by Tom Clancy
“How long have you been thinking about that speech?” Arnie asked. Ryan’s turn of phrase was too polished for extemporaneous speech.
“A little while,” the President admitted.
“Well, when that decision comes through, be ready for a firestorm,” his Chief of Staff warned. “I’m talking demonstrations, TV coverage, and enough newspaper editorials to paper the walls of the Pentagon, and your Secret Service people will worry about the additional danger to your life, and your wife’s life, and your kids. If you think I’m kidding, ask them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s no law, federal, state, or local, which compels the world to be logical, Jack. The people out there depend on you to keep the fucking weather pleasant, and they blame you when you don’t. Deal with it.” With that, an annoyed Chief of Staff headed out and west toward his corner office.
“Crap,” Ryan breathed, as he flipped to the briefing papers for the Secretary of the Interior. Smokey Bear’s owner. Also custodian of the national parks, which the President only got to see on the Discovery Channel, on such nights as he had free time to switch the TV on.
There wasn’t much to be said for the clothing people wore in this place, Nomuri thought again, except for one thing. When you undid the buttons and found the Victoria’s Secret stuff underneath, well, it was like having a movie switch from black-and-white to Technicolor. This time Ming allowed him to do her buttons, then slide the jacket down her arms, and then get her trousers off. The panties looked particularly inviting, but then, so did her entire body. Nomuri scooped her up in his arms and kissed her passionately before dropping her on the bed. A minute later, he was beside her.
“So, why were you late?”
She made a face. “Every week Minister Fang meets with other ministers, and when he comes back, he has me transcribe the notes of the meetings so that he has a record of everything that was said.”
“Oh, do you use my new computer for that?” The question concealed the quivering Jesus! he felt throughout his body on hearing Ming’s words. This girl could be one hell of a source! Nomuri took a deep breath and resumed his poker face of polite disinterest.
“Of course.”
“Excellent. It’s equipped with a modem, yes?”
“Of course, I use it every day to retrieve Western news reports and such from their media Web sites.”
“Ah, that is good.” So, he’d taken care of business for the day, and with that job done, Nomuri leaned over for a kiss.
“Before I came into the restaurant, I put the lipstick on,” Ming explained. “I don’t wear it at work.”
“So I see,” the CIA officer replied, repeating the initial kiss, and extending it in time. Her arms found their way around his neck. The reason for her lateness had nothing to do with a lack of affection. That was obvious now, as his hands started to wander also. The front-closure on the bra was the smartest thing he’d done. Just a flick of thumb and forefinger and it sprang open, revealing both of her rather cute breasts, two more places for his hand to explore. The skin there was particularly silky ... and, he decided a few seconds later, tasty as well.
This resulted in an agreeable moan and squirm of pleasure from his ... what? Friend? Well, okay, but not enough. Agent? Not yet. Lover would do for the moment. They’d never talked at The Farm about this sort of thing, except the usual warnings not to get too close to your agent, lest you lose your objectivity. But if you didn’t get a little bit close, you’d never recruit the agent, would you? Of course, Chester knew that he was far more than a little bit close at the moment.
Whatever her looks, she had delightful skin, and his fingertips examined it in great detail as his eyes smiled into hers, with the occasional kiss. And her body wasn’t bad at all. A nice shape even when she stood. A little too much waist, maybe, but this wasn’t Venice Beach, and the hourglass figure, however nice it might look in pictures, was just that, a picture look. Her waist was smaller than her hips, and that was enough for the moment. It wasn’t as though she’d be walking down the ramp at some New York fashion show, where the models looked like boys anyway. So, Ming is not now and would never be a supermodel—deal with it, Chet, the officer told himself. Then it was time to put all the CIA stuff aside. He was a man, dressed only in boxer shorts, next to a woman, dressed only in panties. Panties large enough maybe to make a handkerchief, though orange-red wouldn’t be a good color for a man to pull from his back pocket, especially, he added to himself with a smile, in some artificial silk fabric.
“Why do you smile?” Ming asked.
“Because you are pretty,” Nomuri replied. And so she was, now, with that particular smile on her face. No, she’d never be a model, but inside every woman was the look of beauty, if only they would let it out. And her skin was first-class, especially her lips, coated with after-work lipstick, smooth and greasy, yet making his lips linger even so. Soon their bodies touched almost all over, and a warm, comfortable feeling it was, so nicely she fit under one arm, while his left hand played and wandered. Ming’s hair didn’t tangle much. She could evidently brush it out very easily, it was so short. Her underarms, too, were hairy, like many Chinese women’s, but that only gave Nomuri something else to play with, teasing and pulling a little. That evidently tickled her. Ming giggled playfully and hugged him tighter, then relaxed to allow his hand to wander more. As it passed her navel, she lay suddenly still, relaxing herself in some kind of invitation. Time for another kiss as his fingertips wandered farther, and there was humor in her eyes now. What game could this be ... ?
As soon as his hands found her panties, her bottom lifted off the mattress. He sat up halfway and pulled them down, allowing her left foot to kick them into the air, where the red-orange pants flew like a mono-colored rainbow, and then—
“Ming!” he said in humorous accusation.
“I’ve heard that men like this,” she said with a sparkle and a giggle.
“Well, it is different,” Nomuri replied, as his hands traced over skin even smoother than the rest of her body. “Did you do this at work?”
A riotous laugh now: “No, fool! This morning at my apartment! In my own bathroom, with my own razor.”
“Just wanted to make sure,” the CIA officer assured her. Damn, isn’t this something! Then her hand moved to do to him much the same as he was doing to her.
“You are different from Fang,” her voice told him in a playful whisper.
“Oh? How so?”
“I think the worst thing a woman can say to a man is ‘Are you in yet?’ One of the other secretaries said that to Fang once. He beat her. She came into work the next day with black eyes—he made her come in—and then the next night... well, he had me to bed,” she admitted, not so much with shame as embarrassment. “To show what a man he still is. But I knew better than to say that to him. We all do, now.”
“Will you say that to me?” Nomuri asked with a smile and another kiss.
“Oh, no! You are a sausage, not a string bean!” Ming told him enthusiastically.
It wasn’t the most elegant compliment he’d ever had, but it sufficed for the moment, Nomuri thought.
“Do you think it’s time for the sausage to find a home?”
“Oh, yes!”
As he rolled on top, Nomuri saw two things under him. One was a girl, a young woman with the usual female drives, which he was about to answer. The other was a potential agent, with access to political intelligence such as an experienced case officer only dreamed about. But Nomuri wasn’t an experienced case officer. He was still a little wet behind the ears, and so he didn’t know what was impossible. He’d have to worry about his potential agent, because if he ever recruited her successfully, her life would be in the gravest danger... he thought about what would happen, how her face would change as the bullet entered her brain... but, no, it was too ugly. With an effort, Nomuri forced the thought aside as he slipped into her. If he were to recruit her at all, he had to perform this function well
. And if it made him happy, too, well, that was just a bonus.
I’ll think about it,” POTUS promised the Secretary of the Interior, walking him to the door that led to the corridor, to the left of the fireplace. Sorry, buddy, but the money isn’t there to do all that. His SecInterior was by no means a bad man, but it seemed he’d been captured by his departmental bureaucracy, which was perhaps the worst danger of working in Washington. He sat back down to read the papers the Secretary had handed over. Of course he wouldn’t have time to read it all over himself. On a good day, he’d be able to skim through the Executive Summary of the documents, while the rest went to a staffer who’d go through it all and draft a report to the President—in effect, another Executive Summary of sorts, and from that document, typed up by a White House staff member of maybe twenty-eight years, policy would actually be made.
And that was crazy! Ryan thought angrily. He was supposed to be the chief executive of the country. He was the only one who was supposed to make policy. But the President’s time was valuable. So valuable, in fact, that others guarded it for him—and really those others guarded his time from himself, because ultimately it was they who decided what Ryan saw and didn’t see. Thus, while Ryan was the Chief Executive, and did alone make executive policy, he made that policy often based solely on the information presented to him by others. And sometimes it worried him that he was controlled by the information that made it to his desk, rather as the press decided what the public saw, and thus had a hand in deciding what the public thought about the various issues of the day.
So, Jack, have you been captured by your bureaucracy, too? It was hard to know, hard to tell, and hard to decide how to change the situation, if the situation existed in the first place.
Maybe that’s why Arnie likes me to get out of this building to where the real people are, Jack realized.
The more difficult problem was that Ryan was a foreign-policy and national-security expert. In those areas he felt the most competent. It was on domestic stuff that he felt disconnected and dumb. Part of that came from his personal wealth. He’d never worried about the cost of a loaf of bread or a quart of milk—all the more so in the White House, where you never saw milk in a quart container anyway, but only in a chilled glass on a silver tray, carried by a Navy steward’s mate right to your hands while you sat in your easy chair. There were people out there who did worry about such things, or at least worried about the cost of putting little Jimmy through college, and Ryan, as President, had to concern himself with their worries. He had to try to keep the economy in balance so that they could earn their decent livings, could go to Disney World in the summer, and the football games in the fall, and splurge to make sure there were plenty of presents under the Christmas tree every year.
But how the hell was he supposed to do that? Ryan remembered a lament attributed to the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. On learning that he’d been declared a god, and that temples had been erected to him, and that people sacrificed to the statues of himself in those temples, Augustus angrily inquired: When someone prays to me to cure his gout, what am I supposed to do? The fundamental issue was how much government policy really had to do with reality. That was a question seldom posed in Washington even by conservatives who ideologically despised the government and everything it did in domestic terms, though they were often in favor of showing the flag and rattling the national saber overseas—exactly why they enjoyed this Ryan had never thought about. Perhaps just to be different from liberals who flinched from the exercise of force like a vampire from the cross, but who, like vampires, liked to extend government as far as they could get away with into the lives of everyone, and so suck their blood—in reality, use the instrument of taxation to take more and more to pay for the more and more they would have the government do.
And yet the economy seemed to move on, regardless of what government did. People found their jobs, most of them in the private sector, providing goods and services for which people paid voluntarily with their after-tax money. And yet “public service” was a phrase used almost exclusively by and about political figures, almost always the elected sort. Didn’t everyone out there serve the public in one way or another? Physicians, teachers, firefighters, pharmacists. Why did the media say it was just Ryan and Robby Jackson, and the 535 elected members of the Congress? He shook his head.
Damn. Okay, I know how I got here, but why the hell did I allow myself to run for election? Jack asked himself. It had made Arnie happy. It had even made the media happy—perhaps because they loved him as a target? the President asked himself—and Cathy had not been cross with him about it. But why the hell had he ever allowed himself to be stampeded into this? He fundamentally didn’t know what he was supposed to do as President. He had no real agenda, and sort of bumped along from day to day. Making tactical decisions (for which he was singularly unqualified) instead of large strategic ones. There was nothing important he really wanted to change about his country. Oh, sure, there were a few problems to be fixed. Tax policy needed rewriting, and he was letting George Winston ramrod that. And Defense needed firming up, and he had Tony Bretano working on that. He had a Presidential Commission looking at health-care policy, which his wife, actually, was overseeing in a distant way, along with some of her Hopkins colleagues, and all of that was kept quiet. And there was that very black look at Social Security, being guided by Winston and Mark Gant.
The “third rail of American politics,” he thought again. Step on it and die. But Social Security was something the American people really cared about, not for what it was, but for what they wrongly thought it to be—and, actually, they knew that their thoughts were wrong, judging by the polling data. As thoroughly mismanaged as any financial institution could possibly be, it was still part of a government promise made by the representatives of the people to the people. And somehow, despite all the cynicism out there—which was considerable—the average Joe Citizen really did trust his government to keep its word. The problem was that union chiefs and industrialists who’d dipped into pension funds and gone to federal prison for it had done nothing compared to what succeeding Congresses had done to Social Security—but the advantage of a crook in Congress was that he or she was not a crook, not legally. After all, Congress made the law. Congress made government policy, and those things couldn’t be wrong, could they? Yet another proof that the drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They’d assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they’d been. One could almost hear the “Oops!” emanating from all those old graves. The people who’d drafted the Constitution had sat in a room dominated by George Washington himself, and whatever honor they’d lacked he’d probably provided from his own abundant supply, just by sitting there and looking at them. The current Congress had no such mentor/living god to take George’s place, and more was the pity, Ryan thought. The mere fact that Social Security had shown a profit up through the 1960s had meant that—well, Congress couldn’t let a profit happen, could it? Profits were what made rich people (who had to be bad people, because no one grew rich without having exploited someone or other, right?, which never stopped members of the Congress from going to those people for campaign contributions, of course) rich, and so profits had to be spent, and so Social Security taxes (properly called premiums, because Social Security was actually called OASDI, for Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) were transformed into general funds, to be spent along with everything else. One of Ryan’s students from his days of teaching history at the Naval Academy had sent him a small plaque to keep on his White House desk. It read: THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE UNTIL THE DAY CONGRESS DISCOVERS THAT IT CAN BRIBE THE PUBLIC WITH THE PUBLIC’S MONEY—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. Ryan paid heed to it. There were times when he wanted to grab Congress by its collective neck and throttle it, but there was no single such neck, and Arnie never tired of telling him how tame a Congress he had, the House of Representatives especially,
which was the reverse of how things usually went.
The President grumbled and checked his daily schedule for his next appointment. As with everything else, the President of the United States lived a schedule determined by others, his appointments made weeks in advance, the daily briefing pages prepared the day before so that he’d know who the hell was coming in, and what the hell he, she, or they wanted to talk about, and also what his considered position (mainly drafted by others) was. The President’s position was usually a friendly one so that the visitor(s) could leave the Oval Office feeling good about the experience, and the rules were that you couldn’t change the agenda, lest the Chief Executive say, “What the hell are you asking me for now!” This would alarm both the guest and the Secret Service agents standing right behind them, hands close to their pistols—just standing there like robots, faces blank but scanning, ears taking everything in. After their shift ended, they probably headed off to whatever cop bar they frequented to chuckle over what the City Council President of Podunk had said in the Oval Office that day—“Jesus, did you see the Boss’s eyes when that dumb bastard ... ?”—because they were bright, savvy people who in many ways understood his job better than he did, Ryan reflected. Well they should. They had the double advantage of having seen it all, and not being responsible for any of it. Lucky bastards, Jack thought, standing for his next appointment.
If cigarettes were good for anything, it was for this, Nomuri thought. His left arm was curled around Ming, his body snuggled up against her, staring at the ceiling in the lovely, relaxed, deflationary moment, and puffing gently on his Kool as an accent to the moment, feeling Ming’s breathing, and feeling very much like a man. The sky outside the windows was dark. The sun had set.