paid in cash. Never rubles or even certificate rubles. It was the only money they trusted, clearly enough. They betrayed their country for money, but only for their own money. Some of them even demanded millions of dollars, not that they ever got it. The most he'd ever seen authorized was £50,000, paid out for information about British and American naval ciphers. What would the Western powers not pay for the communications information in his mind? Zaitzev thought idly. It was a question with no answer. He did not really have the ability to frame the question properly, much less consider the answer seriously.
"Here you go," Rozhdestvenskiy said, handing over the message blanks. "Send them out at once."
"As soon as I get them enciphered," the communicator promised.
"And the same security as before," the colonel added.
"Certainly. Same identifier tag on both?" Oleg Ivanovich asked.
"Correct, all with this number," he replied, tapping the 666 in the upper-right corner.
"By your order, Comrade Colonel. I'll see to it right now."
"And call me when they go out."
"Yes, Comrade Colonel. I have your office number," Zaitzev assured him.
There was more to it than the mere words, Oleg knew. The tone of his voice had told him much. This was going out under the direct order of the Chairman, and all this attention made it a matter of the highest priority, not just something of routine interest to an important man. This wasn't about ordering pantyhose for some bigwig's teenage daughter.
He walked to the cipher-book storage room to get two books, the ones for Rome and Sofia, and then he pulled out his cipher wheel and laboriously encrypted both messages. All in all, it took forty minutes. The message to Colonel Bubovoy in Sofia was a simple one: Fly to Moscow immediately for consultations. Zaitzev wondered if that would make the rezident's, knees wobble a little. Colonel Bubovoy could not know what the numerical identifier meant, of course. He'd find out soon enough.
The rest of Zaitzev's day went routinely. He managed to lock up his confidential papers and walk out before six in the evening.
* * *
LUNCH AT CENTURY HOUSE was good, but British-eccentric. Ryan had learned to enjoy the British Ploughman's Lunch, mainly because the bread was so uniformly excellent over here.
"So, your wife's a surgeon?"
Jack nodded. "Yeah, eye cutter. She's actually starting to use lasers for some things now. She's hoping to be a pioneer in that stuff."
"Lasers? What for?" Harding asked.
"Some of it's like welding. They use a laser to cauterize a leaky blood vessel, for instance—they did it with Suslov. Blood leaked inside the eye, so they drilled into the eyeball and drained out all the fluid—aqueous humor, I think they call it—and then used lasers to weld shut the leaky vessels. Sounds pretty yucky, doesn't it?"
Harding shuddered at the thought. "I suppose it's better than being blind."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when Sally was in shock-trauma. The idea of somebody carving up my little girl didn't exactly thrill me." Ryan remembered how fucking awful that had been, in fact. Sally still had the scars on her chest and abdomen from it, though they were fading.
"What about you, Jack? You've been under the knife before," Simon observed.
"I was asleep, and they didn't make videos of the operations—but you know,