by Tom Clancy
“Mr. President, I know this is a difficult subject for you.”
“Tom, okay, I will say this. As part of my service with CIA, I occasionally had to serve my country in ways that cannot be revealed for a very long time, but at no time have I ever violated the law, and every such activity was fully reported to the appropriate members of the Congress. Let me tell you why I joined CIA.
“I didn’t want to. I was a teacher. I taught history at the Naval Academy. I love teaching, and I had time to write a couple of history books, and I like that, too. But then a group of terrorists came after me and my family. There were two very serious attempts to kill us—all of us. You know that. It was all over the media when it happened. I decided then that my place was in the Agency. Why? To protect others against the same sort of dangers. I never liked it all that much, but it was the job I decided I had to do. Now I’m here, and you know what? I don’t much like this job, either. I don’t like the pressure. I don’t like the responsibility. No one person should have this much power. But I am here, and I swore an oath to do my best, and I’m doing that.”
“But, Mr. President, you are the first person to sit in this office who’s never been a political figure. Your views on many things have never been shaped by public opinion, and what is disturbing to a lot of people is that you seem to be leaning on others who have never achieved high office, either. The danger, as some people see it, is that we have a small group of people who lack political experience but who are shaping policy for our country for some time to come. How do you answer that concern?”
“I haven’t even heard that concern anywhere, Tom.”
“Sir, you’ve also been criticized for spending too much time in this office and not enough out among the people. Could that be a problem?” Now that he’d sunk the hook, Donner could afford to appear plaintive.
“Unfortunately I do have a lot of work to do, and this is where I have to do that work. For the team I’ve put together, where do I start?” Jack asked. Next to him, Cathy was seething. Now her hand felt cold in his. “Secretary of State, Scott Adler, a career foreign service officer, son of a Holocaust survivor. I’ve known Scott for years. He’s the best man I know to run State. Treasury, George Winston, a self-made man. He was instrumental in saving our financial system during the conflict with Japan; he has the respect of the financial community, and he’s a real thinker. Defense, Anthony Bretano, is a highly successful engineer and businessman who’s already making needed reforms at the Pentagon. FBI, Dan Murray, a career cop, and a good one. You know what I’m doing with my choices, Tom? I’m picking pros, people who know the work because they’ve done it, not political types who just talk about it. If you think that’s wrong, well, I’m sorry about that, but I’ve worked my way up inside the government, and I have more faith in the professionals I’ve come to know than I do in the political appointees I’ve seen along the way. And, oh, by the way, how is that different from a politician who selects the people he knows—or, worse, people who contributed to his campaign organization?”
“Some would say that the difference is that ordinarily people selected to high office have much broader experience.”
“I would not say that, and I have worked under such people for years. The appointments I’ve made are all people whose abilities I know. Moreover, a President is supposed to have the right, with the assent of the people’s elected representatives, to pick people he can work with.”
“But with so much to do, how do you expect to succeed without experienced political guidance? This is a political town.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Ryan shot back. “Maybe the political process that we’ve all studied over the years gets in the way more than it helps. Tom, I didn’t ask for this job, okay? The idea, when Roger asked me to be Vice President, was that I serve out the remaining term and leave government service for good. I wanted to go back to teaching. But then that dreadful event happened, and here I am. I am not a politician. I never wanted to be one, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m not a politician now. Am I the best man for this job? Probably not. I am, however, the President of the United States, and I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it to the best of my ability. That’s all I can do.”
“And that’s the last word. Thank you, Mr. President.”
Jack barely waited for the camera lights to go off a final time before unclipping the microphone from his tie and standing. The two reporters didn’t say a word. Cathy glared at them.
“Why did you do that?”
“Excuse me?” Donner replied.
“Why do people like you always attack people like us? What have we done to deserve it? My husband is the most honorable man I know.”
“All we do is ask questions.”
“Don’t give me that! The way you ask them and the questions you choose, you give the answers before anyone has a chance to say anything.”
Neither reporter responded to that. The Ryans left without another word. Then Arnie came in.
“Okay,” he observed, “who set this up?”
“THEY GUTTED HIM like a fish,” Holbrook thought aloud. They were due for some time off, and it was always a good thing to know your enemy.
“This guy’s scary,” Ernie Brown thought, considering things a little more deeply. “At least, politicians you can depend on to be crooks. This guy, Jesus, he’s going to try to we’re talking a police state here, Pete.”
It was actually a frightening thought for the Mountain Man. He’d always thought that politicians were the worst thing in creation, but suddenly he realized that they were not. Politicians played the power game because they liked it, liked the idea of power and jerking people around because it made them feel big. Ryan was worse. He thought it was right.
“God damn,” he breathed. “The court he wants to appoint...”
“They made him look like a fool, Ernie.”
“No, they didn’t. Don’t you get it? They were playing their game.”
33
REBOUNDS
THE EDITORIALS WERE ESTABLISHED by front-page stories in every major paper. In the more enterprising of them, there were even photographs of Marko Ramius’s house—it turned out that he was away at the moment—and that of the Gerasimov family—he was home, but a security guard managed to persuade people to leave, after getting his own photo shot a few hundred times.
Donner came into work very early, and was actually the most surprised by all of that. Plumber walked into his office five minutes later, holding up the front page of the New York Times.
“So who rolled whom, Tom?”
“What do you—”
“That’s a little weak,” Plumber observed acidly. “I suppose after you walked out of the meeting, Kealty’s people had another little kaffeeklatsch. But you’ve trapped everybody, haven’t you? If it ever gets out that your tape wasn’t ”
“It won’t,” Donner said. “And all this coverage does is make our interview look better.”
“Better to whom?” Plumber demanded on his way out the door. It was early in the day for him, too, and his first irrelevant thought of the day was that Ed Murrow would never have used hair spray.
DR. GUS LORENZ finished his morning staff meeting early. Spring was coming early to Atlanta. The trees and bushes were budding, and soon the air would be filled with the fragrances of all the flowering plants for which the southern city was so famous—and a lot of pollen, Gus thought, which would get his sinuses all stuffed, but it was a fair trade for living in a vibrant and yet gracious southern city. With the meeting done, he donned his white lab coat and headed off to his own special fiefdom in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC (“and P” had never been added to the acronym) was one of the government’s crown jewels, an elite agency that was one of the world’s important centers of medical research—many would say the most important. For that reason the center in Atlanta attracted the best of the profession. Some stayed. Some left to teach at the nation’s medical schools, but a
ll were forever marked as CDC people, as others might boast of having served their time in the Marine Corps, and for much the same reason. They were the first people their country sent to trouble spots. They were the first to fight diseases, instead of armed enemies, and that cachet engendered an esprit de corps which more often than not retained the best of them despite the capped government salaries.
“Morning, Melissa,” Lorenz said to his chief lab assistant—she had a master’s and was finishing up her doctorate in molecular biology at nearby Emory University, after which she’d get a sizable promotion.
“Good morning, Doctor. Our friend is back,” she added.
“Oh?” The specimen was all set up on the microscope. Lorenz took his seat, careful as always to take his time. He checked the paperwork to identify the proper sample against the record he’d had on his desk: 98-3-063A. Yes, the numbers matched. Then it was just a matter of zooming in on the sample... and there it was, the Shepherd’s Crook.
“You’re right. Got the other one set up?”
“Yes, Doctor.” The computer screen split into two vertical halves, and next to the first was a specimen from 1976. They weren’t quite identical. The curve at the bottom of the RNA chain was seemingly never the same way twice, as snowflakes had almost infinite patterns, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the protein loops at the top, and those were—
“Mayinga strain.” He spoke the words matter-of-factly.
“I agree,” Melissa said from just behind him. She leaned across to type on the keyboard, calling up -063B. “These were a lot harder to isolate, but—”
“Yes, identical again. This one’s from the child?”
“A little girl, yes.” Both voices were detached. One can only bear so much exposure to sadness before the mind’s defense mechanism kicks in, and the samples become samples, disembodied from the people who donated them.
“Okay, I have some calling to do.”
THE TWO GROUPS were kept separate for obvious reasons, and in fact neither knew of the existence of the other. Badrayn spoke to one group of twenty. The Movie Star spoke to the second group, composed of nine. For both groups there were similarities of preparation. Iran was a nation-state, with the resources of a nation-state. Its foreign ministry had a passport office, and its treasury had a department of printing and engraving. Both allowed the printing of passports from any number of countries and the duplication of entry-exit stamps. In fact such documents could be prepared in any number of places, mostly illegally, but this source made for somewhat higher quality without the risk of revealing the place of origin.
The more important of the two missions was, perversely, the safer in terms of actual physical danger—well, depending on how one looked at it. Badrayn could see the looks on their faces. The very idea of what they were doing was the sort of thing to make a person’s skin crawl, though in the case of these people, it was merely one more example of the vagaries of human nature. The job, he told them, was simple. Get in. Deliver. Get out. He emphasized that they were completely safe, as long as they followed the procedures on which they would be fully briefed. There would be no contacts on the other side. They needed none, and doing without them just made things safer. Each had a choice of cover stories, and such were the parameters of the mission that having more than one of the group select the same one didn’t matter. What did matter was that the stories could be plausibly presented, and so each traveler would pick a field of business activity in which he had some knowledge. Nearly all had a university degree, and those who didn’t could talk about trading or machine tools or some field better known to them than any customs official asking questions out of mere boredom.
The Movie Star’s group was far more comfortable with their task. He supposed it was some flaw in the character of his culture that this was so. This group was younger and less experienced, and part of it was that the young simply know less of life, and therefore less of death. They were motivated by passion, by a tradition of sacrifice, and by their own hatreds and demons, all of which clouded their judgment in a way that pleased the masters, who always felt free to expend the hatreds and the passions, along with the people who bore them. This briefing was more detailed. Photographs were displayed, along with maps and diagrams, and the group drew closer, the better to see the details. None of them remarked on the character of the target. Life and death was so simple a question to those who didn’t know the ultimate answers—or who thought they did, even if they did not—and that was better for all, really. With an answer to the Great Question fixed in their minds, the lesser ones would not even occur to them. The Movie Star had no such illusions. He asked the questions within his own mind, but never answered them. For him the Great Question had become something else. For him it was all a political act, not a matter of religion, and one didn’t measure one’s destiny by politics. At least not willingly. He looked at their faces, knowing that they were doing exactly that, but without realizing it. They were the best sort of people for the task, really. They thought they knew everything, but in reality they knew very little, only the physical tasks.
The Movie Star felt rather like a murderer, but it was something he’d done before, at secondhand, anyway. Doing it firsthand was dangerous, and this promised to be the most dangerous such mission in years.
How remarkable that they didn’t know better. Each of them inwardly styled himself the stone in Allah’s own sling, without reflecting that such stones are by their very nature thrown away. Or maybe not. Perhaps they would be lucky, and for that eventuality he gave them the best data he’d managed to generate, and that data was pretty good. The best time would be afternoon, just before people got out from work, the better to use crowded highways to confuse their pursuers. He himself would go into the field again, he told them, to facilitate their ultimate escape—he didn’t tell them, if it came to that.
“OKAY, ARNIE, WHAT’S going on?” Ryan asked. It was just as well that Cathy didn’t have any procedures scheduled for today. She had seethed all night and was not in a proper mental state to do her normal work. He wasn’t feeling much better, but there was neither justice nor much point in snapping at his chief of staff.
“Well, for damned sure there’s a leak at CIA, or maybe in the Hill, somebody who knows about some of the things you did.”
“Colombia, the only people who know are Fellows and Trent. And they also know that Murray wasn’t there not exactly, anyway. The rest of that operation is locked up tight.”
“What actually happened?” And need-to-know applied to Arnie now. The President gestured and spoke as one explaining something to a parent:
“There were two operations, SHOWBOAT and RECIPROCITY. One of them involved putting troops into Colombia, the idea was to bird-dog drug flights. Those flights were then splashed—”
“What?”
“Shot down, by the Air Force—well, some were intercepted, the crews arrested and processed quietly. Some other things happened, and then Emil Jacobs got killed, and RECIPROCITY got laid on. We started dropping bombs on places. Things got a little out of hand. Some civilians got killed, and it all started coming apart.”
“How much did you know?” van Damm asked.
“I didn’t know jack shit until late in the game. Jim Greer was dying then, and I was handling his work, but that was mostly NATO stuff. I was cut out of it until after the bombs started falling-I was in Belgium when that happened. I saw it on TV, would you believe? Cutter was actually running the operation. He suckered Judge Moore and Bob Ritter into starting it, and then he tried to close it down. That’s when things got crazy. Cutter tried to cut off the soldiers—the idea was that they’d just disappear. I found out. I got into Ritter’s personal records vault. So I went down into Colombia with the rescue crew, and we got most of them out. It wasn’t much fun,” Ryan reported. “There was some shooting involved, and I worked one of the guns on the chopper. A crewman, a sergeant named Buck Zimmer, got killed on the last extraction, and I’ve been looking after
his family ever since. Liz Elliot got a hold of that and tried to use it against me a while later.”
“There’s more to it,” Arnie said quietly.
“Oh, yeah. I had to report the operations to the Select Committee, but I didn’t want to rip the government apart. So I talked it over with Trent and Fellows, and I came in to see the President. We talked for a while, and then I stepped out of the room, and Sam and Al talked with him for a while. I’m not exactly sure what they agreed on, but—”
“But he threw the election. He dumped his campaign manager and his campaign was for crap the whole way. Christ, Jack, what did you do?” Arnie demanded. His face was pale now, but for political reasons. And all along van Damm had figured that he’d run a brilliant and successful campaign for Bob Fowler, unseating a popular sitting President. And so, a fix had been in? And he’d never found out?
Ryan closed his eyes. He’d just forced himself to relive a dreadful night. “I terminated an operation that was technically legal, but teetering right on the edge. I closed it down quietly. The Colombians never found out. I thought I prevented another Watergate, domestically—and a god-awful international incident. Sam and Al signed off on it, the records are sealed until long after we’re all dead. Whoever leaked that must have picked up on a couple of rumors and made a few good guesses. What did I do? I think I obeyed the law as best I could—no, Arnie, I did not break the law. I followed the rules. It wasn’t easy, but I did.” The eyes opened. “So, Arnie, how will that play in Peoria?”
“Why couldn’t you have just reported to Congress and—”
“Think back,” the President said. “It wasn’t just the one thing, okay? That’s when Eastern Europe was coming unglued, the Soviet Union was still there but teetering, some really big things were happening, and if our government had come apart, right then, with everything else happening, hell, it could have been a mess like nobody’s ever seen. America couldn’t—we would not have been able to help settle Europe down if we’d been pissing around with a domestic scandal. And I was the guy who had to make the call and take the action, right now, or those soldiers would have been killed. Think about the box I was in, will you?