The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [39]
"Really? Tell Castro that next time you see him." Ryan suggested.
"You're getting better at this, Jack."
"Thank you, Sergey. My government is most gratified indeed for your President's recent statement on terrorism. Hell, I like the guy personally. You know that. We're changing the world, man. Let's clean a few more messes up. You never approved of your government's support for those creeps."
"What makes you believe that?" the First Deputy Chairman asked.
"Sergey, you're a professional intelligence officer. There's no way you can personally approve the actions of undisciplined criminals. I feel the same way, of course, but in my case it's personal." Ryan leaned back with a hard look. He would always remember Sean Miller and the other members of the Ulster Liberation Army who'd made two earnest attempts to kill Jack Ryan and his family. Only three weeks earlier, after years exhausting every legal opportunity, after three writs to the Supreme Court, after demonstrations and appeals to the Governor of Maryland and the President of the United States for executive clemency, Miller and his colleagues had, one by one, walked into the gas chamber in Baltimore, and been carried out half an hour later, quite dead. And may God have mercy on their souls, Ryan thought. If God has a strong enough stomach. One chapter in his life was now closed for good.
"And the recent incident ?"
"The Indians? That merely illustrates my case. Those "revolutionaries" were dealing drugs to make money. They're going to turn on you, the people you used to fund. In a few years, they're going to be more of a problem for you than they ever were for us." That was entirely correct, of course, and both men knew it. The terrorist-drug connection was something the Soviets were starting to worry about. Free enterprise was starting most rapidly of all in Russia's criminal sector. That was as troubling to Ryan as to Golovko. "What do you say?"
Golovko inclined his head to the side. "I will discuss it with the Chairman. He will approve."
"Remember what I said over in Moscow a couple of years back? Who needs diplomats to handle negotiations when you have real people to settle things?"
"I expected a quote from Kipling or something similarly poetic," the Russian observed dryly. "So, how do you deal with your Congress?"
Jack chuckled. "Short version is, you tell them the truth."
"I needed to fly eleven thousand kilometers to hear you say that?"
"You select a handful of people in your parliament you can trust to keep their mouths shut, and whom the rest of parliament trust to be completely honest and that's the hard part and you brief them into everything they need to know. You have to set up ground rules."
"Ground rules?"
"A baseball term, Sergey. It means the special rules that apply to a specific playing field."
Golovko's eyes lit up. "Ah, yes, that is a useful term."
"Everyone has to agree on the rules, and you may never, ever break them." Ryan paused. He was talking like a college lecturer again, and it wasn't fair to speak that way to a fellow professional.
Golovko frowned. That was the hard part, of course: never, ever breaking the rules. The intelligence business wasn't often that cut and dried. And conspiracy was part of the Russian soul.
"It's worked for us," Ryan added.
Or has it? Ryan wondered. Sergey knows if it has or not well, he knows some things that I don't. He could tell me if we've had major leaks on The Hill,since Peter Henderson but at the same time he knows that we've penetrated so many of their operations despite their manic passion for the utmost secrecy. Even the Soviets had admitted it publicly: the hemorrhage of defectors from KGB over the years had gutted scores of exquisitely-planned operations against America and the West. In the Soviet Union as in America, secrecy was designed to shield failure as well as success.
"What it comes down to is trust." Ryan said after another moment.