Executive Orders

19 RECIPES

"IT'S BEEN A WHILE, MR. Clark."

"Yes, Mr. Holtzman, it has," John agreed. They were in the same booth as before, all the way in the back, close to the jukebox. Esteban's was still a nice family place off Wisconsin Avenue, and still well patronized by nearby Georgetown University. But Clark remembered that he'd never told the reporter what his name was.

"Where's your friend?"

"Busy tonight," Clark replied. Actually Ding had left work early and driven down to Yorktown, and was taking Patsy out to dinner, but the reporter didn't need to know that. It was clear from his face that he already knew too much. "So, what can I do for you?" the field officer asked.

"We had a little deal, you'll recall."

Clark nodded. "I haven't forgotten. That was for five years. Time isn't up yet." The reply wasn't much of a surprise.

"Times change." Holtzman lifted the menu and scanned it. He liked Mexican food, though of late the food didn't seem to like him very much.

"A deal's a deal." Clark didn't look at his menu. He stared straight across the table. His stare was something people often had trouble dealing with.

"The word's out. Katryn is engaged to be married to some fox-chaser out in Winchester."

"I didn't know," Clark admitted. Nor did he especially care.

"Didn't think you would. You're not an SPO anymore. Like it back in the field?"

"If you want me to talk about that, you know I can't—"

"More's the pity. I've been checking up on you for a couple of years now," the reporter told his guest. "You have one hell of a service reputation, and the word is that your partner is a comer. You were the guy in Japan," Holtzman said with a smile. "You rescued Koga."

A scornful look concealed John's real feelings of alarm. "What the hell would give you that idea?"

"I talked with Koga when he was over. Two-man rescue team, he said. Big guy, little guy. Koga described your eyes—blue, hard, intense, he said, but he also said that you were a reasonable man in your speech. How smart do I have to be to figure that one out?" Holtzman smiled. "Last time we talked, you said I would have made a good spook." The waiter showed up with two beers. "Ever have this before? Pride of Maryland, a new local micro on the Eastern Shore." Then the waiter went away. Clark leaned across the table.

"Look, I respect your ability, and the last time we talked, you played ball, kept your word, and I respect that, too, but I would like you to remember that when I go out in the field, my life rides on—"

"I won't reveal your identity. I don't do that. Three reasons, it's wrong, it's against the law, and I don't want to piss off somebody like you." The reporter sipped his beer. "Someday I'd sure as hell like to do a book about you. If half the stories are true—"

"Fine, get Val Kilmer to play me in the movies."

"Too pretty." Holtzman shook his head with a grin. "Nick Cage has a better stare. Anyway, what this meet is about…" He paused. "It was Ryan who got her father out, but I'm not clear on how. You went on the beach and got Katryn and her mother out, took them out by boat to a submarine. I don't know which one, but I know it was one of our nuclear subs. But that's not the story."

"What is?"

"Ryan, like you, the Quiet Hero." Robert Holtzman enjoyed seeing the surprise in Clark's eyes. "I like the guy. I want to help him."

"Why?" John asked, wondering if he could believe his host.

"My wife, Libby, got the goods on Kealty. Published it too soon, and we can't go back to it now. He's scum, even worse than most of the people down there. Not everybody in the business feels that way, but Libby's talked to a couple of his victims. Once upon a time a guy could get away with that, especially if his politics were 'progressive. Not anymore. Not supposed to, anyway," he corrected himself. "I'm not so sure Ryan's the right guy, either, okay? But he's honest. He'll try to do the right thing, for the right reasons. As Roger Durling liked to say, he's a good man in a storm. I have to sell my editors on that idea."

"How do you do that?"

"I do a story about how he did something really important for his country. Something old enough that it isn't sensitive anymore, and recent enough that people know it's the same guy. Jesus Christ, Clark, he saved the Russians! He prevented an internal power play that could have dialed the Cold War back in for another decade. That's a big fucking deal—and he never told anybody about it. We'll make it clear that Ryan didn't leak this. We'll even approach him before we run it, and you know what he'll say—"

"He'd tell you not to run it," Clark agreed. Then he wondered whom Holtzman might have talked with. Judge Arthur Moore? Bob Ritter? Would they have talked? Ordinarily he'd be sure the answer to that one was an emphatic no, but now? Now he wasn't so sure. You got to a certain level and people figured breaking the rules was part of some higher duty to the country. John knew about "higher duty" stuff. It had landed him in all manner of trouble, more than once.

"But it's too good a story not to run. It took me years to figure it all out. The public has a right to know what kind of man is sitting in the Oval Office, especially if he's the right man," the reporter went on. Holtzman clearly was a man who could talk a nun right out of her habit.

"Bob, you don't know the half of it." Clark stopped talking an instant later, annoyed with himself for saying that much. This was deep water, and he was trying to swim with a weight belt on. Oh, what the hell… "Okay, tell me what you know about Jack."

IT WAS AGREED that they'd use the same aircraft, and somewhat to the relief of both sides, that they wouldn't stay one unnecessary minute in Iran. There was the problem that the 737 didn't have the range of the smaller G-IVs, however, and it was agreed that the airliner would land in Yemen to refuel. The Iraqis never left the plane at Mehrabad, but when the stairs pulled up, Badrayn did, without a single word of thanks from the people he'd saved. A car was waiting. He didn't look back. The generals were part of his past, and he part of theirs.

The car took him into town. There was just a driver, who took his time negotiating the streets. Traffic wasn't all that dense at this time of night, and the going was easy. Forty minutes later, the car stopped in front of a three-story building. Here there was security. So, Badrayn thought, he was living in Tehran now? He got out of the car on his own. A uniformed security guard compared a photograph with his face and gestured him toward the door. Inside another guard, this one a captain by the three pips at his shoulders, patted him down politely. From there it was upstairs to a conference room. By now it was three in the morning, local time.

He found Daryaei sitting in a comfortable chair reading some papers stapled together at the corner, the quintessential government briefing document instead of the Holy Koran. Well, Daryaei must have had it memorized by now, so long had he studied it.

"Peace be unto you," Ali said.

"And unto you, peace," Daryaei replied, not so mechanically as Badrayn had expected. The older man rose and came to him for the expected embrace. The face was far more relaxed than he'd expected. Tired, certainly, since it had been a long day or two for the cleric, but old or not, the man was buoyed by the events. "You are well?" he asked solicitously, waving his guest to a chair.

Ali allowed himself a long breath as he took his seat. "I am now. I'd wondered how long the situation in Baghdad would remain stable."

"There was nothing to be gained from discord. My friends tell me that the old mosque is in need of repair."

Badrayn might have said that he didn't know—he didn't—but the reason was that he hadn't seen the inside of a mosque in rather a long time, a fact not calculated to please Daryaei. "There is much to do," he decided to respond.

"Yes, there is." Mahmoud Haji Daryaei returned to his chair, setting the papers aside. "Your services were very valuable. Were there any difficulties?"

Badrayn shook his head. "Not really, no. It's surprising how fearful such men can be, but I was prepared for that. Your proposal was generous. They had no choice but to take it. You will not…?" Ali allowed himself to ask.

He shook his head. "No, they shall go in peace."

And that, if true, was something of a surprise, though Ali didn't allow his face to show it. Daryaei had little reason to love those men. All had played a role in the Iran-Iraq war, and been responsible for the deaths of thousands, a wound still raw on this nation. So many young men had died. The war was one of the reasons why Iran had played no major role in the world for years. But that was about to change, wasn't it?

"So, may I ask what you will do next?"

"Iraq has been a sick country for so long, kept away from the True Faith, wandering in the darkness."

"And strangled by the embargo," Badrayn added, wondering what information this observation would elicit.

"It is time for that to end," Daryaei agreed. Something in his eyes congratulated Ali for the observation. Yes, that was the obvious play, wasn't it? A sop to the West. The embargo would be lifted. Food would then flood the country, and the population would be delighted with the new regime. He would please everybody at once, all the while planning to please no one but himself. And Allah, of course. But Daryaei was one of those who was sure that his policies were inspired by Allah, an idea Badrayn had long since disposed of.

"America will be a problem, as will others closer to you."

"We are examining those issues." This statement was delivered comfortably. Well, that made sense. He must have been thinking about this move for years, and at a moment like this one he must have felt invincible. That also made sense, Badrayn knew. Daryaei always thought Allah was on his side—at his side was more accurate. And perhaps He was, but there was much more to it than that. There had to be if you wanted success. Miracles most often appeared when summoned by preparation. Why not a play to see if he might take a hand in the next miracle, Ali thought.

"I've been looking at the new American leader."

"Oh?" Daryaei's eyes focused a little more tightly.

"It's not difficult, gathering information in the modern age. The American media publishes so much, and it can all be easily accessed now. I have some of my people working on it even now, building a careful dossier." Badrayn kept his voice casual. It wasn't hard. He was bone-tired. "It really is quite remarkable how vulnerable they are now."

"Indeed. Tell me more."

"The key to America is this Ryan fellow. Is that not obvious?"

"THE KEY TO changing America is a constitutional convention," Ernie Brown said, after long days of silent contemplation. Pete Holbrook was flipping the controller on his slide projector. He'd shot three rolls of film of the Capitol building, and a few more of other buildings like the White House, unable completely to avoid being the tourist. He grumbled, seeing that one of the slides was in the caddie upside-down. This idea had gestated long enough, and the result wasn't all that impressive.

"We've talked about that for a long time," Holbrook agreed as he lifted the caddie off the projector. "But how do you—"

"Force it? Easy. If there's no President and no way to select one within the Constitution, then something has to happen, doesn't it?"

"Kill the President?" Pete snorted. "Which one?"

There was the problem. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Take out Ryan, and Kealty would step in. Take out Kealty, and Ryan was in like Flynn. It would be tough enough now. Both men remembered all the security they'd seen at the White House. Kill either one, and the American SS would put a wall around the one who was left that you'd need a nuke to breach. The Mountain Men didn't have any of those. They preferred traditional American weapons, like rifles. Even those had their limitations. The South Lawn of the White House was thoroughly forested with trees, and, they'd noticed, also shielded by skillfully concealed earthen berms. Just seeing the White House was possible down only one visual avenue, past the fountain at the building itself. The surrounding buildings were all government-owned, and atop them would always be people with binoculars—and rifles. The American SS were determined to keep the people away from «their» President, the servant of the people, whose guards didn't trust the people at all. But if the man who lived in that house was really one of the people, there would have been no need, would there? Once Teddy Roosevelt had thrown open the doors and shaken hands with ordinary citizens for four whole hours. No way that would happen anymore!

"Both at once. The way I figure, Ryan will be the hard target, right?" Brown asked. "I mean, he's there where most of the protection is. Kealty has to move around a lot, talking to the newspaper pukes, and he won't be as well protected, will he?"

Holbook replaced the slide caddie. "Okay, that makes sense."

"So, if we figure a way to do Ryan, taking Kealty out will be much easier to do on the fly." Brown took the cellular phone out of his pocket. "Easy to coordinate."

"Keep going."

"It means getting a fix on his schedule, learning his routine, and picking our time."

"Expensive," Holbrook observed, flipping to the next slide. It was one so often taken by so many people, from the top of the Washington Monument, the tiny north window, looking down on the White House. Ernie Brown had taken one, too, and had the print blown up to poster size in the local photo shop. Then he'd stared at it for hours. Then he'd gotten a map and checked the scale. Then he'd done some rough calculations.

"The expensive part's buying the cement truck, and renting a place not too far out of town."

"What?"

"I know what the spot is, Pete. And I know how to bring it off. Just a matter of picking the time."

SHE WOULDN'T LIVE through the night, Moudi decided. Her eyes were open now. What they saw was anyone's guess. Finally, mercifully, she was beyond pain. That happened. He'd seen it before, with cancer patients, mostly, and it was always the harbinger of death. His knowledge of neurology was insufficient to understand the reason for it. Maybe the electro-chemical pathways got overloaded, or maybe there was some editing function in the brain. The body knew what was happening, that the time for battle had ended, and since the nervous system reported pain mainly as a warning system, when the time for warning was past, so was the time for pain. Or maybe it was all his imagination. Possibly her body was simply too damaged to react to anything. Certainly the intra-ocular bleeding had her blind. The last blood line had fallen out, so damaged were her veins now, and she was bleeding from that point in addition to so many others. Only the morphine drip remained, held in place with tape. The heart was being starved of blood, and trying ever harder to pump what diminished supply it had left, it was exhausting itself.

Jean Baptiste still made noises—difficult to hear through the Racal suit—the occasional whimper, and the timing of them made the physician wonder if they might be prayers. They probably were, he decided. Robbed of sanity along with her life, the one thing that remained in her would be the endless hours of prayer, the discipline which had ruled her life, and she'd return to that in her madness because her mind had nowhere else to go. The patient cleared her throat, choking, really, but then murmuring more clearly, and Moudi leaned his head down to listen.

"… — ther of God, pray for us sinners…"

Oh, that one. Yes, it would have to be her favorite prayer.

"Fight no more, lady," Moudi told her. "It is your time. Fight no more."

The eyes changed. Even though she could not see, the head turned and she stared at him. It was a mechanical reflex, the physician knew. Blind or not, years of practice told the muscles what to do. The face instinctively turned to a source of noise, and the eyes—the muscles still worked—focused in the direction of interest.

"Dr. Moudi? Are you there?" The words came slowly, and not all that clearly, but understandable even so.

"Yes, Sister. I am here." He touched her hand automatically, then was dumbfounded. She was still lucid?

"Thank you for… helping me. I will pray for you."

She would. He knew that. He patted her hand again, and with the other increased the morphine drip. Enough was enough. They could put no more blood into her to be polluted with the virus strands. He looked around the room. Both army medics were sitting in the corner, quite content to let the doctor stand with the patient. He walked over to them and pointed to one.

"Tell the director—soon."

"At once." The man was very pleased to leave the room. Moudi counted to ten before speaking to the other.

"Fresh gloves, please." He held up his hands to show that he didn't like touching her either. That medic left, too. Moudi figured he had a minute or so.

The medication tray in the corner had what he needed. He took a 20cc needle from its holder and stuck it into the vial of morphine, pulling in enough to fill the plastic cylinder completely. Then he returned to the bedside, pulled the plastic sheet back and looked for… there. The back of her left hand. He took it in his and slid the needle in, immediately pushing down the plunger.

"To help you sleep," he told her, moving back across the room. He didn't look to see if she responded to his words or not. The needle went into the red-plastic sharps container, and by the time the medic came back with new gloves, everything was as before.

"Here."

Moudi nodded and stripped the overgloves off into their disposal container, replacing them with a new set. Back at the bedside, he watched the blue eyes close for the last time. The EKG display showed her heart rate at just over one-forty, the spiky lines shorter than they should have been, and irregularly spaced. Just a matter of time now. She was probably praying in her sleep, he thought, dreaming prayers. Well, at least he could be sure now that she was in no pain. The morphine would be well into her diminishing blood supply now, the chemical molecules finding their way to the brain, fitting into the receptors, and there releasing dopamine, which would tell the nervous system… yes.

Her chest rose and fell with the labored respiration. There was a pause, almost like a hiccup, and the breathing restarted, but irregularly now, and the flow of oxygen to the bloodstream was now diminishing. The heart rate changed, becoming yet more rapid. Then respiration ceased. The heart still didn't stop at once, so strong it was, so valiant, the doctor thought sadly, admiring this undying part of a person already dead, but that couldn't last long, and with a few final traces on the screen, it, too, ceased to function. The EKG machine began making a steady alarm tone. Moudi reached up and shut it off. He turned to see the medics sharing a look of relief.

"So soon?" the director asked, coming into the room and seeing the flat, silent line on the EKG readout.

"The heart. Internal bleeding." Moudi didn't have to say anything else.

"I see. We are ready, then?"

"Correct, Doctor."

The director motioned to the medics, who had one last job to do. One of them bundled up the plastic sheeting to contain drips. The other disconnected the last IV and the electronic EKG leads. This was done expeditiously, and when the former patient was wrapped like a piece of slaughtered meat, the locks on the wheels were kicked loose, and the two soldiers wheeled her out the door. They would return to clean the room so thoroughly as to make sure that nothing could live on the walls, floor, or ceiling.

Moudi and the director followed them to "Post," a room in the same confined area behind the double doors. Here was an autopsy table made of smooth, cold stainless steel. They wheeled the treatment bed beside it, uncovering the body and rolling it to a facedown position on the steel, while the doctors observed from the corner, each donning surgical gowns over his protective suit—more from habit than necessity; some habits are just that. Next the plastic sheets were lifted, held by the edges to form a U shape that allowed the accumulated blood to be poured into a container. About half a liter, the doctors estimated. The sheets were carefully carried to a large bin. The medics stuffed them in and left the room, wheeling the bin with them, off to the incinerator. Nervous as they were, it didn't appear that they'd spilled a drop anywhere.

"Very well." The director pressed a button and the table elevated from the far end. Out of long-standing professionalism, he touched his fingertips to the left carotid artery to make sure there was no pulse, then to the right, where again there was none. When the body was at a twenty-degree angle, he took a large scalpel and cut both arteries, along with the parallel jugular veins. Blood poured out onto the table, pulled by gravity out of the body, channeled into grooves leading in turn to a drain, and over the next several minutes four liters of blood were captured in a plastic container. The body went pale so quickly, Moudi saw. Moments earlier, the skin had been mottled red and purple. It seemed to fade before his eyes, or perhaps it was just imagination. A laboratory technician came to collect the blood container, which he placed on a small wheeled cart. Nobody wanted to carry something like that, even for a short distance.

"I've never posted an Ebola victim," the director observed. Not that this was a proper postmortem examination. For all the care the director had just shown for the patient's departed humanity, bleeding her out like that, he might have slaughtered a lamb.

They still had to be careful, however. In cases like this, only one pair of hands worked within the surgical field, and Moudi let the director do that, as he made rough, wide incisions. Stainless-steel retractors pulled back the flaps of skin and muscle. Moudi handled those, his eyes locked on the scalpel in the director's gloved hands. In another minute, the left kidney was fully exposed. They waited for the medical corpsmen to return. One of them set a tray on the table next to the cadaver. Moudi was revolted by what he saw next. One effect of the Ebola virus and its disease process was to break down tissue. The exposed kidney was half liquefied, and when the director reached in to remove it, the organ actually broke—pulled itself apart into two pieces like a horrid red-brown pudding. The director clucked at himself with annoyance. He'd known what to expect, but forgotten even so.

"Remarkable what happens to the organs, isn't it?"

"Expect the same from the liver, but the spleen—"

"Yes, I know. The spleen will be like a brick. Watch your hands, Moudi," the director warned. He lifted a fresh retractor—the instrument was shaped rather like a scoop—to remove the remaining kidney fragment. This went onto the tray. He nodded, and the medic took it off to the lab. The right kidney went more smoothly. At the director's insistence, after all the muscle and blood vessels were disconnected, both doctors used their hands to remove it, and this one stayed reasonably intact—until it landed on the tray. There the organ deformed and split open. The only good thing about it was that the softness of the tissue would not compromise the integrity of their doubled gloves. That fact didn't prevent both doctors from cringing.

"Here!" The director flicked his hand for the orderlies to approach. "Turn it over."

The medics did so, one grasping the shoulders, and the other the knees, flipping the body over as briskly as they could. That caused blood and some tissue to spatter on their cloth gowns. The orderlies pulled back, keeping as far away as possible.

"I want the liver and spleen, that's all," the director told Moudi, looking up. He turned to the orderlies. "Then you will wrap the body and remove it to the incinerator. This room will then be disinfected thoroughly."

Sister Jean Baptiste's eyes were open, as sightless now as they had been thirty minutes earlier. The doctor took a cloth and covered the face, murmuring a prayer for her soul which the director heard.

"Yes, Moudi, she is doubtless in Paradise. Now, shall we continue?" he asked brusquely. He made the usual Y-shaped incision to open the thorax, deep and crude as before, peeling back the layers quickly, more like a meat-cutter than a physician. What they saw there even shocked the director. "How did she live so long like this…?" the man breathed.

Moudi thought back to his medical-school days, remembering a life-sized plastic model of the human body in his first anatomy class. It was as though someone had taken the model and poured in.a bucket of powerful solvent. Every exposed organ was misshapen. The surface tissue layer on most of them was… dissolved. The abdomen was a sea of black blood. All they'd put in, Moudi thought… not even half of it had leaked out. Amazing.

"Suction!" the director commanded. An orderly appeared at his side with a plastic tube leading to a vacuum bottle, and the sound of it was obscene. The process lasted fully ten minutes, with the doctors standing back while the orderly moved the suction tube around, like a maid cleaning a house. Another three liters of contaminated, virus-rich blood for the lab.

The body was supposed to be a Temple of Life, the Holy Koran taught. Moudi looked down to see one transformed into—what? A factory of death, more surely than the building in which he stood. The director moved back in, and Moudi watched his hands uncover the liver, more carefully than before. Perhaps he'd been spooked by the blood in the abdominal cavity. Again the blood vessels were cut, the connective tissue cut away. The director set his instruments down, and without being so bidden, Moudi reached in to lift out the organ and set it on the tray which, again, an orderly removed.

"I wonder why the spleen behaves so differently?"

DOWNSTAIRS, OTHER MEDICAL orderlies were at work. One by one, the monkey cages were lifted from the orderly piles in the storage room. The African greens had been fed,

and they were still recovering from the shock of their travel. That somewhat reduced their ability to scratch and bite and fight the gloved hands moving the cages. But the panic of the animals returned soon enough when they arrived in another room. This part of the operation was being handled ten at a time. Once in the killing room, when the doors were all tightly closed, the monkeys knew. The unlucky,ones got to watch as one cage at a time was set on a table. The door to each was opened, and into the cage went a stick with a metal-band loop on the end. The loop went over the head of each monkey and was yanked tight, usually to the faint crackling sound of the broken neck. In every case the animal went taut, then fell limp, usually with the eyes open and outraged at the murder. The same instrument pulled the dead animal out. And when the loop was loosened, the body was tossed to a soldier, who carried it to the next room. The others saw and screeched their rage at the soldiers, but the cages were too small to give them room to dodge. At best one might interpose an arm in the loop, only to have that broken as well. Intelligent enough to see and know and understand what was happening to them, the African greens found it not unlike sitting in a lone tree on the savanna, watching a leopard climb up, and up, and up… and there was nothing they could do but screech. The noise was troublesome to the soldiers, but not that troublesome.

In the next room, five teams of medical corpsmen worked at five separate tables. Clamps affixed at the neck and at the base of the tail helped keep the bodies in place. One soldier, using a curved knife, would slice open the back, tracing up the backbone, and then the other would make a perpendicular cut, pulling the hide apart to expose the inner back. The first would then remove the kidneys and hand them to the second, and while the small organs went into a special container, he would remove the body, tossing it into a plastic trash barrel for later incineration. By the time he returned to pick up his knife, the other team member would have the next monkey corpse fixed in place. It took about four minutes per iteration of the procedure. In ninety minutes, all the African green monkeys were dead. There was some urgency to this. All the raw material for their task was biological, and all subject to biological processes. The slaughtering crew handed off their product through double-doored openings cut into the walls, leading to the Hot Lab.

There things were different. Every man in the large room wore the blue plastic suit. Every motion was slow and careful. They'd been well drilled and well briefed, and what little might have been overlooked in their training had recently been recounted by the medical corpsmen selected by lot to treat the Western woman upstairs, in every dreadful detail. When something was carried from one place to another, an announcement was made, and people made a path.

The blood was in a warming tank, and air bubbled through it. The simian kidneys, two large buckets of them, were taken to a grinding machine—actually not terribly different from the kind of food processor found in gourmet kitchens. This reduced the kidneys to mush, which was moved from one table to another and layered onto trays, along with some liquid nutrients. It struck more than one of the people in the lab that what they were doing was not at all unlike baking a cake or other confection. The blood was poured generously into the trays. About half was used in that way. The rest, divided into plastic containers, went into a deep-freezer cooled by liquid nitrogen. The Hot Lab was kept warm and moist, not at all unlike the jungle. The lights were not overly bright, and shielded to contain whatever ultra-violet radiation the fluorescent might emit. Viruses didn't like UV. They needed the right environment in which to grow, and the kidneys of the African green monkey were just that, along with nutrients, proper temperature, correct humidity, and just a pinch of hate.

"YOU'VE LEARNED SO much?" Daryaei asked.

"It's their media, their newspeople," Badrayn explained.

"They're all spies!" the mullah objected.

"Many think so," Ali said with a smile. "But they aren't, really. They are—how does one explain them? Like

medieval heralds. They see what they see and they tell what they see. They are loyal to no one except themselves and their profession. Yes, it is true that they spy, but they spy on everyone, their own people most of all. It's mad, I admit, but it's true even so."

"Do they believe in anything?" That was a hard one for his host to grasp.

Another smile. "Nothing that I've ever identified. Oh, yes, the American ones are devoted to Israel, but even that is an exaggeration. It took me years to understand that. Like dogs, they will turn on anyone, bite any hand, no matter how kind. They search and they see and they tell. And so, on this Ryan fellow, I've been able to learn everything—his home, his family, the schools his children attend, the number of the office his wife works in, everything."

"What if some of the information is lies?" Daryaei asked suspiciously. As long as he'd dealt with the West, the nature of their reporters was just too foreign to him to be fully understood.

"It's all easily verified. His wife's workplace, for example. I'm sure there must be some of the faithful on staff at that hospital. It's simply a matter of approaching one and asking a few harmless questions. Their home, well, that will be guarded. The same is true of the children. It's a conundrum for all such people. They must have some protection to move about, but the protection can be seen, and that tells one where they are, and who they are. Given the information I've developed, we even know where to start looking." Badrayn kept his remarks short and simple. It wasn't that Daryaei was a fool—he most assuredly was not—just that he was insular. One advantage to all his years in Lebanon was that All had been exposed to much and had learned much. Most of all, he'd learned that he needed a sponsor, and in Mahmoud Haji Daryaei he had a prospective one. This man had plans. He needed people. And for one reason or another, he didn't fully trust his own. Badrayn didn't wonder why. Whatever the reason was, it was good fortune, and not to be questioned.

"How well protected are such people?" the mullah asked, his hand playing with his beard. The man hadn't shaved in nearly twenty-four hours.

"Very well indeed," Badrayn replied, noting something odd about the question and filing that fact away. "American police agencies are quite effective. The crime problem in America has nothing to do with their police. They simply don't know what to do after the criminals are caught. As applied to their President…?" Ali leaned back for a stretch. "He will be surrounded by a highly trained group of expert marksmen, well motivated, and utterly faithful." Badrayn added these words to his presentation to see if his interlocutor's eyes changed. Daryaei was weary, and there was such a change. "Otherwise, protection is protection. The procedures are straightforward. You do not need my instruction on that."

"America's vulnerability?"

"It's severe. Their government is in chaos. Again, you know this."

"They are difficult to measure, these Americans…," Daryaei mused.

"Their military might is formidable. Their political will is unpredictable, as someone we both… knew found out to his misfortune. It is a mistake to underestimate them. America is like a sleeping lion, to be treated with care and respect."

"How does one defeat a lion?"

That one caught Badrayn short for a second or two. Once on a trip to Tanzania—he'd been advising the government on how to deal with insurgents—he'd gone into the bush for a day, driving with a colonel in that country's intelligence service. There he'd spotted a lion, an old one which had nonetheless managed a kill all by himself. Perhaps the wildebeest had been crippled. Then there came into view a troop of hyenas, and seeing that, the Tanzan-ian colonel had stopped the Soviet-made Zil jeep and handed binoculars to Badrayn, and told him to observe and so learn a lesson about insurgents and their capacities. It was something he'd never forgotten. The lion, he remembered, was a large one, perhaps old, perhaps "slowed down from his prime, but still powerful and forbidding to behold, even from two hundred meters away, a creature of undeniable magnificence. The hyenas were smaller, doglike creatures, with their broken-back gait, an odd canter that must have been very efficient. They gathered first in a little group, twenty meters from the lion, which was trying to feed on his kill. And then the hyenas had moved, forming a circle around the lion, and whichever one was directly behind the powerful cat would move in to nip at the hindquarters, and the lion would turn and roar and dart a few meters, and that hyena would withdraw quickly—but even as that happened, another one would advance behind the lion for another nip. Individually, the hyenas would have had no more chance against this king of the grasslands than a man with a knife would have against a soldier armed with a machine gun, but try though he might, the lion could not protect his kill—nor even himself—and in just five minutes the lion was on the defensive, unable even to run properly, because there was always a hyena behind him, nipping at his balls, forcing the lion to run in a way that was pathetically comical, dragging his bottom on the grass as he tried to maneuver. And finally the lion just went away, without a roar, without a backward glance, while the hyenas took the kill, cackling in their odd, laughing barks, as though finding amusement in their usurpation of the greater animal's labor. And so the mighty had been vanquished by the lesser. The lion would get older, and weaker, and someday would be unable to defeat a real hyena attack aimed at his own flesh. Sooner or later, his Tanzanian friend had told him, the hyenas got them all. Badrayn looked at his host's eyes again. "It can be done."