by Tom Clancy
“Hi, honey.”
“We really need to fly together this way once,” her husband observed with a twinkle in his eye. Then he shifted gears in a heartbeat. “What’s the word on Iraq?”
“Something’s happening. At least nine, probably twenty or so senior officers got together for a quiet little meeting. We don’t know what about, but it wasn’t to pick the menu for the wake.” They got in the back of the car, and she handed over a folder. “You’re getting promoted, by the way.”
“What?” Ed’s head came up from the document package.
“DCI. We’re moving with Plan Blue, and Ryan wants you to front it for the Hill. I stay DDO, and I get to run my shop the way I want to, don’t I, honey?” She smiled sweetly. Then she explained the other problem of the day.
CLARK HAD HIS own office at Langley, and his seniority guaranteed him a view of the parking lot and the trees beyond, which beat a windowless cubby. He even shared a pool secretary with four other senior field officers. In many ways Langley was alien country for him. His official job title was that of a training officer down at the Farm. He came to headquarters to deliver reports and get briefed in on new jobs, but he didn’t like it here. There was a smell to any headquarters facility. The desk weenies wanted things their way. They didn’t want irregularities. They didn’t care to work overtime, and miss favorite TV shows as a result. They didn’t much like surprises and data that made them rethink stuff. They were the bureaucratic tail in an intelligence agency, but at CIA the tail had become so massive that it wagged the dog without ever moving itself. The phenomenon wasn’t exactly unusual, but when things went bad, his was the life at risk in the field, and if he were ever killed out there, he’d turn into one residual memo, to be quickly filed and forgotten by people who did National Intelligence Estimates based often as not on newspaper stories.
“Catch the news this morning, Mr. C.?” Chavez asked lightly on entering the room.
“I got in at five.” He held up a folder with PLAN BLUE printed on it. Because he so hated paperwork, when he did it he worked with supreme intensity, the more quickly to be rid of it.
“Then turn your set to CNN.” John did, expecting a news story that would surprise his Agency. And that’s what he got, but not quite what he’d expected.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the President.”
He had to get out in public fast. Everyone agreed on that. Ryan walked into the press room, stood behind the podium, and looked down at his notes. It was easier than looking out at the room, smaller and shabbier than most parts of the building, built atop the former swimming pool. There were eight rows of six seats each. Every one, he’d seen on the way in, was full.
“Thank you for coming in so early,” Jack said in as relaxed a voice as he could manage.
“Recent events in Iraq affect the security of a region which is of vital interest to America and her allies. We note without grief the death of the Iraqi President. As you know, this individual was responsible for the instigation of two wars of aggression, the brutal suppression of that country’s Kurdish minority, and the denial of the most fundamental human rights to his own citizens.
“Iraq is a nation which should be prosperous. It has a sizable fraction of the world’s petroleum reserves, a respectable industrial base, and a substantial population. All that is lacking in that country is a government which looks after the needs of its citizens. We would hope that the passing of the former leader offers an opportunity for just this.” Jack looked up from his notes.
“America therefore extends the hand of friendship to Iraq. We hope that there will be an opportunity to normalize relations, and to put an end once and for all to the hostility between Iraq and its Gulf neighbors. I have directed acting Secretary of State Scott Adler to make contact with the Iraqi government, and to offer the chance of a meeting to discuss matters of mutual interest. In the event that the new regime is willing to address the question of human rights, and to commit to free and fair elections, America is willing to address the question of the removal of economic sanctions, and the rapid restoration of normal diplomatic relations.
“There has been enough enmity. It is unseemly for a region of such natural wealth to be the site of discord, and America is willing to do her part as an honest broker to assist in bringing peace and stability, along with our friends among the Gulf states. We await a favorable reply from Baghdad so that initial contacts might be established.” President Ryan folded the paper away.
“That’s the end of my official statement. Any questions?” That took about a microsecond.
“Sir, this morning, as you know,” the New York Times shouted first, “Vice President Edward Kealty claimed that he is the President and you are not. What do you have to say about that?”
“The allegation by Mr. Kealty is groundless and totally without value,” Jack replied coldly. “Next question.”
Having forsworn the game, Ryan was now condemned to playing it. Nobody in the room was the least bit fooled by his appearance. The announcement he’d just made could as easily have been delivered by his press secretary or the official State Department spokesman. Instead, he was here in front of the lights, looking at the assembled faces, and feeling rather like a lone Christian in a Colosseum full of lions. Well, that’s what the Secret Service was for.
“A follow-up—what if he actually didn’t resign?” the Times insisted over the shouts of others.
“He did actually resign. Otherwise, I could not have been appointed. Therefore your question has no meaning.”
“But, sir, what if he is telling the truth?”
“He isn’t.” Ryan took a breath, as Arnie had told him to do, and then went on, saying what Arnie had told him to say. “Mr. Kealty resigned his position at the request of President Durling. You all know the reason. He was under investigation by the FBI for sexual misconduct while he was a senator. The investigation was in the matter of a sexual assault—not to say”—which Ryan then said—“rape of one of his Senate aides. His resignation was part of a ... deal, a plea bargain, I guess, to avoid criminal prosecution.” Ryan paused just then, somewhat surprised to see the assembled faces go a little pale. He’d just hurled down a gauntlet, and it made a loud noise on the floor. The next one was even louder. “You know who the President is. Now, shall we get on with the business of the country?”
“What are you doing about this?” ABC asked.
“You mean Kealty or Iraq?” Ryan asked. His tone indicated what the subject ought to be.
“The Kealty question, sir.”
“I’ve asked the FBI to check into it. I expect them to report back to me later today. Aside from that, we have enough things to be done.”
“Follow-up—what about what you said to the governors in your speech last night, and what Vice President Kealty said this morning? Do you really want inexperienced people to—”
“Yes, I do. First of all, what people do we have who are experienced in the workings of Congress? The answer is, not very many. We have the few survivors, people fortunate enough to have been elsewhere that night. Aside from that—what? People defeated in the last election? Do you want them back? I want, and I think the country needs, people who know how to do things. The plain truth is that government is by nature inefficient. We can’t make it more efficient by selecting people who’ve always worked in government. The idea the Founding Fathers had was for citizen legislators, not for a permanent ruling class. In that I think I am in agreement with the intentions of the framers of our Constitution. Next?”
“But who will decide the question?” the Los Angeles Times asked. It wasn’t necessary to say which question.
“The question is decided,” Ryan told him. “Thanks for coming. If you will excuse me, I have a lot of work to do today.” He picked up his opening statement and walked off to his right.
“Mr. Ryan!” The shout came from a good dozen voices. Ryan walked through the door and around the corner. Arnie was waiting.
“Not bad unde
r the circumstances.”
“Except for one thing. Not one of them said ‘Mr. President.’ ”
MOUDI TOOK THE call, which required only a few seconds. With that he walked over to the isolation ward. Outside, he donned protective gear, carefully checking the plastic fabric for leaks. The suit was made by a European company, modeled on the American Racal. The thick plastic was an incongruous powder blue, reinforced with Kevlar fiber. At the back on the web belt hung the ventilation unit. This pumped filtered air into the suit, and did so with a slight overpressure so that a tear would not suck environmental air inside. It wasn’t known if Ebola was airborne or not, and nobody wanted to be the first to prove that it was. He opened the door to go inside. Sister Maria Magdalena was there, attending her friend, dressed the same way. Both knew all too well what it meant for a patient to see her attendants dressed in a way that so clearly denoted their fear of what she carried within her.
“Good afternoon, Sister,” he said, his gloved hands lifting the chart off the foot of the bed. Temperature 41.4, despite the ice. Pulse rapid at 115. Respiration 24 and shallow. Blood pressure was starting to fall from the internal bleeding. The patient had received a further four units of whole blood—and probably lost at least that much, most of it internally. Her blood chemistry was starting to go berserk. The morphine was as high as he could prescribe without risking respiratory failure. Sister Jean Baptiste was semiconscious—she should have been virtually comatose from the drugs, but the pain was too severe for that.
Maria Magdalena just looked over at him through the plastic of her mask, her eyes beyond sadness into a despair that her religion forbade. Moudi and she had seen all manner of deaths, from malaria, from cancer, from AIDS. But there was nothing so brutally cruel as this. It hit so fast that the patient didn’t have the time to prepare, to steel the mind, to fortify the soul with prayer and faith. It was like some sort of traffic accident, shocking but just long enough in duration for the suffering to—if there were a devil in creation, then this was his gift to the world. Physician or not, Moudi put that thought aside. Even the devil had a use.
“The airplane is on the way,” he told her.
“What will happen?”
“Professor Rousseau has suggested a dramatic treatment method. We will do a complete blood-replacement procedure. First the blood supply will be removed completely, and the vascular system flushed out with oxygenated saline. Then he proposes to replace the blood supply completely with whole blood in which he has Ebola antibodies. Theoretically, in this way the antibodies will attack the virus systemically and simultaneously.”
The nun thought about that. It wasn’t quite as radical as many would imagine. The total replacement of a body’s blood supply was a procedure dating back to the late 1960s, having been used in the treatment of advanced meningitis. It wasn’t a treatment that could be used routinely. It required a heart-lung-bypass machine. But this was her friend, and she was well past thinking of other patients and practicality.
Just then, Jean Baptiste’s eyes opened wide. They looked at nothing, unfocused, and the very slackness of the face proclaimed her agony. She might not even have been conscious. It was just that the eyes could not remain closed in severe pain. Moudi looked over at the morphine drip. If pain had been the only consideration, he might well have increased it and taken the risk of killing the patient in the name of mercy. But he couldn’t chance it. He had to deliver her alive, and though her fate might be a cruel one, he hadn’t chosen it for her.
“I must travel with her,” Maria Magdalena said quietly.
Moudi shook his head. “I cannot allow that.”
“It is a rule of our order. I cannot allow her to travel unaccompanied by one of us.”
“There is a danger, Sister. Moving her is a risk. In the aircraft we will be breathing recirculated air. There is no need to expose you to the risk as well. Her virtue is not in question here.” And one death was quite enough for his purposes.
“I have no choice.”
Moudi nodded. He hadn’t chosen her destiny either, had he? “As you wish.”
THE AIRCRAFT LANDED at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport ten miles outside Nairobi and taxied to the cargo terminal. It was an old 707, once part of the Shah’s personal fleet, the internal furnishings long since ripped out to reveal a metal deck. The trucks were waiting. The first of them backed up to the rear door, located on the right side, which opened a minute after the chocks secured the wheels in place on the ramp.
There were a hundred fifty cages, in each of them an African green monkey. The black workers all wore protective gloves. The monkeys, as if sensing their fate, were in an evil mode, using every opportunity to bite and scratch at the handlers. They screeched, urinated, and defecated as well, but to little avail.
Inside, the flight crew watched, keeping their distance. They wanted no part of the transfer. These noisy, small, nasty little creatures might not have been designated as unclean by the Koran, but they were clearly unpleasant enough, and after this job was over, they’d have the aircraft thoroughly washed and disinfected. The transfer took half an hour. The cages were stacked and tied down in place, and the handlers moved off, paid in cash and pleased to be done with the job, and their truck was replaced by a low-slung fuel bowser.
“Excellent,” the buyer told the dealer.
“We were lucky. A friend had a large supply ready to go, and his buyer was slow getting the money. In view of this ...”
“Yes, an extra ten percent?”
“That would be sufficient,” the dealer said.
“Gladly. You will have the additional check tomorrow morning. Or would you prefer cash?”
Both men turned as the 707 lit off its engines. In minutes it would take off, this flight a short hop to Entebbe, Uganda.
“I DON’T LIKE the smell of this,” Bert Vasco said, handing the folder back.
“Explain,” Mary Pat commanded.
“I was born in Cuba. Once my dad told me about the night Batista bugged out. The senior generals had a little meeting and started boarding airplanes, quick and quiet, off to where their bank accounts were, and left everybody else holding the bag.” Vasco was one of the State Department people who enjoyed working with CIA, probably as a result of his Cuban birth. He understood that diplomacy and intelligence each worked better when working together. Not everyone at Foggy Bottom agreed. That was their problem. They’d never been chased out of their homelands.
“You think that’s what’s happening here?” Mary Pat asked, beating Ed by half a second.
“That’s the morning line from where I sit.”
“You feel confident enough to tell the President that?” Ed Foley asked.
“Which one?” Vasco asked. “You should hear what they’re saying over at the office. The FBI just took over the seventh floor. That has things a little shook up. Anyway, yes. It’s just a guess, but it’s a good guess. What we need to know is, who, if anyone, has been talking to them. Nobody on the ground, eh?”
The Foleys both looked down, which answered the question.
“MR. RYAN’S ALLEGATIONS show that he’s learned the shabby part of politics faster than the proper ones,” Kealty said, in a voice more hurt than angry. “I had honestly expected better of him.”
“So, you deny the allegations?” ABC asked.
“Of course I do. It’s no secret that I once had an alcohol problem, but I overcame it. And it’s no secret that my personal conduct has at times been questionable, but I’ve changed that, too, with help from my church, and the love of my wife,” he added, squeezing her hand as she looked on with soft compassion and ironclad support. “That really has nothing to do with the issue here. We have to place the interests of our country first. Personal animosity has no place in this, Sam. We’re supposed to rise above that.”
“You bastard,” Ryan breathed.
“This is not going to be pleasant,” van Damm said.
“How can he win, Arnie?”
“De
pends. I’m not sure what game he’s playing.”
“—could say things about Mr. Ryan, too, but that isn’t the sort of thing we need to do now. The country needs stability, not discord. The American people are looking for leadership—experienced, seasoned leadership.”
“Arnie, how much has this—”
“I remember when he’d fuck a snake, if somebody held it straight for him. Jack, we can’t think about that sort of thing. Remember what Allen Drury said, this is a town in which we deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. The press likes Ed, always has. They like him. They like his family. They like his social conscience—”
“My ass!” Ryan nearly shouted.
“You listen to me right now. You want to be the President? You’re not allowed to have a temper. You hold on to that thought, Jack. When the President loses his temper, people die. You’ve seen how that happens, and the people out there want to know that you are calm and cool and collected at all times, got it?”
Ryan swallowed and nodded. Every so often it was good to lose one’s temper, and Presidents were allowed. But you had to know when, and that was a lesson as yet unlearned. “So what are you telling me?”
“You are the President. Act like it. Do your job. Look presidential. What you said at the press conference was okay. Kealty’s claim is groundless. You’re having the FBI check out his claim, but the claim doesn’t matter. You swore the oath, you live here, and that’s that. Make him irrelevant and he’ll go away. Focus on this thing and you give him legitimacy.”