by Tom Clancy
“WE HAVE THIS closing comment from special correspondent John Plumber.” Donner turned graciously. “John.”
“Thank you, Tom. The profession of journalism is one I entered many years ago, because I was inspired in my youth. I remember my crystal radio set—those of you old enough might recall how you had to ground them to a pipe,” he explained, with a smile. “I remember listening to Ed Murrow in London during the blitz, to Eric Sevareid from the jungles of Burma, to all the founding fathers—giants, really—of our profession. I grew up with pictures in my mind painted by the words of men whom all America could trust to tell the truth to the best of their ability. I decided that finding the truth and communicating it to people was as noble a calling as any to which a man—or woman—could aspire.
“We’re not always perfect in this profession. No one is,” Plumber went on.
To his right, Donner was looking at the TelePrompTer in puzzlement. This wasn’t what was rolling in front of the camera lens, and he realized that, though Plumber had printed pages in front of him, he was giving a memorized speech. Imagine that. Just like the old days, apparently.
“I would like to say that I am proud to be in this profession. And I was, once.
“I was on the microphone when Neil Armstrong stepped down on the moon, and on sadder occasions, like the funeral of Jack Kennedy. But to be a professional does not mean merely being there. It means that you have to profess something, to believe in something, to stand for something.
“Some weeks ago, we interviewed President Ryan twice in one day. The first interview in the morning was taped, and the second one was done live. The questions were a little different. There’s a reason for that. Between the first interview and the second, we were called over to see someone. I will not say who that was right now. I will later. That person gave us information. It was sensitive information aimed at hurting the President, and it looked like a good story at the time. It wasn’t, but we didn’t know that then. At the time, it seemed as though we had asked the wrong questions. We wanted to ask better ones.
“And so we lied. We lied to the President’s chief of staff, Arnold van Damm. We told him that the tape had been damaged somehow. In doing that, we also lied to the President. But worst of all, we lied to you. I have the tapes in my possession. They are not damaged in any way.
“No law was broken. The First Amendment allows us to do almost anything we want, and that’s all right, because you people out there are the final judge of what we do and who we are. But one thing we may not do is to break faith with you.
“I have no brief for President Ryan. Speaking personally, I disagree with him on many policy issues. If he should run for reelection, I will probably vote for someone else. But I was part of that lie, and I cannot live with it. Whatever his faults, John Patrick Ryan is an honorable man, and I am not supposed to allow my personal animus for or against anyone or anything to affect my work.
“In this case, I did. I was wrong. I owe an apology to the President, and I owe an apology to you. This might well be the end of my career as a broadcast journalist. If so, I want to leave it as I entered it, telling the truth as best I can.
“Good night, from NBC News.” Plumber took a very deep breath as he stared at the camera.
“What the hell was that all about?”
Plumber stood before he answered. “If you have to ask that question, Tom—”
The phone on his desk rang—actually, it had a blinking light. Plumber decided not to answer it, and instead walked to his dressing room. Tom Donner would have to figure it out all by himself.
TWO THOUSAND MILES away, over Rocky Mountain National Park, Arnold van Damm stopped the machine, ejected the tape, and carried it down the circular stairs to the President’s compartment in the nose. He saw Ryan going over his next and final speech of the day.
“Jack, I think you will want to see this,” the chief of staff told him, with a broad grin.
THERE HAS TO be a first one of everything. This time it happened in Chicago. She’d seen her physician on Saturday afternoon and been told the same as everyone else. Flu. Aspirin. Liquids. Bed rest. But looking in the mirror, she saw some discoloration on her fair skin, and that frightened her even more than the other symptoms she’d had to that point. She called her doctor, but she got only an answering machine, and those blotches could not wait, and so she got in her car and drove to the University of Chicago Medical Center, one of America’s finest. She waited in the emergency room for about forty minutes, and when her name was called, she stood and walked toward the desk, but she didn’t make it, instead falling to the tile floor in sight of the administrative people. That caused some instant reactions, and a minute later, two orderlies had her on a gurney and were wheeling her back to the treatment area, her paperwork carried behind by one of the admissions people.
The first physician to see her was a young resident most of the way through his first year of post-graduate study in internal medicine, doing his ER rotation and liking it.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, as the nursing staff went to work, checking pulse, blood pressure, and respiration.
“Here,” the woman from admissions said, handing over the paper forms. The physician scanned them.
“Flu symptoms, looks like, but what’s this?”
“Heart rate is one twenty, BP is—wait a minute.” The nurse ran it again. “Blood pressure is ninety over fifty?” She looked much too normal for that.
The doctor was unbuttoning the woman’s blouse. And there it was. The clarity of the moment made passages from his textbooks leap into his mind. The young resident held up his hands.
“Everybody, stop what you’re doing. We may have a major problem here. I want everybody regloved, everybody masked, right now.”
“Temp is one-oh-four-point-four,” another nurse said, stepping back from the patient.
“This isn’t flu. We have a major internal bleed, and those are petechiae.” The resident got a mask and changed gloves as he spoke. “Get Dr. Quinn over here.”
A nurse trotted out, while the resident looked again at the admission papers. Might be vomiting blood, darkened stool. Depressed blood pressure, high fever, and subcutaneous bleeding. But this was Chicago, his mind protested. He got a needle.
“Everybody stay clear, okay, nobody get close to my hands and arms,” he said, slipping the needle into the vein, then drawing four 5cc tubes.
“What gives?” Dr. Joe Quinn asked. The resident recited the symptoms, and posed his own question as he moved the blood tubes onto a table.
“What do you think, Joe?”
“If we were somewhere else ...”
“Yeah. Hemorrhagic fever, if that’s possible.”
“Anybody ask her where she’s been?” Quinn asked.
“No, Doctor,” the admissions clerk replied.
“Cold packs,” the head nurse said, handing over an armload of them. These went under the armpits, under the neck, and elsewhere to bleed off the body’s potentially lethal heat.
“Dilantin?” Quinn wondered.
“She’s not convulsing yet. Hell.” The chief resident took out his surgical scissors and cut off the patient’s bra. There were more petechiae forming on her torso. “We have a very sick lady here. Nurse, call Dr. Klein in infectious disease. He’ll be at home now. Tell him we need him here at once. We have to get her temp down, wake her up, and find out where the hell she’s been.”
47
INDEX CASE
MARK KLEIN WAS A FULL professor at the medical school, and therefore a man accustomed to regular working hours. Getting called in at almost nine in the evening wasn’t the usual thing for him, but he was a physician, and when called, he went. It was a twenty-minute drive on this Monday night to his reserved parking space. He walked through the security staff with a nod, changed into scrubs, came into the emergency room from the back, and asked the charge nurse where Quinn was.
“Isolation Two, Doctor.”
He was ther
e in twenty seconds, and stopped cold when he saw the warning signs posted on the door. Okay, he thought, donning a mask and gloves, then walking in.
“Hi, Joe.”
“I don’t want to make this call without you, Professor,” Quinn said quietly, handing the chart over.
Klein scanned it, then his brain stopped cold, and he started from the beginning, looking up to compare the patient with the data. Female Caucasian, yes, age forty-one, about right, divorced, that was her business, apartment about two miles away, fine, temperature on admission 104.4, pretty damn high, BP, that was awfully low. Petechiae?
“Let me take a look here,” Klein said. The patient was coming around. The head was moving a little, and she was making some noise. “What’s her temp now?”
“One-oh-two-two, coming down nicely,” the admitting resident replied, as Klein pulled the green sheet back. The patient was nude now, and the marks could hardly have been more plain on her otherwise very fair skin. Klein looked at the other doctors.
“Where’s she been?”
“We don’t know,” Quinn admitted. “We looked through her purse. It seems she’s an executive with Sears, office over in the tower.”
“Have you examined her?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Quinn and the younger resident said together.
“Animal bites?” Klein asked.
“None. No evidence of needles, nothing unusual at all. She’s clean.”
“I’m calling it possible hemorrhagic fever, method of transmission unknown for now. I want her upstairs, total isolation, full precautions. I want this room scrubbed—everything she touched.”
“I thought these viruses only passed—”
“Nobody knows, Doctor, and things I can’t explain scare me. I’ve been to Africa. I’ve seen Lassa and Q fever. Haven’t seen Ebola. But what she has looks a hell of a lot like one of those,” Klein said, speaking those awful names for the first time.
“But how—”
“When you don’t know, it means you don’t know,” Professor Klein said to the resident. “For infectious diseases, if you do not know the means of transmission, you assume the worst. The worst case is aerosol, and that’s how this patient will be handled. Let’s get her moved up to my unit. Everybody who’s been in contact with her, I want you to scrub down. Like AIDS or hepatitis. Full precautions,” he emphasized again. “Where’s the blood you drew?”
“Right there.” The admitting physician pointed to a red plastic container.
“What’s next?” Quinn asked.
“We get a sample off to Atlanta, but I think I’m going to take a look myself.” Klein had a superb laboratory in which he worked every day, mainly on AIDS, which was his passion.
“Can I come with you?” Quinn asked. “I go off duty in a few minutes anyway.” Monday was usually a quiet day for emergency rooms. Their hectic time was generally weekends.
“Sure.”
“I KNEW HOLTZMAN would come through for me,” Arnie said. He was having a drink to celebrate, as the 747 began its descent into Sacramento.
“What?” the President asked.
“Bob’s a tough son of a bitch, but he’s an honest son of a bitch. That also means that he will honestly burn you at the stake if he thinks you have it coming. Always remember that,” the chief of staff advised.
“Donner and Plumber lied,” Jack said aloud. “Damn.”
“Everybody lies, Jack. Even you. It’s a question of context. Some lies are designed to protect the truth. Some lies are designed to conceal it. Some are designed to deny it. And some lies happen because nobody gives a damn.”
“And what happened here?”
“A combination, Mr. President. Ed Kealty wanted ’em to ambush you for him, and he suckered them. But I got that treacherous bastard for you. I’ll bet that tomorrow there will be a front-page article in the Post exposing Kealty as the guy who suborned two very senior reporters, and the press will turn on him like a pack of wolves.” The reporters riding in the back of the plane were already buzzing about it. Arnie had seen to it that the NBC news tape had run on the cabin video system.
“Because he’s the one who made them look bad ...”
“You got it, boss,” van Damm confirmed, tossing off the remainder of his drink. He couldn’t add that it might not have happened without the attack on Katie Ryan. Even reporters felt sympathy on occasion, which might have been decisive in Plumber’s change of heart on the matter. But he was the one who’d made the carefully measured leaks to Bob Holtzman. He decided that he’d have a Secret Service agent find him a good cigar once they got on the ground. He felt like having one right now.
ADLER’S BODY CLOCK was totally confused now. He found that catching cat-naps helped, and it also helped that the message he was delivering was a simple and favorable one. The car stopped. A minor official opened the door for him and bowed curtly. Adler stifled a yawn as he walked into the ministry building.
“So good to see you again,” the PRC Foreign Minister said, through his interpreter. Zhang Han San was there again, too, and made his own greeting.
“Your gracious agreement to allow direct flights certainly makes the process easier for me. Thank you for that,” SecState replied, taking his seat.
“Just so you understand that these are exceptional circumstances,” the Foreign Minister observed.
“Of course.”
“What news do you bring us from our wayward cousins?”
“They are entirely willing to match your reductions in activity, with an eye toward reducing tension.”
“And their insulting accusations?”
“Minister, that issue never arose. I believe that they are as interested as you in returning to peaceful circumstances.”
“How good of them,” Zhang commented. “They initiate hostilities, shoot down two of our aircraft, damage one of their own airliners, kill over a hundred people, whether by deliberate act or by incompetence, and then they say that they will match us in reducing provocative acts. I hope your government appreciates the forbearance we are showing here.”
“Mr. Minister, peace serves everyone’s best interests, does it not? America appreciates the actions of both parties in these informal proceedings. The People’s Republic has indeed been gracious in more than one way, and the government in Taiwan is willing to match your actions. What more is required than that?”
“Very little,” the Foreign Minister replied. “Merely compensation for the deaths of our four aviators. Each of them left a family behind.”
“Their fighters did shoot first,” Zhang pointed out.
“That may be true, but the question of the airliner is still undetermined.”
“Certainly, we had nothing to do that that.” This came from the Foreign Minister.
There were few things more boring than negotiations between countries, but there was actually a reason for that. Sudden or surprise moves could force a country into making impromptu decisions. Unexpected pressure caused anger, and anger had no place in high-level discussions and decisions. Therefore, important talks were almost never decisive, but were, rather, evolutionary in nature, which gave each side time to think through its position, and that of the other side, carefully, so to arrive at a final communique with which both sides could be relatively content. Thus the demand for compensation was a violation of the rules. More properly done, this would have been said at the first session, and Adler would have taken it to Taipei and probably presented it as his own suggestion after the Republic of China government had agreed to cooperate in the reduction of tension. But they had already done that, and now the PRC wanted him to take back the request for compensation instead of a formula for local detente. That was an insult to the Taiwanese government, and also a measured insult to the American government for having been used as a stalking horse for another country.
This was all the more true since Adler and the ROC knew who’d killed the airliner, and who had therefore shown contempt for human life—for which the PRC
now demanded compensation! And now Adler wondered again how much of what he knew of the incident was known to the PRC. If they knew a lot, then this was definitely a game whose rules had yet to be decoded.
“I think it would be more useful if both sides were to cover their individual losses and needs,” Secretary Adler suggested.
“I regret that we cannot accept that. It is a matter of principle, you see. He who commits the improper act must make amends.”
“But what if—I do not have any evidence to suggest this, but what if it is determined that the PRC inadvertently damaged the airliner? In such a case your request for compensation might appear unjust.”
“That is not possible. We have interviewed our surviving pilots and their reports are unequivocal.” Again it was Zhang.
“What precisely do you request?” Adler asked.
“Two hundred thousand dollars for each of the four aviators lost. The money will go to their families, of course,” Zhang promised.
“I can present this request to—”
“Excuse me. It is not a request. It is a requirement,” the Foreign Minister told Adler.
“I see. I can present your position to them, but I must urge you not to make this a condition of your promise to reduce tension.”
“That is our position.” The Foreign Minister’s eyes were quite serene.
“... AND GOD BLESS America,” Ryan concluded. The crowd stood and cheered. The band struck up—there had to be a band everywhere he went, Jack supposed—and he made his way off the dais behind a wall of nervous Secret Service agents. Well, the President thought, no gunfire out of the blinding lights this time, either. He stifled another yawn. He’d been on the move for over twelve hours. Four speeches didn’t seem to be all that much physical work, but Ryan was learning just how exhausting public speaking could be. You had the shakes every time before getting up there, and though you got over it in a few minutes, the accumulated stress did take its toll. The dinner hadn’t helped much. The food had been bland, so carefully chosen to offend no one that it wasn’t worth anyone’s attention. But it had given him heartburn anyway.