“The antibody tests?” he asked quietly, summoning his official dignity.
“Positive,” MacGregor told him.
The first documented Ebola outbreak—no one knew how far back the disease went, how many jungle villages it might have exterminated a hundred years earlier, for example—had gone through the nearest hospital’s staff with frightening speed, to the point that the medical personnel had left the facility in panic. And that, perversely, had helped end the outbreak more rapidly than continued treatment might have done—the victims died, and nobody got close enough to them to catch what they had. African medics now knew what precautions to take. Everyone was masked and gloved, and disinfection procedures were ruthlessly enforced. As casual and careless as many African personnel often were, this was one lesson they’d taken to heart, and with that feeling of safety established, they, like medical personnel all over the world, did the best they could.
For this patient, that was very little use. The chart showed that, too.
“From Iraq?” the official asked.
Dr. MacGregor nodded. “That is what he told me.”
“I must check on that with the proper authorities.”
“Doctor, I have a report to make,” MacGregor insisted. “This is a possible outbreak and—”
“No.” The official shook his head. “Not until we know more. When we make a report, if we do, we must forward all of the necessary information for the alert to be useful.”
“But—”
“But this is my responsibility, and it is my duty to see that the responsibility is properly executed.” He pointed the chart to the patient. His hand wasn’t shaking now that he had established his power over the case. “Does he have a family? Who can tell us more about him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me check that out,” the government doctor said. “Have your people make copies of all records and send them to me at once.” With a stern order given, the health department representative felt as though he had done his duty to his profession and his country.
MacGregor nodded his submission. Moments like this made him hate Africa. His country had been here for more than a century. A fellow Scot named Gordon had come to the Sudan, fallen in love with it—was the man mad? MacGregor wondered—and died right in this city 120 years earlier. Then the Sudan had become a British protectorate. A regiment of infantry had been raised from this country, and that regiment had fought bravely and well under British officers. But then Sudan had been returned to the Sudanese—too quickly, without the time and money spent to create the institutional infrastructure to turn a tribal wasteland into a viable nation. The same story had been told in the same way all over the continent, and the people of Africa were still paying the price for that disservice. It was one more thing neither he nor any other European could speak aloud except with one another—and sometimes not even then—for fear of being called a racist. But if he were a racist, then why had he come here?
“You will have them in two hours.”
“Very well.” The official walked out the door. There the head nurse for the unit would take him to the disinfection area, and for that the official would follow orders like a child under the eye of a stern mother.
PAT MARTIN CAME in with a well-stuffed briefcase, from which he took fourteen folders, laddering them across the coffee table in alphabetical order. Actually they were labeled A to M, because President Ryan had specifically asked that he not know the names at first.
“You know, I’d feel a lot better if you hadn’t given me all this power,” Martin said without looking up.
“Why’s that?” Jack asked.
“I’m just a prosecutor, Mr. President. A pretty good one, sure, and now I run the Criminal Division, and that’s nice, too, but I’m only—”
“How do you think I feel?” Ryan demanded, then softened his voice. “Nobody since Washington has been stuck with this job, and what makes you think I know what I’m supposed to be doing? Hell, I’m not even a lawyer to understand all this stuff without a crib sheet.”
Martin looked up with half a smile. “Okay, I deserved that.”
But Ryan had set the criteria. Before him was a roster of the senior federal judiciary. Each of the fourteen folders gave the professional history of a judge in the United States Court of Appeals, ranging from one in Boston to another in Seattle. The President had ordered Martin and his people to select judges of no less than ten years’ experience, with no less than fifty important written decisions (as distinguished from routine matters like which side won in a liability case), none of which had been overturned by the Supreme Court—or if one or two had been overturned, had been vindicated by a later reversal in Washington.
“This is a good bunch,” Martin said.
“Death penalty?”
“The Constitution specifically provides for that, remember. Fifth Amendment,” Martin quoted from memory: “ ‘Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ So with due process, you can take a person’s life, but you can only try him once for it. The Court established the criteria for that in a number of cases in the ’70s and ’80s—guilt trial followed by penalty trial, with the penalty phase dependent upon ‘special’ circumstances. All of these judges have upheld that rule—with a few exceptions. D here struck down a Mississippi case on the basis of mental incompetence. That was a good call, even though the crime was pretty gruesome—the Supreme Court affirmed it without comment or hearing. Sir, the problem with the system is one that nobody can really fix. It’s just the nature of law. A lot of legal principles are based on decisions from unusual cases. There’s a dictum that hard cases make for bad law. Like that case in England, remember? Two little kids murder a younger kid. What the hell is a judge supposed to do when the defendants are eight years old, definitely guilty of a brutal murder, but only eight years old? What you do then is, you pray some other judge gets stuck with it. Somehow we all try to make cohesive legal doctrine out of that. It’s not really possible, but we do it anyway.”
“I figure you picked tough ones, Pat. Did you pick fair ones?” the President asked.
“Remember what I said a minute ago? I don’t want this sort of power? I didn’t dare do otherwise. E here reversed a conviction one of my best people got on a technicality—an issue of admissibility—and when he did it, we were all pretty mad. The issue was entrapment, where the line is. The defendant was guilty as hell, no doubt of it. But Judge ... E looked at the arguments and probably made the right call, and that ruling is part of FBI guidelines now.”
Jack looked at the folders. It would be a full week’s reading. This, as Arnie had told him a few days before, would be his most important act as President. No Chief Executive since Washington had been faced with the necessity of appointing the entire Supreme Court, and even that had been in an age when the national consensus on law had been far firmer and deeper than what existed in America now. Back then “cruel and unusual punishment” had meant the rack and burning at the stake—both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America—but in more recent rulings had been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons. So fine, Ryan thought, the prisons are too crowded, and then why not release dangerous criminals on society for fear of being cruel to convicted felons?
Now he had the power to change that. All he had to do was select judges who took as harsh a view on crime as he did, an outlook he’d learned from listening to his father’s occasional rant about a particularly vile crime, or an especially bat-brained judge who hadn’t ever viewed a crime scene, and therefore never really known what the issues were. And for Ryan there was the personal element. He’d been the subject of attempted murder, as had his wife and children. He knew what it was all about, the outrage at f
acing the fact that there were people who could take a life as easily as buying candy at a drug store, who preyed on others as though they were game animals, and whose actions cried out for retribution. He could remember looking into Sean Miller’s eyes more than once and seeing nothing, nothing in there at all. No humanity, no empathy, no feelings—not even hatred, so outside the human community he’d taken himself that there was no returning ...
And yet.
Ryan closed his eyes, remembering the moment, a loaded Browning pistol in his grip, his blood boiling in his veins but his hands like ice, the exquisite moment at which he could have ended the life of the man who had so wanted to end his own—and Cathy‘s, and Sally’s, and Little Jack, yet unborn. Looking in his eyes, and finally seeing the fear at last, breaking through the shell of inhumanity ... but how many times had he thanked a merciful God that he’d neglected to cock the hammer on his pistol? He would have done it. He’d wanted to do it more than anything in his life, and he could remember pulling the trigger, only to be surprised when it hadn’t moved—and then the moment had passed away. Jack could remember killing. The terrorist in London. The one in the boat at the base of his cliff. The cook on the submarine. Surely he’d killed others—that horrible night in Colombia which had given him nightmares for years after. But Sean Miller was different. It hadn’t been necessity for Miller. For him it had been justice of a sort, and he’d been there, and he’d been the Law, and, God, how he’d wanted to take that worthless life! But he hadn’t. The Law that had ended the life of that terrorist and his colleagues had been well considered, cold and detached ... as it had to be—and for that reason he had to select the best possible people to repopulate the Court, because the decisions they would make were not about one enraged man trying at the same time to protect and avenge his family. They would say what the law was for everyone, and that wasn’t about personal desires. This thing people called civilization was about something more than one man’s passion. It had to be. And it was his duty to make sure that it was, by picking the right people.
“Yeah,” Martin said, reading the President’s face. “Big deal, isn’t it?”
“Wait a minute.” Jack rose and walked out the door to the secretaries’ room. “Which one of you smokes?” he asked there.
“It’s me,” said Ellen Sumter. She was of Jack’s age, and probably trying to quit, as all smokers of that age at least claimed. Without another question, she handed her President a Virginia Slim—the same as the crewwoman on his airplane, Jack realized—and a butane lighter. The President nodded his thanks and walked back into his office, lighting it. Before he could close the door, Mrs. Sumter raced to follow him with an ashtray taken from her desk drawer.
Sitting down, Ryan took a long drag, eyes on the carpet, which was of the Great Seal of the President of the United States, covered though it was with furniture.
“How the hell,” Jack asked quietly, “did anybody ever decide that one man could have this much power? I mean, what I’m doing here—”
“Yes, sir. Kind of like being James Madison, isn’t it? You pick the people who decide what the Constitution really means. They’re all in their late forties or fifties, and so they’ll be there for a while,” Martin told him. “Cheer up. At least it’s not a game for you. At least you’re doing it the right way. You’re not picking women because they’re women, or blacks because they’re black. I gave you a good mix, color, bathrooms, and everything, but all the names have been redacted out—and you won’t be able to tell who’s who unless you follow cases, which you probably don’t. I give you my word, sir, they’re all good ones. I spent a lot of time assembling the list for you. Your guidelines helped, and they were good guidelines. For what it’s worth, they’re all people who think the way you do. People who like power scare me,” the attorney said. “Good ones reflect a lot on what they’re doing before they do it. Picking real judges who’ve made some hard calls—well, read their decisions. You’ll see how hard they worked at what they did.”
Another puff. He tapped the folders. “I don’t know the law well enough to understand all the points in there. I don’t know crap about the law, except you’re not supposed to break it.”
Martin grinned at that one: “Not a bad place to start when you think about it.” He didn’t have to go any further. Not every occupant of this office had thought of things quite that way. Both men knew it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one said to the sitting President.
“I know the things I don’t like. I know the things I’d like to see changed, but, God damn it”—Ryan looked up, eyes wide now—“do I have the right to make that sort of call?”
“Yes, Mr. President, you do, because the Senate has to look over your shoulder, remember? Maybe they’ll disagree on one or two. All these judges have been checked out by the FBI. They’re all honest. They’re all smart. None of them ever wanted or expected to make it to the Supreme Court except through a certiori grant. If you can’t come up with nine you like, we’ll search some more—better then if you have somebody else do it. The head of the Civil Rights Division is also a pretty good man—he’s off to my left some, but he’s another thinker.”
Civil rights, Jack thought. Did he have to make government policy on that, too? How was he supposed to know what might be the right way to treat people who might or might not be a little different from everybody else? Sooner or later you lost the ability to be objective, and then your beliefs took over—and were you then making policy based on personal prejudice? How were you supposed to know what was right? Jesus.
Ryan took a last puff and stubbed the cigarette out, rewarded as always by a dizzying buzz from the renewed vice. “Well, I guess I have a lot of reading to do.”
“I’d offer you some help, but probably better that you try to do it yourself. That way, nobody pollutes the process—more than I’ve already done, that is. You want to keep that in mind. I might not be the best guy for this, but you asked me, and that’s the best I have.”
“I suppose that’s all any of us can do, eh?” Ryan observed, staring at the pile of folders.
THE CHIEF OF the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice was a political appointee dating back to President Fowler. Formerly a corporate lawyer and lobbyist—it paid far better than the academic post he’d held before his first political appointment—he’d been politically active since before his admission to law school, and as with so many occupants of official offices he had become, if not his post, then his vision of it. He had a constituency, even though he’d never been elected to anything, and even though his government service had been intermittent, a series of increasingly high posts made possible by his proximity to the power that rested in this city, the power lunches, the parties, the office visits made while representing people he might or might not really care about, because a lawyer had an obligation to serve the interests of his clients—and the clients chose him, not the reverse. One often needed the fees of the few to serve the needs of the many—which was, in fact, his own philosophy of government. Thus he’d unknowingly come to live Ben Jonson’s dictum about “speaking to mere contraries, yet all be law.” But he’d never lost his passion for civil rights, and he’d never lobbied for anything contrary to that core belief—of course, nobody since the 1960s had lobbied against civil rights per se, but he told himself that was important. A white man with stock originating well before the Revolutionary War, he spoke at all the right forums, and from that he’d earned the admiration of people whose political views were the same as his. From that admiration came power, and it was hard to say which aspect of his life influenced the other more. Because of his early work in the Justice Department he’d won the attention of political figures. Because he’d done that work with skill, he’d also earned the attention of a powerful Washington law firm. Leaving the government to enter that firm, he’d used his political contacts to practice his profession more effectively, and from that effectiveness he’d generated additional credibility in the pol
itical world, one hand constantly washing the other until he couldn’t really discern which hand was which. Along the way the cases he argued had become his identity in a process so gradual and seemingly so logical that he hardly knew what had taken place. He was what he’d argued for over the years.
And that was the problem right now. He knew and admired Patrick Martin as a lesser legal talent who’d advanced at Justice by working exclusively in the courts—never even a proper United States Attorney (those were political appointments, mainly selected by senators for their home states), but rather one of the apolitical professional worker bees who did the real casework while their appointed boss worked on speeches, caseload management, and political ambition. And the fact of the matter was that Martin was a gifted legal tactician, forty-one and one in his formal trials, better yet as a legal administrator guiding young prosecutors. But he didn’t know much about politics, the Civil Rights chief thought, and for that reason he was the wrong man to advise President Ryan.
He had the list. One of his people had helped Martin put it together, and his people were loyal, because they knew that the real path to advancement in this city was to move in and out as their chief had done, and their chief could by lifting a phone get them that job at a big firm, and so one of them handed his chief the list, with the names not redacted out.
The chief of the Civil Rights Division had only to read off the fourteen names. He didn’t need to call up the paperwork on their cases. He knew them all. This one, at the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, had reversed a lower-court ruling and written a lengthy opinion questioning the constitutionality of affirmative action—too good a discourse, it had persuaded the Supreme Court in a sharply divided 5-4 decision. The case had been a narrow one, and the affirmation of it in Washington had been similarly narrow, but the chief didn’t like any chips in that particular wall of stone.
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