by Tom Clancy
“But—”
“The subject is closed, John. Our intelligence services operate under congressional oversight. I’ve always supported that law, and I will continue to uphold it, and that’s it on this subject.”
Both reporters blinked pretty hard at that, and surely, Ryan thought, that part of the tape wouldn’t make it onto the network tonight.
BADRAYN NEEDED TO select thirty people, and while the number wasn’t especially difficult—nor was the required dedication—brains were. He had the contacts. If there was a surplus of anything in the Middle East, it was terrorists, men like himself, if somewhat younger, who had dedicated their lives to the Cause, only to have it wither before their eyes. And that only made their anger and dedication worse—and better, depending on one’s point of view. On reflection, he needed only twenty smart ones. The rest just had to be dedicated, with one or two intelligent overseers. They all had to follow orders. They all had to be willing to die, or at least to take the chance. Well, that wasn’t much of a problem, either. Hezbollah still had a supply of people willing to strap explosives to their bodies, and there were others.
It was part of the region’s tradition—probably not one that Mohammed would have approved entirely, but Badrayn wasn’t particularly religious, and terrorist operations were his business. Historically, Arabs had not been the world’s most efficient soldiers. Nomadic tribesmen for most of their history, their military tradition was one of raiding, later quantified as guerrilla tactics, rather than set-piece battle, which was, in fact, an invention of the Greeks, passed along to the Romans and thence to all Western nations. Historically, a single person would step forward to become a sacrifice—in Viking tradition the person was called a “berzerker,” and in Japan they’d been part of the special attack corps also known as kamikaze—on the field of battle, to swing his sword gloriously, and take as many of his foes off to be his servants in Paradise as possible. This was especially true in a jihad, or “holy war,” whose objective was to serve the interests of the Faith. It ultimately proved that Islam, like any religion, could be corrupted by its adherents. For the moment, it meant that Badrayn had a supply of people who would do what he told them to do, his instructions relayed from Daryaei, who would also tell them that this was, indeed, a jihad service in which lay their individual keys to a glorious afterlife.
He had his list. He made three telephone calls. The calls were relayed through several cutout chains, and in Lebanon and elsewhere, people made travel plans.
“SO, HOW’D WE do, coach?” Jack asked with a smile.
“The ice got pretty thin, but I guess you didn’t get wet,” Arnie van Damm said with visible relief. “You hit the interest groups pretty hard.”
“Isn’t it okay to trash the special interests? Hell, everybody else does!”
“It depends on which groups and which interests, Mr. President. They all have spokespersons, too, and some of them can come across like Mother Teresa after a nice-pill—right before they slash your throat with a machete.” The chief of staff paused. “Still, you handled yourself pretty well. You didn’t say anything they could turn against you too badly. We’ll see how they cut it up for tonight, and then what Donner and Plumber say at the end. The last couple of minutes count the most.”
THE TUBES ARRIVED in Atlanta in a very secure container called a “hatbox” because of its shape. It was in its way a highly sophisticated device, designed to hold the most dangerous of materials in total safety, multiple-sealed, and spec’d to survive violent impacts. It was covered with biohazard warning labels and was treated with great respect by the handlers, including the FedEx deliveryman who’d handed it over this morning at 9:14.
The hatbox was taken to a secure lab, where the outside was checked for damage, sprayed with a powerful chemical disinfectant, and then opened under strict containment procedures. The accompanying documents explained why this was necessary. The two blood tubes were suspected to contain viruses which caused hemorrhagic fever. That could mean any of several such diseases from Africa—the indicated continent of origin—all of which were things to be avoided. A technician working in a glove box made the transfer after examining the containers for leaks. There were none he could see, and more disinfectant spray made sure of that. The blood would be tested for antibodies and compared with other samples. The documentation went off to the office of Dr. Lorenz in the Special Pathogens Branch.
“GUS, ALEX,” Dr. Lorenz heard on the phone.
“Still not getting any fishing in?”
“Maybe this weekend. There’s a guy in neurosurgery with a boat, and we have the house pretty well set up, finally.” Dr. Alexandre was looking out the window of his office at east Baltimore. One could see the harbor, which led to the Chesapeake Bay, and there were supposed to be rockfish out there.
“What’s happening?” Gus asked, as his secretary came in with a folder.
“Just checking in on the outbreak in Zaire. Anything new?”
“Zip, thank God. We’re out of the critical time. This one burned out in a hurry. We were very—” Lorenz stopped when he opened the folder and scanned the cover sheet. “Wait a minute. Khartoum?” he muttered to himself.
Alexandre waited patiently. Lorenz was a slow, careful reader. An elderly man, rather like Ralph Forster, he took his time with things, which was one of the reasons he was a brilliant experimental scientist. Lorenz rarely took a false step. He thought too much before moving his feet.
“We just had two samples come in from Khartoum. Cover sheet is from a Dr. MacGregor, the English Hospital in Khartoum, two patients, adult male and four-year-old female, possible hemorrhagic fever. The samples are in the lab now.”
“Khartoum? Sudan?”
“That’s what it says,” Gus confirmed.
“Long way from the Congo, man.”
“Airplanes, Alex, airplanes,” Lorenz observed. If there was one thing that frightened epidemiologists, it was international air travel. The cover sheet didn’t say much, but it did give phone and fax numbers. “Okay, well, we have to run the tests and see.”
“What about the samples from before?”
“Finished the mapping yesterday. Ebola Zaire, Mayinga sub-type, identical with the samples from 1976, down to the last amino acid.”
“The airborne one,” Alexandre muttered, “the one that got George Westphal.”
“That was never established, Alex,” Lorenz reminded him.
“George was careful, Gus. You know that. You trained him.” Pierre Alexandre rubbed his eyes. Headaches. He needed a new desk light. “Let me know what those samples tell you, okay?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t worry too much. Sudan is a crummy environment for this little bastard. Hot, dry, lots of sunlight. The virus wouldn’t last two minutes in the open. Anyway, let me talk to my lab chief. I’ll see if I can micrograph it myself later today—no, more likely tomorrow morning. I have a staff meeting in an hour.”
“Yeah, and I need some lunch. Talk to you tomorrow, Gus.” Alexandre—he still thought of himself more as “Colonel” than “Professor”—replaced the phone and walked out, heading off to the cafeteria. He was pleased to find Cathy Ryan in the food line again, along with her bodyguard.
“Hey, Prof.”
“How’s the bug business?” she asked, with a smile.
“Same-o, same-o. I need a consult, Doctor,” he said, selecting a sandwich off the counter.
“I don’t do viruses.” But she did enough work with AIDS patients whose eye troubles were secondary to their main problem. “What’s the problem?”
“Headaches,” he said on the way to the cashier.
“Oh?” Cathy turned and took his glasses right off his face. She held them up to the light. “You might try cleaning them once in a while. You’re about two diopters of minus, pretty strong astigmatism. How long since you had the prescription checked?” She handed them back with a final look at the encrusted dirt around the lenses, already knowing the answer to her question.
/> “Oh, three ”
“Years. You should know better. Have your secretary call mine and I’ll have you checked out. Join us?”
They selected a table by the window, with Roy Altman in tow, scanning the room, and catching looks from the other detail members doing the same. All clear.
“You know, you might be a good candidate for our new laser technique. We can re-shape your cornea and bring you right down to 20-20,” she told him. She’d helped ramrod that program, too.
“Is it safe?” Professor Alexandre asked dubiously.
“The only unsafe procedures I perform are in the kitchen,” Professor Ryan replied with a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, ma’am.” Alex grinned.
“What’s new on your side of the house?”
IT WAS ALL in the editing. Well, mostly in the editing, Tom Donner thought, typing on his office computer. From that he would slide in his own commentary, explaining and clarifying what Ryan had really meant with his seemingly sincere ... seemingly? The word had leaped into his mind of its own accord, startling the reporter. Donner had been in the business for quite a few years, and before his promotion to network anchor, he’d been in Washington. He’d covered them all and knew them all. On his well-stuffed Rolodex was a card with every important name and number in town. Like any good reporter, he was connected. He could lift a phone and get through to anyone, because in Washington the rules for dealing with the media were elegantly simple: either you were a source or a target. If you didn’t play ball with the media, they would quickly find an enemy of yours who did. In other contexts, the technical term was “blackmail.”
Donner’s instincts told him that he’d never met anyone like President Ryan before, at least not in public life ... or was that true? The I’m-one-of-you, Everyman stance went at least as far back as Julius Caesar. It was always a ploy, a sham to make voters think that the guy really was like them. But he never was, really. Normal people didn’t get this far in any field. Ryan had advanced in CIA by playing office politics just like everyone else—he must have. He’d made enemies and allies, as everyone did, and maneuvered his way up. And the leaks he’d gotten about Ryan’s tenure at CIA ... could he use them? Not in the special. Maybe in the news show, which would contain a teaser anyway to make people watch it instead of their usual evening TV fare.
Donner knew he had to be careful on this. You didn’t go after a sitting President for the fun of it—well, that wasn’t true, was it? Going after a President was the best sort of fun, but there were rules about how you did it. Your information had to be pretty solid. That meant multiple sources, and they had to be good sources. Donner would have to take them to a senior official of his news organization, and people would hem and haw, and then they’d go over the copy for his story, and then they’d let him run it.
Everyman. But Everyman didn’t work for CIA and go into the field to be a spy, did he? Damned sure Ryan was the first spy who’d ever made it to the Oval Office ... was that good?
There were so many blanks in his life. The thing in London. He’d killed there. The terrorists who’d attacked his home—he’d killed at least one of them there, too. This incredible story about stealing a Soviet submarine, during which, his source said, he’d killed a Russian sailor. The other things. Was this the sort of person the American people wanted in the White House?
And yet he tried to come across as ... Everyman. Common sense. This is what the law says. I take my oaths seriously.
It’s a lie, Donner thought. It has to be a lie.
You’re one clever son of a bitch, Ryan, the anchorman thought.
And if it was that he was clever, and if it was a lie, then what? Changing the tax system. Changes in the Supreme Court. Changes in the name of efficiency, Secretary Bretano’s activities at Defense ... damn.
The next leap of imagination was that CIA and Ryan had had a role in the crash at the Capitol—no, that was too crazy. Ryan was an opportunist. They all were, the people Donner had covered for all of his professional life, all the way back to his first job at the network affiliate in Des Moines, where his work had landed a county commissioner in jail, and so gotten Donner noticed by the network executives at 30 Rock. Political figures. Donner reported on all manner of news from avalanches to warfare, but it was politicians whom he had studied as a profession and a hobby.
They were all the same, really. Right place, right time, and they already had the agenda. If he’d learned anything at all, he’d learned that. Donner looked out his window and lifted his phone with one hand while flipping the Rolodex with the other.
“Ed, this is Tom. Just how good are those sources, and how quickly can I meet them?” He couldn’t hear the smile on the other end of the line.
SOHAILA WAS SITTING up now. Such situations provided a relief that never failed to awe the young doctor. Medicine was the most demanding of the professions, MacGregor believed. Every day, to a greater or lesser degree, he diced with Death. He didn’t think of himself as a soldier, or a warrior knight on a bloodied charger, at least not in conscious terms, because Death was an enemy who never showed himself—but he was always there, even so. Every patient he treated had that enemy inside, or hovering about somewhere, and his job as a physician was to discover his hiding place, seek him out, and destroy him, and you saw the victory in the face of the patient, and you savored every one.
Sohaila was still unwell, but that would pass. She was on liquids now, and she was keeping them down. Still weak, she would grow no weaker. Her temperature was down. All her vital signs were either stabilized or heading back to normal. This was a victory. Death wouldn’t claim this child. In the normal course of events, she would grow and play and learn and marry and have children of her own.
But it was a victory for which MacGregor could not really take credit, at least not all of it. His care for the child had been merely supportive, not curative. Had it helped? Probably, he told himself. You couldn’t know where the line was between what would have happened on its own and what had made a real difference. Medicine would be far easier if its practitioners possessed that degree of sight, but they didn’t yet and probably never would. Had he not treated her—well, in this climate, just the heat might have done it, or certainly the dehydration, or maybe some opportunistic secondary infection. People so often expired not from their primary ailment, but from something else that took hold from the general weakening of the body. And so, yes, he would claim this victory, better yet that it was the life of a charming and attractive little girl who would in just a short time learn to smile again. MacGregor took her pulse, savoring the touch of the patient as he always did, and the remote contact with a heart that would still be beating a week from now, and as he watched, she fell off to sleep. He gently replaced the hand on the bed and turned.
“Your daughter will recover fully,” he told the parents, confirming their hopes and crushing their fears with five quiet words and a warm smile.
The mother gasped as though punched, her mouth open, tears exploding from her eyes as she covered her face with her hands. The father took the news in what he deemed a more manly way, his face impassive—but not his eyes, which relaxed and looked up to the ceiling in relief. Then he seized the doctor’s hand, and his dark eyes came back down to bore in on MacGregor’s.
“I will not forget,” the general told him.
Then it was time to see Saleh, something he’d consciously delayed. MacGregor left the room and walked down the corridor. Outside he changed into a different set of clothing. Inside he saw a defeat. The man was under restraints. The disease had entered his brain. Dementia was yet another symptom of Ebola, and a merciful one. Saleh’s eyes were vacant and stared at the water marks on the ceiling. The nurse in attendance handed him the chart, the news on which was uniformly bad. MacGregor scanned it, grimaced, and wrote an order to increase the morphine drip. Supportive care in this case hadn’t mattered a damn. One victory, one loss, and if he’d had the choice of which to save and which to lose, this wa
s how he’d have written the story, for Saleh was grown and had had a life of sorts. That life had but five days to run, and MacGregor could do nothing now to save it, only a few things to make its final passage less gruesome for the patient—and the staff. After five minutes he left the room, stripped off his protective garb, and walked to his office, his face locked in a frown of thought.
Where had it come from? Why would one survive and one die? What didn’t he know that he needed to know? The physician poured himself a cup of tea and tried to think past the victory and the defeat in order to find the information that had decided both issues. Same disease, same time. Two very different outcomes. Why?
32
RERUNS
I CAN’T GIVE THIS TO YOU, and I can’t let you copy any of it, but I can let you look at it.” He handed the photo over. He had light cotton gloves on, and he’d already given a pair to Donner. “Fingerprints,” he explained quietly.
“Is this what I think it is?” It was a black-and-white photograph, eight-by-ten glossy, but there was no classification stamp on it, at least not on the front. Donner didn’t turn it over.
“You really don’t want to know, do you?” It was a question and a warning.
“I guess not.” Donner nodded, getting the message. He didn’t know how the Espionage Act—18 U.S.C. §793E—interacted with his First Amendment rights, but if he didn’t know that the photo was classified, then he didn’t have to find out.
“That’s a Soviet nuclear missile submarine, and that’s Jack Ryan on the gangway. You’ll notice he’s wearing a Navy uniform. This was a CIA operation, run in cooperation with the Navy, and that’s what we got out of it.” The man handed over a magnifying glass to make sure that the identifications were positive. “We conned the Soviets into thinking she’d exploded and sunk about halfway between Florida and Bermuda. They probably still think that.”