by Tom Clancy
But those people weren’t the threat. As long as the agents did their job correctly, the casual threat wasn’t a deadly one. Those people almost always tipped their hand, and people like her knew what to look for. It was the ones their intelligence division didn’t hear about who constituted the real threat. Those could be deterred somewhat through a massive show of force, but the massive show was too expensive, too oppressive, too obvious not to attract notice and adverse comment. Even then she remembered another event, months after the near death of SURGEON, SHADOW, and the yet unborn SHORTSTOP. A whole squad, she thought. It was a case study at the Secret Service Academy at Beltsville. The Ryan house had been used to film a re-creation of the event. Chuck Avery—a good, experienced supervisory agent—and his whole squad taken out. As a rookie she’d watched the taped analysis of what had gone wrong, and even then she’d chilled at how easy it had been for that team to make a small mistake, that to be compounded by bad luck and bad timing....
“Yeah, I know.” She turned to see Don Russell, sipping from a plastic coffee cup while he got some fresh air. Another agent was on post inside.
“Did you know Avery?”
“He was two years ahead of me at the academy. He was smart, and careful, and a damned good shot. He dropped one of the bad guys then, in the dark from thirty yards, two rounds in the chest.” A shake of the head. “You don’t make little mistakes in this business, Marci.”
That is when the second chill came, the one that made you want to reach for your weapon, just to be sure that it was there, to tell yourself that you were ready to get the job done. That’s when you remembered, in this case, how cute a little kid could be, and how even if you took the hits you’d make damned sure your last conscious act on the planet would be to put every round through the bastard’s X-ring. Then you blinked, and the image went away.
“She’s a beautiful little girl, Don.”
“I’ve rarely seen an ugly one,” Russell agreed. This was the time when one was supposed to say, Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of her. But they didn’t say that. They didn’t even think it. Instead they looked around at the highway and the trees and the 7-Eleven across Ritchie Highway, wondering what they’d missed, and wondering how much money they could spend on surveillance cameras.
GEORGE WINSTON WAS used to being met. It was the ultimate perk, really. You got off the airplane—almost always an airplane in his case—and there was somebody to meet you and take you to the car whose driver knew the quickest way to where you were going. No hassles with Hertz and figuring the useless little maps out, and getting lost. It cost a lot of money, but it was worth it, because time was the ultimate commodity, and you were born with only so much to spend, and there was no passbook to tell you the exact amount. The Metroliner pulled into Union Station’s track 6. He’d gotten some reading done, and had himself a nice nap between Trenton and Baltimore. A pity the railroad couldn’t make money carrying passengers, but you didn’t have to buy air to fly in, while it was necessary to build a right-of-way for ground transport. Too bad. He collected his coat and briefcase and headed for the door, tipping the first-class attendant on the way out.
“Mr. Winston?” a man asked.
“That’s right.” The man held up a leather ID holder, identifying himself as a federal agent. He had a partner, Winston noted, standing thirty feet away with his topcoat unbuttoned.
“Follow me, please, sir.” With that they were merely three more busy people heading off to an important meeting.
THERE WERE MANY such dossiers, each of them so large that the data had to be edited so as not to overflow the file cabinets, and it was still more convenient to do it with paper than a computer, because it was hard to get a computer that worked well in his native language. Checking up on the data would not be difficult. For one thing, there would be more press coverage to confirm or alter what he had. For another, he could confirm a lot very simply, merely by having a car drive past a few places once or twice, or by observing roads. There was little danger in that. However careful and thorough the American Secret Service might be, they were not omnipotent. This Ryan fellow had a family, a wife who worked, children who went to school; and Ryan himself had a schedule he had to keep. In their official home they were safe—reasonably so, he corrected himself, since no fixed place was ever truly safe—but that safety did not follow them everywhere, did it?
It was more than anything else a matter of financing and planning. He needed a sponsor.
“HOW MANY DO you need?” the dealer asked.
“How many do you have?” the prospective buyer asked.
“I can get eighty, certainly. Perhaps a hundred,” the dealer thought aloud, sipping at his beer.
“When?”
“A week will suffice?” They were in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, and a major center for this particular trade. “Biological research?”
“Yes, my client’s scientists have a rather interesting project under way.”
“What project might that be?” the dealer asked.
“That I am not at liberty to say,” was the not unexpected answer. Nor would he say who his client was. The dealer didn’t react, and didn’t particularly care. His curiosity was human, not professional. “If your services are satisfactory, we may be back for more.” The usual enticement. The dealer nodded and commenced the substantive bargaining.
“You must understand that this is not an inexpensive undertaking. I must assemble my people. They must find a small population of the creature you desire. There are the problems of capture and transport, export licenses, the usual bureaucratic difficulties.” By which he meant bribes. Trade in African green monkeys had picked up in the last few years. Quite a few companies used them for various experimental purposes. That was generally bad for the monkeys, but there were a lot of monkeys. The African green was in no way endangered, and even if they were, the dealer didn’t especially care. Animals were a national resource for his country, as oil was for the Arabs, to be marketed for hard currency. He didn’t get sentimental about them. They bit and spat, and were generally unpleasant little beggars, “cute” though they might appear to the tourists at Treetops. They also ate the crops tended by the numerous small farmers in the country, and were thoroughly detested for that reason, whatever the game wardens might say.
“These problems are not strictly our concern. Speed is. You will find that we arewilling to reward you handsomely in return for reliable service.”
“Ah.” The dealer finished his beer, and, lifting his hand, snapped his fingers for a refill. He named his price. It included his overhead, pay to the gatherers, the customs people, a policeman or two, and a mid-level government bureaucrat, plus his own net profit, which in the terms of the local economy was actually quite fair, he thought. Not everyone did.
“Agreed,” the buyer said without so much as a sip of his soft drink.
It was almost a disappointment. The dealer enjoyed haggling, so much a part of the African marketplace. He’d scarcely begun to depose on how difficult and involved his business was.
“A pleasure doing business with you, sir. Call me in... five days?”
The buyer nodded. He finished his drink and took his leave. Ten minutes after that, he made a call, the third such communication to the embassy in the day, and all for the same purpose. Though he didn’t know it, yet more such calls had been made in Uganda, Zaire, Tanzania, and Mali.
JACK REMEMBERED HIS first time in the Oval Office, the way you shuffled left to right from the secretaries’ room through what turned out to be a molded door set in a curved wall, much in the manner of an eighteenth-century palace, which the White House actually was, if a modest one in the context of the times. You tended to notice the windows first of all, especially on a sunny day. Their thickness made them look green, rather like the glass walls of an aquarium designed for a very special fish. Next you saw the desk, a large wooden one. It was always intimidating, all the more so if the President was standing there, waiting for yo
u. All this was good, the President thought. It made his current job all the easier.
“George,” Ryan said, extending his hand.
“Mr. President,” Winston responded pleasantly, ignoring the two Secret Service agents standing immediately behind him, there to grab him if he did something untoward. You didn’t have to hear them. The visitor could feel their eyes on the back of his neck, rather like laser beams. He shook Ryan’s hand anyway, and managed a crooked smile. Winston didn’t know Ryan very well. They’d worked together well during the Japanese conflict. Previously they’d bumped into each other at a handful of minor social functions, and he knew of Ryan’s work in the market, discreet but effective. All that time in the intelligence business hadn’t been entirely wasted.
“Sit down.” Jack waved to one of the couches. “Relax. How was the trip down?”
“The usual.” A Navy mess steward appeared seemingly from nowhere and poured two cups of coffee, because it was that time of the day. The coffee, he found, was excellent, and the china exquisite with its gold trim.
“I need you,” Ryan said next.
“Sir, look, there was a lot of damage done to my—”
“Country.”
“I’ve never wanted a government job, Jack,” Winston replied at once, speaking rapidly.
Ryan didn’t even touch his cup. “Why do you think I want you? George, I’ve been there and done that, okay? More than once. I have to put a team together. I’m going to give a speech tonight. You might like what I’m going to say. Okay, first, I need somebody to run Treasury. Defense is okay for the moment. State’s in good hands with Adler. Treasury is first on my list of things that have to be filled with somebody new. I need somebody good. You’re it. Are you clean?” Ryan asked abruptly.
“What—bet your ass I am! I made all my money within the rules. Everybody knows that.” Winston bristled until he realized that he was expected to.
“Good. I need somebody who has the confidence of the financial community. You do. I need somebody who knows how the system really works. You do. I need somebody who knows what’s broke and needs fixing, and what isn’t and doesn’t. You do. I need somebody who isn’t political. You aren’t. I need a dispassionate pro—most of all, George, I need somebody who’s going to hate his job as much as I hate mine.”
“What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. President?”
Ryan leaned back for a second and closed his eyes before going on. “I started working inside when I was thirty-one. I got out once, and I did okay on the Street, but I got sucked back, and here I am.” The eyes opened. “Ever since I started with the Agency, I’ve had to watch how things work on the inside, and guess what? I never did like it. I started on the Street, remember, and I did okay then, too, remember? I figured I’d become an academic after I made my pile. History’s my first love, and I thought I’d teach and study and write, figure out how things worked and pass my knowledge along. I almost made it, and maybe things didn’t work out that way, exactly, but I’ve done a lot of studying and learning. So, George, I’m going to put a team together.”
“To do what?”
“Your job is to clean up Treasury. You’ve got monetary and fiscal policy.”
“You mean—”
“Yes.”
“No political bullshit?” He had to ask that.
“Look, George, I don’t know how to be a politician, and I don’t have time to learn. I never liked the game. I never liked most of the people in it. I just kept trying to serve my country as best I could. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I didn’t have a choice. You remember how it started. People tried to kill me and my family. I didn’t want to get sucked in, but God damn it, I learned that somebody has to try to get the job done. I’m not going to do it alone anymore, George, and I’m not going to fill all the vacant posts with ticket-punchers who know how to work ‘the system,’ okay? I want people with ideas in here, not politicians with agendas.”
Winston set his cup down, managing not to rattle the saucer as he did so. He was a little surprised that his hand wasn’t shaking. The length and breadth of what Ryan proposed was quite a bit more than the job which he’d had every intention of declining. It would mean more than was obvious. He’d have to cut himself off from his friends—well, not really, but it meant that he would not make executive decisions based on what campaign contributions the Street would give the President as a result of the nice things that Treasury did for the trading houses up there. That’s the way the game had always been played, and though he’d never been a player, he’d talked often enough with those who were, working the system in the same old way, because that was how things were.
“Shit,” he whispered half to himself. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
As founder of the Columbus Group, he’d assumed a duty so basic that few ever thought about it, beyond those who actually undertook it—and not always enough of them. Literally millions of people, directly or indirectly, entrusted their money to him, and that gave him the theoretical ability to be a thief on the cosmic scale. But you couldn’t do that. For one thing, it was illegal, and you ran the risk of rather substandard federal housing as a result of it, with very substandard neighbors to boot. But that wasn’t the reason you didn’t. The reason was that those were people out there, and they trusted you to be honest and smart, and so you treated their money the same as you treated your own, or maybe even a little better, because they couldn’t gamble the way a rich man did. Every so often you’d get a nice letter from some widow, and that was nice, but it really came from inside. Either you were a man of honor or you were not, and honor, some movie writer had once said, was a man’s gift to himself. Not a bad aphorism, Winston told himself. It was also profitable, of course. You did the job in the right way, and chances were that people would reward you for it, but the real satisfaction was playing the game well. The money was merely a result of something more important, because money was transitory, but honor wasn’t.
“Tax policy?” Winston asked.
“We need Congress put back together first, remember?” Ryan pointed out. “But, yes.”
Winston took a deep breath. “That’s a very big job, Ryan.”
“You’re telling me that?” the President demanded ... then grinned.
“It won’t make me any friends.”
“You also become head of the Secret Service. They’ll protect you, won’t they, Andrea?”
Agent Price was not used to being pulled into these conversations, but she feared she’d have to get used to it. “Uh, yes, Mr. President.”
“Things are just so damned inefficient,” Winston observed.
“So fix it,” Ryan told him.
“It might be bloody.”
“Buy a mop. I want your department cleaned up, streamlined, and run like you want it to make a profit someday. How you do that is your problem. For Defense, I want the same thing. The biggest problem over there is administrative. I need somebody who can run a business and make a profit to cull the bureaucracy out. That’s the biggest problem of all, for all the agencies.”
“You know Tony Bretano?”
“The TRW guy? He used to run their satellite division....” Ryan remembered his name as a former candidate for a senior Pentagon post, which offer he’d turned down flat. A lot of good people declined such offers. That was the paradigm he had to break.
“Lockheed-Martin is going to steal him away in a couple weeks, at least that’s what my sources tell me. That’s why Lockheed’s stock is nudging up. We have a buy-advisory on it. He gave TRW a fifty-percent profit increase in two years, not bad for an engineer who isn’t supposed to know beans about management. I play golf with him sometimes. You should hear him scream about doing business with the government.”
“Tell him I want to see him.”
“Lockheed’s board is giving him a free hand to—”
“That’s the idea, George.”
“What about my job, I mean, what you want me to do. The rule
is—”
“I know. You’ll be acting Secretary until we get things put back together.”
Winston nodded. “Okay. I need to bring a few people down with me.”
“I’m not going to tell you how to do it. I’m not even going to tell you all the things you have to do. I just want it to get done, George. You just have to tell me ahead of time. I don’t want to read about it in the papers first.”
“When would I start?”
“The office is empty right now,” Ryan told him.
A final hedge: “I have to talk to my family about it.”
“You know, George, these government offices have phones and everything.” Jack paused. “Look, I know what you are. I know what you do. I might have turned out the same way, but I just never found it ... satisfactory, I guess, just to make money. Getting start-ups off the ground, that was something different. Okay, managing money is important work. I didn’t like it myself, but I never wanted to be a doctor, either. Fine, different strokes and all that. But I know you’ve sat around a lot of tables with beer and pretzels talking about how screwed up this town is. Here’s your chance. It will never come again, George. Nobody will ever have an opportunity to be SecTreas without political considerations. Never. You can’t turn it down, because you’d never forgive yourself if you did.”
Winston wondered how one could be so adroitly cornered in a room with curved walls. “You’re learning the political stuff, Jack.”
“Andrea, you have a new boss,” the President told his principal agent.
For her part, Special Agent Price decided that Callie Weston might be wrong after all.