by Tom Clancy
“Thank you, Governor, for that introduction.” Ryan turned to gesture to the people on the dais with him, naming them from the list on the first page of his speech folder, good friends whom he’d never see again after this first time, whose faces were illuminated by the simple fact that he spoke their names in the correct order.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve never been to Indiana before. This is my first visit to the Hoosier State, but after experiencing your welcome, I hope it won’t be the last—”
It was as though someone had held up the APPLAUSE sign on a TV show. He’d just spoken the truth, followed by something that might or might not have been a lie, and while they had to know it, they didn’t care a whit. And then Jack Ryan learned something important for the first time.
God, it’s like a narcotic, Jack thought, understanding just then why people entered politics. No man could stand here like this, hearing the noise, seeing the faces, and not love the moment. It came through the stage fright, through the overwhelming sense of not belonging. Here he was, before four thousand people, fellow citizens each of them, equal to him before the law, but in their minds he was something else entirely. He was the United States of America. He was their President, but more than that, he was the embodiment of their hopes, their desires, the image of their own nation, and because of that they were willing to love someone they didn’t know, to cheer his every word, to hope that for a brief moment they could believe that he’d looked directly into each individual pair of eyes so that the moment would be forever special, never to be forgotten. It was power such as he had never known to exist. This crowd was his to command. This was why men devoted their lives to seeking the presidency, to bathe in this moment like a warm ocean wave, a moment of utter perfection.
But why did they think he was so different? What made him special in their minds? Ryan wondered. It was only chance in his case, and in every other instance, it was they who’d done the choosing, they who had elevated the man to the podium, they who by their act had changed the ordinary into something else—and perhaps not even that. It was only perception. Ryan was the same man he’d been a month or a year before. He’d acquired little in the way of new knowledge and less in the way of wisdom. He was the same person with a different job, and while the trappings of the new post were all around him, the person within the protective ring of bodyguards, the person surrounded by a flood of love which he’d never sought, was merely the product of parents, a childhood, an education, and experiences, just as they all were. They thought him different and special and perhaps even great, but that was perception, not reality. The reality of the moment was sweaty hands on the armored podium, a speech written by someone else, and a man who knew that he was out of place, however pleasant the moment might be.
So, what do I do now? the President of the United States asked himself, his mind racing as the current wave of applause diminished. He’d never be what they thought he was. He was a good man, he thought, but not a great one, and the presidency was a job, a post, a government office that came with duties defined by James Madison, and, as with all things in life, a place of transition from one reality to another. The past was something you couldn’t change. The future was something you tried to see. The present was where you were, and that’s where you had to do your best—and if you were lucky, maybe you’d be worthy of the moment. It wasn’t enough to feel the love. He had to earn it, to make the looks on the assembled faces something other than a lie, for in giving power they also gave responsibility, and in giving love they demanded devotion in return. Chastened, Jack looked at the glass panel that reflected the text of his speech, took a deep breath, and started talking as he’d done as a history instructor in Annapolis.
“I come here today to speak to you about America ...”
Below the President were five Secret Service agents standing in line, their sunglasses shielding their eyes so that those in the audience could not always tell where they were looking, and also because people without eyes are intimidating at a visceral level. Their hands were clasped in front, and radio earpieces kept them in contact with one another as they scanned the crowd. In the rear of the field house were others, this group scanning with binoculars, because they knew that the love in the building was not uniform, or even that there were some who sought to kill the things they loved. For that reason, the advance team had erected portable metal-detector arches at all the entrances. For that reason Belgian Malinois dogs had sniffed the building for explosives. For that reason they watched everything in the same way an infantryman in a combat zone was careful to examine every shadow.
“... and the strength of America lies not in Washington, but in Indiana, and New Mexico, and in every place Americans live and work, wherever it might be. We in Washington are not America. You are,” the President’s voice boomed through the PA system—not a good system, the agents thought, but this event had been laid on a little fast. “And we work for you.” The audience cheered again anyway.
The TV cameras all fed into vans outside the building, and those had uplink dishes to relay the sound and pictures to satellites. The reporters were mainly in the back today, taking notes despite the fact that they had the full text, along with a written promise that the President really would deliver this one. “The President’s speech today,” all would say this evening, but it wasn’t really the President’s speech at all. They knew who’d written it. Callie Weston had already talked to several of their number about it. They read the crowd, an easier task for them because they didn’t have the klieg lights in their faces.
“... is not an opportunity, but a responsibility which we all share, because if America belongs to us all, so then the duty for running our country starts here, not in Washington.” More applause.
“Good speech,” Tom Donner observed to his commentator /analyst, John Plumber.
“Pretty good delivery, too. I talked to the superintendent of the Naval Academy. They say he was an excellent teacher once,” Plumber replied.
“Good audience for him, mainly kids. And he’s not talking major policy issues.”
“Getting his feet wet,” John agreed. “You have a team working the other segment for tonight, right?”
Donner checked his watch and nodded. “Should be there now.”
“SO. DR. RYAN, how do you like being First Lady?” Krystin Matthews asked, with a warm smile.
“I’m still figuring it out.” They were talking in Cathy’s cubbyhole office overlooking central Baltimore. It had barely enough room for a desk and three chairs (a good one for the doctor, one for the patient, and the other for the spouse or mother of the patient), and with all the cameras and lights in the room, she felt trapped. “You know, I miss cooking for my family.”
“You’re a surgeon—and your husband expects you to cook, too?” the NBC co-anchor asked, in surprise bordering on outrage.
“I’ve always loved cooking. It’s a good way for me to relax when I get home.” Instead of watching TV, Professor Caroline Ryan didn’t add. She was wearing a new starched lab coat. She’d had to take fifteen minutes with her hair and makeup, and she had patients waiting. “Besides, I’m pretty good at it.”
Ah, well, that was different. A cloying smile: “What’s the President’s favorite meal?”
A smile returned. “That’s easy. Steak, baked potato, fresh corn on the cob, and my spinach salad—and I know, the physician in me tells him that it’s a little heavy on the cholesterol. Jack’s pretty good with a grill. In fact, he’s a pretty handy man to have around the house. He doesn’t even mind cutting the grass.”
“Let me take you back to the night your son was born, that awful night when the terrorists—”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Cathy said in a quieter voice.
“Your husband has killed people. You’re a doctor. How does that make you feel?”
“Jack and Robby—he’s Admiral Jackson now—Robby and Sissy are our closest friends,” Cathy explained. “Anyway, they did what they had to
do, or we would not have survived that night. I don’t like violence. I’m a surgeon. Last week I had a trauma case, a man lost his eye as a result of a fistfight in a bar a few blocks from here. But what Jack did is different from what they did. My husband fought to protect me and Sally, and Little Jack, who wasn’t even born yet.”
“You like being a doctor?”
“I love my work. I wouldn’t leave it for anything.”
“But usually a First Lady—”
“I know what you want to say. I’m not a political wife. I practice medicine. I’m a research scientist, and I work in the best eye institute in the world. I have patients waiting for me now. They need me—and you know, I need them, too. My job is who I am. I’m also a wife and a mother, and I like nearly everything about my life.”
“Except this?” Krystin asked, with a smile.
Cathy’s blue eyes twinkled. “I really don’t have to answer that, do I?” And Matthews knew she had the tagline for the interview.
“What sort of man is your husband?”
“Well, I can’t be totally objective, can I? I love him. He’s risked his life for me and my children. Whenever I’ve needed him, he was there. And I do the same for him. That’s what love and marriage mean. Jack is smart. He’s honest. I guess he’s something of a worrier. Sometimes he’ll wake up in the middle of the night—at home, I mean—and spend half an hour looking out the windows at the water. I don’t think he knows that I know that.”
“Does he still do that?”
“Not lately. He’s pretty tired when he gets to bed. These are the worst hours he’s ever worked.”
“His other government posts, at CIA, for example, there are reports that he—”
Cathy stopped that one with a raised hand. “I do not have a security clearance. I don’t know, and probably I don’t want to know. It’s the same with me. I am not allowed to discuss confidential patient information with Jack, or anyone else outside the faculty here.”
“We’d like to see you with patients and—” FLOTUS shook her head, stopping the question dead.
“No, this is a hospital, not a TV studio. It’s not so much my privacy as that of my patients. To them, I am not the First Lady. To them, I am Dr. Ryan. I’m not a celebrity. I’m a physician and a surgeon. To my students, I’m a professor and teacher.”
“And reportedly one of the best in the world at what you do,” Matthews added, just to see the reaction.
A smile resulted. “Yes, I’ve won the Lasker prize, and the respect of my colleagues is a gift that’s worth more than money—but you know, that isn’t it, either. Sometimes—not very often—but sometimes after a major procedure, I’m the one who takes the bandages off in a darkened room, and we turn the lights up slowly, and I see it. I can see it on the patient’s face. I fixed the eyes, and they work again, and the look you see on his or her face—well, nobody’s in medicine for the money, at least not here at Hopkins. We’re here to make sick people well, and for me to preserve and restore sight, and the look you see when that job is done is like having God tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Nice job.’ That’s why I’ll never, never leave medicine,” Cathy Ryan said, almost lyrically, knowing that they’d use this on TV tonight, and hoping that maybe some bright young high-school kid would see her face and hear the words and decide to think about medicine. If she had to put up with this waste of her time, perhaps she could use it to serve her art.
It was a pretty good sequence, Krystin Matthews thought, but with only two minutes and thirty seconds of air time, they would not be able to use it. Better the part about how she hated being First Lady. Everybody was used to hearing doctors talk.
24
ON THE FLY
THE RETURN TO THE AIRPLANE was quick and efficient. The governor went his way. The people who’d lined the sidewalks were mainly back to their jobs, and those who turned and looked were shoppers who probably wondered what the sirens were all about—or if they knew, were annoyed with the noise. Ryan was able to lean back in the plush leather seats, deflated by the fatigue that comes after a stressful moment.
“So, how’d I do?” he asked, looking out the window as Indiana passed by at seventy miles per hour. He smiled inwardly at the thought of driving this fast in the outskirts of a city without getting a ticket.
“Very well, actually,” Callie Weston said first. “You talked like a teacher.”
“I was a teacher once,” the President said. And with luck, I may be again someday.
“That’s okay for a speech like this, but for others you’ll need a little fire,” Arnie observed.
“One thing at a time,” Callie advised the chief of staff. “You crawl before you walk.”
“Same speech in Oklahoma, right?” POTUS asked.
“A few changes, but no big deal. Just remember you’re not in Indiana anymore. Sooner State, not Hoosier State. Same line about tornadoes, but football instead of basketball.”
“They also lost both senators, but they still have a congressman left, and he’ll be on the dais with you,” van Damm advised.
“How’d he make it?” Jack asked idly.
“Probably getting laid that night,” was the curt answer. “You’ll announce a new contract for Tinker Air Force Base. It means about five hundred new jobs, consolidating a few operations at the new location. That’ll make the local papers happy.”
BEN GOODLEY DIDN’T know if he was the new National Security Advisor or not. If so, he was rather young for the job, but at least the President he served was well grounded in foreign affairs. That made him more a high-class secretary than an adviser. It was a function he didn’t mind. He’d learned much in his brief time at Langley, and had advanced rapidly, becoming one of the youngest men ever to win the coveted NIO card because he knew how to organize information, and because he had the political savvy to grade the important stuff. He especially liked working directly for President Ryan. Goodley knew that he could play it straight with the Boss, and that Jack he still thought of him by that name, though he could no longer use it—would always let him know what he was thinking. It would be another learning experience for Dr. Goodley, and a priceless one for someone whose new life dream was someday becoming DCI on merit and not through politics.
On the wall opposite his desk was the sort of clock that shows the sun position for the entire world. He’d ordered it the very day he’d arrived—and to his surprise it had appeared literally overnight, instead of perking its way through five levels of procurement bureaucracy. He’d heard stories that the White House was one portion of the government that actually did work, and had not believed them the Harvard graduate had been in government service about four years now, and figured he knew what worked and what didn’t. The surprise was welcome, and the clock, he’d found from his work in the CIA Operations Center, was an instant reference, better than the array of regular clocks that some places had. Your eye instantly saw where noon was and could automatically grasp what time it was anywhere in the world. More to the point, you instantly knew if something was happening at an unusual hour, and that told you as much as the Signals Intelligence—SIGINT—bulletin. Such as the one that had just come in over his personal fax machine that was connected to his STU-4 secure phone.
The National Security Agency was in the habit of posting periodic summaries of activity across the world. Its own watch center was staffed by senior military people, and while their outlook was more technical and less political than his own, they were not fools. Ben had gotten to know many of them by name in addition to reputation, and had also learned their individual strengths. The USAF colonel who had command of the NSA Watch Center on weekday afternoons didn’t bother people with trivia. That was left to lower-level people and lower-level signals. When the colonel put his name on something, it was usually worth reading. And so it was just after noon, Washington time.
Goodley saw that the FLASH concerned Iraq. That was another thing about the colonel. He didn’t go using CRITIC headers for the fun of it,
as some did. Ben looked up to check the wall clock. After sundown, local time, a time of relaxation for some, and action for others. The action would be the sort to last all night, the better to get things accomplished without interference, so that the next day would be genuinely new, and genuinely different.
“Oh, boy,” Goodley breathed. He read down the page again, then turned his swivel chair and picked up the phone, touching the #3 speed-dial button.
“Director’s office,” a fiftyish female voice answered.
“Goodley for Foley.”
“Please hold, Dr. Goodley.” Then: “Hi, Ben.”
“Hello, Director.” He felt it improper to first-name the DCI. He’d probably go back to work at Langley within the year, and not as a seventh-floor-rank official. “You have what I have?” The page was still warm in his hand from the printer.
“Iraq?”
“Right.”
“You must have read it twice, Ben. I just told Bert Vasco to get his ass up here.” CIA’s own Iraq desk was weak, both thought, while this State guy was very good indeed.
“Looks pretty hot to me.”
“Agreed,” Ed Foley replied, with an unseen nod. “Jesus, but they’re moving fast over there. Give me an hour, maybe ninety minutes.”
“I think the President needs to know,” Goodley said, with a voice that concealed the urgency he felt. Or so he thought.
“He needs to know more than we can tell him now. Ben?” the DCI added.
“Yes, Director?”
“Jack won’t kill you for patience, and we can’t do any more than watch it develop anyway. Remember, we can’t overload him with information. He doesn’t have the time to see it all anymore. What he sees has to be concise. That’s your job,” Ed Foley explained. “It’ll take you a few weeks to figure it out. I’ll help,” the DCI went on, reminding Goodley how junior he was.