Executive Orders

26 WEEDS

THERE WERE FEW THINGS sadder than a sick child. Sohaila, her name was, Dr. Mac-Gregor remembered. A pretty name, for a pretty, elfin little girl. Her father carried her in his arms. He appeared to be a brutish man—that was MacGregor's first impression, and he'd learned to trust them—but if so, one transformed by concern for his child. His wife was in his wake, along with another Arabic-appearing man wearing a jacket, and behind him was an official-looking Sudanese, all of which the physician noted and ignored. They weren't sick. Sohaila was.

"Well, hello again, young lady," he said, with a comforting smile. "You are not feeling at all well, are you? We'll have to see about that, won't we? Come with me," he said to the father.

Clearly these people were important to someone, and they would be treated accordingly. MacGregor led them to an examining room. The father set the little girl down on the table and backed away, letting his wife hold Sohaila's hand. The bodyguards—that's what they had to be—remained outside. The physician touched his hand to the child's forehead. She was burning up—39 at least. Okay. He washed his hands thoroughly and donned gloves, again because this was Africa, and in Africa you took every precaution. His first considered action was to take her temperature via the ear: 39.4. Pulse was rapid but not worrisome for a child. A quick check with a stethoscope confirmed normal heart sounds and no particular problem with the lungs, though her breathing was rapid as well. So far she had a fever, something hardly uncommon with young children, especially those recently arrived into a new environment. He looked up.

"What seems to be the problem with your daughter?" The father answered this time.

"She cannot eat, and her other end—"

"Vomiting and diarrhea?" MacGregor asked, checking her eyes out next. They seemed unremarkable as well.

"Yes, Doctor."

"You've arrived here recently, I believe?" He looked up when the answer was hesitation. "I need to know."

"Correct. From Iraq, just a few days."

"And your daughter has a mild case of asthma, nothing else, no other health problems, correct?"

"That is true, yes. She's had all her shots and such. She's never been ill like this." The mother just nodded. The father clearly had taken over, probably to get the feeling of authority, to make things happen, the physician surmised. It was fine with him.

"Since arriving here, any unusual things to eat? You see," MacGregor explained, "travel can be very unsettling to some people, and children are unusually vulnerable. It could just be the local water."

"I gave her the medicine, but it got worse," the mother said.

"It is not the water," the father said positively. "The house has its own well. The water is good."

As though on cue, Sohaila moaned and turned, vomiting off the examining table and onto the tile floor. It wasn't the right color. There were traces of red and black. Red for new blood, black for old. It wasn't jet lag or bad water. Perhaps an ulcer? Food poisoning? MacGregor blinked and instinctively checked to be sure his hands were gloved. The mother was looking for a paper towel to—

"Don't touch that," he said mildly. He next took the child's blood pressure. It was low, confirming an internal bleed. "Sohaila, I'm afraid you will be spending the night with us so that we can make you well again."

It could have been many things, but the doctor had been in Africa long enough to know that you acted as though it were the worst. The young physician consoled himself with the belief that it couldn't be all that bad.

IT WASN'T QUITE like the old days—what was? — but Mancuso enjoyed the work. He'd had a good war—he thought of it as a war; his submarines had done exactly what they'd been designed to do. After losing Asheville and Charlotte— those before the known commencement of hostilities—he'd lost no more. His boats had delivered on every mission assigned, savaging the enemy submarine force in a carefully planned ambush, supporting a brilliant special operation, conducting deep-strike missile launches, and, as always, gathering vital tactical intelligence. His best play, CoMSusPAC judged, had been in recalling the boomers from retirement. They were too big and too unwieldy to be fast-attack boats, but God damn if they hadn't done the job for him. Enough so that they were all down the hill from his headquarters, tied alongside, their crews swaggering around town a bit, with brooms still prominent on their sails. Okay, so he wasn't Charlie Lock-wood exactly, modesty told him. He'd done the job he'd been paid to do. And now he had another.

"So what are they supposed to be up to?" he asked his immediate boss, Admiral Dave Seaton.

"Nobody seems to know." Seaton had come over to look around. Like any good officer, he tried to get the hell out of his office as much as possible, even if it only meant visiting another. "Maybe just a FleetEx, but with a new President, maybe they want to flex their muscles and see what happens." People in uniform did not like such international examinations, since they were usually the ones whose lives were part of the grading procedure.

"I know this guy, boss," Bart said soberly.

"Oh?"

"Not all that well, but you know about Red October."

Seaton grinned. "Bart, if you ever tell me that story, one of us has to kill the other, and I'm bigger." The story, one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Navy's history, still was not widely known, though the rumors—one could never stop those—were many and diverse.

"You need to know, Admiral. You need to know what National Command Authority has hanging between his legs. I've been shipmates with the guy."

That earned Mancuso a hard blink from CiNCPAC. "You're kidding."

"Ryan was aboard the boomer with me. Matter of fact, he got aboard before I did." Mancuso closed his eyes, delighted that he could finally tell this sea story and get away with it. Dave Seaton was a theater commander-in-chief, and he had a right to know what sort of man was sending the orders down from Washington.

"I heard he was involved in the operation, even that he got aboard, but I thought that was at Norfolk, when they parked her at the Eight-Ten Dock. I mean, he's a spook, right, an intel weenie…"

"Not hardly. He killed a guy—shot him, right in the missile room—before I got aboard. He was on the helm when we clobbered the Alfa. He was scared shitless, but he didn't cave. This President we've got's been there and done that. Anyway, if they want to test our President, my money's on him. Two big brass ones, Dave, that's what he's got hangin'. He may not look like it on TV, but I'll follow that son of a bitch anywhere." Mancuso surprised himself with the conclusion. It was the first time he'd thought it all the way through.

"Good to know," Seaton thought.

"So what's the mission?" SuePAC asked.

"J-3 wants us to shadow."

"You know Jackson better than I do. What are the parameters?"

"If this is a FleetEx and nothing else, we observe covertly. If things change, we let them know we care. You've got point, Bart. My cupboard's pretty damned bare."

They had only to look out the windows to see that. Enterprise and John Stennis were both in drydock. CiNiCPAC did not have a single carrier to deploy, and wouldn't for two more months. They'd run Johnnie Reb on two shafts for the retaking of the Marianas, but now she lay alongside her older sister, with huge holes torched from the flight deck down to the first platform level while new turbines and reduction gears were fabricated. The aircraft carrier was the usual means for the United States Navy to make a show offeree. Probably that was part of the Chinese plan, to see how America would react when a substantive reaction was not possible, or so it would appear to some.

"Will you cover for me with DeMarco?" Mancuso asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that Bruno's from the old school. He thinks it's bad to get detected. Personally, I think sometimes it can be a good thing. If you want me to rattle John Chinaman's cage, he has to hear the bars shake, doesn't he?"

"I'll write the orders accordingly. How you run it is your business. For the moment, if some 'can skipper talks to his XO about getting laid on the beach, I want it on tape for my collection."

"Dave, that's an order a man can understand. I'll even get you the phone number, sir."

"AND NOT A damned thing we can do," Cliff Rutledge concluded his assessment.

"Gee, Cliff," Scott Adler responded. "I kinda figured that one out for myself." The idea was that subordinates gave you alternatives instead of taking them away—or in this case, telling you what you already knew.

They'd been fairly lucky to this point. Nothing much had gotten out to the media. Washington was still too shell-shocked, the junior people filling senior posts were not yet confident enough to leak information without authorization, and the senior posts President Ryan had filled were remarkably loyal to their Commander-in-Chief, an unexpected benefit of picking outsiders who didn't know from politics. But it couldn't last, especially with something as juicy as a new country about to be born from two enemies, both of whom had shed American blood.

"I suppose we could always just do nothing," Rutledge observed lightly, wondering what the reaction would be. This alternative was distinct from not being able to do anything, a metaphysical subtlety not lost on official Washington.

"Taking that position only encourages developments adverse to our interests," another senior staffer observed crossly.

"As opposed to proclaiming our impotence?" Rutledge replied. "If we say we don't like it, and then we fail to stop it, that's worse than our taking no position at all."

Adler reflected that you could always depend on a Harvard man for good grammar and finely split hairs and, in Rutledge's case, not much more than that. This career foreign service officer had gotten to the seventh floor by never putting a foot wrong, which was another way of saying that he'd never led a dance partner in his life. On the other hand, he was superbly connected—or had been. Cliff had the deadliest disease of a FSO, however. Everything was negotiable. Adler didn't think that way. You had to stand and fight for some things, because if you didn't, the other guy would decide where the battlefield was, and then he had control. The mission of diplomats was to prevent war, a serious business, Adler thought, which one accomplished by knowing where to stand firm and where the limits on negotiation were. For the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, it was just an unending dance. With someone else leading. Alas, Adler didn't yet have the political capital to fire the man, or maybe make him an ambassador to some harmless post. He himself still had to be confirmed by the new Senate, for example.

"So just call it a regional issue?" another senior diplomat asked. Adler's head turned slowly. Was Rutledge building a consensus?

"No, it is not that," the Secretary of State pronounced, making his stand within his own conference room. "It is a vital security interest of the United States. We have pledged our support to the Saudis."

"Line in the sand?" Cliff asked. "There's no reason to do that yet. Look, let's be sensible about this, okay? Iran and Iraq merge and form this new United Islamic Republic, fine. Then what? It takes them years to get the new country organized. In that time, forces which we know to be under way in Iran weaken the theocratic regime that's been giving us such a royal pain in the butt. This is not a one-way deal, is it? We can expect that from the influence the secular elements in Iraqi society will necessarily have in Iran. If we panic and get pushy, we make life easier for Daryaei and his fanatics. But if we take it easy, then we lessen the imperative for them to stoke up the rhetoric against us. Okay, we can't stop this merger, can we?" Rutledge went on. "So if we can't, what do we do? We think of it as an opportunity to open a dialogue with the new country."

There was a certain logic to the proposal, Adler noted, noting also the tentative nods around the conference table. He knew the proper buzzwords. Opportunity. Dialogue.

"That'll really make the Saudis feel warm and fuzzy," a voice objected from the far end of the table. It was Bert Vasco, the most junior man here. "Mr. Rutledge, I think you underestimate the situation. Iran managed the assassination—"

"We have no proof of that, do we?"

"And Al Capone was never convicted for Valentine's Day, but I saw the movie." Being called into the Oval Office had enlivened the desk officer's rhetoric. Adler raised an amused eyebrow. "Somebody is orchestrating this, starting with the shooting, continuing with the elimination first of the military high command, and then second with the slaughter of the Ba'ath Party leadership. Next, we have this religious revival now under way. The picture I have of this is one of renewed national and religious identity. That will attenuate the moderating influences you referred to. The internal dissent in Iran will be knocked back a full year at least by these developments—and we don't know what else might be going on. Daryaei's a plotter, and a good one. He's patient, dedicated, and one ruthless son of a bitch—"

"Who's on his last legs," one of Rutledge's allies in the room objected.

"Says who?" Vasco shot back. "He's managed this one pretty sharp."

"He's in his seventies."

"He doesn't smoke or drink. Every tape we have of him in public, he looks vigorous enough. Underestimating this man is a mistake we've made before."

"He's out of touch with his own people."

"Maybe he doesn't know that. He's having a good year so far, and everybody likes a winner," Vasco concluded.

"Bert, maybe you're just worried about losing your desk when they form the UIR," someone joked. It was a low blow, aimed by a senior man at a junior, with chuckles around the table to remind him of that. The resulting silence told the Secretary of State that there was a consensus forming, and not the one he wanted. Time to take control again.

"Okay, moving on," Adler said. "The FBI will be back tomorrow to talk to us about the purloined letter. And guess what they'll be bringing?"

"Not the Box again," someone groaned. Nobody noticed the way Rutledge's head turned.

"Just think of it as a routine test for our security clearances," SecState told his principal subordinates. Polygraphs weren't exactly unknown for the senior people here.

"God damn it, Scott," Cliff said, speaking for the others. "Either we're trusted or we're not. I've already wasted hours with those people."

"You know, they never found Nixon's letter of resignation, either," another said.

"Maybe Henry kept it," a third joked.

"Tomorrow. Starting at ten o'clock. Myself included," Adler told them. He thought it a waste of time as well.

HIS SKIN WAS very fair, his eyes gray, and his hair had a reddish tinge, the result, he thought, of an Englishwoman somewhere in his ancestry, or such was the family joke. One advantage was his ability to pass for any Caucasian ethnicity. That he could still do so was the result of his caution. On his few «public» operations, he'd tinted his hair, worn dark glasses, and let his beard grow—that was black—which resulted in jokes within his own community: "Movie star," they said. But many of the jokers were dead, and he was not. Perhaps the Israelis had photos of him— one never knew about them, but one did know that they rarely shared information with anyone, even their American patrons, which was foolish. And you couldn't worry about everything, even photographs in some Mossad file cabinet.

He came through Dulles International Airport after the flight from Frankfurt, with the requisite two bags of the serious businessman he was, with nothing more to declare than a liter of Scotch purchased in a German duty-free store. Purpose of his visit to America? Business and pleasure. Is it safe to move around Washington now? Terrible thing, saw the replay on the TV news, must be a thousand times, dreadful. It is? Really? Things are back to normal now? Good. His rental car was waiting. He drove to a nearby hotel, tired from the long flight. There he purchased a paper, ordered dinner in, and switched on the TV. That done, he plugged his portable computer into the room's phone—they all had data jacks now—and accessed the Net to tell Badrayn that he was safely in-country for his reconnaissance mission. A commercial encryption program transformed what was a meaningless code phrase into total gibberish.

"WELCOME ABOARD. My name is Clark," John told the first class of fifteen. He was turned out much better than was his custom, wearing a properly tailored suit, button-down shirt, and a striped tie. For the moment, he had to impress in one way. Soon he'd do it in another. Getting the first group in had been easier than expected. The CIA, Hollywood notwithstanding, is an agency popular among American citizens, with at least ten applications for every opening, and it was just a matter of doing a computer search of the applications to find fifteen which fit the parameters of dark's PLAN BLUE. Every one was a police officer with a college degree, at least four years of service, and an unblemished record which would be further checked by the FBI. For the moment, all were men, probably a mistake, John thought, but for the moment it wasn't important. Seven " ere white, two black, and one Asian. They were, mainl;. from big-city police forces. All were at least bilingual.

"I am a field intelligence officer. Not an 'agent, not a 'spy, not an 'operative. An officer," he explained. "I've been in the business for quite some time. I'm married and I have two children. If any of you have ideas about meeting a sleek blonde and shooting people, you can leave now. This business is mainly dull, especially if you're smart enough to do it right. You're all cops, and therefore you already know how important this job is. We deal with high-level crime, and the job is about getting information so that those major crimes can be stopped before people get killed. We do that by gathering information and passing it on to those who need it. Others look at satellite pictures or try to read the other guy's mail. We do the hard part. We get our information from people. Some are good people with good motives. Some are not such good people who want money, who want to get even, or who want to feel important. What these people are doesn't matter. You've all worked informants on the street, and they're not all Mother Teresa, are they? Same thing here. Your informants will often be better educated, more powerful people, but they won't be very different from the ones you've been working with. And just like your street informants, you have to be loyal to them, you have to protect them, and you'll have to wring their scrawny little necks from time to time. If you fuck up, those people die, and in some of the places you'll be working, their wives and children will die, too. If you think I'm kidding on that, you're wrong, people. You will work in countries where due process of law means whatever somebody wants it to mean. You've seen that on television just in the last few days, right?" he asked. Some of the Ba'ath officials shot in Baghdad had made world news telecasts, with the usual warnings about children and the sensitive, who invariably watched anyway. The heads nodded soberly.

"You will, for the most part, not be armed in the field. You will survive by your wits. You will sometimes be at risk of your life. I've lost friends in the field, some in places you know about, and some in places you don't. The world may be kinder and gentler now, but not everywhere. You're not going to be going to the nice places, guys," John promised them. In the back of the room, Ding Chavez was struggling hard not to smile. That little greasy guy is my partner and he's engaged to my little girl. No sense, Domingo knew, in scaring them all away.

"What's good about the job? Well, what's good about being a cop? Answer: every bad guy you put away saves lives on the street. In this job, getting the right information to the right people saves lives, too. Lots," Clark emphasized. "When we do the job right, wars don't happen.

"Anyway, welcome aboard. I am your supervising teacher. You will find the training here stimulating and difficult. It starts at eight-thirty tomorrow morning." With that John left the podium and walked to the back of the room. Chavez opened the door for him and they walked out into the fresh air.

"Gee, Mr. C., where do I sign up?"

"God damn it, Ding, I had to say something." It had been John's longest oration in some years.

"So, to get these rookies aboard, what did Foley have to do?"

"The RIFs have begun, m'boy. Hell, Ding, we had to get things started, didn't we?"

"I think you should have waited a few weeks. Foley isn't confirmed by the Senate yet. Better to wait," Chavez thought. "But I'm just a junior spook."

"I keep forgetting how smart you've gotten."

"SO WHO THE hell is Zhang Han San?" Ryan asked.

"Somewhere in his fifties, but young looking for his age, ten kilos overweight, five four or so, medium everything, so says our friend," Dan Murray reported from his written notes. "Quiet and thoughtful, and he stiffed Yamata."

"Oh?" Mary Pat Foley said. "How so?"

"Yamata was on Saipan when we got control of things. He placed a call to Beijing, looking to bug out to a safe place. Mr. Zhang reacted as though it were a cold call. 'What deal? We don't have any deal, " the FBI Director mimicked. "And after that, the calls didn't go through at all. Our Japanese friend regards that as a personal betrayal."

"Sounds as though he's singing like a canary," Ed Foley observed. "Does that strike anybody as suspicious?" "No," Ryan said. "In World War Two, what Japanese prisoners we took talked plenty."

"The President's right," Murray confirmed. "I asked Tanaka about that myself. He says it's a cultural thing. Yamata wants to take his own life—the honorable way out in their cultural context—but they've got him on suicide watch—not even shoestrings. The resulting disgrace is so great for the guy that he has no particular reason to keep secrets. Hell of an interrogation technique. Anyway, Zhang is supposedly a diplomat—Yamata said he was tit-ularly part of a trade delegation—but State's never heard of him. The Japanese have no records of the name on any diplomatic list. That makes him a spook, as far as I'm concerned, and so…" He looked over at the Foleys.

"I ran the name," Mary Pat said. "Zippo. But who's to say it's a real name?"

"Even if it were," her husband added, "we don't know that much about their intelligence people. If I had to guess" — and he did —"he's political. Why? He cut a deal, a quiet one but a big one. Their military is still on an increased readiness and training regime because of that deal, which is why the Russians are still nervous. Whoever this guy is, best guess, he's a very serious player." Which wasn't exactly an earth-shaking revelation.

"Anything you can do to find out?" Murray inquired delicately.

Mrs. Foley shook her head. "No assets in place, at least nothing we can use for this. We have a good husband-wife team in Hong Kong, setting up a nice little network. We have a couple of assets in Shanghai. In Beijing we have some low-level agents in the defense ministry, but they're long-term prospects and using them on this issue wouldn't accomplish much more than to endanger them. Dan, the problem we have with China is that we don't really know how their government works. It has levels of complexity that we can only guess at. The Politburo members, we know who they are—we think. One of the biggies might be dead now, and we've been fishing for that tidbit for over a month. Even the Russians let us know when they buried people," the DDO noted, as she sipped her wine. Ryan had come to like bringing his closest advisers in for drinks after the close of regular office hours. It hadn't quite occurred to him that he was extending their working day. He was also short-circuiting his own National Security Advisor, but as loyal and clever as Ben Goodley was, Jack Ryan still wanted to hear it directly when he could.

Ed took up the explanation. "You see, sure, we think we know the political varsity over there, but we've never had a real handle on the second-string players. The dynamic is simple when you think about it, but it took us long enough to twig to it. We're talking elderly folks over there. They can't get around all that well. They need mobile eyes and ears, and over the years those gofers have accumulated a lot of power. Who's really calling the shots? We don't know for sure, and without ID'ing people, we can't find out."

"I can dig it, guys." Murray grunted, and reached for his beer. "When I was working OC—organized crime— sometimes we ID'd Mafia capi by who held the car door open for whom. Hell of a way to do business." It was the friendliest thing the Foleys remembered hearing from the FBI about CIA. "Operational security really isn't all that hard if you think about it a little."

"Makes a good case for PLAN BLUE," Jack said next.

"Well, then you might be pleased to know the first fifteen are in the pipeline even as we speak. John should have given them their welcoming speech a few hours ago," the DCI announced.

Ryan had gone over Foley's reduction-in-force plan for CIA. Ed planned to swing a mean ax, ultimately reducing the Agency budget by $500 million over five years while increasing the field force. It was something to make people on the Hill happy, though with much of CIA's real budget in the black part of federal expenditures, few would ever know. Or maybe not, Jack thought. That was likely to leak.

Leaks. He'd hated them over his entire career. But now they were part of statecraft, weren't they? the President reflected. But what was he supposed to think? That leaks were okay now that he was the one doing it or allowing it? Damn. Laws and principles weren't supposed to work that way, were they? What exactly, what idea or ideal or principle or rock was he supposed to hold on to?

THE BODYGUARD'S NAME was Saleh. He was a physically robust individual, as his work demanded, and, as such, one who tried to deny illness or discomfort of any sort. A man of his station in life simply did not admit to difficulty. But when discomfort didn't go away as he'd expected and as the doctor had told him—Saleh knew that all men were vulnerable to stomach problems—and then he saw blood in the toilet… it was that, really. The body isn't supposed to issue blood except from a shaving cut or a bullet wound. Not in any case from moving one's bowels, and it was the sort of indicator certain to shake any man, all the more so a strong and otherwise confident one. Like many, he delayed somewhat, asking himself if it might be a temporary problem that would go away, that the discomfort would peak and abate, as flu symptoms always did. But these kept getting worse, and finally his fear got the better of him. Before dawn he left the villa, taking the car and driving to the hospital. Along the way he had to stop the car to vomit, deliberately not looking to see what he'd left on the street before heading on, his body weakening with every minute, until the walk from the car to the door seemed to take every bit of energy he had. In what passed here for an emergency room, he waited while people searched for his records. It was the smell of hospitals which frightened him, the same disinfectant odor which makes a dog stop dead and strain backward at the leash and whimper and pull away, because the smell is associated with pain, until finally a black nurse called his name, and then he rose, assembled his dignity and composure, and walked into the same examining room he'd visited before.

THE SECOND GROUP often criminals was little different from the first, except that in this one there was not a condemned apostate. It was easy to dislike them, Moudi thought, looking at the group with their sallow faces and slinking mannerisms. It was their expressions most of all. They looked like criminals, never quite meeting his eyes, glancing this way and that, always, it seemed, searching for a way out, a trick, an angle, something underhanded. The combination of fear and lingering brutality on their faces. They were not just men, and while that seemed to the doctor a puerile observation, it did mark them as different from himself and the people he knew, and therefore as the bearers of lives which were unimportant.

"We have some sick people here," he told them. "You have been assigned to look after them. If you do this job well, you will be trained as hospital aides for work at your prisons. If not, you will be returned to your cells and your sentences. If any of you misbehaves, your punishment will be immediate and severe." They all nodded. They knew about severe treatment. Iranian prisons were not noted for their amenities. Nor, it would seem, for good food. They all had pale skin and rheumy eyes. Well, what solicitude did such people merit? the physician asked himself. Each of them was guilty of known crimes, all of them serious, and what unknown crimes lay in their pasts only the criminals and Allah knew. What pity Moudi felt for them was residual, a result of his medical training, which compelled him to view them as human beings no matter what. That he could overcome. Robbers, thieves, pederasts all, they'd violated the law in a country where law was a thing of God, and if it was stern, it was also fair. If their treatment was harsh by Western standards—Europeans and Americans had the strangest ideas about human rights; what of the rights of the victims of such people? — that was just too bad, Moudi told himself, distancing himself from the people before him. Amnesty International had long since stopped complaining about his country's prisons. Perhaps they could devote their attention to other things, like the treatment of the Faithful in other lands. There was not a Sister Jean Baptiste among them, and she was dead, and that was written, and what remained was to see if their fates had been penned by the same hand in the book of life and death. He nodded to the head guard, who shouted at the new "aides." They even stood insolently, Moudi saw. Well, they'd all see about that.

They'd all been pre-processed, stripped, showered, shaved, disinfected, and dressed in surgical greens with single-digit numbers on the back. They wore cloth slippers. The armed guards led them off to the air-lock doors, inside of which were the army medics, supplemented by a single armed guard, who kept his distance, a pistol in his gloved hands. Moudi returned to the security room to watch on the TV system. On the black-and-white monitors he watched them pad down the corridor, eyes shifting left and right in curiosity— and doubtless looking for a way out. All the eyes lingered on the guard, who was never less than four meters distant. Along the way, each of the new arrivals was handed a plastic bucket with various simple tools inside—the buckets also were numbered.

They'd all started somewhat at seeing the medics in their protective suits, but shuffled along anyway. It was at the entrance of the treatment room that they stopped. It must have been the smell, or perhaps the sight. Slow to pick up on the situation, one of their number had finally realized that whatever this was—

On the monitor, a medic gestured at the one who froze in the doorway. The man hesitated, then started speaking back. A moment later, he hurled his bucket down at the floor and started shaking his fist, while the others watched to see what would result. Then the security guard appeared out of the corner of the picture, his arm coming up and his pistol extended. At a range of two meters, he fired—so strange to see the shot but not hear it—straight into the criminal's face. The body fell to the tile floor, leaving a pattern of black spots on the gray wall. The nearest medic pointed to one of the prisoners, who immediately retrieved the fallen bucket and went into the room. There would be no more disciplinary trouble with this group. Moudi shifted his gaze to the next monitor.

This one was a color camera. It had to be. It could also be panned and zoomed. Moudi indicated the corner bed, Patient 1. The new arrival with 7 on his back and bucket just stood there at the foot of the bed at first, bucket in his hand, not knowing what he beheld. There was a sound pickup for this room, but it didn't work terribly well because it was a single nondirectional mike, and the security staff had long since turned it down to zero, because the sound was so piteous as to be debilitating to those who listened—moans, whimpers, cries from dying men who in their current state did not appear so sinister. The apostate, predictably, was the worst. He prayed and even tried to comfort those he could reach from his bed. He'd even attempted to lead a few in prayer, but they'd been the wrong prayers, and his roommates were not of the sort to speak to God under the best of circumstances.

Aide 1 continued to stand for a minute or so, looking down at Patient 1, a convicted murderer, his ankle chained to the bed. Moudi took control of the camera and zoomed it in further to see that the shackles had worn away the skin. There was a red stain on the mattress from it. The man—the condemned patient, Moudi corrected himself— was writhing slowly, and then Aide 1 remembered what he'd been told. He donned his plastic gloves, wet his sponge, and rubbed it across the patient's forehead. Moudi backed the camera off. One by one, the others did the same, and the army medics withdrew.

The treatment regime for the patients was not going to be a serious one. There was no point in it, since they'd already fulfilled their purpose in the project. That made life much easier on everyone. No IV lines to run, no needles to stick — and no «sharps» to worry about. In contracting Ebola, they'd confirmed that the Mayinga strain was indeed airborne, and now all that was left was to prove that the virus had not attenuated itself in the reproductive process… and that it could be passed on by the same aerosol process which had infected the first grouping of criminals. Most of the new arrivals, he saw, did what they'd been told to do—but badly, crassly, wiping off their charges with quick, ungentle strokes of the sponges. A few seemed genuinely compassionate. Perhaps Allah would notice their charity and show them mercy when the time came, less than ten days from now.

"REPORT CARDS," CATHY said when Jack came into the bedroom.

"Good or bad?" her husband asked.

"See for yourself," his wife suggested.

Uh-oh, the President thought, taking them from her hand. For all that, it wasn't so bad. The attached commentary sheets—every teacher did a short paragraph to supplement the letter grade—noted that the quality of the homework turned in had improved in the past few weeks… so, the Secret Service agents were helping with that, Jack realized. At one level, it was amusing. At another— strangers were doing the father's job, and that thought made his stomach contract a little. The loyalty of the agents merely illustrated something that he was failing to do for his own kids.

"If Sally wants to get into Hopkins, she's going to have to pay more attention to her science courses," Cathy observed.

"She's just a kid." To her father she'd always be the little girl who—

"She's growing up, and guess what? She's interested in a young soccer player. Name of Kenny, and he's way cool," SURGEON reported. "Also needs a haircut. His is longer than mine."

"Oh, shit," SWORDSMAN replied.

"Surprised it took this long. I started dating when I was—"

"I don't want to hear about it—"

"I married you, didn't I?" Pause. "Mr. President…" Jack turned. "It has been a while."

"Any way we can get to the Lincoln Bedroom?" Cathy asked. Jack looked over and saw a glass on her night-stand. She'd had a drink or two. Tomorrow wouldn't be a surgery day. "He never slept there, babe. They call it that because—"

"The picture. I know. I asked. I like the bed," she explained with a smile. Cathy set her patient notes down and took off her reading glasses. Then she held her arms up, almost like a toddler soliciting a pickup and a hug. "You know, I've never made love to the most powerful man in the world before—at least not this week."

"What about the timing?" Cathy had never used the pill.

"What about the timing?" she replied. And she'd always been as regular as a metronome.

"You don't want another—"

"Maybe I don't especially care."

"You're forty," POTUS objected.

"Well, thank you! That's well short of the record. What are you worried about?"

Jack thought about that for a moment. "Nothing, I guess. Never did get that vasectomy, did I?"

"Nope, you never even talked to Pat about it like you said you would—and if you do it now," FLOTUS went on with a positively wicked grin, "it'll be in all the papers. Maybe even on live TV. Arnie might tell you that it'll set a good example for the Zero Population Growth people, and you'll cave on that. Except for the national security implications…"

" What?"

"President of the United States has his nuts cut, and they won't respect America anymore, will they?"

Jack almost started laughing, but stopped himself. The Detail people in the corridor might hear and—

"What got into you?"

"Maybe I'm finally getting comfortable with all this— or maybe I just want to get laid," she added.

That's when the phone next to the bed rang. Cathy's face made a noiseless snarl as she reached for it. "Hello? Yes, Dr. Sabo. Mrs. Emory? Okay… no, I don't think so… No, definitely not, I don't care if she's agitated or not, not till tomorrow. Get her something to help her sleep… whatever it takes. The bandages stay on till I say otherwise, and make sure that's on her chart, she's too good at whining. Yes. Night, Doctor." She replaced the phone and grumbled. "The lens replacement I did the other day. She doesn't like being blindfolded, but if we take the coverings off too soon—"

"Wait a minute, he called—"

"They have our number at Wilmer."

"The direct residence?" That one even bypassed Signals, though it, like all White House lines, was bugged. Or probably was. Ryan hadn't asked, and probably didn't want to know.

"They had it for home, didn't they?" Cathy asked. "Me surgeon, me treat patients, me professor, always on call when me have patients—especially the pain-in-the-ass ones."

"Interruptions." Jack lay down next to his wife. "You don't really want another baby, do you?"

"What I want is to make love to my husband. I can't be picky about timing anymore, can I?"

"Has it been that bad?" He kissed her gently.

"Yes, but I'm not mad about it. You're trying very hard. You remind me of my new residents— older, though." She touched his face and smiled. "If something happens, it happens. I like being a woman."

"I rather like it myself."