Code of Honor

5

Jack Ryan met Mary Pat Foley at the top of the staircase on the second floor of the White House Residence, diagonally across from the Lincoln Bedroom. It was early, too early for breakfast, really, but both had such full schedules that they had to start work at the proverbial zero-dark-thirty if they hoped to put any kind of a dent in their days. Ryan embraced Foley as an old friend, brotherly, but close enough to smell her rosewater shampoo. She wore an expensive-looking A-line wool skirt befitting the director of national intelligence and a fashionable silk blouse that she’d probably describe as camel or taupe but Jack would have said was tan.

Foley was in better-than-average shape for a woman in her sixties, but used the banister to haul herself up the last two steps for dramatic effect.

She shook her finger at her old friend. “I thought about having my detail bum-rush your detail so I could take the elevator.”

“I’m pretty sure my detail can take your detail,” Ryan said.

“That’s because this is your home turf,” Mary Pat groused. “My detail doesn’t have guys on the roof with sniper rifles. They’re pretty damned good, though.”

“I know they are,” Ryan said. “But next time use the elevator. Nobody’s going to stop you.”

Mary Pat grinned. “I’d rather gripe about it, Jack.” They’d been acquainted for well over thirty years, fast friends for most of that, and she customarily used his given name unless they were in the Oval Office and there were others present. She’d been here enough to know her way around, and walked toward the dining room off the West Sitting Hall without being told. “Anyway,” she said. “I could use the exercise.”

Foley could be counted on to speak her mind. Ryan liked that. He enjoyed their no-spin chats.

“Griping counts as exercise now?” Ryan chuckled, following a step behind. “I’ll have to tell that to the kids.”

“You know what I mean, wiseass,” she said, drawing a raised brow from the female Secret Service agent posted in the Center Hall, across from the elevator.

“What do you think, Tina?” Ryan said as they passed. “Could my detail take Director Foley’s detail?”

“Without question, Mr. President,” Special Agent Tina Jordan said, stone-faced. With her hands folded low and relaxed in front of her slightly rumpled gray slacks, she tipped her head cordially to Mary Pat. “Good morning, Director Foley.”

The DNI paused outside the dining room door and turned to face Ryan, sniffing the air. “Eggs and bacon, Jack? What gives?”

“Hey,” Ryan said. “The most powerful man in the world should be able to eat what he wants for breakfast.” He shot a guilty glance over his shoulder as if afraid of being caught, then showed Foley through the door. “Seriously, Cathy had an early surgery to perform. That leaves me to harden my arteries at will.”

“I’m up for some comfort food,” Foley said. “Because we need to talk about Russia — and Russia should not be discussed over something as paltry as a breakfast of seeds and whey.”

“Not China?” Ryan mused. “President Zhao and his war games are all over the PDB this morning.” The PDB was the President’s Daily Brief, prepared by Foley’s office. It fused sensitive and secret data gleaned from across the nation’s seventeen intelligence agencies and was ready for Ryan when he woke up each morning.

“Russia first,” Foley said. “I’m saving the Chinese for last.”

A steward from the White House kitchen got them both seated, while the sous-chef, a woman whose parents were from the Dominican Republic, uncovered two plates piled high with eggs Benedict — made with bacon, the way Ryan liked it, instead of ham.

“Thank you, Josey,” Ryan said to the sous-chef. “It looks fantastic.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” The woman stood fast, as if she were waiting to be dismissed.

“Was there something else?”

“There is, Mr. President,” Josey said, shuffling her feet like a child with a C on her report card. “These Benedicts turned out to perfection… Chef asked me to take a photo with you and the breakfast for the White House Instagram account…”

Ryan sighed, waving a hand over his plate as if to give her the go-ahead. Photos of his food for social media — one of the countless things you never realized about being President of the United States until you were on the job. “This has Arnie’s name written all over it,” he muttered.

“Truth be told, Mr. President,” Josey whispered, glancing toward the doors, “it was Mr. van Damm who asked Chef to get some photos.” She took a small digital camera out of her jacket pocket — personal cell phones were locked away downstairs.

Mary Pat reflexively held up an open hand in front of her face at the sight of the camera. “Just the President, if you don’t mind.” She shot a sheepish glance at Ryan. “I know, I know. My photo is all over open-source media now that I’m in this job, but old habits die hard.”

“Of course, Director Foley,” Josey said, snapping three quick photos from different angles before thanking Ryan and stepping out.

“I like her,” Foley said. “She’s honest. The kind of gal I would have tried to recruit.”

“Be my guest,” Ryan said. “She’s not likely to be here long with a brain like hers.”

As was his habit, Ryan poured his guest’s coffee before his own. Being President was a lonely job. Hell, he thought, sometimes being Jack Ryan could be a lonely job. People had come to expect a certain decorum in his actions, a measured restraint when what he wanted to do was beat some bad actor to death with a hammer. He’d proven more than once that he wasn’t beyond using the full force of the presidency with devastating effect. But the times Mary Pat had talked him off the ledge were too numerous to count.

Apart from his wife, Cathy, Mary Pat Foley was Ryan’s closest confidant. Blessed with an innate ability to read people within a few moments after meeting them, she’d been a skilled field officer with the Agency. Her husband, Ed, had been the station chief in Moscow during the turbulent eighties — when things were even worse between the U.S. and Russia than they were now — marginally. Mary Pat was well known among her cohort as a bit of a cowboy, ready to take any manner of risk for her agents — a mother hen. She’d taken Ryan under her wing early on, mentoring him, offering advice from a near peer when he was still new to the CIA and unaccustomed to the Byzantine ways. Her maiden name was Kaminsky and she spoke Russian with the colloquial ease of someone who’d grown up in a Russian household, peppering her conversation with just the right mixture of humor and resignation to the vagaries of life to make her blend in like a native. She could think in Russian — beyond just the language — which made her invaluable as the top intelligence officer for Ryan’s administration.

Ryan used the point of his knife — Cathy preferred Shun when it came to blades — to pop a poached egg. He paused for a moment, watching the yolk mix with the hollandaise and drench the English muffin in liquid gold. Ryan didn’t do Instagram, but if any food was photogenic, this was it. He savored a bite — much richer than the steel-cut oats and skim milk Cathy normally made him eat — and then took a sip of coffee before speaking over the top of the cup.

“So, what’s this about Yermilov?”

Knife in one hand, Foley used the other to gesture at Ryan with her fork. “The man is a menace, Jack. You know that? He’s shameless.”

“Talks regarding Russia are becoming quotidian,” Ryan said.

Foley chuckled. “Doing your crosswords this morning, Mr. President?”

“Keeping the language alive,” Ryan said. “At any rate, it’s not a secret Yermilov fancies himself the next tsar. This report on China…”

“I’m briefing you on Russia, Jack,” Foley said. “Seriously, why do you keep asking about the Chinese? I’m your director of national intelligence. Do you know something I don’t know?”

“Hey,” Ryan chuckled. “I read Intellipedia.”

“Of course you do.” Foley dabbed her lips with a linen napkin, leaving a trace of red lipstick, and then looked at Ryan. “In your spare time.”

Part of the government’s venture into Web 2.0, Intellipedia was an online data-sharing system overseen by Foley’s office. Much like Wikipedia, the collaborative tool allowed intelligence analysts — half of them barely thirty years old, from what Ryan had seen — from the seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies to post and share to wikis classified up to and including Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI) regarding their areas of expertise. The forum was open to those with the necessary security clearance. Personal opinions were not only allowed but encouraged. In Ryan’s view, one of the best things about what his friend John Clark called Wikispook was that it was not anonymous. Submitters shared an opinion, and then had to own it. Any analyst was free to state individual views that would be shared with anyone with the appropriate clearance, but that opinion linked back to the analyst, not some nameless avatar or pseudonym.

Ryan took another bite of eggs Benedict, wishing he had longer to savor it. “We’re always on the brink of something when it comes to Nikita Yermilov,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting your intelligence product. These guys have been studying the way we wage war for the last couple of decades — and figuring out how to counter it. We’ve got to start looking at things differently. The next war will likely be on ground we don’t yet even comprehend at this point. Cyber… AI… who knows what.”

“No argument there,” Foley said. “Both Yermilov and Zhao are running more and more active measures against the West every day. The bad old days with a hell of a lot more technology. The Bureau arrested two Chinese illegals in Queens last week — brothers living under the assumed identities of two children who died in the late seventies.”

Ryan gave a contemplative nod. “I read that brief. Your people are following a couple more, if I’m not mistaken.”

“We are,” Foley said. “A joint team of Bureau and Agency folk.” She pretended to wipe her brow with the back of her hand. “You don’t know how hard it was to get that one put together. Sadly, there are still a few bastions of blinkered thought in the puzzle palaces of our intelligence community. The directors of both agencies were fine with the task force—”

“They better be.” Ryan cut her off. He’d appointed them both.

Mary Pat raised her hand. “They’re on board, Jack, but a couple of old-dog senior executives were guarding their turf like the last bone in the yard. Deanne Staples at the Bureau and Simon Cross at CIA.”

“Did you mentor them?”

“Right out the door,” Foley said. “I am so far past that shit, pardon my French. Gave them each a nice send-off and a pretty plaque thanking them for their service. Yermilov and Zhao both want to end us, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a couple of dinosaurs bent on marking their territory keep us from catching him at his game.”

Ryan chuckled. “Good for you.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Foley said. “It’s not your problem. I just needed to vent. Anyway, the task force has teams on seven suspected illegals at the moment, two here in D.C., one in Manhattan, and a married couple in Colorado Springs who run a diner outside Cheyenne Mountain.” She chuckled. “Most are Russian, but the two in Colorado are Chinese.”

“Do we know who’s running them?”

Foley took a sip of coffee. “Nothing definitive,” she said. “A couple of sources say there is significant infighting among a couple of high-ranking military brass in Beijing. We do have a source close to General Song, a one-star who runs war-gaming scenarios who says he could be ripe to turn. He’d have a treasure trove of data at his fingertips if they want the scenarios to be realistic. We’re playing it slow or we run the risk of burning that source.”

Ryan didn’t ask for specifics about the sources. Both he and Foley had been at this game long enough that neither made a habit of discussing details about intelligence officers or their assets’ meeting schedules unless it was absolutely necessary. Ryan trusted his staff — but people leaked, sometimes on purpose, more often accidentally. Loose lips really had sunk a fair number of ships — and gotten more than a few outed agents shot. As the saying went, Trust in God, but tether your camel at night.

“Anyway, we’ll keep a close watch on the general.” Foley used the tip of her index finger to doodle on the tablecloth. “The situation with all these illegals reminds me of life before you took this stodgy desk job.”

“I’ve always had a stodgy desk job,” Ryan said.

“Yeah,” Foley said, “but you could get up and come play with the rest of us there for a while.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny…”

Foley put both hands on the tablecloth and leaned forward. “Don’t you miss the field?”

“Not one damned bit,” Ryan lied.

Foley sat back, obviously seeing through him. “It’s safer to be a chess player than a chess piece,” she said. “But it’s not nearly as much fun. Anyway, you’re up on your briefing books. Yermilov wants Ukraine and Zhao wants us out of the South China Sea—”

The door from the Sitting Hall opened and Ryan’s chief of staff blew in, gripping his cell phone like it was a sword. He was the only bald guy Ryan knew who could look like he had bedhead. The single Windsor knot of his polyester tie hung at half-mast. He wore no jacket and the top button of his blue striped Eddie Bauer shirt gaped open. The sleeves were rolled to just below his elbows.

He held up the phone as he dragged a chair back from the table with his free hand. “Instagram photo looks great,” he said, not exactly smiling, but looking pleased.

“I see you slept in your clothes again,” Ryan said.

Arnie van Damm waved off the comment. “Yeah, yeah, a guy keeps the wheels oiled, he’s bound to get into a little grease.”

Ryan motioned to his uneaten Benedict. “I can have Josey bring in another set of silverware.”

“I’ve already eaten,” van Damm said. “Did I hear you talking about Russia when I came in? Because that’s what I came to see you about, among other things.”

Van Damm had been chief of staff to three presidents — the man behind the curtain, the chamberlain who whispered in the shogun’s ear. He’d been there from the beginning of the Ryan presidency, when Jack was literally picking himself up from the rubble. Politics, not blood, flowed in his veins. It was no easy task playing ringmaster to the White House circus, and harder still to cajole whoever was sitting behind the Resolute desk into playing politics. He had a knack for knowing when a whispered suggestion would do — or when he needed a chair and a whip. Arnie saw sides of things that Ryan did not, and vice versa. He was a good guy to have in the room, even if he did look like he’d just crawled out of a laundry hamper.

Van Damm absentmindedly dragged Ryan’s plate in front of him as he sat down. Ryan called Josey to bring in silverware and more coffee, which she did immediately. She looked horrified to see the chief of staff preparing to chow down on the rest of the President’s breakfast.

“I’d be happy to make you a fresh plate, Mr. van Damm,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Arnie said, popping the yolk of the second egg. “I’m not really hungry.” Ryan smiled inwardly as his friend began to eat, one arm on the table, wrapped around the plate like that of a prisoner afraid another inmate might try and steal his tater tots. Admittedly rough around the edges, Arnie van Damm was one of the most viscerally intelligent men Ryan had ever come across.

The chief of staff looked up at Ryan. “Senator Chadwick is killing us on our position in the Baltics.”

“Not news,” Ryan said. “At least not new news.”

Michelle Chadwick, the senior senator from Arizona and chairman of the influential Ways and Means Committee, rarely wasted a chance to bash Ryan and his administration for any manner of what she considered to be misadventures. Lately, it was Ryan’s push to increase security in the Baltic nations. She’d swallowed the Russian line that any security buildup would precipitate aggression from the Kremlin instead of preventing it. But she didn’t know Yermilov like Ryan did.

Van Damm gestured with the tines of his fork. “She’s killing us everywhere that matters — the Middle East, China, trade, economy, intelligence oversight. You name it. If we’re for it, she’s against it. That woman has not met a Ryan policy that she does not despise like Brussels sprouts.”

“Not everyone despises Brussels sprouts,” Foley noted.

Van Damm harrumphed. “Well, I do. Just last night Chadwick was on the news calling our Freedom of Navigation operations in the South China Sea ‘saber-rattling.’”

“That’s exactly what they are,” Ryan said. “And I’m good with that.”

“Well,” van Damm said, digging into the egg again. “Be that as it may, I don’t like hearing it out loud, and neither do the American people.”

“I’m not too worried about Senator Chadwick,” Ryan said.

“That’s your problem, Jack,” van Damm scoffed. “You need to worry more. I think she’s banking on the fact that a lot of Americans don’t even know that the Baltics aren’t part of former Yugoslavia.”

Now Josey looked even more horrified.

“You don’t agree?” van Damm asked.

Josey moved the butter, salt, and pepper alongside what was left of the President’s eggs, arranging them in a line, one at a time, illustrating her words. “Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — your plate being the Baltic Sea. All are members of NATO, Mr. van Damm. Estonia is one of the most digitally advanced nations on the planet. It was the first to hold elections on the Internet. Over a quarter of the people living in Latvia are Russian — which is kind of a problem, since President Yermilov can fall back on the excuse that he’s taking care of his people’s interests if he decides he wants to roll across the border. Most of the people in Lithuania belong to the Church of Rome, which might interest you, Mr. President. GDP—”

Van Damm held up an open hand. “You win, Josey.”

Mary Pat nodded at the pepper. “Didn’t expect the sous-chef to have a political science degree from Maryland, did you? Now, if you’ll please pass me the Lithuania…”

“Anyway…” van Damm said, after Josey excused herself with an extremely satisfied grin on her face. “Chadwick and the Baltics are only one problem.” He shook his head. “I swear this job is trying to play baseball with ten or twelve different pitchers, all throwing knuckles, curves, and fastballs from different places on the field… It looks like Zhao has decided to build another island off the Spratlys. One of their 054A frigates came within shooting range of an MEU we had in the area.”

An MEU was a Marine Expeditionary Unit, a quick reaction force generally consisting of support ships and an amphibious LHD that looked like a small carrier, capable of launching rotary-wing aircraft as well as Harriers or F-35s. These MEUs were often used to project American might in far corners of the world while they stood ready to react.

Ryan gave a somber nod. “We were just discussing that before you came in.”

“More feints and jabs,” Foley said. “He’s baiting you, Jack. Pressing buttons to see what you’ll do.”

“Interesting to note,” van Damm said, “that this latest attack comes on the heels of Zhao’s last speech, where he all but assured the world the DF-ZF hypersonic missiles are ready to launch if China feels the least bit threatened. Tacked on to the end of his statement was a throwaway line about historic territorial claims.”

Foley gave a contemplative nod. “Conveniently leaving out that China and Russia are both using hypersonic missile plans stolen from the U.S. He’s pressing you to see what you might do if he takes more aggressive action against, say, a Japanese ship. It’s a dangerous game of chicken.”

Ryan grew distant, thinking, pondering. He didn’t see the proverbial falling dominoes when he pictured a world map, but it was impossible not to see a chessboard, with Zhao gobbling up land and resources around the world — Africa, South America, and all over the Pacific. As it stood, most war-gaming models predicted that the United States would win a prolonged conflict. But what did that even mean? Generals on both sides — PLA and U.S. — stood steadfastly behind their ability to crush the enemy in any conflict. A good general had to be possessed of a certain swagger, a deep and abiding confidence, no matter their shortcomings. Great men were often… almost always… incredibly flawed men. Lincoln, when confronted about Grant’s drunken behavior, had said simply, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”

The giant brains in the think tanks and working groups around Washington had a more sobering view of possible conflict with a near peer state. The U.S. would likely “win” a prolonged conflict — but any openly declared war with a state like China or Russia would come to American soil. Maybe not in boots-on-the-ground foreign troops, but certainly in a rain of missiles and bombs and devastating cyberattacks once the gloves were off. Gone would be the proxy wars fought by guerilla armies and despot dictators propped up with foreign money. Everyone would suffer greatly. Even the nation that came out on top would be belly-down, gasping for breath, and drained of blood and treasure. The American people would feel the next war.

Ryan had to force himself to stop clenching his teeth.

Van Damm waved a hand back and forth in the air. “You still with us, Mr. President?”

“Your analogy made me think,” Ryan said. “I’d like to hear more about these illegals and what they’re up to.”

“Of course, Jack,” Foley said. “I’ll get you something by lunch.”

“Thanks,” Ryan said. “You know, we’re playing a game of chicken with China. You know what game theory says about the surest way to win a game of chicken?”

Foley shrugged. Van Damm wrinkled his bald head.

Ryan jammed an index finger on the table to make his point. “What you have to do is let your opponent see you rip out your own steering wheel right before the game begins.”

“That would work if the other guy happens to be sane.”

“Yeah.” Ryan nodded slowly. “There is that…”