by Tom Clancy
“I just don’t see him that way, Ed,” the Globe responded, after a few seconds. “His politics are pretty far to the right, but he comes across as sincere as hell.”
“What’s the first rule of politics?” the Times asked with a chuckle. Then he continued: “I tell you, if this stuff about Russia and Colombia is true ... whoa! It is the ’50s, fucking around with other governments that way. We’re not supposed to do that anymore, sure as hell not at that level.”
“You never got this from us, and you can’t reveal the source at Langley.” The chief of staff handed out tape cassettes. “But there are enough verifiable facts here to back up everything we’ve told you.”
“It’s going to take a couple of days,” the San Francisco Examiner said, fingering the cassette and looking at his colleagues. The race started now. Every reporter in the room would want to be the first to break the story. That process would start with them playing their tapes in their cars during the drive to their homes, and the one with the shortest drive had the advantage.
“Gentlemen, all I can say is, this is an important story, and you have to apply your best professional conduct to it. It’s not for me,” Kealty said. “I wish I could pick someone else to do this, someone with a better record—but I can’t. Not for me. It’s for the country, and that means you have to play it as straight as you can.”
“We will, Ed,” the Times promised. He checked his watch. Almost three in the morning. He’d work all day to make the ten P.M. deadline. In that time he’d have to verify, re-verify, and conference in with his assistant managing editor to make sure that he got the front page, above the fold. The West Coast papers had the advantage—three more hours because of time zones—but he knew how to beat them to the punch. The coffee cups went down on the table, and the journalists rose, tucking their personal mini-tape machines in their jacket pockets, and each holding his personal cassette in the left hand while the right fished for the car keys.
“TALK TO ME, BEN,” Jack commanded barely four hours later.
“Still nothing on the local TV, but we’ve caught microwave stuff transmitted for later broadcast.” Goodley paused as Ryan took his seat behind the desk. “Quality is too poor to show you, but we have the audio tracks. Anyway, they spent all day consolidating power. Tomorrow, they go public. Probably the word’s out on the street, and the official stuff will be for the rest of the world.”
“Smart,” the President observed.
“Agreed.” Goodley nodded. “New wild card. The Premier of Turkmenistan bit the big one, supposedly an automobile accident. Golovko called me about—just after five, I think to let us know. He ain’t a real happy camper at the moment. He thinks that Iraq and Turko-land are part of the same play—”
“Do we have anything to support that?” Ryan asked, tying his necktie. It was a dumb question.
“You kidding, boss? We don’t have crap, not even overheads in this case.”
Jack looked down at his desktop for a second. “You know, for all the things people say about how powerful CIA is—”
“Hey, I work there, remember? Thank God for CNN. Yeah, I know. Good news, the Russians are telling us at least some of what they know.”
“Scared,” the President observed.
“Very,” the national intelligence officer agreed.
“Okay, we have Iran taking over Iraq. We have a dead leader in Turkmenistan. Analysis?” Jack asked.
“I won’t contradict Golovko on this one. He doubtless does have agents in place, and it sounds like he’s in the same situation we’re in. He can watch and worry, but he doesn’t have any real operational possibilities. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but spooks aren’t supposed to believe in such things. Damned sure Sergey doesn’t. He thinks it’s all one play. I think that’s a definite possibility. I’ll be talking to Vasco about that, too. What he says is shaping up is starting to look a little scary. We’ll be hearing from the Saudis today.” And Israel could not be far behind, Ryan knew.
“China?” the President asked next. Maybe the other side of the world was a little better. It wasn’t.
“Major exercise. Surface and sub-surface combatants, no air yet, but the overheads show the fighter bases are tooling up—”
“Wait a minute—”
“Yes, sir. If it’s a planned exercise, why weren’t they ready for it? I’ll be talking to the Pentagon about that one at eight-thirty. The ambassador had a little talk with a foreign ministry type. Feedback is, no big deal, the ministry didn’t even know about it, routine training.”
“Bullshit.”
“Maybe. Taiwan is still low-keying it, but they’ll be sending some ships out today—well, tonight over there. We have assets heading to the area. The Taiwanese are playing ball, full cooperation with our observers in their listening posts. Soon they will ask us what we will do if ‘A’ or ‘B’ happens. We need to think about that. The Pentagon says that the PRC doesn’t have the assets to launch an invasion, same as back in ‘96. The ROC air force is stronger now than it was. So, I don’t see that this is likely to lead anywhere. Maybe it really is just an exercise. Maybe they want to see how we—you, that is—will react.”
“What’s Adler think?”
“He says to ignore it. I think he’s right. Taiwan is playing low-key. I think we do the same. We move ships, especially subs, but we keep them out of sight. CINCPAC seems to have a handle on it. We let him run it for the time being?”
Ryan nodded. “Through SecDef, yes. Europe?”
“Nice and quiet, ditto our hemisphere, ditto Africa. You know, if the Chinese are just being their usual obnoxious selves, then the only real problem is the Persian Gulf—and the truth of the matter is that we’ve been there and done that, sir. We’ve told the Saudis that we’re not going to back off of them. That word will get to the other side in due course, and it ought to make the other side stop and think before making any plans to go farther. I don’t like the UIR thing, but I think we can deal with it. Iran is fundamentally unstable; the people in that country want more freedom, and when they get a taste, that country will change. We can ride it out.”
Ryan smiled and poured himself a cup of decaf. “You’re getting very confident, Dr. Goodley.”
“You pay me to think. I might as well tell you what’s moving around between the ears, boss.”
“Okay, get on with your work and keep me posted. I have to figure a way to reconstitute the Supreme Court today.” Ryan sipped his coffee and waited for Arnie to come in. This job wasn’t all that tough, was it? Not when you had a good team working for you.
“IT’S ABOUT SEDUCTION,” Clark said to the shiny new faces in the auditorium, catching Ding’s grin in the back of the room and cringing. The training film they’d just watched had gone over the history of six important cases. There were only five prints of the film, and this one was already being rewound for the walk back to the vault. Two of the cases he’d worked himself. One of the agents had been executed in the basement of 2 Dzerzhinskiy Square after being burned by a KGB mole inside Langley. The other had a small farm in the birch country of northern New Hampshire, probably still wishing that he could go home—but Russia was still Russia, and the narrow view their culture took of high treason wasn’t an invention of the previous regime. Such people were forever orphans ... Clark turned the page and continued from his notes.
“You will seek out people with problems. You will sympathize with those problems. The people with whom you will work are not perfect. They will all have beefs. Some of them will come to you. You don’t have to love them, but you do have to be loyal to them.
“What do I mean by seduction? Everyone in this room has done it once or twice, right? You listen more than you talk. You nod. You agree. Sure, you’re smarter than your boss—I know about him, we have the same sort of jerk in our government. I had a boss like that once myself. It’s hard to be an honest man in that kind of government, isn’t it? You bet, honor really is important.
“When they say that,
you know they want money. That’s fine,” Clark told them. “They never expect as much as they ask for. We have the budget to pay anything they want—but the important thing is getting them on the hook. Once they lose their virginity, people, they can’t get it back.
“Your agents, the people you recruit, will get addicted to what they do. It’s fun to be a spy. Even the most ideologically pure people you recruit will giggle from time to time because they know something nobody else knows.
“They will all have something wrong with them. The most idealistic ones are often the worst. They experience guilt. They drink. Some might go to their priest, even—I’ve had that happen to me. Some break the rules for the first time and figure no rules matter anymore. Those kind will start boffing every girl that crosses their path and taking all sorts of chances.
“Handling agents is an art. You are mother, father, priest, and teacher to them. You have to settle them down. You have to tell them to look after their families, and look after their own ass, especially the ‘good’ ideological recruits. They’re dependable for a lot of things, but one of them is to get too much into it. A lot of these agents self-destruct. They can turn into crusaders. Few of the crusaders,” Clark went on, “died of old age.
“The agent who wants money is often the most reliable. They don’t take too many chances. They want out eventually, so they can live the good life in Hollywood and get laid by a starlet or something. Nice thing about agents who work for money—they want to live to spend it. On the other hand, when you need something done in a hurry, when you need somebody to take a risk, you can use a money guy—just be ready to evac him the next day. Sooner or later he’ll figure that he’s done enough, and demand to be got out.
“What am I telling you? There are no hard and fast rules in this business. You have to use your heads. You have to know about people, how they are, how they act, how they think. You must have genuine empathy with your agents, whether you like them or not. Most you will not like,” he promised them. “You saw the film. Every word was real. Three of those cases ended with a dead agent. One ended with a dead officer. Remember that.
“Okay, you now have a break. Mr. Revell will have you in the next class.” Clark assembled his notes and walked to the back of the room while the trainees absorbed the lessons in silence.
“Gee, Mr. C., does that mean seduction is okay?” Ding asked.
“Only when you get paid for it, Domingo.”
ALL OF GROUP Two was sick now. It was as though they’d all punched in on some sort of time clock. Within ten hours, they’d all complained of fever and aches—flu symptoms. Some knew, Moudi saw, or certainly suspected what had happened to them. Some of them continued to help the sicker subjects to whom they were assigned. Others called for the army medics to complain, or just sat on the floor in the treatment room and did nothing but savor their own illness in fear that they would become what they saw. Again the conditions of their prior imprisonment and diet worked against them. The hungry and debilitated are more easily controlled than the healthy and well fed.
The original group was deteriorating at the expected rate. Their pain grew worse, to the point that their slow writhing lessened because it hurt more to move than to remain still. One seemed very close to death, and Moudi wondered if, as with Benedict Mkusa, this victim’s heart was unusually vulnerable to the Ebola Mayinga strain—perhaps this sub-type of the disease had a previously unsuspected affinity for heart tissue? That would have been interesting to learn in the abstract, but he’d gone well beyond the abstract study of the disease.
“We gain nothing by continuing this phase, Moudi,” the director observed, standing beside the younger man and watching the TV monitors. “Next step.”
“As you wish.” Dr. Moudi lifted the phone and spoke for a minute or so.
It took fifteen minutes to get things moving, and then the medical orderlies entered the picture, taking all of the nine members of the second group out of that room, then across the corridor to a second large treatment room, where, on a different set of monitors, the physicians saw that each was assigned a bed and given a medication which, in but a few minutes, had them all asleep. The medics then returned to the original group. Half of them were asleep anyway, and all the others stuporous, unable to resist. The wakeful ones were killed first, with injections of Dilaudid, a powerful synthetic narcotic into whatever vein was the most convenient. The executions took but a few minutes and were, in the end, merciful. The bodies were loaded one by one onto gurneys for transport to the incinerator. Next the mattresses and bedclothes were bundled for burning, leaving only the metal frames of the beds. These, along with the rest of the room, were sprayed with caustic chemicals. The room would be sealed for several days, then sprayed again, and the collective attention of the facility’s staff would transfer to Group Two, nine condemned criminals who had proven, or so it would seem, that Ebola Zaire Mayinga could be transmitted through the air.
THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT official took a whole day to arrive, doubtless delayed, Dr. MacGregor suspected, by a pile of paperwork on his desk, a fine dinner, and a night with whatever woman spiced up his daily life. And probably the paperwork was still there on his desk, the Scot told himself.
At least he knew about the proper precautions. The government doctor barely entered the room at all he had to come an additional, reluctant step so that the door could be closed behind him, but moved no farther than that, standing there, his head tilting and his eyes squinting, the better to observe the patient from two meters away. The lights in the room were turned down so as not to hurt Saleh’s eyes. Despite that the discoloration of his skin was obvious. The two hanging units of type-O blood and the morphine drip told the rest, along with the chart, which the government official held in his gloved, trembling hands.
“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 c
ome 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.