Free Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy Page A

in place at a suspiciously clean desk. Jack tried it out. The room was going to be a little crowded, but not too badly so. His desk phone had a scrambler under it for making secure calls, Ryan wondered if it worked as well as the STU he'd had at Langley. GCHQ out at Cheltenham worked closely with NSA, and maybe it was the same innards with a different plastic case. He'd have to keep reminding himself that he was in a foreign country. That ought not to be too hard, Ryan hoped. People did talk funny here: gr ah ss, r ah sberry and c ah stle, for example, though the effect of American movies and global television was perverting the English language to the American version slowly but surely.
    “Did Bas talk to you about the Pope?” Simon asked.
    “Yeah. That letter could be a bombshell. He's wondering how Ivan's going to react to it.”
    “We all are, Jack. You have any ideas?”
    “I just told your boss, if Stalin was sitting there, he might want to shorten the Pope's life, but that would be a hell of a big gamble.”
    “The problem, I think, is that although they are rather collegial in their decision-making, Andropov is in the ascendancy, and he might be less reticent than the rest of them.”
    Jack settled back in to his chair. “You know, my wife's friends at Hopkins flew over there a couple of years ago. Mikhail Suslov had diabetic retinopathy of the eyes—he was also a high myope, very nearsighted—and they went over to fix it, and to teach some Russian docs how to do the procedure. Cathy was just a resident then. But Bernie Katz was on the fly team. He's the director at Wilmer. Super eye surgeon, hell of a good guy. The Agency interviewed him and the others after they came back. Ever see that document?”
    There was interest in his eyes now: “No. Is it any good?”
    “One of the things I've learned being married to a doc is that I listen to what she says about people. I'd damned sure listen to Bernie. It's worth reading. There's a universal tendency for people to talk straight to surgeons and, like I said, docs are good for seeing things that most of us miss. They said Suslov was smart, courteous, businesslike, but underneath he was the sort of guy you wouldn't trust with a gun in his hand—or more likely a knife. He really didn't like the fact that he needed Americans to save his sight for him. It didn't tickle his fancy that no Russians were able to do what he needed done. On the other hand, they said that the hospitality was Olympic-class once they did the job. So they're not complete barbarians, which Bernie halfway expected—he's Jewish, family from Poland, back when it belonged to the czar, I think. Want me to have the Agency send that one over?”
    Harding waved a match over his pipe. “Yes, I would like to see that. The Russians—they're a rum lot, you know. In some ways, wonderfully cultured. Russia is the last place in the world where a man can make a decent living as a poet. They revere their poets, and I rather admire that about them, but at the same time… you know, Stalin himself was reticent about going after artists—the writing sort, that is. I remember one chap who lived years longer than one would have expected… Even so, he eventually died in the Gulag. So, their civilization has its limits.”
    “You speak the language? I never learned it.”
    The Brit analyst nodded. “It can be a wonderful language for literature, rather like Attic Greek. It lends itself to poetry, but it masks a capacity for barbarism that makes the blood run cold. They are a fairly predictable people in many ways, especially their political decisions, within limits. Their unpredictability lies in playing off their inherent conservatism against their dogmatic political outlook. Our friend Suslov is seriously ill, heart problems—from the diabetes, I suppose—but the chap behind him is Mikhail Yevgeniyevich Alexandrov, equal parts Russian and Marxist, with the morals of Lavrenti Beria. He bloody hates the West.