by Tom Clancy
“Oh, shit, Boss,” Andrea Price muttered, just outside the room. Some media people had found out, but the Service hadn’t confirmed it to anyone, and most news organizations had reported that the Ryan family was at “an undisclosed location.” Well, they’d be sleeping somewhere else tonight. And the location would not be disclosed this time. Damn.
“Why there?”
“Well, it had to be somewhere, and that seemed convenient. I was a Marine myself once, Barry,” Jack said quietly.
“REMEMBER WHEN WE blew them up?”
“A fine night.” The intelligence officer remembered watching through binoculars from the top of the Beirut Holiday Inn. He’d helped set that mission up. The only hard part, really, had been selecting the driver. There was an odd cachet about the American Marines, something seemingly mystical about them that this Ryan’s nation clung to. But they died just like any other infidel. He wondered with amusement if there might be a large truck in Washington that one of his people might buy or lease.... He set the amusing thought aside. There was work to be done. It wasn’t practical, anyway. He’d been to Washington more than once, and the Marine Barracks was one of the places he’d examined. It was too easily defended. Too bad, really. The political significance of the target made it highly attractive.
“NOT SMART,” DING observed over his morning coffee.
“Expect him to hide?” Clark asked.
“You know him, Daddy?” Patricia asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Ding and I used to look after him back when we were SPOs. I knew his father, once ...,” John added without thinking, which was very unusual for him.
“What’s he like, Ding?” Patsy asked her fiance, the ring still fresh on her finger.
“Pretty smart,” Chavez allowed. “Kinda quiet. Nice guy, always has a kind word. Well, usually.”
“He’s been tough when he had to be,” John observed with an eye to his partner and soon-to-be son-in-law, which thought almost occasioned a chill. Then he saw the look in his daughter’s eyes, and the chill became quite real. Damn.
“That’s a fact,” the junior man agreed.
THE LIGHTS MADE HIM sweat under his makeup, and Ryan fought the urge to scratch the itches on his face. He managed to keep his hands still, but his facial muscles began a series of minor twitches that he hoped the camera didn’t catch.
“I’m afraid I can’t say, Barry,” he went on, holding his hands tightly together. “It’s just too soon to respond substantively to a lot of questions right now. When we’re able to give hard answers, we will. Until then, we won’t.”
“You have a big day ahead,” the CNN reporter said sympathetically.
“Barry, we all do.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” He waited until the light went off and he heard a voice-over from the Atlanta headquarters before speaking again. “Good one. Thank you.”
Van Damm came in then, pushing Andrea Price aside as he did so. Few could touch a Secret Service agent without seriously adverse consequences, much less bustle one, but Arnie was one who could.
“Pretty good. Don’t do anything different. Answer the questions. Keep your answers short.”
Mrs. Abbot came in next to check Ryan’s makeup. A gentle hand touched his forehead while the other adjusted his hair with a small brush. Even for his high-school prom—what was her name? Ryan asked himself irrelevantly—neither he nor anyone else had been so fussy about his coarse black hair. Under other circumstances it would have been something to laugh about.
The CBS anchor was a woman in her middle thirties, and proof positive that brains and looks were not mutually exclusive.
“Mr. President, what is left of the government?” she asked after a couple of conventional get-acquainted questions.
“Maria”—Ryan had been instructed to address each reporter by the given name; he didn’t know why, but it seemed reasonable enough—“as horrid as the last twelve hours have been for all of us, I want to remind you of a speech President Durling gave a few weeks ago: America is still America. All of the federal executive agencies will be operating today under the leadership of the sitting deputy secretaries, and—”
“But Washington—”
“For reasons of public safety, Washington is pretty well shut down, that is true—” She cut him off again, less from ill manners than from the fact that she only had four minutes to use, and she wanted to use them.
“The troops in the street ...?”
“Maria, the D.C. police and fire departments had the roughest night of all. It’s been a long, cold night for those people. The Washington, D.C., National Guard has been called out to assist the civilian agencies. That also happens after hurricanes and tornadoes. In fact, that’s really a municipal function. The FBI is working with the mayor to get the job done.” It was Ryan’s longest statement of the morning, and almost left him breathless, he was wound so tightly. That was when he realized that he was squeezing his hands to the point that his fingers were turning white, and Jack had to make a conscious effort to relax them.
“LOOK AT HIS arms,” the Prime Minister observed. “What do we know of this Ryan?”
The chief of her country’s intelligence service had a file folder in his lap which he had already memorized, having had the luxury of a working day to familiarize himself with the new chief of state.
“He’s a career intelligence officer. You know about the incident in London, and later in the States some years ago—”
“Oh, yes,” she noted, sipping her tea and dismissing that bit of history. “So, a spy ...”
“A well-regarded one. Our Russian friends think very highly of him indeed. So does Century House,” said the army general, whose training went back to the British tradition. Like his Prime Minister, he’d been educated at Oxford, and, in his case, Sandhurst. “He is highly intelligent. We have reason to believe that in his capacity as Durling’s National Security Advisor he was instrumental in controlling American operations against Japan—”
“And us?” she asked, her eyes locked on the screen. How convenient it was to have communications satellites—and the American networks were all global now. Now you didn’t have to spend a whole day in an aircraft to go and see a rival chief of state—and then under controlled circumstances. Now she could see the man under pressure and gauge how he responded to it. Career intelligence officer or not, he didn’t look terribly comfortable. Every man had his limitations.
“Undoubtedly, Prime Minister.”
“He is less formidable than your information would suggest,” she told her adviser. Tentative, uncomfortable, rattled... out of his depth.
“WHEN DO YOU expect to be able to tell us more about what happened?” Maria asked.
“I really can’t say right now. It’s just too soon. Some things can’t be rushed, I’m afraid,” Ryan said. He vaguely grasped that he’d lost control of this interview, short as it was, and wasn’t sure why. It never occurred to him that the TV reporters were lined up outside the Roosevelt Room like shoppers in a checkout line, that each one wanted to ask something new and different after the first question or two—and that each wanted to make an impression, not on the new President, but on the viewers, the unseen people behind the cameras who watched each morning show out of loyalty which the reporters had to strengthen whenever possible. As gravely wounded as the country was, reporting the news was the business which put food on their family tables, and Ryan was just one more subject of that business. That was why Arnie’s earlier advice on how they’d been instructed on what questions to ask had been overly optimistic, even coming from an experienced political pro. The only really good news was that the interviews were all time-limited—in this case by local news delivered by the various network affiliates at twenty-five minutes after the hour. Whatever tragedy had struck Washington, people needed to know about local weather and traffic in the pursuit of their daily lives, a fact perhaps lost on those inside the D.C. Beltway, though not lost on the local stations across the co
untry. Maria was more gracious than she felt when the director cut her off. She smiled at the camera—
“We’ll be back.”
—and Ryan had twelve minutes until NBC had at him. The coffee he’d had at breakfast was working on him now, and he needed to find a bathroom, but when he stood, the microphone wire nearly tripped him.
“This way, Mr. President,” Price pointed to the left, down the corridor, then right toward the Oval Office, Jack realized too late. He stopped cold on entering the room. It was still someone else’s in his mind, but a bathroom was a bathroom, and in this case, it was actually part of a sitting room off the office itself. Here, at least, there was privacy, even from the Praetorian Guard, which followed him like a pack of collies protecting a particularly valuable sheep. Jack didn’t know that when there was someone in this particular head, a light on the upper door frame lit up, and that a peephole in the office door allowed the Secret Service to know even that aspect of their President’s daily life.
Washing his hands, Ryan looked in the mirror, always a mistake at times like this. The makeup made him appear more youthful than he was, which wasn’t so bad, but also phony, the false ruddiness which his skin had never had. He had to fight off the urge to wipe it all off before coming back out to face NBC. This anchor was a black male, and on shaking hands with him, back in the Roosevelt Room, it was of some consolation that his makeup was even more grotesque than his own. Jack was oblivious to the fact that the TV lights so affected the human complexion that to appear normal on a television screen, one had to appear the clown to non-electronic eyes.
“What will you be doing today, Mr. President?” Nathan asked as his fourth question.
“I have another meeting with acting FBI Director Murray—actually we’ll be meeting twice a day for a while. I also have a scheduled session with the national security staff, then with some of the surviving members of Congress. This afternoon, we have a Cabinet meeting.”
“Funeral arrangements?” The reporter checked off another question from the list in his lap.
Ryan shook his head. “Too soon. I know it’s frustrating for all of us, but these things do take time.” He didn’t say that the White House Protocol Office had fifteen minutes of his afternoon to brief him on what was being planned.
“It was a Japanese airliner, and in fact a government-owned carrier. Do we have any reason to suspect—”
Ryan leaned forward at that one: “No, Nathan, we don’t. We’ve had communications with the Japanese government. Prime Minister Koga has promised full cooperation, and we are taking him at his word. I want to emphasize that hostilities with Japan are completely over. What happened was a horrible mistake. That country is working to bring to justice the people who caused that conflict to take place. We don’t yet know how everything happened—last night, I mean—but ‘don’t know’ means don’t know. Until we do, I want to discourage speculation. That can’t help anything, but it can hurt, and there’s been enough hurt for a while. We have to think about healing now.”
“DOMO ARIGATO,” MUTTERED the Japanese Prime Minister. It was the first time he’d seen Ryan’s face or heard his voice. Both were younger than he’d expected, though he’d been informed of Ryan’s particulars earlier in the day. Koga noted the man’s tension and unease, but when he had something to say other than an obvious answer to an inane question—why did the Americans tolerate the insolence of their media?—the voice changed somewhat, as did the eyes. The difference was subtle, but Koga was a man accustomed to noting the smallest of nuance. It was one advantage of growing up in Japan, and all the more so for having spent his adult life in politics.
“He was a formidable enemy,” a Foreign Ministry official noted quietly. “And in the past he showed himself to be a man of courage.”
Koga thought about the papers he’d read two hours earlier. This Ryan had used violence, which the Japanese Prime Minister abhorred. But he had learned from two shadowy Americans who had probably saved his life from his own countrymen that violence had a place, just as surgery did, and Ryan had taken violent action to protect others, suffered in the process, then done so again before returning to peaceful pursuits. Yet again he’d displayed the same dichotomy, against Koga’s country, fighting with skill and ruthlessness, then showing mercy and consideration. A man of courage ...
“And honor, I think.” Koga paused for a moment. So strange that there should already be friendship between two men who had never met, and who had only a week before been at war. “He is samurai.”
THE ABC CORRESPONDENT, female and blond, had the name of Joy, which for some reason struck Ryan as utterly inappropriate to the day, but it was probably the name her parents had given her, and that was that. If Maria from CBS had been pretty, Joy was stunning, and perhaps a reason ABC had the top-rated morning show. Her hello handshake was warm and friendly—and something else that almost made Jack’s heart stop.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” she said softly, in a voice better suited to a dinner party than a morning TV news show.
“Please.” Ryan waved her to the chair opposite his.
“Ten minutes before the hour. We’re here in the Roosevelt Room of the White House to speak with President John Patrick Ryan,” her voice cooed to the camera. “Mr. President, it’s been a long and difficult night for our country. What can you tell us?”
Ryan had it down sufficiently pat that the answer came out devoid of conscious thought. His voice was calm and slightly mechanical, and his eyes locked on hers, as he’d been told to do. In this case it wasn’t hard to concentrate on her liquid brown eyes, though looking so deeply into them this early in the morning was disconcerting. He hoped it didn’t show too much.
“Mr. President, the last few months have been very traumatic for all of us, and last night was only more so. You will be meeting with your national security staff in a few minutes. What are your greatest concerns?”
“Joy, a long time ago an American President said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Our country is as strong today as yesterday—”
“YES, THAT IS true.” Daryaei had met Ryan once before. He’d been arrogant and defiant then, in the way of a dog standing before his master, snarling and brave—or seemingly so. But now the master was gone, and here was the dog, eyes fixed on a beautiful but sluttish woman, and it surprised Daryaei that his tongue wasn’t out and drooling. Fatigue had something to do with it. Ryan was tired; that was plain to see. What else was he? He was like his country, the Ayatollah decided. Outwardly strong, perhaps. Ryan was a young man still, broad of shoulder, erect of posture. His eyes were clear, and his voice firm, but when asked of his country’s strength, he spoke of fear and the fear of fear. Interesting.
Daryaei knew well enough that strength and power were things of the mind more than the body, a fact as true of nations as of men. America was a mystery to him, as were America’s leaders. But how much did he have to know? America was a godless country. That was why this Ryan boy talked of fear. Without God, both the country and the man lacked direction. Some had said that the same was true of Daryaei’s country, but if that were true at all, it was for a different reason, he told himself.
Like people all over the world, Daryaei concentrated on Ryan’s face and voice. The answer to the first question was obviously mechanical. Whatever America knew about this glorious incident, they weren’t telling. Probably they didn’t know very much, but that was to be understood. His had been a long day, and Daryaei had used it profitably. He’d called his Foreign Ministry and had the chief of the America desk (actually a whole department in the official building in Tehran) order a paper on the working of the American government. The situation was even better than Daryaei had hoped. They could make no new laws, could levy no new taxes, could spend no new money until such time as their Congress was reconstituted, and that would require time. Almost all of their ministries were headless. This Ryan boy—Daryaei was seventy-two-was the American government, and he was not impressed with
what he saw.
The United States of America had thwarted him for years. So much power. Even after reducing its might following the downfall of the Soviet Union—the “lesser Satan”—America could do things possible for no other nation. All it needed was political resolve, and though that was rare enough, the threat of it was ever daunting. Every so often the country would rally behind a single purpose, as had happened not so long before against Iraq, with consequences so startlingly decisive as compared with what little his own country had managed in a shooting war that had lasted nearly a full decade. That was the danger of America. But America was a thinner reed now—or rather, America was, if not quite headless, then nearly so. The strongest body was rendered crippled and useless by an injury to its neck, the more so from one to its head....
Just one man, Daryaei thought, not hearing the words from the television now. The words didn’t matter now. Ryan wasn’t saying anything of substance, but telling the man half a world away much with his demeanor. The new head of that country had a neck that became the focus of Daryaei’s gaze. Its symbolism was clear. The technical issue, after all, was to complete the separation of head from body, and all that stood between the two was the neck.
“TEN MINUTES TO the next one,” Arnie said after Joy left to catch her car to the airport. The Fox reporter was in makeup.
“How am I doing?” Jack disconnected the mike wire before standing this time. He needed to stretch his legs.
“Not bad,” van Damm judged, charitably. He might have said something else to a career politician, but a real politico would have had to field really tough questions. It was as though a golfer were playing against his handicap instead of a tour-pro partner, and that was fair, as far as it went. Most important, Ryan needed to have his confidence built up if he were to function at all. The presidency was hard enough at the best of times, and while every holder of that office had wished more than once to be rid of Congress and other agencies and departments as well, it was Ryan who would have to learn how indispensable the whole system of government was—and he’d learn the hard way.