Executive Orders

17 THE REVIVAL

IT IS TO BE EXPECTED THAT important things never happen at convenient times. Whether the birth of a baby or a national emergency, all such events seem to find the appropriate people asleep or otherwise indisposed. In this case, there was nothing to be done. Ben Goodley determined that CIA had no assets in place to confirm the signal-intelligence take, and interested though his country was in the region, there was no action that could be taken. The public news organizations hadn't twigged to this development, and as was often the case, CIA would play dumb until they did. In doing so, the Central Intelligence Agency would give greater substance to the public belief that the news organizations were as efficient as the government in finding things out. It wasn't always the case, but was more frequently so than Good-ley would have preferred.

This SNIE would be a short one. The substance of it didn't require a great deal of pontificating, and the fact of it didn't take long to present. Goodley and his area specialist took half an hour to draft it. A computer printer generated the hard copy for in-house use, and a modem transmitted it via secure lines to interested government agencies. With that done, the men returned to the Operations Center.

GOLOVKO WAS DOING his best to sleep. Aeroflot had just purchased ten new Boeing 777 jetliners for use in its international service to New York, Chicago, and Washington. They were far more comfortable, and reliable, than the Soviet airliners in which he'd traveled for so many years, but he was less than enthralled with the idea of flying so far on two engines, American-made or not, rather than the usual four. The seats, at least, were comfortable here in first class, and the vodka he'd had soon after take-off was a premium Russian label. The combination had given him five and a half hours of sleep until the usual dis-orientation of travel clicked in, waking him up over Greenland, while his bodyguard next to him managed to remain in whatever dreamland his profession allowed. Somewhere aft, the stewardesses were probably sleeping as well as they could in their folding seats.

In previous times, Sergey Nikolayevich knew, it wouldn't have been like this. He would have flown on a special charter with full communications gear, and if something had taken place in the world, he'd be informed just as quickly as the transmission towers outside of Moscow could dot-dash the information out. All the more frustrating was the fact that something was happening. Something had to be. It was always this way, he thought in the noisy darkness. You traveled for an important meeting because you expected something to take place, and then it happened while you were on the move and, if not totally out of touch, then at least denied the chance to confer with your senior aides. Iraq and China. Thankfully, there was a wide separation between the two hot spots. Then Golovko reminded himself that there was a wider separation still between Washington and Moscow, one which lasted about as long as an overnight flight on a twin-engine aircraft. With that pleasant realization, he turned slightly and told himself that he'd need all the sleep he could get.

THE HARD PART wasn't getting them out of Iraq. The hard part would be getting them from Iran to Sudan. It had been a long while since flights from Iran had been allowed to overfly the Saudi Kingdom, and the only exceptions were the pilgrimage flights into Mecca during the annual hajj. Instead, the business jet had to skirt around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea before turning west to Khartoum, tripling both time and distance on the delivery leg of the process, and the next short flight couldn't begin until the first long one had arrived in Africa, and the VIPs had arrived at their hastily prepared quarters, and found them satisfactory, am/made a phone call with the inevitable code word confirming that all was well. It would have been so much easier had it been possible to load them all onto a single airliner for a single Baghdad-Tehran-Khartoum cycle, but that wasn't possible. Neither was it possible to take the far shorter air routing directly from Baghdad to Khartoum through the simple expedient of overflying Jordan. But that meant passing close to Israel, not a prospect to make the Iraqi generals happy. And then there was the secrecy issue, too, to make things inconvenient.

A lesser man than Daryaei would have found it enraging. Instead he stood alone at the window of a closed portion of the main terminal, watching the G-IV stop alongside another, watching the doors open, watching the people scurry down one staircase and immediately onto another, while baggage handlers transferred what few belongings they'd brought albng—doubtless jewels and other items of high value and portability, the holy man thought without a smile. It took only a few minutes, and then the waiting aircraft started moving.

It was foolish, really, to have come down just to see something so pedestrian and tedious as this, but it represented fully two decades of effort, and man of God though he was, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei was still human enough to want to see the fruits of his labor. A lifetime had gone into this, and even so it was a task not even half done. And his time was running out…

As it was for every man, Daryaei reminded himself, one second, one minute, one hour, one day at a time, the same for all, but somehow it seemed to run faster when one was over seventy years of age. He looked down at his hands, the lines and scars of a lifetime there, some natural, some not. Two of his fingers had been broken while a guest of Savak, the Shah's Israeli-trained security service. He remembered the pain of it. He remembered even better the reckoning with the two men who'd interrogated him. Daryaei hadn't spoken a word. He'd just looked at them, stood there like a statue, as they were taken off to the firing squad. Not very much satisfaction in it, really. They'd been functionaries, doing a job assigned to them by others, without really caring who he was or why they were supposed to hate him. Another mullah had sat with each in turn to pray with them, because to deny anyone a chance to reconcile himself with Allah was a crime—and what did it hurt? They died just as quickly that way as any other. One small step in a lifetime's journey, though theirs had ultimately been far shorter than his.

All the years spent for his single-minded purpose. Khomeini had taken his exile in France, but not Daryaei. He'd remained in the background, coordinating and directing for his leader. Picked up that one time, he'd been let go because he hadn't talked, nor had anyone close to him. That had been the Shah's mistake, one of many. The man had ultimately succumbed to indecision. Too liberal in his policies to make the Islamic clergy happy, too reactionary to please his Western sponsors, trying vainly to find a middle ground in a part of the world where a man had only two choices. Only one, really, Daryaei corrected himself as the Gulfstream jet lifted off. Iraq had tried the other path, away from the Word of God, and what had it profited them? Hussein had started his war with Iran, thinking the latter country weak and leaderless, and achieved nothing. Then he had struck out to the south and accomplished even less, all in the sole quest for temporal power.

It was different for Daryaei. He'd never lost sight of his goal, as Khomeini had not, and though the latter was dead, his task lived on. His objective lay behind him as he faced north, too far to see, but there even so, in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina… and Jerusalem. He'd been to the first two, but not the third. As a boy, young and pious, he'd wanted to see the Rock of Abraham, but something, he didn't remember what, had prevented his merchant father from taking him there. Perhaps in time. He'd seen the city of the Prophet's birth, however, and of course made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, more than once despite the political and religious differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He wished to do so again, to pray before the veiled Kaaba. But there was more to it than that, even.

Titular chief of state, he wanted more. Not so much for himself. No, he had a larger task at the bottom of his humble life. Islam stretched from the extreme west of Africa to the extreme east of Asia, not counting the small pockets of the Faith's adherents in the Western Hemisphere, but the religion had not had a single leader and a single purpose for over a thousand years. It caused Daryaei pain that this should be so. There was but one God and one Word, and it must have saddened Allah that His Word was so tragically misunderstood. That was the only possible reason for the failure of all men to grasp the True Faith, and if he could change that, then he could change the world and bring all of mankind to God. But to do that—

The world was the world, an imperfect instrument with imperfect rules for imperfect men, but Allah had made it so, and that was that. Worse, there were those who would oppose everything he did, Believers and un-Believers both, another cause more for sadness than for anger. Daryaei didn't hate the Saudis and the others on the far side of the Persian Gulf. They were not evil men. They were Believers, and despite their differences with him and his country, they'd never be denied access to Mecca. But their way wasn't the Way, and that couldn't be helped. They'd grown fat and rich and corrupt, and that had to be changed. Daryaei had to control Mecca in order to reform Islam. To do that meant acquiring worldly power. It meant making enemies. But that wasn't new, and he'd just won his first major battle.

If only it didn't take so long. Daryaei often spoke of patience, but his was the work of a lifetime, and he was seventy-two, and he didn't want to die as his mentor had, with the work not even half done. When there came his moment to face Allah, he wanted to speak of accomplishment, of successfully fulfilling the noblest task any man could have, the reunification of the True Faith. And Daryaei was willing to do much for that goal. He himself didn't even know how much it was that he was willing to undertake, because not all the questions had yet been asked. And because his goal was so pure and bright, and his remaining time so short, he'd never asked himself how deeply he would cross into darkness in order to get there.

Well. He turned away from the window and walked off with his driver to the car. The process had begun.

PEOPLE IN THE intelligence community are not paid to believe in coincidences, and these particular people had maps and watches to predict them. The unrefueled range of the G-IV was well known, and the distances to be covered were easily computed. The circling AW ACS aircraft established a track heading south from Tehran. Transponder settings told them the type of aircraft, along with speed, heading, and altitude, the last being 45,000 feet for maximum fuel efficiency. Timing was checked between one such flight and another. The course told them even more.

"Sudan," Major Sabah confirmed. It could have gone elsewhere. He almost thought that Brunei was a possible option, but, no, that would be too far from Switzerland, and Switzerland was where the money was—had to be.

With that judgment, a satellite signal was sent to America, again to CIA, and this one occasioned waking a senior DO official up merely to say yes to a brief question. The answer was relayed back to PALM BOWL out of courtesy to the Kuwaitis. Then it was just a matter of waiting.

THE CIA HAD a small presence in Khartoum, really just a station chief and a couple of field officers and a secretary whom they shared with the NSA-run signals section. The station chief was a good one, however, who had recruited a number of local citizens to act as agents. It helped that the Sudanese government had little to hide, most of the time, too poor to be of interest as much of anything. In previous times the government had used its geographic location as a ploy to play East against West, garnering cash and weapons and favor out of the bargain, but the USSR had fallen and with it the Great Power Game which had sustained the Third World for two generations. Now the Sudanese had to depend on their own resources, which were slim, and the few crumbs tossed their way by whichever country had transitory need for what little they had. The country's leaders were Islamic, and in proclaiming it as loudly as they could lie—they were no more devout than their Western counterparts— they managed to get aid from Libya and Iran and others, in return for which they were expected to make life hard on the pagan animists in the southern part of the country, plus risk a rising Islamic political tide in their own capital, people who knew the real level of devotion of the country's leaders, and wanted to replace them with people who truly believed. On the whole the political leaders of that impoverished nation thought it was easier to be religious and rich than religious and poor.

What that meant to the American embassy personnel was great unpredictability. Sometimes Khartoum was safe, when the fundamentalist troublemakers were under control. Sometimes it was not, because they were not. At the moment, the former seemed to be the case, and all the American foreign service officers had to worry about were the environmental conditions, which were vile enough to place this post in the bottom ten of global embassy assignments even without a terrorist threat. For the station chief it meant early advancement, though his wife and two children remained home in Virginia, because most of the official American residents didn't feel safe enough to set up their families here. Almost as bad, AIDS was becoming a threat sufficient to deny much in the way of nightlife to them, not to mention the question of getting safe blood in the event of an injury. The embassy had an Army doctor to handle those issues. He worried a lot.

The station chief shook that off. He'd jumped a whole pay grade on taking this assignment. He'd performed well, with one especially well-placed agent in the Sudanese foreign ministry to inform America about everything that country did. That his country didn't do all that much was not important to the desk-sitters at Langley. Better to know everything about nothing than nothing about everything.

He'd handle this one himself. Checking time and distance against his own maps, the station chief had an early lunch and drove off to the airport, only a few miles out of town. Security there was African-casual, and he found a shady spot outside. It was easier to cover the private terminal than the public one, especially with a 500mm lens on his camera. He even had time to make sure he had the aperture right. A buzz on his cellular phone from the NSA people at the embassy confirmed that the inbound aircraft was on final, a fact further verified by the arrival of some official-looking cars. He'd already memorized two photographs faxed to him from Langley. Two senior Iraqi generals, eh? he thought. Well, with the death of their boss, it wasn't all that surprising. The problem with the dictatorship business was that there wasn't much of a retirement plan for any of those near the top of it.

The white business jet floated in with the customary puffs of rubber smoke. He locked the camera on it and shot a few frames of high-speed black-and-white to make sure the motor drive worked. The only worry now was whether the bird would stop in such a way that he could cover the exit with the camera—the bastards could always face the wrong way and spoil the whole thing for him. In that he had little choice. The Gulfstream stopped. The door dropped open, and the station chief started shooting frames. There was a middle-level official there to do the semi-official greeting. You could tell who was important by who got the hugs and kisses—and from the sweep-around look they gave the area. Click. Click. He recognized one face for sure, and the other was a probable hit. The transfer took only a minute or two. The official cars pulled off, and the station chief didn't much care where they were heading at the moment. His agent in the foreign ministry would fill that one in. He shot the remaining eight frames of the aircraft, already being refueled, and decided to wait to see what it would do. Thirty minutes later, it lifted off yet again, and he headed back to the embassy. While one of his junior people handled the developing, he made a call to Langley.

"CONFIRMATION," GOODLEY SAID, approaching the end of his watch. "Two Iraqi generals touched down at Khartoum fifty minutes ago. It's a bug-out."

"Makes the SNIE look pretty good, Ben," the area specialist observed, with a raised eyebrow. "I hope they pay attention to the time stamp on it."

The national intelligence officer managed a smile. "Yeah, well, the next one has to say what it means." The regular analysts, just starting to arrive for a day's work, would fiddle around with that.

"Nothing good." But you didn't need to be a spook to figure that one out.

"Photos coming in," a communications officer called.

THE FIRST CALL had to go to Tehran. Daryaei had told his ambassador to make things as clear as possible. Iran would assume responsibility for all expenses. The best possible accommodations were to be provided, with every level of comfort that the country could arrange. The overall operation would not cost a great amount of money, but the savages in that country were impressed by small sums, and ten million American dollars—a pittance—had already been transferred electronically to ensure that everything went well. A call from the Iranian ambassador confirmed that the first pickup had gone properly and that the aircraft was on its way back.

Good. Now perhaps the Iraqis would begin to trust him. It would have been personally satisfying to have these swine eliminated, and that would not have been difficult to arrange under the circumstances, but he'd given his word, and besides, this wasn't about personal satisfaction. Even as he set the phone down, his air minister was calling in additional aircraft to expedite the transfer. This was better done quickly.

BADRAYN WAS TRYING to make the same point. The word was going to get out, probably in one day, certainly no more than two. They were leaving people behind who were too senior to survive the coming upheaval, and too junior to merit the solicitude the Iranians were willing to show the generals. Those officers, colonels and brigadiers, would not be overly happy at the prospect of becoming the sacrificial goats necessary to assuage the awakening rage of the mob. This fact was becoming clear, but instead of making them more eager to leave, it emerged as a nonspecific fear that made all the other fears loom larger in the unknown darkness ahead. They stood on the deck of a burning ship off an unfriendly shore, and they didn't know how to swim all that well. But the ship was still afire. He had to make them grasp that.

IT WAS ROUTINE enough by now that Ryan was becoming used to it, at home with it, even comfortable with the discreet knock on the door, more startling in its way than the clock-radio which had begun his days for twenty years. Instead his eyes opened at the muted knock, and he rose, put on his robe, walked the twenty feet from the bed to the door, and got his paper, along with a few sheets of his daily schedule. Next, he headed to the bathroom, and then to the sitting room adjoining the presidential bedroom, while his wife, a few minutes behind him, started her wake-up routine.

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper. Though it wasn't nearly as good—usually—as the intelligence documents waiting on the table for him, the Washington Post also covered things whose interest was not strictly governmental, and so was fuel for his normal desire to keep abreast of things. But the first order of business was a SNIE, an urgent official document stapled inside a manila folder. Ryan rubbed his eyes before reading it.

Damn. Well, it could have been worse, the President told himself. At least this time they hadn't awakened him to let him know about something he couldn't change. He checked the schedule. Okay, Scott Adler would be in to discuss that one, along with that Vasco guy. Good. Vasco seemed to know his stuff. Who else today? He skimmed down the page. Sergey Golovko? Was that today? Good luck for a change. Brief press conference to announce Tony Bretano's appointment as SecDef, with a list of possible questions to worry about, and instructions from Arnie—ignore the Kealty question as much as possible. Let Kealty and his allegations die from apathy—oh, yeah, that's a good one-liner! Jack coughed as he poured some coffee—getting himself the right to do that alone had entailed direct orders; he hoped the Navy mess stewards didn't take it as a personal insult, but Ryan was used to doing some things for himself. Under the current arrangement, the stewards set up breakfast in the room and let the Ryans serve themselves, while others hovered in the corridor outside.

"Morning, Jack." Cathy's head appeared in his view. He kissed her lips and smiled.

"Morning, honey."

"Is the world still out there?" she asked, getting her own coffee. That told the President that the First Lady wasn't operating today. She never touched coffee on a surgery day, saying that she couldn't risk the slight tremor that caffeine might impart to her hands when she was carving up somebody's eyeball. The image always made him shudder, even though she mainly operated with lasers now.

"Looks like the Iraqi government is falling."

A female snort. "Didn't that happen last week?"

"That was act one. This is act three." Or maybe act four. He wondered what act five would be.

"Important?" Jack also heard the toast go down.

"Could be. What's your day like?"

"Clinic and follow-ups, budget meeting with Bernie."

"Hmph." Jack next started looking at the Early Bird, a collection of government-edited clippings from the major papers. Cathy appeared again in his peripheral vision, as she looked at his office schedule.

"Golovko…? Didn't I meet him in Moscow—he's the one who joked about having a gun on you!"

"Wasn't a joke," Ryan told his wife. "It really happened."

"Come on!"

"He said later that the gun wasn't loaded." Jack wondered if that was true. Probably, he thought.

"But he was telling the truth?" she asked incredulously.

The President looked up and smiled. Amazing, he thought, that it seemed funny now. "He was very pissed with me at the time. That's when I helped with the defection of the KGB chairman."

She lifted her morning paper. "Jack, I never know when you're kidding or not."

Jack thought about that. The First Lady was, technically, a private citizen. Certainly in Cathy's case, since she was not a political wife but a working physician who had about as much interest in politics as she did in group sex. She was also, therefore, not technically the holder of a security clearance, but it was assumed that the President would confide in his spouse just as any normal person did. Besides, it made sense. Her judgment was every bit as good as his, and unschooled as she might be in international relations, every day she made decisions that directly affected the lives of real people in the most immediate way. If she goofed, they went blind.

"Cathy, I think it's about time to tell you some of the things I've been stuck with over the years, but for now, yeah, Golovko had a pistol to my head once, on one of the runways at Moscow airport, because I helped two very senior Russians skip the country. One of them was his boss at KGB."

That made her look up, and wonder again about the nightmares that had plagued her husband for months, a few years ago. "So where is he now?"

"In the D.C. area, I forget exactly where, Virginia horse country, I think." Jack vaguely remembered hearing that the daughter, Katryn Gerasimov, was engaged to some old-money fox-killer out around Winchester, having changed from one form of nobility to another. Well, the stipend CIA had paid to the family was enough to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle.

Cathy was used to her husband's jokes. Like most men, he would tell amusing little stories whose humor was in their exaggeration—and besides, his ancestry was Irish— but now she marked the fact that his revelation was as casual as a report of the baseball scores. He didn't see her stare at the back of his head. Yes, she decided, as the kids entered the room, I'd like to hear the stories.

"Daddy!" Katie said, seeing Jack first. "Mommy!"

With that the morning routine stopped, or rather changed over to something more immediately important than world news and events. Katie was already in her school clothes, like most small children, able to awaken in a good mood.

"Hi," Sally said, coming next, clearly vexed.

"What's the matter?" Cathy asked her elder daughter.

"All those people out there! You can't even walk around here without people seeing you everywhere!" she grumped, getting a glass of juice off the tray. And she didn't feel like Frosted Flakes this morning. She'd rather have Just Right. But that box was all the way down on the ground floor in the capacious White House kitchen. "It's like living in a hotel, but not as private."

"What exam is it today?" Cathy asked, reading the signals for what they were.

"Math," Sally admitted.

"Did you study?"

"Yes, Mom."

Jack ignored that problem, and instead fixed cereal for Katie, who liked Frosted Flakes. Little Jack arrived next and turned on the TV, selecting the Cartoon Channel for his morning ration of Road Runner and Coyote, which Katie also approved.

Outside, the day was starting for everyone else. Ryan's personal NIO was putting the finishing touches on his dreaded morning intelligence brief. This President was far too hard to please. The chief usher was in early to supervise some maintenance on the State Floor. In the President's bedroom, the valet was setting out clothes for POTUS and FLOTUS. Cars were waiting to take the children off to school. Maryland State Police officers were already checking out the route to Annapolis. The Marines were warming up their helicopter for the trip to Baltimore—that problem had still not been worked out. The entire machine was already in motion.

GUS LORENZ WAS in his office early because of a telephone call from Africa returning his call from Atlanta. Where, he demanded, were his monkeys? His purchasing agent explained from eight time zones away that, because CDC had fumbled getting the money cleared, somebody else had bought up the shipment, and that a new batch had to be obtained from out in the bush. A week, perhaps, he told the American doctor.

Lorenz grumbled. He'd hoped to start his new study this week. He made a note on his desk pad, wondering who the hell would have bought so many African greens just like that. Was Rousseau starting something new in Paris? He'd call the guy a little later, after his morning staff conference. The good news, he saw, was that—oh, that was too bad. The second patient, killed in a plane crash, the telex from WHO said. But there were no hew cases reported, and it had been long enough from Number Two that they could say now, rather than hope, that this micro-outbreak was over—probably, maybe, hopefully, Lorenz added with his thoughts. That was good news. It looked like the Ebola Zaire Mayinga strain under the electron microscope, and that was the worst of the subtypes of the virus. It could still be that the host was out there, waiting to infect someone else, but the Ebola host was the most bafflingly elusive quarry since malaria—"bad air," in Italian, which was what people had thought caused it. Maybe, he thought, the host was some rodent that had gotten run over by a truck. He shrugged. It was possible, after all.

WITH THE REDUCTION in her morphine drip, Patient Two was semiconscious at the Hasanabad facility. She was aware enough to know, and to feel, the pain, but not to understand what was really happening. The pain would have taken over in any case, all the worse because Jean Baptiste knew what every twinge meant. The abdominal pain was the worst, as the disease was destroying her gastrointestinal tract throughout its ten-meter length, quite literally eating the delicate tissues designed to convert food into nutrients, and dumping infected blood down toward her rectum.

It felt as though her entire body were being twisted and crushed and burned at the same time. She needed to move, to do something to make things different, just to make the pain come briefly from a new direction, and so briefly relieve that which tormented her, but when she tried to move she found that every limb was restrained with Velcro-coated straps. The insult of that was somehow worse than the pain, but when she tried to object it only caused violent nausea that started her gagging. At that indication the blue-coated spaceman rotated the bed—what sort of bed was this? she wondered—which allowed her to vomit into a bucket, and what she saw there was black, dead blood. It distracted her from the pain for a second, but all the distraction told her was that she could not survive, that the disease had gone too far, that her body was dying, and then Sister Jean Baptiste started praying for death, because this could have only one end, and the pain was such that the end needed to come soon, lest she lose her faith in the process. The prospect sprang out into her diminished consciousness like a jack-in-the-box. But this childhood toy had horns and hooves. She needed a priest at hand. She needed—where was Maria Magdalena? Was she doomed to die alone? The dying nurse looked at the space suits, hoping to find familiar eyes behind the plastic shields, but though the eyes she saw were sympathetic, they were not familiar. Nor was their language, as two of them came close.

The medic was very careful drawing blood. First he checked to see that the arm was fully restrained, unable to move more than a centimeter. Then he had a comrade hold the arm in his two strong hands, careful himself to keep those hands well away from the needle. With a nod of agreement, the first selected the proper vein and stabbed the needle in. He was lucky this time. The needle went right in on the first try. To the back of the needle-holder he attached a 5cc vacuum tube, which took in blood that was darker than the usual purple. When it was full, he withdrew it, and set it carefully in a plastic box, to be followed by three more. He withdrew the needle next, and placed gauze on the puncture, which wouldn't stop bleeding. The medic released the arm, noting that their brief grasp had discolored the skin badly. A cover was placed on the box, and the first medic walked it out of the room, while the second went to the corner to spray his gloves and arms with dilute iodine. They'd been fully briefed on how dangerous this duty was, but in the way of normal men they hadn't really believed it, despite all the repetitions and the films and the slides. Both men believed it now, every cursed word, and to a man the army medics wished and prayed for Death to come and spirit this woman off to whatever destination Allah had planned for her. Watching her body disintegrate was bad enough. The thought of following her in this horrid journey was enough to quail the stoutest heart. It was like nothing they'd ever seen. This woman was melting from the inside out. As the medic finished cleaning the outside of his suit, he turned, startled by her cry of pain, as if from an infant tortured by the hands of the devil himself. Eyes open, mouth wide, a rasping, liquid cry escaped into the air and penetrated the plastic of his suit.

The blood samples were handled quickly, but under the greatest care, in the Hot Lab up the corridor. Moudi and the project director were in their offices. It wasn't strictly necessary for them to be in the lab for this, and it was easier for them to view the tests without the hindrance of the protective garb.

"So fast, so remarkably fast." The director shook his head in awe.

Moudi nodded. "Yes, it overwhelms the immune system like a tidal wave." The display on the computer screen came off an electron microscope, which showed the field full of the shepherd-staff-configured viruses. A few antibodies were visible on the screen, but they might as well have been individual sheep in a pride of lions for all the good they might do. The blood cells were being attacked and destroyed. Had they been able to take tissue samples of the major organs, they could have found that the spleen was turning into something as hard as a rubber ball, full of little crystals which were like transport capsules for the Ebola virus particles. It would, in fact, have been interesting, and maybe even scientifically useful, to do laparo-scopic examination of the abdomen, to see exactly what the disease did to a human patient over measured time intervals, but there was the danger of accelerating the patient's death, which they didn't want to risk.

Samples of her vomitus showed tissue fragments from her upper GI, and those were interesting because they were not merely torn loose, but dead. Large sections of the patient's still-living body had already died, come loose from the living remainder, and been ejected as the corporate organism fought vainly to survive. The infected blood would be centrifuged and deep-frozen for later use. Every drop that came out was useful, and because of that, more blood was dripped into her via rubber IV tubes. A routine heart-enzyme test showed that her heart, unlike that of the Index Patient, was still normal and healthy.

"Strange how the disease varies in its mode of attack," the director observed, reading the printout.

Moudi just looked away, imagining that he could hear her cries of anguish through the multiple concrete walls of the building. It would have been an act of supreme mercy to walk into the room and push in 20ccs of potassium, or just to turn the morphine drip all the way open and so kill her with respiratory arrest.

"Do you suppose the African boy had a preexisting cardiovascular problem?" his boss asked.

"Perhaps. It wasn't diagnosed if he did."

"Liver function is failing rapidly, as expected." The director scanned the blood-chemistry data slowly. All the numbers were well out of normal ranges, except the heart indicators, and those but barely. "It's a textbook case, Moudi."

"Indeed it is."

"This strain of the virus is even more robust than I'd imagined." He looked up. "You've done well."

Oh, yes.

"…ANTHONY BRETANO has two doctorates from MIT, Mathematics and Optical Physics. He has an impressive personal record in industry and engineering, and I expect him to be a uniquely effective Secretary of Defense," Ryan said, concluding his statement. "Questions?"

"Sir, Vice President Kealty—"

"Former Vice President," Ryan interrupted. "He resigned. Let's get that right."

"But he says he didn't," the Chicago Tribune pointed out.

"If he said he had a talk with Elvis, would you believe that?" Ryan asked, hoping that he'd delivered the prepared line properly. He scanned faces for the reaction. Again, all forty-eight seats were filled, with twenty more reporters standing. Jack's scornful remark made them all blink, and a few even allowed themselves a smile. "Go ahead, ask your question."

"Mister Kealty has requested a judicial commission to ascertain the facts of the matter. How do you respond to that?"

"The question is being investigated by the FBI, which is the government's principal investigative agency. Whatever the facts are, they haveio be established before anyone can make a judgment. But I think we all know what is going to happen. Ed Kealty resigned, and you all know why. Out of respect for the constitutional process, I have directed the FBI to look into the matter, but my own legal advice is absolutely clear. Mr. Kealty can talk all he wants. I have a job to do here. Next question?" Jack asked confidently.

"Mr. President" — Ryan nodded fractionally at hearing the Miami Herald say that—"In your speech the other night, you said that you're not a politician, but you are in a political job. The American people want to know your views on a lot of issues."

"That makes good sense. Like what?" Jack asked.

"Abortion, for one," the Herald reporter, a very liberated woman, asked. "What exactly is your position?"

"I don't like it," Ryan answered, speaking the truth before thinking about it. "I'm Catholic, as you probably know, and on that moral issue I think my Church is correct. However, Roe v. Wade is the law of the land until such time as the Supreme Court might reconsider the ruling, and the President isn't allowed to ignore the rulings of the federal courts. That puts me in a somewhat uncomfortable position, but as President I have to execute my office in accordance with the law. I swore an oath to do that." Not bad, Jack, Ryan thought.

"So you do not support the right of a woman to choose?" the Herald asked, smelling the blood.

"Choose what?" Ryan asked, still comfortable. "You know, somebody once tried to kill my wife while she was pregnant with our son, and soon thereafter I watched my oldest child lying near death in a hospital. I think life is a very precious commodity. I've learned that lesson the hard way. I'd hope that people would think about that before deciding to have an abortion."

"That doesn't answer the question, sir."

"I can't stop people from doing it. Like it or not, it's the law. The President may not break the law." Wasn't this obvious?

"But in your appointments for the Supreme Court, will you use abortion as a litmus-test issue? Would you like to have Roe v. Wade overturned?" Ryan scarcely noticed the cameras changing focus, and the reporters concentrating on their scribbled notes.

"I don't like Roe v. Wade, as I said. I think it was a mistake. I'll tell you why. The Supreme Court interjected itself into what should have been a legislative matter. The Constitution doesn't address this issue, and on issues where the Constitution is mute, we have state and federal legislatures to write our laws." This civics lesson was going well. "Now, for the nominations I have to make to the Supreme Court, I will look for the best judges I can find. That's something we will be addressing shortly. The Constitution is sort of the Bible for the United States of America, and the justices of the Supreme Court are the— theologians, I guess, who decide what it means. They aren't supposed to write a new one. They're supposed to figure out what it means. When a change in the Constitution is needed, we have a mechanism to change it, which we've used more than twenty times."

"So, you will select only strict-constructionists who are likely to overturn Roe."

It was like hitting a wall. Ryan paused noticeably before answering. "I hope to pick the best judges I can find. I will not interrogate them on single issues."

The Boston Globe leaped to his feet. "Mr. President, what about where the life of the mother is in danger, the Catholic Church—"

"The answer to that is obvious. The life of the mother is the paramount consideration."

"But the Church used to say—"

"I don't speak for the Catholic Church. As I said earlier, I cannot violate the law."

"But you want the law changed," the Globe pointed out.

"Yes, I think it would be better for everybody if the matter was returned to the state legislatures. In that way the people's elected representatives can write the laws in accordance with the will of their electorates."

"But then," the San Francisco Examiner pointed out, "we'd have a hodgepodge of laws across the country, and in some areas abortion would be illegal."

"Only if the electorate wants it that way. That's how democracy works."

"But what about poor women?"

"It's not for me to say," Ryan replied, feeling the beginnings of anger, and wondering how he'd ever gotten into this mess.

"So, do you support a constitutional amendment against abortion?" the Atlanta Constitution demanded.

"No, I don't think that's a constitutional question. I think it is properly a legislative question."

"So," the New York Times summarized, "you are personally against abortion on moral and religious grounds, but you will not interfere with women's rights; you plan to appoint conservative justices to the new Supreme Court who will probably overturn Roe, but you don't support a constitutional amendment to outlaw freedom of choice." The reporter smiled. "Exactly what do you believe in on this issue, sir?"

Ryan shook his head, pursed his lips, and bit off his first version of an answer to the impertinence. "I thought I just made that clear. Shall we go on to something else?"

"Thank you, Mr. President!" a senior reporter called loudly, so advised by the frantic gestures of Arnold van Damm. Ryan left the podium puzzled, walked around the corner, then another until he was out of sight. The chief of staff grabbed the President by the arm, and nearly pushed him against the wall, and this time the Secret Service didn't move a muscle.

"Way to go, Jack, you just pissed off the entire country!"

"What do you mean?" the President replied, thinking, Huh?

"I mean you don't pump gas in your car when you're smoking a cigarette, God damn it! Jesus! Don't you know what you just did?" Arnie could see that he didn't. "The pro-choice people now think you're going to take their rights away. The pro-life people think you don't care about their issue. It was just perfect, Jack. You alienated the whole fucking country in five minutes!" Van Damm stormed off, leaving his President outside the Cabinet Room, afraid that he'd really lose his temper if he said anything more.

"What's he talking about?" Ryan asked. The Secret Service agents around him didn't say anything. It wasn't their place—politics—and besides, they were split on the issue as much as the country was.

IT WAS LIKE taking candy from a baby. And after the initial shock, the baby cried pretty loud.

"BUFFALO Six, this is GUIDON Six, over." Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Masterman—"Duke" to his peers— stood atop "Mad Max II," his M1A2 Abrams command tank, microphone in one hand, and binoculars in the other. Before him, spread over about ten square miles in the Negev Training Area, were the Merkava tanks and infantry carriers of the Israeli army's 7th Armored Brigade, all with yellow lights blinking and purple smoke rising from their turrets. The smoke was an Israeli innovation. When tanks were hit in battle, they burned, and when the MILES gear receptors recorded a laser «hit» they set off the marker. But the idea had been for the Israelis to count coup that way on the OpFor. Only four of Masterman's tanks and six of his M3 Bradley Scout tracks were similarly "dead."

"GUIDON, BUFFALO," came the return call from Colonel Scan Magruder, commander of the 10th «Buffalo» Armored Cavalry Regiment.

"I think this one's about concluded, Colonel, over. The fire sack is full."

"Roger that, Duke. Come on down for the AAR. We're going to have one really pissed Israeli in a few minutes." Just as well the radio link was encrypted.

"On the way, sir." Masterman stepped down off the turret as his HMMVW pulled up. His tank crew started back up, heading down toward the squadron laager.

It didn't get much better than this. Masterman felt like a football player allowed to play every day. He commanded 1st «Guidon» Squadron of the 10th ACR. It would have been called a battalion, but the Cav was different, to the yellow facings on their shoulder straps and the red-and-white unit guidons, and if you weren't Cav, you weren't shit.

"Kickin' some more ass, sir?" his driver asked as his boss lit up a Cuban cigar.

"Lambs to the slaughter, Perkins." Masterman sipped some water from a plastic bottle. A hundred feet over his head, some Israeli F-16 fighters roared past, showing outrage at what had happened below them. Probably a few of them had run afoul of the administrative SAM "launches." Masterman had been especially careful today siting his Stinger-Avenger vehicles, and sure enough, they'd come in just as he'd expected. Tough.

The local "Star Wars Room" was a virtual twin to the original one at Fort Irwin. A somewhat smaller main display screen, and nicer seats, and you could smoke in this one. He entered the building, snaking the dust off his chocolate-chip cammies and striding like Patton into Bas-togne. The Israelis were waiting.

Intellectually, they had to know how useful the exercise had been to them. Emotionally, it was something else. The Israeli 7th Armored was as proud an outfit as any in the world. Practically alone, it had stopped an entire Syrian tank corps on the Golan Heights back in 1973, and their current CO had been a lieutenant then who'd taken command of a headless company and fought brilliantly.

Not accustomed to failure, he'd just seen the brigade in which he'd practically grown up annihilated, in thirty brutal minutes.

"General," Masterman said, extending his hand to the chastened brigadier. The Israeli hesitated before taking it.

"Not personal, sir, just business," said Lieutenant Colonel Nick Sarto, who commanded the 2nd «Bighorn» Squadron, and who had just played hammer to Master-man's anvil. With the Israeli 7th in the middle.

"Gentlemen, shall we begin?" called the senior observer-controller. As a sop to the Israeli Army, the OC team here was a fifty-fifty mix of experienced American and Israeli officers, and it was hard to determine which group was the more embarrassed.

There was, first, a quick-time replay of the theoretical engagement. The Israeli vehicles in blue marched into the shallow valley to meet GUIDON'S reconnaissance screen, which leapfrogged back rapidly, but not toward the prepared defense positions of the rest of the squadron, instead leading them away at an angle. Thinking it a trap, the Israeli 7th had maneuvered west, so as to loop around and envelop their enemies, only to walk into a solid wall of dug-in tanks, and then to have Bighorn come in from the east much faster than expected—so fast that Doug M ills's 3rd «Dakota» Squadron, the regimental reserve, never had a chance to come into play for the pursuit phase. It was the same old lesson. The Israeli commander had guessed at his enemy's positions instead of sending his reconnaissance screen to find out.

The Israeli brigadier watched the replay, and it seemed that he deflated like a balloon. The Americans didn't laugh. They'd all been there before, though it was far nicer to be on the winning side.

"Your reconnaissance screen wasn't far forward enough, Benny," the senior Israeli OC said diplomatically.

"Arabs don't fight that way!" Benjamin Eitan replied.

"They're supposed to, sir," Masterman pointed out. "This is standard Soviet doctrine, and that's who trained 'em all, remember. Pull 'em into the fire sack and slam the back door. Hell, General, that's exactly what you did with your Centurions back in 73.1 read your book on the engagement," the American added. It defused the mood at once. One of the other things the American officers had to exercise here was diplomacy. General Eitan looked sideways and managed something approaching a smile.

"I did, didn't I?"

"Sure as hell. You clobbered that Syrian regiment in forty minutes, as I recall."

"And you, at 73 Easting?" Eitan responded, grateful for the compliment, even though he knew it was a deliberate effort to calm his temper.

It was no accident that Magruder, Masterman, Sarto, and Mills were here. All four had participated in a vicious combat action in the Persian Gulf War, where three troops of the 2nd «Dragoon» Cav had stumbled into an elite Iraqi brigade force under very adverse weather conditions—too bad for the regimental aircraft to participate, even to warn of the enemy's presence—and wiped it out over a period of a few hours. The Israelis knew it, and therefore couldn't complain that the Americans were book soldiers playing theoretical games.

Nor was the result of this «battle» unusual. Eitan was new, only a month in command, and he would learn, as other Israeli officers had learned, that the American training model was more unforgiving than real combat. It was a hard lesson for the Israelis, so hard that nobody really learned it until he'd visited the Negev Training Area, the NTA, and had his head handed to him. If the Israelis had a weakness, it was pride, Colonel Magruder knew. The OpFor's job here, as in California, was to strip that away. A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.

"Okay," the senior American OC said. "What can we learn from this?"

Don't fuck with the Buffalo Soldiers, all three squadron commanders thought, but didn't say. Marion Diggs had reestablished the regiment's gritty reputation in his command tour before moving on to command Fort Irwin. Though the word was still percolating down through the Israeli Defense Forces, the troopers of the 10th had adopted a confident strut when they went out shopping, and for all the grief they caused the Israeli military on the playing fields of the NTA, they were immensely popular. The 10th ACR, along with two squadrons of F-16 fighters, was America's commitment to Israeli security, all the more so that they trained the Jewish state's ground forces to a level of readiness they hadn't known since the Israeli army had nearly lost its soul in the hills and towns of Lebanon. Eitan would learn, and learn fast. By the end of the training rotation he'd give them trouble. Maybe, the three squadron commanders thought. They weren't in the business of giving freebies.

"I REMEMBER WHEN you told me how delightful democracy was, Mr. President," Golovko said chirpily, as he walked through the door.

"You must have caught me on TV this morning," Ryan managed to reply.

"I remember when such comments would have gotten such people shot." Behind the Russian, Andrea Price heard the comment and wondered how this guy had the chutzpah to twist the President's tail.

"Well, we don't do that here," Jack responded, taking his seat. "That will be all for now, Andrea. Sergey and I are old friends." This was to be a private conversation, not even a secretary present to take notes, though hidden microphones would copy down every word for later transcription. The Russian knew that. The American knew that he knew that, but the symbolism of no other people in the room was a compliment to the visitor, another fact which the American knew the Russian to know as well. Jack wondered how many sets of interlocking wheels he was supposed to keep track of, just for an informal meeting with a foreign representative. When the door closed behind the agent, Golovko spoke on.

"Thank you."

"Hell, we are old friends, aren't we?"

Golovko smiled. "What a superb enemy you were."

"And now…?"

"How is your family adjusting?"

"About as well as I am," Jack admitted, then shifted gears. "You had three hours at the embassy to get caught up." Golovko nodded; as usual, Ryan was well briefed for this meeting, covert though it was. The Russian embassy was only a few blocks-up Sixteenth Street, and he'd walked down to the White House, a simple way to avoid notice in a town where official people traveled in official cars. "I didn't expect things in Iraq to fall so quickly."

"Neither did we. But that's not why you came over, Sergey Nikolay'ch. China?"

"I presume your satellite photos are as clear as ours on the issue. Their military is at an unusually high state of readiness."

"Our people are divided on that," Ryan said. "They might be building up to put some more pressure on Taiwan. They've been building their navy up."

"Their navy isn't ready for combat operations yet. Their army still is, and their rocket forces. Neither is going to cross the Formosa Strait, Mr. President." That made the reason for his trip clear enough. Jack paused to look out the window at the

Washington Monument, surrounded as it was by a circle of flagpoles, rather like a garland. What was it George had said about avoiding entangling foreign alliances? But it had been a far simpler world back then, two months to cross the Atlantic, not six or seven hours….

"If you are asking what I think you are, yes—or should I say, no." "Could you clarify?" "America would not look kindly upon an attack by China against Russia. Such a conflict would have very adverse effects upon world stability, and would also impede your progress to full democratic status. America wants to see Russia become a prosperous democracy. We were enemies long enough. We should be friends, and America wants her friends safe and peaceful."

"They hate us, they covet what we have," Golovko went on, not satisfied with America's statement.

"Sergey, the time for nations to steal what they cannot earn is past. It's history, and not to be repeated."

"And if they move on us anyway?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, Sergey," the President answered. "The idea is to prevent such actions. If it appears that they are really thinking about a move, we'll counsel them to reconsider. We are keeping an eye on things."

"I don't think you understand them." Another push, Ryan saw. They really were worked up about this.

"Do you think anyone does? Do you think they themselves know what they want?" The two intelligence officers—that was how both men would always think of themselves—shared a look of professional amusement.

"That is the problem," Golovko admitted. "I try to explain to my President that it is difficult to predict the behavior of undecided people. They have capabilities, but so do we, and the calculus of the matter appears different from both sides—and then the personalities come into play. Ivan Emmetovich, those are old men with old ideas. Their personalities are the major consideration here."

"And history, and culture, and economics, and trade— and I haven't had the chance to look them in the eye yet. I'm weak on that part of the world," Jack reminded his guest. "I spent most of my life trying to figure you people out."

"So you will stand with us?"

Ryan shook his head. "It's too early and too speculative to go that far. We will do everything in our power, however, to prevent a possible conflict between the PRC and Russia. If it happens, you'll go nuclear. I know it. You know it. I think they know it."

"They don't believe it."

"Sergey, nobody's that stupid." Ryan made a mental note to discuss this with Scott Adler, who knew the region far better than he did. It was time to close the book on that issue for the moment, and open another. "Iraq. What are your people saying?"

Golovko grimaced. "We had a network go down three months ago. Twenty people, all shot or hanged—after interrogation, that is. What we have left doesn't tell us much, but it appears that senior generals are preparing to do something."

"Two of them just showed up in the Sudan this morning," Ryan told him. It wasn't often he caught Golovko by surprise.

"So fast?"

Ryan nodded, handing over the photographs from the Khartoum airport. "Yep."

Golovko scanned them, not knowing the faces, but not really needing to. Information passed along at this level was never, ever faked. Even with enemies and former enemies, a nation had to keep its word on some things. He handed the photos back. "Iran, then. We have some people there, but we've heard nothing in the last few days. It's a dangerous environment in which to operate, as you know. We expect that Daryaei had something to do with the assassination, but we have no evidence to support it." He paused. "The implications of this are serious."

"You're telling me that you can't do anything about it, either, then?"

"No, Ivan Emmetovich, we cannot. We have no influence there, and neither do you."