The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan, #4; Jack Ryan Universe, #5)

by Tom Clancy

“Thank you, Major,” the sergeant said as she examined the film from the KA-91 panoramic camera.

“So, Colonel Filitov, we now have you to 1976.” “Dmitri Fedorovich brought me with him when he became Defense Minister. It simplified things, of course.” “And increased your opportunities,” Vatutin observed. “Yes, it did.”

Most damaging of all, Filitov had given the West everything he knew of Soviet strategy—and he knew all there was to know. As

They spent an hour, and still the plan was not as complete as any of them would like, but their training allowed for this. Once committed, the operation would depend on the expertise and judgment of the individual team members, but in the final analysis, such things always did. When they were finished, everyone started moving.

A larger truck, she thought, would take too long to fill with the proper boxes. These she picked up an hour later from a business called the Box Barn. It was something she’d never had to do before—all of her information transfers had been done with film cassettes that fitted easily into one’s pocket—but all she’d needed to do was look through the Yellow Pages and make a few calls. She purchased ten shipping crates made with wood edges and plastic-covered cardboard sides, all neatly broken down for easy assembly. The same place sold her labels to indicate what was inside, and polystyrene shipping filler to protect her shipment. The salesperson insisted on the latter. Tania watched as two men loaded her truck, and drove off.

different. It was one thing to go into a job knowing that a shooting was possible. In the Bureau that chance was always there. You planned for it, always hoping that it would not be necessary—he knew all too well what happened when a cop killed someone, the nightmares, the depression that rarely seemed to appear on TV cop shows. The doc was already flying out, he thought. The Bureau kept a psychiatrist on retainer to help agents through the time after a shooting, because even when you knew that there’d been no choice at all, the human psyche quails before the reality of unnecessary death and punishes the survivor for being alive when his victim is not. That was one price of progress, Paulson thought. It hadn’t always been so, and with criminals in most cases it still wasn’t.

“Who are you?” Gregory asked. “Tania Bisyarina.” She walked

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Rules of the Game

The bodies were bagged and driven to Kirtland, from which they were flown to Dover Air Force Base, where there was a special receiving center staffed by forensic pathologists. The developed photos of the dead KGB officers were sent electronically

began talking about how the case against the surviving KGB agent would be handled. It was determined that he’d broken at least a dozen statutes, evenly divided between federal and state jurisdiction, and various attorneys would have to sort that mess out, even though they knew that the real decision would be made in Washington. They were wrong in that assessment, however. Part of it would be decided elsewhere.

People didn’t go about their business here. For the most part they went about the business assigned to them by someone else. The irony was that he would soon be one of the people giving orders, to a person who’d forgotten how to take them.

this morning he turned left on Kudrinskiy Pereulok—the Russians had at least nine ways of saying “street,” but the nuances were lost on Jack—then right, then left again on Barrikadnaya.

We don’t even know what our country is doing, Narmonov thought to himself. For at

least the past eight years all figures on economic performance had been false in one way or another, each compounding itself on the next until the economic forecasts generated by the GOSPLAN bureaucracy were as fictitious as the list of Stalin’s virtues. The ship he commanded was running deeper and deeper into an enveloping fog of lies told by functionaries whose careers would be destroyed by the truth. That was how he spoke of it at the weekly Politburo meetings. Forty years of rosy goals and predictions had merely plotted a course on a meaningless chart. Even the Politburo itself didn’t know the state of the Soviet Union—something the West hardly suspected. The alternative? That was the rub, wasn’t it? In his darker moments, Narmonov wondered if he or anyone else could really change things. The goal of his entire political life had been to achieve the power that he now held, and only now did he fully understand how circumscribed that power was. All the way up the ladder of his career he’d noted things that had to change, never fully appreciating how difficult that would be. The power he wielded wasn’t the same as Stalin’s had been. His more immediate predecessors had seen to that. Now the Soviet Union wasn’t so much a ship to be guided, as a huge bureaucratic spring that absorbed and dissipated energy and vibrated only to its own inefficient frequency. Unless that changed . . . the West was racing into a new industrial age while the Soviet Union still could not feed itse...

land, and with a racial hatred of all Russians that could make Hitler’s fascist legions seem like a flock of football hooligans. That was a strategic threat to his country that made the nuclear weapons of America and NATO shrivel to insignificance—and still the Party bureaucracy...

He spent his five minutes counting votes. It should have been easier for him than for his American counterpart—in the Soviet Union only full Politburo members had the right to vote, and there were only thirteen of them—but each man represented a collection of interests, and Narmonov was asking each of them to do things never before contemplated. In the final analysis, power still counted for more than anything else,

Perhaps Allah has not deserted us after all. Perhaps He will let us continue this mission. Perhaps we are His instrument, and He will show them through us that they should leave our country lest we come to visit them.”

After thirty years of U.S. demands, the Soviets had finally accepted the idea that both sides should allow officially recognized spying. When that happened, during the previous round of talks on intermediate weapons, the American reaction had been stunned suspicion—Why were the Russians agreeing to our terms? Why did they say yes? What are they really trying to do?

Why? Why did you guys change your mind? Do you know what I said in my National Intelligence Estimate? It hasn’t made the papers yet, but you might have seen it. I said that you finally realized (1) how much the goddamned things cost, (2) that ten thousand warheads was enough to fry all of America eight times over when three or four times was probably enough, and (3) that you’d save money by eliminating all your old missiles, the ones that you can’t maintain very well anymore. It’s just business, I told them, not a change in your outlook. Oh, yes: (4) it’s very good public relations, and you still love to play PR games, even though you screw it up every time. Not that we mind, of course. Once the agreement went through—and Jack thought it would—both sides would save about three percent of their defense outlays; maybe as much as five percent for the Russians because of their more diverse missile systems, but it was hard to be sure. A small fraction of total defense outlays, it would be enough for the Russians to finance a few new factories, or maybe build some roads, which was what they really needed. How would they reallocate their savings? For that matter, how would America?

“And this Colonel Bondarenko?” Vatutin asked. “A fine young officer. Very bright. He’ll make a good general when the time comes.”

The Americans had asked him if he’d seen what the light-beam had hit. They knew it had hit something, then? Something in the sky. Whatever it was, it had frightened the Americans, had frightened the same people who made the missiles with which he had killed so many Russian pilots .

What sort of people would they be that the Russians would put up a building of the sort found only in cities? People who needed comfort. People who had to be guarded. People who worked on something the Americans were afraid of. People he would kill without mercy, the Archer told himself.

“You can’t exactly wear Hart, Schaffner, and Marx and expect to look like a local.”

and a pistol. It was a small one, barely larger than the silencer that sat next to it. “Never seen one of these before,” the Captain said. “Well, that’s a Qual-A-Tec baffle-type silencer with no wipes and a slide-lock internal to the can,” Clark said.

“It’s damned near impossible to silence a big round unless you want a silencer as long as your forearm, like the FBI guys have on their toys. I have to have something that’ll fit in a pocket. This is the best Mickey can do, and he’s the best around.”

For a silencer to work right, it has to be a small caliber, you have to use a subsonic round, and you have to have a sealed breech. And it helps if you’re out in the open. In here, you’d hear it ’cause of the steel walls. Outside, you’d hear something out to thirty feet or so, but you wouldn’t know what it was. The silencer goes on the pistol like this, and you twist it”—he demonstrated—“and now the gun’s a single shot. The silencer locks the action. To get off another round, you have to twist it back and cycle the action manually.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Convergence

Maria and Katryn Gerasimov always got the sort of VIP treatment that they deserved as the immediate family of a Politburo member.

Maria Ivanovna Gerasimova was not actually an Estonian, though she’d been born there fifty years before. Her family was composed entirely of ethnic Russians, since the small Baltic state had been part of the Russian Empire under the czars, only to experience a brief “liberation”—as the troublemakers called it—between the world wars, during which the Estonian nationalists had not made life overly easy for ethnic Russians. Her earliest childhood memories of Tallinn were not all that pleasant, but like all children she had made friends who would be friends forever. They’d even survived her marriage to a young Party man who had, to everyone’s surprise—most especially hers—risen to command the most hated organ of the Soviet government. Worse, he’d made his career on repressing dissident elements.

The Party was something you joined to secure your position, and her father’s post put her on the inside track for a comfortable job. She sat beside her mother in silence, reading a West German fashion magazine that was now sold in the Soviet Union and deciding what new Western fashions she would like to wear to classes. She would have to learn, her mother thought, remembering that at eighteen the world is a place with horizons both near and far, depending on one’s mood.

The other passengers had already ridden out to the aircraft on a bus—the Russians haven’t quite discovered jetways yet—and when their car arrived, they were able to walk right up the stairs.

Our rockets do that for us,” Narmonov said, “but there is more to national greatness than the ability to kill. If we are to defeat the West, it cannot be with nuclear bombs—unless you want the Chinese to inherit our world.” Narmonov paused. “Comrades, if we are to prevail we have to get our economy moving!”

Together they walked to the elevator, which took them from the seventh floor up to the ninth, where they waited for another elevator to take them down to the lobby. “Do you know who designed this building?” “Obviously someone with a sense of humor,” Candela replied. “They hired the same fellow to handle construction of the new embassy.” Both men laughed. That story was worthy of a Hollywood disaster epic. There were enough electronic devices in that building to cobble up a mainframe computer. The elevator came a minute later, taking both men to the lobby.

knots. Pretty quiet for an outboard. Electric, eh?” “Right.” “I sure hope he’s got good batteries, skipper.” “Rotating-anode lithium. I asked.” “Cute.” Jones grunted. He tapped a cigarette out of his pack and offered one to the Captain, who forgot for the moment that he’d quit, again.

The submarine’s sail might not have been picked up through all the clutter, but if the Russian radar sets had a moving-target-indicator setting, the simple computer that monitored the returning signals might well lock in on something traveling at twenty miles per hour.

but lonely men in dangerous places tended to develop unusually active minds. It was better, really, to be stupid, he told himself. Intelligence only allowed you to realize how dangerous things like this were. After such missions were over, after the shakes went away, after the hot shower, you could bask in the glow of how brave and clever you were, but not now. Now it just seemed dangerous, not to say crazy, to be doing something like this.

when he taught people how to do this sort of thing, which was his normal occupation, he always told them to be patient. You friggin’ hypocrite! he observed silently.

I may soon be an assistant section leader,” Morozov said proudly. “I am also familiar with computer systems, you see.”

Theirs was the warrior’s creed. Their enemy was also the enemy of their God. Whatever they did to the people who had offended Allah would be forgiven them, and every one of the Archer’s men reminded himself of friends and family who had died at Russian hands.

“‘“Why should we refuse to fight for the cause of Allah, when we and our children have been driven from our dwellings?”’” “‘When they met Goliath and his warriors they cried: “Lord fill our hearts with steadfastness. Make us firm of foot and help us against the unbelievers.”’” The quote was from the Koran, and neither man thought it strange that the passage actually referred to the Israelites’ battle against the Philistines. David and Saul were known to the Muslims, too, as was their cause. The Major smiled one last time before running off to join his men.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Black Operations

It was going well, he thought. He’d lost five men, but that was not very many for a mission like this . . . Thank you for all the training you gave me, my Russian friends . . .

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Under Wraps

“Golovko tells me that we did not do that to you. Is this correct?” It seemed an odd question to Jack, since Golovko was handling the translating. So Andrey Ily’ch speaks a little English, does he? “No, sir, I did it to myself. I have not been mistreated in any way.” Just had the piss scared out of me, Ryan thought to himself. But that’s my own damned fault. Narmonov looked at him with silent interest for perhaps half a minute before speaking again. “I did not need your help.”

“I do not know what you mean, sir,” Ryan lied.

The embassy car drove Ryan to Sheremetyevo the following day to catch the regular Pan Am 727 flight to Frankfurt. The ticket they provided him was tourist, but Ryan upgraded it to first class. Three hours later he connected with a 747 for Dulles, also Pan Am. He slept most of the way.

EPILOGUE Common Ground

“One way or another we all fight for the things we believe in. Doesn’t that give us some common ground?” Jack asked. He walked off to his car, leaving Dalmatov with the thought.