by Tom Clancy
An hour later, at the routine morning meeting between the President’s press secretary and the White House correspondents, the Post reporter announced an “unconfirmed report” that Fowler was going to Rome—and did this mean that the treaty negotiations had reached an impasse or success? The press secretary was caught short by that. He’d just learned ten minutes before that he’d be flying to Rome, and as usual was sworn to total secrecy—an admonition that carried about as much weight as sunlight on a cloudy day. He allowed himself to be surprised by the question, though, and that surprised the man who had fully expected to engineer the leak—but only after lunch at the afternoon briefing. His “no comment” hadn’t carried enough conviction, and the White House correspondents smelled the blood in the water. They all had edited copies of the President’s appointments schedule, and sure enough, there were names to check with.
The President’s aides were already making calls to cancel appointments and appearances. Even the President cannot allow important people to be inconvenienced without warning, and while those might keep secrets, not all of their assistants and secretaries can. It was a classic case of the phenomenon upon which a free press depends. People who know things cannot keep them inside. Especially secret things. Within an hour, confirmation was obtained from four widely separated sources: President Fowler had canceled several days’ worth of appointments. The President was going somewhere, and it wasn’t Peoria. That was enough for all the TV networks to run bulletins timed to erase segments of various game shows with hastily written statements, which immediately cut to commercials, denying millions of people the knowledge of what the word or phrase was, but informing them of the best way to get their clothes clean despite deep grass stains.
It was late afternoon in Rome, a sultry, humid summer day, when the pool headquarters was told that three, only three, cameras—and no correspondents—would be permitted into the building whose outside had been subjected to weeks of careful scrutiny. In the “green room” trailers near each of the anchor booths, the network anchors on duty had makeup applied and hustled to their chairs, putting their earpieces in and waiting for word from their directors.
The picture that appeared simultaneously on the booth monitors and TV sets all over the world showed the conference room. In it was a large table all of whose seats were filled. At its head was the Pope, and before him was a folder of folio size, made of red calfskin—the reporters would never know of the momentary panic that had erupted when someone realized that he didn’t know what kind of leather it was, and had to check with the supplier; fortunately, no one objected to the skin of a calf.
It had been agreed that no statement would be made here. Preliminary statements would be made in the capitals of each of the participants, and the really flowery speeches were being drafted for the formal signing ceremonies. A Vatican spokesman delivered a written release to all of the TV correspondents. It said in essence that a draft treaty concerning a final settlement of the Middle East dispute had been negotiated, and that the draft was ready for initialing by representatives of the interested nations. The formal treaty documents would be signed by the chiefs of state and/or foreign ministers in several days. The text of the treaty was not available for release, nor were its provisions. This did not exactly thrill the correspondents—mainly because they realized that the treaty details would be broken from the foreign ministries in the respective capitals of the concerned nations, to other reporters.
The red folder was passed from place to place. The order of the initialers, the Vatican statement pointed out, had been determined by lot, and it turned out that the Israeli Foreign Minister went first, followed by the Soviet, the Swiss, the American, the Saudi, and the Vatican representatives. Each used a fountain pen, and a curved blotter was applied to each set of initials by the priest who moved the document from place to place. It wasn’t much of a ceremony, and it was swiftly accomplished. Handshakes came next, followed by a lengthy bit of mutual applause. And that was it.
“By God,” Jack said, watching the TV picture change. He looked down to the fax of the treaty outline, and it was not very different from his original concept. The Saudis had made changes, as had the Israelis, the Soviets, the Swiss, and, of course, the State Department, but the original idea was his—except insofar as he himself had borrowed ideas from a multitude of others. There were few genuinely original ideas. What he’d really done had been to organize them, and pick an historically correct moment to make his comment. That was all. For all that, it was the proudest moment of his life. It was a shame that there was no one to congratulate him.
In the White House, President Fowler’s best speechwriter was already working on the first draft of his speech. The American President would have primacy of place at the ceremony because it had been his idea, after all, his speech before the U.N. that had brought them all together in Rome. The Pope would speak—hell, they would all speak, the speechwriter thought, and for her that was a problem, since each speech had to be original and unrepetitive. She realized that she’d probably still be working on it while hopping the Atlantic on the -25A, pecking busily away on her laptop. But that, she knew, was what they paid her for, and Air Force One had a LaserJet printer.
Upstairs in the Oval Office the President was looking over his hastily revised schedule. A committee of new Eagle Scouts would have to be disappointed, as would the new Wisconsin Cheese Queen, or whatever the young lady’s title was, and a multitude of business people whose importance in their own small ponds quite literally paled when they entered the side door into the President’s workshop. His appointments secretary was getting the word out. Some people whose visits were genuinely important were being shoehorned into every spare minute of the next thirty-six hours. That would make the President’s next day and a half as hectic as it ever got, but that, too, was part of the job.
“Well?” Fowler looked up to see Elizabeth Elliot grinning at him through the open door to the secretary’s anteroom.
Well, this is what you wanted, isn’t it? Your presidency will forever be remembered as the one in which the Middle East problems were settled once and for all. If—Liz admitted to herself in a rare moment of objective clarity—it all works out, which is not a given in such disputes as this.
“We have done a service to the whole world, Elizabeth.” By “we” he actually meant “I,” Elliot knew, but that was fair enough. It was Bob Fowler who’d endured the months of campaigning on top of his executive duties in Columbus, the endless speeches, kissing babies and kissing ass, stroking legions of reporters whose faces changed far more rapidly than their brutally repetitive questions. It was an endurance race to get into this one small room, this seat of executive power. It was a process that somehow did not break the men—pity it was still only men, Liz thought—who made it safely here. But the prize for all the effort, all the endless toil, was that the person who occupied it got to take the credit. It was a simple historical convention that people assumed the President was the one who directed things, who made the decisions. Because of that, the President was the one who got the kudos and the barbs. The President was responsible for what went well and for what went badly. Mostly that concerned domestic affairs, the blips in the unemployment figures, interest rates, inflation (wholesale and retail), and the all-powerful Leading Economic Indicators, but on rare occasions, something really important happened, something that changed the world. Reagan, Elliot admitted to herself, would be remembered by history as the guy who happened to be around when the Russians decided to cash in their chips on Marxism, and Bush was the man who collected that particular political pot. Nixon was the man who’d opened the door to China, and Carter the one who had come so tantalizingly close to doing what Fowler would now be remembered for. The American voters might select their political leaders for pocketbook issues, but history was made of more important stuff. What earned a man a few paragraphs in a general-history text and focused volumes of scholarly study were the fundamental changes in the shape of
the political world. That was what really counted. Historians remembered the ones who shaped political events—Bismarck, not Edison—treating technical changes in society as though they were driven by political factors, and not the reverse, which, she judged, might have been equally likely. But historiography had its own rules and conventions that had little to do with reality, because reality was too large a thing to grasp, even for academics working years after events. Politicians played within those rules, and that suited them because following those rules meant that when something memorable happened, the historians would remember them.
“Service to the world?” Elliot responded after a lengthy pause. “Service to the world. I like the sound of that. They called Wilson the man who kept us out of war. You will be remembered as the one who put an end to war.”
Fowler and Elliot both knew that scant months after being reelected on that platform, Wilson had led America into its first truly foreign war, the war to end all wars, optimists had called it, well before Holocaust and nuclear nightmares. But this time, both thought, it was more than mere optimism, and Wilson’s transcendent vision of what the world could be was finally within the grasp of the political figures who made the world into the shape of their own choosing.
The man was a Druse, an unbeliever, but for all that he was respected. He bore the scars of his own battle with the Zionists. He’d gone into battle, and been decorated for his courage. He’d lost his mother to their inhuman weapons. And he’d supported the movement whenever asked. Qati was a man who had never lost touch with the fundamentals. As a boy he’d read the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. That Mao was, of course, an infidel of the worst sort—he’d refused even to acknowledge the idea of a God and persecuted those who worshiped—was beside the point. The revolutionary was a fish who swam in a peasant sea, and maintaining the goodwill of those peasants—or in this case, a shopkeeper—was the foundation of whatever success he might enjoy. This Druse had contributed what money he could, had once sheltered a wounded freedom fighter in his home. Such debts were not forgotten. Qati rose from his desk to greet the man with a warm handshake and the perfunctory kisses.
“Welcome, my friend.”
“Thank you for seeing me, Commander.” The shopkeeper seemed very nervous, and Qati wondered what the problem was.
“Please, take a chair. Abdullah,” he called, “would you bring coffee for our guest?”
“You are too kind.” “Nonsense. You are our comrade. Your friendship has not wavered in—how many years?”
The shopkeeper shrugged, smiling inwardly that this investment was about to pay off. He was frightened of Qati and his people—that was why he had never crossed them. He also kept Syrian authorities informed of what he’d done for them, because he was wary of those people, too. Mere survival in that part of the world was an art form, and a game of chance.
“I come to you for advice,” he said after his first sip of coffee.
“Certainly.” Qati leaned forward in his chair. “I am honored to be of help. What is the problem, my friend?”
“It is my father.”
“How old is he now?” Qati asked. The farmer had occasionally given his men gifts also, most often a lamb. Just a peasant, and an infidel peasant at that, but he was one who shared his enemy with Qati and his men.
“Sixty-six—you know his garden?”
“Yes, I was there some years ago, soon after your mother was killed by the Zionists,” Qati reminded him.
“In his garden there is an Israeli bomb.”
“Bomb? You mean a shell.”
“No, Commander, a bomb. What you can see of it is half a meter across.”
“I see—and if the Syrians learn of it ...”
“Yes. As you know, they explode such things in place. My father’s house would be destroyed.” The visitor held up his left forearm. “I cannot be of much help rebuilding it, and my father is too old to do it himself. I come here to ask how one might go about removing the damned thing.”
“You have come to the right place. Do you know how long it has been there?”
“My father says that it fell the very day this happened to me.” The shopkeeper gestured with his ruined arm again.
“Then surely Allah smiled on your family that day.”
Some smile, the shopkeeper thought, nodding.
“You have been our most faithful friend. Of course we can help you. I have a man highly skilled in the business of disarming and removing Israeli bombs—and then he takes the guts from them and makes bombs for our use.” Qati stopped and held up an admonishing finger. “You must never repeat that.”
The visitor jerked somewhat in his chair. “For my part, Commander, you may kill all of them you wish, and if you can do it from a bomb the pigs dropped into my father’s garden, I will pray for your safety and success.”
“Please excuse me, my friend. No insult was intended. I must say such things, as you can understand.” Qati’s message was fully understood.
“I will never betray you,” the shopkeeper announced forcefully.
“I know this.” Now it was time to keep faith with the peasant sea. “Tomorrow I will send my man to your father’s home. Insh’Allah, ” he said, God willing.
“I am in your debt, Commander.” Sometime between now and the new year, he hoped.
8
THE PANDORA PROCESS
The converted Boeing 747 rotated off the Andrews runway just before sumet. President Fowler had had a bad day and a half of briefings and unbreakable appointments. He would have two more even worse; even presidents are subject to the vagaries of ordinary human existence, and in this case, the eight-hour flight to Rome was coupled with a six-hour time change. The jet lag would be a killer. Fowler was a seasoned-enough traveler to know that. To attenuate the worst of it, he’d fiddled with his sleep pattern yesterday and today so that he’d be sufficiently tired to sleep most of the way across, and the VC- 25A had lavish accommodations to make the flight as comfortable as Boeing and the United States Air Force could arrange. An easy-riding aircraft, the -25A had its presidential accommodations in the very tip of the nose. The bed—actually a convertible sofa—was of decent size, and the mattress had been selected for his personal taste. The aircraft was also large enough that a proper separation between the press and the administration people was possible—nearly two hundred feet, in fact; the press was in a closed-off section in the tail—and while his press secretary was dealing with the reporters aft, Fowler was discreetly joined by his National Security Advisor. Pete Connor and Helen D’Agustino shared a look that an outsider might take to be blank, but which spoke volumes within the close fraternity of the Secret Service. The Air Force Security Policeman assigned to the door just stared at the aft bulkhead, trying not to smile.
“So, Ibrahim, what of our visitor?” Qati asked.
“He is strong, fearless, and quite cunning, but I don’t know
what possible use we have for him,” Ibrahim Ghosn replied. He related the story of the Greek policeman.
“Broke his neck?” At least the man was not a plant ... that is, if the policeman had really died, and this was not an elaborate ruse of the Americans, Greeks, Israelis, or God only knew who.
“Like a twig.”
“His contacts in America?”
“They are few. He is hunted by their national police. His group, he says, killed three of them, and his brother was recently ambushed and murdered by them.”
“He is ambitious in his choice of enemies. His education?”
“Poor in formal terms, but he is clever.”
“Skills?”
“Few that are of use to us.”
“He is an American,” Qati pointed out. “How many of those have we had?”
Ghosn nodded. “That is true, Commander.”
“The chance that he could be an infiltrator?”
“I would say slim, but we must be careful.”
“In any case, I have something I need you to do.” Qati explai
ned about the bomb.
“Another one?” Ghosn was an expert at this task, but he was not exactly excited about being stuck with it. “I know the farm—that foolish old man. I know, I know, his son fought against the Israelis, and you like the cripple.”
“That cripple saved the life of a comrade. Fazi would have bled to death had he not received shelter in that little shop. He didn’t have to do that. That was at a time when the Syrians were angry with us.”
“All right. I have nothing to do for the rest of the day. I need a truck and a few men.”
“This new friend is strong, you say. Take him with you.”
“As you say, Commander.”
“And be careful!”
“Insh’Allah. ” Ghosn was almost a graduate of the American University of Beirut—almost because one of his teachers had been kidnapped, and two others had used that as an excuse to leave the country. That had denied Ghosn the last nine credit hours needed for a degree in engineering. Not that he really needed it. He’d been at the top of his class, and learned well enough from the textbooks without having to listen to the explanations of instructors. He’d spent quite a bit of time in labs of his own making. Ghosn had never been a front-line soldier of the movement. Though he knew how to use small arms, his skills with explosives and electronic devices were too valuable to be risked. He was also youthful in appearance, handsome, and quite fair-skinned, as a result of which he traveled a lot. An advance man of sorts, he often surveyed sites for future operations, using his engineer’s eye and memory to sketch maps, determine equipment needs, and provide technical support for the actual operations people, who treated him with far more respect than an outsider might have expected. Of his courage there was no doubt. He’d proven his bravery more than once, defusing unexploded bombs and shells that the Israelis had left in Lebanon, then reworking the explosives recovered into bombs of his own. Ibrahim Ghosn would have been a welcome addition to any one of a dozen professional organizations anywhere in the world. A gifted, if largely self-taught engineer, he was also a Palestinian whose family had evacuated Israel at the time of the country’s founding, confidently expecting to return as soon as the Arab armies of the time erased the invaders quickly and easily. But that happy circumstance had not come about, and his childhood memories were of crowded, unsanitary camps where antipathy for Israel had been a creed as important as Islam. It could not have been otherwise. Disregarded by the Israelis as people who had voluntarily left their country, largely ignored by other Arab nations who might have made their lot easier but had not, Ghosn and those like him were mere pawns in a great game whose players had never agreed upon the rules. Hatred of Israel and its friends came as naturally as breathing, and finding ways to end the lives of such people was his task in life. It had never occurred to him to wonder why.