"So, how do we do things here? Differently from Johns Hopkins?" Hood asked, as he stubbed out his cigarette.
Cathy nearly gagged, but decided not to make any of the comments running around her brain. "Well, surgery is surgery. I'm surprised that you don't have very many CAT scans. Same for MRI and PET scanners. How can you do without them? I mean, at home, for Mr. Smithson, I wouldn't even think of going in without a good set of shots of the tumor. "
"She's right, you know," Hood thought, after a moment's reflection. "Our bricklayer chum could have waited several months more if we'd had a better idea of the extent of the growth."
"You wait that long for a hemangioma?" Cathy blurted out. "At home, we take them out immediately." She didn't have to add that these things hurt to have inside your skull. It caused a frontal protrusion of the eyeball itself, sometimes with blurring of vision-which was why Mr. Smithson had gone to this local doctor to begin with. He'd also reported god-awful headaches that must have driven him mad until they'd given him a codeine-based analgesic.
"Well, here things operate a little differently."
Uh-huh. That must be a good way to practice medicine, by the hour instead of by the patient. Lunch arrived. The sandwich was okay-better than the hospital food she was accustomed to-but she still couldn't get over these guys drinking beer! The local beer was about double the potency of American stuff, and they were drinking a full pint of it-sixteen ounces! What the hell was this?
"Ketchup for your chips, Cathy?" Ellis slid the bottle over. "Or should I say Lady Caroline? I hear that His Highness is your son's godfather?"
"Well, sort of. He agreed to it-Jack asked him on the spur of the moment in the hospital at the Naval Academy. The real godparents are Robby and Sissy Jackson. Robby's a Navy fighter pilot. Sissy plays concert piano."
"Was that the black chap in the papers?"
"That's right. Jack met him when they were both teachers at the Naval Academy, and they're very close friends."
"Quite so. So the news reports were correct? I mean-"
"I try not to think about it. The only good thing that happened that night was that Little Jack arrived."
"I quite understand that, Cathy," Ellis responded around his sandwich. "If the news accounts were accurate, it must have been a horrid evening."
"It wasn't fun." She managed a smile. "The labor and delivery was the good part."
The three Brits had a good laugh at that remark. All had kids, and all had been there for the deliveries, which were no more fun for British women than for American women. Half an hour later, they headed back to Moorefields. Hood smoked another cigarette along the way, though he had the good manners do stay downwind of his American colleague. Ten more minutes, and they were back in the OR. The pinch-hitting gas-passer reported that nothing untoward had taken place, and surgery resumed.
"Want me to assist now?" Cathy asked hopefully.
"No, thank you, Cathy," Hood replied. "I have it," he added, bending over his patient, who, being soundly asleep, wouldn't smell the beer on his breath.
Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, thought to congratulate herself for not screaming her head off, but mostly she leaned in as closely as she could to make sure these two Englishmen didn't screw up and remove the patient's ear by mistake. Maybe the alcohol would help steady their hands, she told herself. But she had to concentrate to keep her own hands from trembling.
The crown and cushion was a delightful, if typical, London pub. The sandwich was just fine, and Ryan enjoyed a pint of John Smith Ale while talking shop with Simon. He thought vaguely about serving beer at the CIA cafeteria, but that would never fly. Someone in Congress would find out and raise hell in front of the C-Span cameras, while enjoying a glass of Chardonnay with his lunch in the Capitol Building, of course, or something a little stronger in his office. The culture was just different here, and vive la difference, he thought, walking across Westminster Bridge Road toward Big Ben-the bell, not the bell tower, which was, in fact, St. Mary's Bell Tower, tourist errors to the contrary. The Parliamentarians there had three or four pubs right there in the building, Ryan was sure. And they probably didn't get any drunker than their American colleagues.
"You know, Simon, I think everyone's worried about this."
"It's a pity he had to send that letter to Warsaw, isn't it?"
"Could you expect him not to?" Ryan countered. "They are his people. It is his homeland, after all, isn't it? It's his parish the Russians are trying to stomp on."
"That is the problem," Harding agreed. "But the Russians will not change. Impasse."
Ryan nodded. "Yeah. What's the chance that the Russians will back off?"
"Absent a solid reason to, not a very great chance. Will your President try to warn them off?"
"Even if he could, he wouldn't. Not on something like this, buddy."
"So we have two sides. One is driven by what it deems to be the proper moral course of action-and the other by political necessity, by fear of not acting. As I said, Jack, it's a bloody impasse."
"Father Tim at Georgetown liked to say that wars are begun by frightened men. They're afraid of the consequences of war, but they are more afraid of not fighting. Hell of a way to run a world," Ryan thought out loud, opening the door for his friend.
"August 1914 as the model, I expect."
"Right, but at least those guys all believed in God. The second go round was a little different in that respect. The players in that one-the Bad Guys, anyway-didn't live under that particular constraint. Neither do the guys in Moscow. You know, there have to be some limits on our actions, or we can turn into monsters."
"Tell that to the Politburo, Jack," Harding suggested lightly.
"Yeah, Simon, sure." Ryan headed off to the men's room to dump some of his liquid lunch.
The evening didn't come quickly enough for either of the players. Ed Foley wondered what was coming next. There was no guarantee that this guy would follow up on what he'd started. He could always get cold feet-actually, it'd be rather a sensible thing for him to do. Treason was dangerous outside the U.S. Embassy. He was still wearing a green tie-the other one; he had only two-for luck, because he'd gotten to the point where luck counted. Whoever the guy was, just so he didn't get cold feet.
Come on, Ivan, keep coming and we'll give you the joint, Foley thought, trying to reach out with his mind. Lifetime ticket to Disney World, all the football games you can handle. Oleg Penkovskiy wanted to meet Kennedy and, yeah, we can probably swing that with the new President. Hell, we'll even throw in a movie in the White House theater.
And across town, Mary Pat was thinking exactly the same thing. If this went one more step, she'd play a part in the opening drama. If this guy worked in the Russian MERCURY, and if he wanted a ticket out of Mother Russia, then she and Ed would have to figure a way to make that happen. There were ways, and they'd been used before, but they weren't what you'd call "routine." Soviet border security wasn't exactly perfect, but it was pretty tight-tight enough to make you sweat playing with it, and though she had the sort of demeanor that often worked well while playing serious games, it didn't make you feel comfortable. And so she started kicking some ideas around, just in her head, as she worked around the apartment and little Eddie took his afternoon nap, and the hours crept by, one lengthy second at a time.
Ed foley hadn't sent any messages off to Langley yet. It wasn't time. He had nothing substantive to report, and there was no sense getting Bob Ritter all excited over something that hadn't developed yet. It happened often enough: People made approaches to CIA and then felt a chill inside their shoes and backed away. You couldn't chase after them. More often than not, you didn't even know who they were and, if you did, and if they decided not to play, the sensible thing for the other guy was to report you to KGB. That fingered you as a spook-rendering your value to your country as approximately zero-and covered his ass nicely as a loyal and vigilant Soviet citizen, doing his duty to the Motherland.