Tom Clancy Red Winter, page 2
“Embarrassed, more than anything,” she said, brushing the snow off her coat and checking herself for breaks. “Everything bends the way it’s supposed to.”
It was something her grandfather always said.
The mugger hadn’t really had time to take anything from her purse, but Ruby stepped under the streetlight to check anyway. She paused when she saw what was inside. Looked up at the crowd in disbelief and then back to the purse.
This couldn’t be right. It was her bag, but instead of stealing anything, the kid, or someone, had put something inside it. A brown paper bag with a folded piece of typing paper and a black eight-inch floppy.
Ruby whistled to get the sergeant’s attention as he returned to the group holding the mugger to the ground. She held up the purse when he turned. “You took this directly off of him?”
The sergeant shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I helped to pin him down. That lady . . .” He turned to look at the group standing over the downed mugger. “I don’t see her anymore, but I’m pretty sure she was German. She’d already picked it up, I guess. She handed it to me and I gave it back to you.”
“Thanks,” Ruby said, staring into her open purse at the computer disk. The paper had an address in Chantilly, Virginia, and a hastily scrawled note that read: I wish to speak to someone in your Special Services. Instructions to proceed are on disk. You will find decryption code at Virginia location. Involve no one stationed in Germany.
Ruby closed the purse, squeezing the clasp until her knuckles hurt. She looked over her shoulder. Someone had to be watching her. And who was the lady who’d given the sergeant the purse? Why not just give it back herself?
Wanting to “speak to Special Services” was a kind of shorthand in the diplomatic world.
Whoever this was wanted to defect.
This was big. The CIA at USBER, probably Army Intelligence, a gob of people would want to talk to this mugger kid, find out who he was, and what he knew, and the woman, too, if they could find her.
A murmur ran through the crowd.
Someone said, “Stand back.”
“Give him some room,” said another.
It was dark and snowing and the crowd was so large now that from her vantage point, Keller could just make out her assailant’s head. His wool hat had come off in the scuffle. Long hair splayed over the snow. Then one of the sergeant’s friends who’d been stooped over the motionless figure stood up and edged away.
“Whoa! I think this guy’s dead.”
2
Dr. Cathy Ryan tossed her dressing gown on a paisley Queen Anne chair and fell back on her pillows, giving an exaggerated bounce against the mattress. “He’s down and out and it’s not quite ten p.m.!” She sighed. “It’s a miracle.”
On the other side of the bed, thirty-four-year-old Jack Ryan lowered an open folder to peer over the top of his light bedtime reading, a British Secret Intelligence Service study titled A Soviet View of the Threat Posed by American Pershing II Missiles Deployed in Europe. The document was marked Confidential rather than Secret. It had to be checked out from the office, and Ryan was allowed to bring it home to study as long as he secured it in the home safe MI6 had graciously provided.
A colder-than-usual London November nipped at the windows, promising a hell of a winter—but the bedroom was what Ryan called “Cathy-warm,” meaning she could sleep in a light silk gown instead of one of the flannel grannie ones she wore if he turned down the heat.
Not the pajama type, Jack wore a white T-shirt and jogging shorts to bed, making it easier to roll out and throw on some sweats before lacing up his Nikes and braving the snowy streets around their home as soon as he got up in the morning. He was built like a runner, six one and trim, with a full head of dark hair that framed a longish face. Jack Ryan was also a doctor, though as his eight-year-old daughter often pointed out, “not the useful kind.” He held a Ph.D. in history.
Cathy sighed again, as if she wanted his attention, moving her feet just enough to draw his gaze downward toward her freshly manicured toes. Cathy was her own woman to be sure, but she generally yielded to Jack’s preference that nail polish looked best when it was a color that would look good on a sports car. She’d gone with something called Misty Cinnamon this time—close enough to candy-apple red. Her gown had hiked up to mid-thigh, leaving gorgeous legs alluringly exposed.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and knelt to open the safe so he could put away the folder.
Cathy chuckled. “I knew I married a rule-keeper . . . but . . .”
He jumped back onto the bed with an exaggerated bounce, scooting closer.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have come in and helped with the hellion. I got carried away reading about this Soviet general secretary . . .”
“That’s fine,” Cathy said. “Honestly.”
“How about Sally?” Ryan asked after their daughter.
“She’s still out.” Cathy nestled against her pillow with a long yawn. “Surrounded by stacks of books.” She yawned again, fluttered her eyes. “I’m glad we named that boy Jack Junior. He’s got my heart, like his father, but he can also drive me crazy—”
“Like his father?”
“You got that right, mister,” she said. “Did you know he’s already got a girlfriend? Can you imagine? Four years old.”
Ryan grinned. “Who’s the lucky girl?”
“Little Maeve Norwood.”
“Daughter of the Right Honorable Member of Parliament Warren James Norwood?” Ryan feigned a British accent. “Good fellow, that one. A fine family. I heartily approve of the arrangement.”
Cathy gave him a playful smack on the arm. “She’ll probably just break his heart.”
“He’s four.” Ryan took off his watch and leaned over to set it on his side table. “If I move his toy Corvette it breaks his heart. Anyway, we Ryan men have an eye for highly intelligent, extremely beautiful women.”
Cathy rolled onto her side. A lock of blond hair fell across her baby blues. “You’re briefing with your MI6 overlords tomorrow. I suppose you should get right to sleep.”
Jack swallowed. “My meeting isn’t until nine a.m.”
“Good.” Cathy kicked the sheets off the end of the bed. “Because . . . you know . . . a woman has knees . . .”
Jack opened his mouth to speak but the phone rang, cutting him off. He cursed under his breath. It wasn’t that late, but ten p.m. calls were rarely good news.
An ophthalmic surgeon, Cathy got far more calls than he did, so the phone was on her side of the bed. She picked it up before it woke Jack Junior, listened for a moment, and then passed it across to Jack, scooting up against the headboard so the cord didn’t fall across her face.
The familiar resonance of Admiral James Greer’s voice poured out of the receiver.
“Jack,” the CIA deputy director of intelligence said. “I know it’s late. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
Ryan’s parents had been killed in a plane crash just a decade earlier and the savvy intelligence officer had become a sort of stand-in father over the years. If Ryan considered anyone his mentor, it was Jim Greer. He’d walk barefoot over broken glass for that man.
“No, Admiral,” Ryan said. “Not at all.” He shot a glance at Cathy. “Just catching up on some reading.”
“Good,” Greer said. “How’s London treating you, Jack?”
“All good on this side of the pond, sir,” Ryan said. “Excellent colleagues, Cathy’s enjoying her work, kids have lots of friends . . .” His eyes narrowed. Greer knew exactly what time it was. Deputy directors at the CIA didn’t call to chat at ten o’clock at night. “Why do you ask?”
As was his custom, the admiral circled the issue once, then got to his reason for the call . . . in his own enigmatic way. He spoke for just three minutes before saying, “Give my love to Cathy,” and then hanging up as some other important matter drew him away.
“What was that all about?” Cathy asked after Jack cradled the phone and lay down to stare at the ceiling.
“He wants me to come to D.C.,” Jack said.
“I know you probably can’t talk about it,” she said, clutching a pillow to her chest like a shield against bad news. “But is something up?”
“No,” Jack said. “. . . And yes, maybe. I couldn’t tell. He didn’t mention a specific assignment, but I’ll tell you what I think. I think he’s considering me for another job.”
She perked up at that. “At Langley?”
“I could be way off,” Jack said, slightly dumbfounded. “But that’s what I’m gleaning.”
His brain was in overdrive, parsing through the admiral’s every word and inflection.
“You analyze things for a living, sweetheart. Pretty sure you can read Jim Greer.”
“He says there are some people I need to get to know . . . and that he ‘wants to run some ideas by me.’ ”
“Well.” Cathy let the pillow fall away, relaxing by degree. “I’m prejudiced, but I think that’s a smart move on their part. It wouldn’t hurt to have you over there helping make sure the Cold War doesn’t boil over.”
“And you’re ready to leave London if it happens?”
“There’s something visceral about this place,” she said. “Something incredibly real. I mean, the bomb smoke and brick dust from World War II have barely even settled. I am supremely happy here, and I’m sure I’ll be supremely happy back in the States as well.”
“But the kids’ schools,” Jack said. “Your work, all the relationships we’ve built.”
“True enough.” Cathy rolled up on one elbow to face him. “But the whole world’s a shitshow right now, Jack. South Africa, Eastern Europe. And don’t get me started on the Soviets in Afghanistan.”
“You’re right,” Ryan said. “But we look at all of that from our offices here. Keeping an eye on the shitshow is pretty much my exact job description.”
For the past several years, Ryan had been assigned as the CIA liaison to the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service—SIS, commonly called MI6. The Brits and the Yanks shared everything—mostly. They were the two “big brothers” in Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance consisting of the U.S., the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Springing from World War II when British and American codebreakers had worked together at Bletchley to defeat the Nazis, the Five Eyes alliance took its name from the classification and releasability designation on intelligence cover sheets—AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/U.S. EYES ONLY.
As young as he was, Jack Ryan was a millionaire several times over, having made his fortune on several intelligent gambles in the stock market—some of which had impressed the father of the beautiful blonde beside him now. He didn’t need this job—in England or in Virginia—but the job needed to be done, and he was good at it. Damned good.
“They’ve been asking me to come back to Wilmer,” Cathy said, pulling him back to the present. She’d gone to med school at Johns Hopkins and naturally impressed the surgeons there at the Wilmer Eye Institute.
“Makes sense,” Jack said. “It would be a no-brainer for them to take you back. I could be reading this all wrong. Greer might not ask me to stay.”
Cathy shuffled her legs again, rubbing the top of one foot with the other. “Reading things is what you do, sweetheart.”
“I do, don’t I.” Ryan’s eyebrow shot upward. “It’s my specialty.”
“One of many,” she said.
He pushed aside thoughts of D.C. and the often-internecine politics of Langley. “How about we see to those womanly knees you were talking—”
The bedroom suddenly flooded with light from the hall as the door creaked open. Ryan raised up to see the silhouette of his four-year-old son, Jack Junior, clutching his favorite toy Corvette.
“Mommy . . .”
3
The National Security Agency’s listening post perched atop a hill deep in West Berlin’s Grunewald Forest was monumentally indiscreet for a spy station. Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain, was actually no mountain at all, but an 80-meter pile of overgrown bricks stacked on top of a never-completed Nazi military-technical college by Trümmerfrauen. These “rubble women” dug out and piled the debris from some four hundred thousand German homes and buildings that had been destroyed during World War II. Allied personnel who staffed the surveillance post called it the Hill. The huge spherical radomes prompted the locals to dub the installation “Berlin’s Balls.” Visible but shrouded in secrecy, the shared British and U.S. installation was the subject of all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories. Some thought a secret shaft below the installation led to an underground submarine base or a hidden nuclear weapon. The Stasi even opened an investigation that hypothesized there was a secret tunnel leading into the East, used for the most sensitive escapes. In reality, the white globes and antennas simply gathered signals intelligence from the other side of the Berlin Wall and all over the Eastern Bloc. Soviets and East Germans openly groused that the West was able to “hear their farts.”
Sergeant Dennis McCambridge, an Army Intel signals clerk with the Berlin Brigade, adjusted his headset and fiddled with the amplifier in front of him.
“What you got?” Staff Sergeant Ramirez asked from the workstation beside him.
“Another hit on FLEDERMAUS,” Sergeant McCambridge said. He made a note in the time log at his workstation.
Ramirez flipped through the pages of his notepad. “Third mention in two weeks.”
“And that’s just the times we’re picking up,” McCambridge said. “Weird word to use so often in a sentence.”
Warsaw Pact nations ran frequent training ops, but FLEDERMAUS didn’t appear to be one of those. For one thing, it was German, not Russian. Worse yet, the word was often heard in conjunction with U.S. or British operations or weapons systems—at least so far as the coded messages could be understood. FLEDERMAUS was a person—and, from the sound of things, that person was substantiating bits of Western intel.
That was above Sergeant McCambridge’s pay grade. He listened, made notes, and then sent those notes up the chain to someone who had the big picture. FLEDERMAUS . . . He had to admit, that was a kickass code name.
The BAT.
“Note the time stamp on the tape when you heard it,” Ramirez said. “Get some DAFL guys to give it a listen. See if we missed any idioms.”
McCambridge chuckled.
“E-I-E-I-O,” he said.
Ramirez loved to make up his own acronyms. In Ramirezese, DAFL meant Deutsch As a First Language. No matter what you called them, it was a good idea—and standard procedure. Sergeants Ramirez and McCambridge had both been to DLIFLC—a real acronym that stood for the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey. Their German was very good, but it took a native speaker to catch the subtle nuances and idioms. “Tote Oma” tripped up most everyone the first time they heard it. Translated literally, it meant “dead grandma,” but was in reality a mashed blood sausage. You had to grow up here to get that kind of thing on the fly.
“Maybe FLEDERMAUS is a spy,” McCambridge mused. “Some East German infiltrator?”
“Maybe,” Ramirez said. “Hell, we’re spies, Weedhopper. Shouldn’t surprise us that they’re spying on us. The guys in ops are probably already hunting this one down. Our lowly asses will never get to know a damn thing unless we hear chatter from the other side . . .” He glanced at McCambridge. “And anyway, who says FLEDERMAUS has to be German?”
4
Greasy hair splayed like a halo in the snow around the mugger’s head. He stared skyward, face pulled back into a terrifying grimace. But he wasn’t dead. Not yet. White froth bubbled from the corners of his mouth. His body writhed and seethed like a rattlesnake Ruby’s grandfather had once thrown into a campfire.
The resigned look on the paramedics’ faces as they loaded him into the back of an ambulance said he would not likely make it to the hospital.
Ruby told the responding military and West German police what she knew—which was almost nothing—but kept the information about the cryptic note and computer disk to herself.
The puzzle of it all gave her a worse headache than the fall had. Why her? They were in the West. If someone wanted to defect, why hadn’t they just walked into the U.S. Mission? She was new to State and West Berlin. Was she being turned into some kind of scapegoat?
“Crapola,” she said under her breath, blowing a cloud of vapor in the cold. It was pretty much the strongest byword her mother had allowed in the house. They’d covered defections during her Foreign Service officer training, but the information was sparse. Essentially, refer everything to the CIA. Even so, Ruby had read enough Ludlum to know what to do.
This was going to be one of those stories she could tell her kids someday, how she helped some Russian or East German flee the repression of communism. She found a pay phone outside the McDonald’s and called the USBER switchboard. The mission was only a few blocks away, but this information wasn’t something she could sit on, even for a few minutes. She had to let someone in charge know what she had.
The United States government was prickly about Germans getting their diplomatic mission in Berlin confused with an embassy, so Army military police were assigned security duties rather than the Marine Corps guards that embassies got.
Ruby barely mentioned receiving the mysterious computer disk before the soldier who answered the phone, an Army sergeant who’d flirted with her when she’d left, instructed her to return immediately to USBER without saying anything else over the telephone. He obviously had a lot more experience with this sort of thing than she did.
It took her fifteen minutes to walk back down Clayallee, imagining Stasi operatives behind every tree and park bench the entire way. To her dismay, no one spoke to her or even looked in her direction. Still, she felt like she might pass out by the time she reached the flirtatious sergeant at the front doors. A local German woman from the cleaning staff was already buffing the tile floor.
