Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [97]
His office was as shabby as usual—it was part of his cover to be a little on the untidy side.
But his cover did not include the communications department. It couldn't. Heading embassy comms was Mike Russell, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Army Security Agency—ASA was the Army's own communications-security arm—and now a civilian with the National Security Agency, which officially did the same for the entire government.
Moscow was a hardship tour for Russell. Black and divorced-single, he didn't get much female action here, since the Russians were notoriously dubious of people with dark skin. The knock on the door was distinctive.
"Come on in, Mike," Foley said.
"Morning, Ed." Russell was under six feet, and he needed to watch his eating by the look of his waist. But he was a good guy with codes and comms, and that was sufficient for the moment. "Quiet night for you."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, just this." He fished an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it over. "Nothing important, looks like." He had also decrypted the dispatch. Even the ambassador wasn't cleared as high as the head of communications. Foley was suddenly glad for Russian racism. It made Mike that much less likely to get turned. That was a scary thought. Of all the people in the embassy, Mike Russell was the one guy who could rat everyone out, which was why intelligence services always tried to corrupt cipher clerks, the underpaid and spat-upon people who had enormous information power in any embassy.
Foley took the envelope and opened it. The dispatch inside was lower than routine, proof positive that CIA was just one more government bureaucracy, however important its work might be. He snorted and entered the paper into his shredder, where rotating steel wheels reduced it to fragments about two centimeters square.
"Must be nice to get your day's work done in ten seconds," Russell observed, with a laugh.
"Wasn't like that in Vietnam, I bet."
"Not hardly. I remember once one of my troops DF'd a VC transmitter at MAC-V headquarters, and that was one busy night."
"Get him?"
"Oh yeah," Russell replied with a nod. "The locals were seriously pissed about that little dink. He came to a bad end, they told me." Russell had been a first lieutenant then. A Detroit native, his father had built B-24 bombers during World War II, and had never stopped telling his son how much more satisfying that had been than making Fords. Russell detested everything about this country (they didn't even appreciate good soul music!), but the extra pay that came with duty here—Moscow was officially a hardship posting—would buy him a nice place on the Upper Peninsula someday, where he'd be able to hunt birds and deer to his heart's content. "Anything to go out, Ed?"
"Nope, not today—not yet, anyway."
"Roger that. Have a good one." And Russell disappeared out the door.
It wasn't like the spy novels—the job of a CIA officer was composed of a good deal more boredom than excitement. At least two-thirds of Foley's time as a field officer was taken up with writing reports that somebody at Langley might or might not read, and/or waiting for meets that might or might not come off. He had case officers to do most of the street work, because his identity was too sensitive to risk exposure—something about which he had to lecture his wife on occasion. Mary Pat just liked the action a little too much. It was somewhat worrying, though neither of them faced much real physical danger. They both had diplomatic immunity, and the Russians were assiduous about respecting that, for the most part. Even if things should get a little rough, it would never be really rough. Or so he told himself.