Executive Orders

32 RERUNS

"I CAN'T GIVE THIS TO YOU, and I can't let you copy any of it, but I can let you look at it." He handed the photo over. He had light cotton gloves on, and he'd already given a pair to Donner.

"Fingerprints," he explained quietly.

"Is this what I think it is?" It was a black-and-white photograph, eight-by-ten glossy, but there was no classification stamp on it, at least not on the front. Donner didn't turn it over.

"You really don't want to know, do you?" It was a question and a warning.

"I guess not." Donner nodded, getting the message. He didn't know how the Espionage Act—18 U.S.C. § 793E—interacted with his First Amendment rights, but if he didn't know that the photo was classified, then he didn't have to find out.

"That's a Soviet nuclear missile submarine, and that's Jack Ryan on the gangway. You'll notice he's wearing a Navy uniform. This was a CIA operation, run in cooperation with the Navy, and that's what we got out of it." The man handed over a magnifying glass to make sure that the identifications were positive. "We conned the Soviets into thinking she'd exploded and sunk about halfway between Florida and Bermuda. They probably still think that."

"Where is it now?" Donner asked.

"They sank her a year later, off Puerto Rico," the CIA official explained.

"Why there?"

"Deepest Atlantic water close to American territory, about five miles down, so nobody will ever find her, and nobody can even look without us knowing."

"This was back—I remember!" Donner said. "The Russians had a big exercise going and we raised hell about it, and they actually lost a submarine, didn't—"

"Two." Another photo came out of the folder. "See the damage to the submarine's bow? Red October rammed and sank another Russian sub off the Carolinas. It's still there. The Navy didn't recover that one, but they sent down robots and stripped a lot of useful things off the hulk. Lt was covered as salvage activity on the first one, that sank from a reactor accident. The Russians never found out what happened to the second Alfa."

"And this never leaked?" It was pretty amazing to a man who'd spent years extracting facts from the government, like a dentist with an unwilling patient.

"Ryan knows how to hush things up." Another photo. "That's a body bag. The person inside was a Russian crewman. Ryan killed him—shot him with a pistol. That's how he got his first Intelligence Star. I guess he figured we couldn't risk having him tell—well, isn't too hard to figure, is it?"

"Murder?"

"No." The CIA man wasn't willing to go that far. "The official story is that it was a real shoot-out, that other people got hurt also. That's how the documents read in the file, but…"

"Yeah. You have to wonder, don't you?" Donner nodded, staring down at the photos. "Could this possibly be faked?"

"Possibly, yes," he admitted. "But it's not. The other people in the photo: Admiral Dan Foster, he was Chief of Naval Operations back then. This one is Commander Bar-tolomeo Mancuso. Back then he commanded USS Dallas. He was transferred to Red October to facilitate the defection. He's still on active duty, by the way, an admiral now. He commands all the submarines in the Pacific. And that one is Captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius of the Soviet navy. He was the captain of Red October. They're all still alive. Ramius lives in Jacksonville, Florida, now. He works at the Navy's base at Mayport under the name Mark Ramsey. Consulting contract," he explained. "The usual thing. Got a big stipend from the government, too, but God knows he earned it."

Donner noted the details, and he recognized one of the extraneous faces. Sure as hell this wasn't faked. There were rules for that, too. If somebody lied to a reporter, it wasn't all that hard to make sure the right people found out who had broken the law—worse yet, that person became a target, and the media was in its way a crueler prosecutor than anyone in the Justice Department could ever hope to be. The court system, after all, required due process of law.

"Okay, — " the journalist said. The first set of photos went back in their folder. Another folder appeared, and from it a photograph.

"Recognize this guy?"

"He was—wait a minute. Gera-something. He was—"

"Nikolay Gerasimov. He was chairman of the old KGB."

"Killed in a plane crash back in—"

Another photo went down. The subject was older, grayer, and looking far more prosperous. "This picture was taken in Winchester, Virginia, two years ago. Ryan went to Moscow, covered as a technical adviser to the START talks. He got Gerasimov to defect. Nobody's exactly sure how. His wife and daughter got out, too. That op was run directly out of Judge Moore's office. Ryan worked that way a lot. He was never really part of the system. Ryan knows—well, look, in fairness to the guy, he's one hell of a spook, okay? He supposedly worked directly for Jim Greer as part of the DI, not the DO. A cover within a cover. Ryan's never made an operational mistake that I know of, and that's some record. Not too many others can claim that, but one reason for it is he's one ruthless son of a bitch. Effective, yes, but ruthless. He cut through all the bureaucracy whenever he wanted. He does it his way every time, and if you get in his way—well, there's one dead Russian we buried off the Red October, and a whole Alfa crew off the Carolinas, to keep that op a secret. This one, I'm not sure. Nothing in the file, but the file has a lot of blanks. How the wife and daughter got out, it's not in the file. All I have for that are rumors, and they're pretty thin."

"Damn, I wish I'd had this a few hours ago."

"Rolled you, did he?" This question came from Ed Kealty over a speaker phone.

"I know the problem," the CIA official said. "Ryan is slick. I mean, slick. He's skated through CIA like Dorothy Hamill at Innsbruck, done it for years. Congress loves him. Why? He comes across as the most straightforward guy this side of Honest Abe. Except he's killed people." The man's name was Paul Webb, and he was a senior official in the Directorate of Intelligence, but not senior enough to prevent his whole unit from ending up on the RIF list. He should have been DDI now, Webb thought, and he would have been except for the way Ryan had gotten James Greer's ear and never let go of it. And so his career had ended as an entry-level supergrade at CIA, and now that was being taken away from him. He had his retirement. Nobody could take that away—well, if it became known that he'd smuggled these files out of Langley, he'd be in very deep trouble… or maybe not. What really happened to whistle-blowers, after all? The media protected them pretty well, and he had his time in service, and… he didn't like being part of a reduction-in-force exercise. In another age, though he didn't admit it even to himself, his anger might have prompted him to make contact with—no, not that. Not to an enemy. But the media wasn't an enemy, was it? He told himself that it was not, despite an entire career of thinking otherwise.

"You've been rolled, Tom," Kealty said again over the phone line. "Welcome to the club. I don't even know all the stuff he can pull off. Paul, tell him about Colombia."

"There's no file on that one that 1 can find," Webb admitted. "Wherever it is—well, there are special files, the ones with date-stamps on them. Like 2050 at the earliest. Nobody sees those."

"How does that happen?" Donner demanded. "I've heard that before, but I've never been able to confirm—"

"How they keep those off the books? It's a deal that has to go through Congress, an unwritten part of the oversight process. The Agency goes there with a little problem, asks for special treatment, and if Congress agrees, off the file goes into the special vault—hell, for all I know, the whole thing's been shredded and turned into compost, but I can give you a few verifiable facts," Webb concluded with an elegant dangle.

"I'm listening," Donner replied. And so was his tape recorder.

"How do you suppose the Colombians broke up the Medellin cartel?" Webb asked, drawing Donner in further. It wasn't all that hard. These people thought they knew about intrigue, Webb thought with a benign smile.

"Well, they had some sort of internal faction fight, a couple of bombs went off and—"

"They were CIA bombs. Somehow—I'm not sure exactly how, we initiated the faction fight. This I do know: Ryan was down there. His mentor at Langley was James Greer—they were like father and son. But when James died, Ryan wasn't there for the funeral, and he wasn't at home, and he wasn't away on CIA business—he'd just come back from a NATO conference in Belgium. But then he just dropped off the map, like he's done any number of times. Soon thereafter the President's National Security Advisor, Jim Cutter, is accidentally run down by a D.C. transit bus on the G.W., right? He didn't look? He just ran in front of a bus. That's what the FBI said, but the guy running that was Dan Murray, and what job does he have now? FBI Director, right? It just so happens he and Ryan go back more than ten years. Murray was the 'special' guy for both Emil Jacobs and Bill Shaw. When the Bureau needed something done quietly, they called in Murray. Before that he was legal attache in London—that's a spook post, lots of contacts with the intelligence communities over there; Murray's the black side of FBI, big time and well connected. And he picked Pat Martin to advise Ryan on Supreme Court appointments. Is the picture becoming clear?"

"Wait a minute. I know Dan Murray. He's a tough son of a bitch, but he's an honest cop—"

"He was in Colombia with Ryan, which is to say, he was off the map at exactly the same time. Okay, remember, I do not have the file on this operation, okay? I can't prove any of this. Look at the sequence of events. Director Jacobs and all the others were killed, and right after that we have bombs going off in Colombia, and a lot of the cartel boys go to talk it over with God—but a lot of innocent people got killed, too. That's the problem with bombs. Remember how Bob Fowler made an issue of that? So what happens then? Ryan disappears. Murray does, too. I figure they went down to turn the operation off before it got totally out of hand—and then Cutter dies at a very convenient moment. Cutter didn't have the balls for wet work, he probably knew that, and people probably were afraid he'd crack because he just didn't have the nerve. But Ryan sure as hell did—and still does. Murray—well, you kill the FBI Director, and you piss off a very serious organization, and I can't say I disapprove. Those Medellin bastards stepped way over the line, and they did it in an election year, and Ryan was in the right place to play a little catch-up ball, and so somebody issued him a hunting license, and maybe things got a little out of hand—it happens—and so he goes down there to shut it down. Successfully," Webb emphasized. "In fact, the whole operation was a success. The cartel came apart—"

"Another one took its place," Donner objected. Webb nodded with an insider's smile.

"True, and they haven't killed any American officials, have they? Somebody explained to them what the rules are. Again, I will not say that what Ryan did was wrong, except for one little thing."

"What's that?" Donner asked, disappointing Webb, though he was fully caught up in the story now.

"When you deploy military forces into a foreign country, and kill people, it's called an act of war. But, again, Ryan skated. The boy's got some beautiful moves. Jim Greer trained him well. You could drop Ryan in a septic tank and he'll come out smelling like Old Spice."

"So, what's your beef with him?"

"You finally asked," Webb observed. "Jack Ryan is probably the best intelligence operator we've had in thirty years, the best since Alien Dulles, maybe the best since Bill Donovan. Red October was a brilliant coup. Getting the chairman of KGB out was even better. The thing in Colombia, well, they twisted the tiger's tail, and they forgot that the tiger has great big claws. Okay," Webb allowed. "Ryan's a king spook—but he needs somebody to tell him what the law is, Tom."

"A guy like this would never get elected," Kealty observed, straining himself to say as little as possible. Three miles away his own chief of staff almost pulled the phone away from him, they were so close to getting the message across. Fortunately, Webb carried on.

"He's done a great job at the Agency. He was even a good adviser for Roger Durling, but that's not the same as being President. Yeah, he rolled you, Mr. Donner. Maybe he rolled Durling—probably not, but who can say? But this guy is rebuilding the whole fucking government, and he's building it in his image, in case you didn't notice. Every appointment he's made, they're all people he's worked with, some for a long time—or they were selected for him by close associates. Murray running the FBI. Do you want Dan Murray in charge of America's most powerful law enforcement agency? You want these two people picking the Supreme Court? Where will he take us?" Webb paused, and sighed. "I hate doing this. He's one of us at Langley, but he isn't supposed to be President, okay? I have an obligation to my country, and my country isn't Jack Ryan." Webb collected the photos and tucked them back in the folders. "I gotta get back. If anyone finds out what I've done, well, look what happened to Jim Cutter…"

"Thank you," Donner said. Then he had some decisions to make. His watch said three-fifteen, and he had to make them fast. Driving that decision would be a well-understood fact. There was something in creation even more furious than a woman scorned. It was a reporter who'd discovered that he'd been rolled.

ALL NINE WERE dying. It would take from five to eight days, but they were all doomed, and they all knew it. Their faces stared at the overhead cameras, and they had no illusions now. Their executions would be even crueller than the courts had decided for them. Or so they thought. This group promised to be more dangerous than the first— they just knew more of what was going on—and as a result they were more fully restrained. As Moudi watched, the army medics went in to draw blood samples from the subjects, which would be necessary to confirm and then to quantify the degree of their infection. On their own, the medics had come up with a way to keep the «patients» from struggling during the process—a jerked arm at the wrong moment could make one of the medical corpsmen stab the needle into the wrong body, and so while one man did the sample, the other held a knife across the subject's throat. Doomed though the criminals believed themselves to be, they were criminals, and cowards, and therefore unwilling to hasten their deaths. It wasn't good medical technique, but then nobody in the building was practicing good medicine. Moudi watched the process for a few minutes and left the monitoring room.

They'd been overly pessimistic on many things, and one of them was the quantity of virus that would be needed. In the culturing tank, the Ebola had consumed the monkey kidneys and blood with a gusto whose results chilled even the director. Though it happened fundamentally at the molecular level, overall it was like seeing ants going after dead fruit, seeming to come from nowhere and then covering it, turning it black with their bodies. So it was with the Ebola virus; even though it was too small to see, there were literally trillions of them eating and displacing the tissue offered them as food. What had been one color was now another, and you didn't have to be a physician to know that the contents of the chamber were hateful beyond words. It chilled his blood merely to look at the dreadful "soup." There were liters of it now, and they were growing more, using human blood taken from the Tehran central blood bank.

The director was examining a sample under the electron microscope, comparing it with another. As Moudi approached, he could see the date-stamp labels on each. One was from Jean Baptiste. The other was newly arrived from a «patient» in the second group of nine.

"They're identical, Moudi," he said, turning when the younger man approached.

This was not as much to be expected as one might think. One of the problems with viruses was that, since they were scarcely alive at all, they were actually ill suited for proper reproduction. The RNA strand lacked an "editing function" to ensure that each generation would fully follow in the footsteps of its predecessor. It was a serious adaptive weakness of Ebola, and many other similar organisms. Sooner or later each Ebola outbreak petered out, and this was one of the reasons. The virus itself, maladapted to the human host, became less virulent. And that was what made it the ideal biological weapon. It would kill. It would spread. Then it would die before doing too much of the latter. How much it did of the former was a function of the initial distribution. It was both horribly lethal and also self-limiting.

"So, we have at least three generations of stability," Moudi observed.

"And by extrapolation, probably seven to nine." The project director, whatever his perversion of medical science, was a conservative on technical issues. Moudi would have said nine to eleven. Better that the director was right, he admitted to himself, turning away.

On a table at the far wall were twenty cans. Similar to the ones used to infect the first collection of criminals, but slightly modified, they were labeled as economy-size cans of a popular European shaving cream. (The company was actually American-owned, which amused everyone associated with the project.) They'd been exactly what they said, and been bought singly in twelve different cities in five different countries, as the lot numbers inked on their curving bottoms showed. Here in the Monkey House they'd been emptied and carefully disassembled for modification. Each would contain a half liter of the thinned-out "soup," plus a neutral-gas propellant (nitrogen, which would not involve any chemical reaction with the «soup» and would not support combustion) and a small quantity of coolant. Another part of the team had already tested the delivery system. There would be no degradation of the Ebola at all for more than nine hours. After that, with the loss of the coolant, the virus particles would start to die in a linear function. At 9 + 8 hours, less than ten percent of the particles would be dead—but those, Moudi told himself, were the weak ones anyway, and probably the particles that would be unlikely to cause illness. At 9 + 16 hours, fifteen percent would be dead. Thereafter, experiments had revealed, every eight hours—for some reason the numbers seemed to track with thirds of days—an additional five percent would die. And so…

It was simple enough. The travelers would all fly out of Tehran. Flight time to London, seven hours. Flight time to Paris, thirty minutes less. Flight time to Frankfurt, less still. Much of that factor was the time of day, Moudi had learned. In the three cities there would be easy connecting flights. Baggage would not be checked because the travelers would be moving on to another country, and therefore customs inspection wasn't necessary, and therefore no one would notice the cans of unusually cold shaving cream. About the time the coolant ran out, the travelers would be in their first-class seats, climbing to cruising altitude to their cities of final destination, and there again international air travel worked out nicely. There were direct flights from Europe to New York, to Washington, to Boston, to Philadelphia, to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Dallas, to Orlando, and regular connecting flights to Las Vegas, and Atlantic City— in fact to all of America's convention cities. The travelers would all fly first class, the quicker to claim their luggage and get through customs. They would have good hotel reservations, and return tickets that took them out from different airports. From time-zero to delivery no more than twenty-four hours would pass, and therefore eighty percent of the Ebola released would be active. After that, it was all random, in Allah's hands—no! Moudi shook his head. He was not the director. He would not apply this act to the will of his God. Whatever it might be, however necessary it was to his country—and a new one at that—he would not defile his religious beliefs by saying or even thinking that.

Simple enough? It had been simple once, but then—it was a legacy of sorts. Sister Jean Baptiste, her body long since incinerated… instead of leaving children behind as a woman's body ought, disease was its only physical legacy, and that was an act of such malignance that surely Allah must be offended. But she'd left something else, too, a real legacy. Moudi had once hated all Westerners as unbelievers. In school he'd learned of the Crusades, and how those supposed soldiers of the prophet Jesus had slaughtered Muslims, as Hitler had later slaughtered Jews, and from that he'd taken the lesson that all Westerners and all Christians were something less than the people of his own Faith, and it was easy to hate such people, easy to write them off as irrelevancies in a world of virtue and belief. But that one woman. What was the West and what was Christianity? The criminals of the eleventh century, or a virtuous woman of the twentieth who denied every human wish she might have had—and for what? To serve the sick, to teach her faith. Always humble, always respectful. She'd never broken her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—Moudi was sure of that—and though those vows and those beliefs might have been false, they hadn't been that false. He'd learned from her the same thing that the Prophet had learned. There was but one God. There was but one Book. She had served both with a pure heart, however misguided her religious beliefs might have been.

Not just Sister Jean Baptiste, he reminded himself. Sister Maria Magdalena, too. And she had been murdered— and why? Loyalty to her faith, loyalty to her vows, loyalty to her friend, not one of which the Holy Koran found the least bit objectionable.

It would have been so much easier for him had he only worked with black Africans. Their religious beliefs were things the Koran abhorred, since many of them were still pagans in deed if not in word, ignorant of the One God, and he could easily have looked down on them, and not worried at all about Christians—but he had met Jean Baptiste and Maria Magdalena. Why? Why had that happened?

Unfortunately for him it was too late to ask such questions. What was past was past. Moudi walked to the far corner of the room and got himself some coffee. He'd been awake for more than a day, and with fatigue came doubts, and he hoped the drink would chase them away until sleep could come, and with it rest, and with that, perhaps, peace.

"YOU HAVE TO be kidding!" Arnie snarled into the phone. Tom Donner's voice was as apologetic as it could be.

"Maybe it was the metal detectors on the way out. The tape—I mean, it's damaged. You can still see it and hear it just fine, but there's a little noise on the audio track. Not broadcast quality. The whole hour's worth is shot. We can't use it."

"So?" van Damm demanded.

"So, we have a problem, Arnie. The segment is supposed to run at nine."

"So, what do you want me to do about it?"

"Is Ryan up to redoing it live? We'll get better share that way," the anchorman offered.

The President's chief of staff almost said something else. If this had been sweeps week—during which the networks did their best to inflate their audiences in order to get additional commercial fees—he might have accused Donner of having done this deliberately. No, that was a line even he couldn't cross. Dealing with the press on this level was rather like being Clyde Beatty in center ring, armed with a bottomless chair and a blank-loaded revolver, holding great jungle cats at bay for the audience, having the upper hand at all times, but knowing that the cats needed to get lucky only once. Instead he just offered silence, forcing Donner to make the next move.

"Look, Arnie, it'll be the same agenda. How often do we give the President a chance to rehearse his lines? And he did fine this morning. John thinks so, too."

"You can't retape?" van Damm asked.

"Arnie, I go on the air in forty minutes, and I'm wrapped till seven-thirty. That gives me thirty minutes to scoot down to the White House, set up and shoot, and get the tape back here, all before nine? You want to lend me one of his helicopters?" He paused. "This way—tell you what. I will say on the air that we goofed on the tape, and that the Boss graciously agreed to go live with us. If that isn't a network blow job, I don't know what is."

Arnold van Damm's alarm lights were all flashing red. The good news was that Jack had handled himself pretty well. Not perfect, but pretty well, especially on the sincerity. Even the controversial stuff, he'd come across as believing what he'd said. Ryan took coaching well, and he learned fast. He hadn't looked as relaxed as he should, but that was okay. Ryan wasn't a politician—he'd said that two or three times—and therefore looking a little tense was all right. Focus groups in seven different cities all said that they liked Jack because he acted like one of them. Ryan didn't know that Arnie and the political staff were doing that. That little program was as secret as a CIA operation, but Arnie justified it to himself as a reality check on how the President could best project his agenda and his image in order to govern effectively—and no President had ever known all the things done in his name. So, yes, Ryan did come across as presidential—not in the normal way, but in his own way, and that, the focus groups all agreed, was good, too. And going live, yes, that would really look good, and it would get a lot more people to flip the channel to NBC, and Arnie wanted the people to get to know Ryan better.

"Okay, Tom, a tentative yes. But I do have to ask him."

"Fast, please," Donner replied. "If he cancels out, then we have to jerk around the whole network schedule for tonight, and that could mean my ass, okay?"

"Back to you in five," van Damm promised. He killed the button on the phone and hustled out of the room, leaving the receiver on his desk pad.

"On the way to see the Boss," he told the Secret Service agents in the east-west corridor. His stride told them to jump out of his way even before they saw his eyes.

"Yes?" Ryan said. It wasn't often his door opened without warning.

"We have to redo the interview," Arnie said somewhat breathlessly.

Jack shook his head in surprise. "Why? Didn't I have my fly zipped?"

"Mary always checks that. The tape got screwed up, and there isn't time to reshoot. So Donner asked me to ask you if you would do it live at nine o'clock. Same questions and everything—no, no," Arnie said, thinking fast. "What about we get your wife down here, too?"

"Cathy won't like that. Why?" the President asked.

"Really, all she has to do is sit there and smile. It will look good for the people out there. Jack, she has to act like the First Lady occasionally. This should be an easy one. Maybe we can even bring the kids in toward the end—"

"No. My kids stay out of the public eye, period. Cathy and I have talked about that."

"But—"

"No, Arnie, no now, no tomorrow, no in'the future, no." Ryan's voice was as final as a death sentence. The chief of staff figured he couldn't talk Ryan into everything. This would take a little time, but he'd come around eventually. You couldn't be one of the people without letting them meet your kids, but now wasn't the time to press on that one.

"Will you ask Cathy?"

Ryan sighed and nodded. "Okay."

"Right, okay, I'll tell Donner that she might be on, but we're not sure yet because of her medical obligations. It'll give him something to think about. It will also take some of the heat off you. That's the First Lady's main job, remember."

"You want to tell her that, Arnie? Remember, she's a surgeon, good with knives."

Van Damm laughed. "I'll tell you what she is. She's a hell of a lady, and she's tougher than either one of us. Ask nicely," he advised.

"Yeah." Right before dinner, Jack thought.

"OKAY, HE'LL DO it. But we want to ask his wife to join us, too."

"Why?"

"Why not?" Arnie asked. "Not sure yet. She isn't back from work," he added, and that was a line that made the reporters smile.

"Okay, Arnie, thanks, I owe you one." Donner turned off the speakerphone.

"You realize that you just lied to the President of the United States," John Plumber observed pensively. Plumber was an older pro than Donner. He wasn't of the Edward R. Murrow generation—quite. Pushing seventy now, he'd been a teenager in World War II, but had gone to Korea as a young reporter, and been foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Bonn, and finally Moscow. Plumber had been ejected from Moscow, and his somewhat left political stance had nonetheless never turned into sympathy with the Soviet Union. But more than that, though he was not of Murrow's generation, he had grown up listening to the immortal CBS correspondent, and he could still close his eyes and hear the gravelly voice which had somehow carried a measure of authority usually associated with the clergy. Maybe it was because Ed had started on the radio, when one's voice was the currency of the profession. He'd certainly known language better than most of his own time, and infinitely better than the semiliterate reporters and newswriters of the current generation. Plumber was something of a scholar in his own right, a devoted student of Elizabethan literature, and he tried to draft his copy and his spontaneous comments with an elegance in keeping with that of the teacher he'd only watched and heard, but never actually met. More than anything else, people had listened to Ed Murrow because of his honor, John Plumber reminded himself. He'd been as tough as any of the later generation of "investigative journalists" that the schools turned out now, but you always knew that Ed Murrow was fair. And you knew that he didn't break the rules. Plumber was of the generation that believed that his profession was supposed to have rules, one of which was you never told a lie. You could bend, warp, and twist the truth in order to get information out of someone—that was different—but you never told someone something that was deliberately and definitely false. That troubled John Plumber. Ed would never have done that. Not a chance.

"John, he rolled us."

"You think."

"The information I got—well, what do you think?" It had been a frantic two hours, with the entire network research staff running down bits of such minor trivia that even two or three of the pieces, put together, didn't amount to much of anything. But they'd all checked out, and that was something else entirely.

"I'm not sure, Tom." Plumber rubbed his eyes. "Is Ryan a little out of his depth? Yes, he is. But is he trying pretty hard? Definitely. Is he honest? I think so. Well, as honest as any of them ever can be," he amended himself.

"Then we'll give him the chance to prove it, won't we?"

Plumber didn't say anything. Visions of ratings, and maybe even an Emmy, were dancing in the eyes of his junior colleague like sugar plums on Christmas Eve. In any case, Donner was the anchor, and Plumber was the commentator, and Tom had the ear of the front office in New York, which had once been peopled by men of his own generation, but was now entirely populated by people of Donner's, businessmen more than journalists, who saw ratings as the Holy Grail on their quarterly earnings statements. Well, Ryan liked businessmen, didn't he? "I suppose."

THE HELICOPTER LANDED on the South Lawn pad. The crew chief jerked the door open and jumped out, next helping the First Lady out with a smile. Her portion of the Detail followed, walking up the gentle slope to the south entrance, then to the elevator, where Roy Altman pushed the button for her, since the First Lady wasn't allowed to do that, either.

"SURGEON is in the elevator, heading for the residence," Agent Raman reported from the ground floor.

"Roger," Andrea Price acknowledged upstairs. She'd already had some people from the Technical Security Unit check all the metal detectors the NBC crew had passed on the way out. The TSU chief commented that occasionally they got a little fluky, and the large-format Beta tapes the networks used could easily be damaged—but he didn't think so. Maybe a line surge, she'd asked. No chance, he'd replied, reminding her archly that even the air in the White House was checked continuously by his people. Andrea debated discussing that with the chief of staff, but it would have been no use. Damn the reporters anyway. They were the biggest pain in the ass on the campus. "Hi, Andrea," Cathy said, breezing past her.

"Hello, Dr. Ryan. Dinner is just coming up now."

"Thank you," SURGEON replied on her way into the bedroom. She stopped on entering, seeing that a dress and jewelry were on her valet. Frowning, she kicked off her shoes and got casual clothes for dinner, wondering, as always, if there were cameras hidden somewhere to record the event.

The White House cook, George Butler, was by far her superior. He'd even improved on her spinach salad, adding a pinch of rosemary to the dressing she'd perfected over the years. Cathy kibitzed with him at least once a week, and in turn he showed her how to use the institutional-class appliances. She sometimes wondered how good a cook she might have become had she not opted for medicine. The executive chef hadn't told her that she had a gift for it, being fearful of patronizing her— SURGEON was a surgeon, after all. Along the way he'd learned the family preferences, and cooking for a toddler, he'd discovered, was a treat, especially when she occasionally came down with her towering bodyguard to search for snacks. Don Russell and she had milk and cookies at least twice a week. SANDBOX had become the darling of the staff.

"Mommy!" Katie Ryan said when Cathy came through the door.

''Hi, honey." SANDBOX got the first hug and kiss. POTUS got the second. The older kids resisted, as always. "Jack, why are my clothes out?"

"We're going to be on TV tonight," SWORDSMAN replied warily.

"Why?"

"The tape from this morning got all farbled up, and they want to do it live at nine, and if you're willing, I want you to be there, too."

"To answer what?"

"About what you'd expect as far as I'm concerned."

"So, what do I do, walk in with a tray of cookies?"

"George makes the best cookies!" SANDBOX added to the conversation. The other kids laughed. It broke the tension somewhat.

"You don't have to if you don't want, but Arnie thinks it's a good idea."

"Great," Cathy observed. Her head tilted as she looked at her husband. Sometimes she wondered where the puppet strings were, the ones Arnie used to jerk her husband around.

BONDARENKO WAS WORKING late—or early, depending on one's point of view. He'd been at his desk for twenty hours, and since his promotion to general officer he'd learned that life was far better as a colonel. As a colonel he'd gotten out to jog, and even managed to sleep with his wife most of the time. Now—well, he'd always aspired to higher rank. He'd always had ambition, else why would a Signal Corps officer have gone into the Afghan mountains with the Spetznaz? Recognized for his talent, his colonelcy had almost been his undoing, as he'd worked as a close aide for another colonel who'd turned out to be a spy— that fact still boggled him. Misha Filitov a spy for the West? It had shaken his faith in many things, most of all his faith in his country—but then the country had died. The Soviet Union which had raised him and uniformed him and trained him had died one cold December night, to be replaced with something smaller and more… comfortable to serve. It was easier to love Mother Russia than a huge polyglot empire. Now it was as though the adopted children had all moved away, and the true children remained, and that made for a happier family.

But a poorer one. Why hadn't he seen it before? His country's military had been the world's largest and most impressive, or so he had once thought, with its huge masses of men and arms, and its proud history of destroying the German invaders in history's most brutal war. But that military had died in Afghanistan, or if not quite that, then lost its soul and its confidence, as America's had done in Vietnam. But America had recovered, a process his country had yet to begin.

All that money wasted. Wasted on the departed provinces, those ungrateful wretches whom the Union had supported for generations, now gone, taking so much wealth with them, and in some cases turning away to join with others, then, he feared, to turn back as enemies. Just like unfaithful adopted children.

Golovko was right. If that danger was to be stopped, it had to be stopped early. But how? Dealing with a few bandit Chechens had proved difficult enough.

He was operations chief now. In five more years, he'd be commanding general. Bondarenko had no illusions about that. He was the best officer of his age group, and his performance in the field had won him high-level attention, ever the determining factor in the ultimate advancement. He could get that job just in time to fight Russia's last losing battle. Or maybe not. In five years, given funding and a free hand to reshape doctripe and training, he might just convert the Russian army into a force such as it had never been. He would shamelessly use the American model, as the Americans had shamelessly used Soviet tactical doctrine in the Persian Gulf War. But for that to happen he needed a few years of relative peace. If his forces were to be trapped into fighting brushfires all along its southern periphery, he would not have the needed time or funding to save the army. So what was he supposed to do? He was the operations chief. He was supposed to know. It was his job to know. Except he didn't. Turkmenistan was first. If he didn't stop it there, he never would. On the left side of his desk was a roster of available divisions and brigades, with their supposed states of readiness. On the right side was a map. The two made a poor match.

"YOU HAVE SUCH nice hair," Mary Abbot said.

"I didn't do surgery today," Cathy explained. "The cap always ruins it."

"You've had the same hairstyle for how long?"

"Since we got married."

"Never changed it?" That surprised Mrs. Abbot. Cathy just shook her head. She thought that she looked rather like the actress Susannah York—or at least she'd liked the look from a movie she'd seen while in college. And the same was true of Jack, wasn't it? He'd never changed his haircut, except when he didn't have the time to get a trim, something else the White House staff took care of, every two weeks. They were far better at managing Jack's life than she'd ever been. They probably just did things and scheduled things instead of asking first, as she had always done. A much more efficient system, Cathy told herself. She was more nervous than she let on, worse than the first day of medical school, worse than her first surgical procedure, when she'd had to close her eyes and scream inwardly at her hands to keep them from shaking. But at least they'd listened then, and they listened now, too. Okay, she thought, that was the key. This was a surgical procedure, and she was a surgeon, and a surgeon was always in control.

"I think that does it," Mrs. Abbot said.

"Thank you. Do you like working with Jack?"

An insider's smile. "He hates makeup. But most men do," she allowed.

"I have a secret for you—so do I."

"I didn't do much," Mary observed at once. "Your skin doesn't need much."

The woman-to-woman observation made Dr. Ryan smile. "Thank you."

"Can I make a suggestion?"

"Sure."

"Let your hair grow another inch, maybe two. It would complement the shape of your face better."

"That's what Elaine says—she's my hairdresser in Baltimore. I tried it once. The surgical caps make it all scrunchy."

"We can make bigger caps for you. We try to take care of our First Ladies."

"Oh!" And why didn't I think of that? Cathy asked herself. It had to be cheaper than taking the helicopter to work… "Thank you!"

"This way." Mrs. Abbot led FLOTUS to the Oval Office.

Surprisingly, Cathy had been in the room only twice before, and only once to see Jack there. It suddenly struck her as odd. Her bedroom wasn't fifty yards away from her husband's place of work, after all. The desk struck her as grossly old-fashioned, but the office itself was huge and airy compared to hers at Hopkins, even now with the TV lights and cameras set up. Over the mantel opposite the desk was what the Secret Service called the world's most photographed plant. The furniture was too formal to be comfortable, and the rug with the President's Seal embroidered on it was downright tacky, she thought. But it wasn't a normal office for a normal person.

"Hi, honey." Jack kissed her and handled introductions. "This is Tom Donner and John Plumber."

"Hello." Cathy smiled. "I used to listen to you while fixing dinner."

"Not anymore?" Plumber asked with a smile.

"No TV in the dining room upstairs, and they won't let me fix dinner."

"Doesn't your husband help?" Donner asked.

"Jack in the kitchen? Well, he's okay on a grill, but the kitchen is my territory." She sat down, looking at their eyes. It wasn't easy. The TV lights were already on. She made the extra effort. Plumber she liked. Donner was hiding something. The realization made her blink, and her face changed over to her doctor's look. She had the sudden desire to say something to Jack, but there wasn't—

"One minute," the producer said. Andrea Price, as always, was in the room, standing by the door to the secretaries' space, and the door behind Cathy was open to the corridor. Jeff Raman was there. He was another odd duck, Cathy thought, but the problem with the White House was that everyone treated you like you were Julius Caesar or something. It was so hard just being friendly with people. It seemed that there was always something in the way. Fundamentally, neither Jack nor Cathy was used to having servants. Employees, yes, but not servants. She was popular with her nurses and technicians at Hopkins because she treated them all like the professionals they were, and she was trying to do the same thing here, but for some reason it didn't work quite the same way, and that was bothersome in a distant way.

"Fifteen seconds."

"Are we having fun yet?" Jack whispered.

Why couldn't you just have stayed at Merrill Lynch? Cathy almost said aloud. He would have been a senior VP by now—but, no. He would never have been happy. Jack was as driven to do his work as she was to fix people's eyes. In that they were the same.

"Good evening," Donner said to the camera behind the Ryans. "We're here in the Oval Office to speak with President Jack Ryan and the First Lady. As I said on NEC Nightly News, a technical glitch damaged the taping we did earlier today. The President has graciously allowed us to come back and talk live." His head turned. "And for that, sir, we thank you."

"Glad to see you again, Tom," the President said, comfortably. He was getting better at concealing his thoughts.

"Also joining us is Mrs. Ryan—"

"Please," Cathy said, with a smile of her own. "It's Dr. Ryan. I worked pretty hard for that."

"Yes, ma'am," Donner said with a charm that made Cathy think about a bad trauma case rolling off on Monument Street at lunchtime. "You're both doctors, aren't you?"

"Yes, Mr. Donner, Jack in history, and me in ophthalmology."

"And you're a distinguished eye surgeon with the Lasker Public Service Award," he observed, applying his anchorman's charm.

"Well, I've been working in medical research for over fifteen years. At Johns Hopkins we're all clinicians and researchers, too. I work with a wonderful group of people, and, really, the Lasker Prize is more a tribute to them than it is to me. Back fifteen years ago, Professor Bernard Katz encouraged me to look into how we could use lasers to correct various eye problems. I found it interesting, and I've been working in that area ever since, in addition to my normal surgical practice."

"Do you really make more money than your husband?" Donner asked with a grin for the cameras.

"Lots," she confirmed with a chuckle.

"I always said that Cathy was the brains of the outfit," Jack went on, patting his wife's hand. "She's too modest to say that she's just about the best in the world at what she does."

"So, how do you like being First Lady?"

"Do I have to answer?" A charming smile. Then she turned serious. "The way we got here—well, it's not something anyone would wish for, but I guess it's like what I do at the hospital. Sometimes a trauma case comes in, and that person didn't choose to be injured, and we try our best to fix what's wrong. Jack's never turned away from a problem or a challenge in his life."

Then it was time for business. "Mr. President, how do you like your job?"

"Well, the hours are pretty long. As much time as I have spent in government service, I don't think I ever really understood how difficult this job is. I am blessed with a very fine staff, and our government has thousands of dedicated workers doing the public's business. That helps a lot."

"As you see it, sir, what is your job?" John Plumber asked.

"The oath says to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," Ryan replied. "We're working to restore the government. We now have the Senate fully in place, and as the several states get on with their elections, we'll soon have a new House of Representatives. I've got most of the Cabinet posts filled—for HHS and Education, we still have the sitting Deputy Secretaries doing a fine job."

"We spoke this morning about events in the Persian Gulf. What are the problems there as you see them?" It was Plumber again. Ryan was handling himself well, much more relaxed, and Plumber noted the look in his wife's eyes. She was smart.

"The United States wants nothing more than peace and stability in that region. We have every wish to establish friendly relations with the new United Islamic Republic. There's been enough strife there and elsewhere in the world. I'd like to think that we've turned the corner on that. We've made peace—a real peace, not just the absence of war—with the Russians, after generations of turmoil. I want us to build on that. Maybe the world's never been fully at peace, but that is no reason why we can't do it. John, we've come a very long way in the past twenty years. There's a lot more for us to do, but we have a lot of good work to build on."

"We'll be back after this break," Donner told the cameras. He could see that Ryan was pretty pleased with himself. Excellent.

A staffer came in from the back door with water glasses. Everyone had a sip while they waited for the two commercials to run. "You really hate all this, don't you?" he asked Cathy.

"As long as I can do my work, I can live with almost anything, but I do worry about the kids. After this is over, they have to go back to being normal children, and we didn't raise them for all this hoopla." Then everyone was quiet for the rest of the commercial time.

"We're back on the Oval Office with the President and First Lady. Mr. President," Donner asked, "what about the changes you are making?"

"Mainly my job isn't to 'change, Tom, it's to 'restore. Along the way we will try to do a few things. I've tried to select my new Cabinet members with an eye toward making the government function more efficiently. As you know, I've been in government service for quite a while, and along the way I've seen numerous examples of inefficiency. The citizens out there pay a lot of money in taxes, and we owe it to them to see that the money is spent wisely—and efficiently. So I've told my Cabinet officers to examine all of the executive departments with an eye to doing the same work for less cost."

"A lot of presidents have said that."

"This one means it," Ryan said seriously.

"But your first major policy act has been to attack the tax system," Donner observed.

"Not 'attack, Tom. 'Change. George Winston has my full support. The tax code we have now is totally unfair—and I mean unfair in many ways. People can't understand it, for one. That means that they have to hire people to explain the tax system to them, and it's hard to see how it makes sense for people to pay good money for people to explain how the law takes more of their money away—especially when the government writes the laws. Why make laws that the people can't understand? Why make laws that are so complicated?" Ryan asked.

"But along the way, your administration's goal is to make the tax system regressive, not progressive."

"We've been over that," the President replied, and Donner knew he had him then. It was one of Ryan's more obvious weaknesses that he didn't like repeating himself. He really was not a politician. They loved to repeat themselves. "Charging everyone the same amount is just as fair as anything can be. Doing so in a way that everyone can understand will actually save money for people. Our proposed tax changes will be revenue-neutral. Nobody's getting any special breaks."

"But the tax rates for the rich will fall dramatically."

"That's true, but we'll also eliminate all the breaks that their lobbyists have written into the system. They'll actually end up paying the same, or more probably, a little more than they already do. Secretary Winston has studied that very carefully, and I concur in his judgment."

"Sir, it's hard to see how a thirty percent rate reduction will make them pay more. That's fourth-grade arithmetic."

"Ask your accountant." Ryan smiled. "Or for that matter, look at your own tax returns, if you can figure them out. You know, Tom, I used to be an accountant—I passed the exam before I went into the Marine Corps— and I can't even figure the darned things out. The government does not serve the public interest by doing things that the people can't understand. There's been too much of that. I'm going to try to dial it back a bit."

Bingo. To Donner's left, John Plumber grimaced. The director with his selection of camera feeds made sure that one didn't go out. Instead he picked Donner's winning anchorman smile.

"I'm glad you feel that way, Mr. President, because there are many things that the American people would like to know about government operations. Nearly all of your government service has been in the Central Intelligence Agency."

"That's true but, Tom, as I told you this morning, no President has ever spoken about intelligence operations. There's a good reason for that." Ryan was still cool, not knowing what door had just opened.

"But, Mr. President, you have personally been involved in numerous intelligence operations which had important effects on bringing that end to the Cold War. For example, the defection of the Soviet missile submarine Red October. You played a personal part in that, didn't you?"

The director, cued ahead of time to the question, had selected the camera zeroed in on Ryan's face just in time to see his eyes go as wide as doorknobs. He really wasn't all that good at controlling his emotions. "Tom, I—"

"The viewers should know that you played a decisive role in one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time. We got our hands on an intact Soviet ballistic-missile submarine, didn't we?"

"I won't comment on that story." By this time his makeup couldn't hide the pale look. Cathy turned to look at her husband, having felt his hand in hers turn to ice.

"And then less than two years later, you personally arranged the defection of the head of the Russian KGB."

Jack managed to control his face, finally, but his voice was wooden. "Tom, this has to stop. You're making unfounded speculations."

"Mr. President, that individual, Nikolay Gerasimov, formerly of the KGB, now lives with his family in Virginia. The captain of the submarine lives in Florida. It's not a 'story'"—he smiled—"and you know it. Sir, I don't understand your reticence. You played a major role in bringing that peace to the world that you talked about a few minutes ago."

"Tom, let me make this clear. I will not ever discuss intelligence operations in any public forum. Period."

"But the American people have a right to know what sort of man sits in this office." The same thing had been said eleven hours before by John Plumber, who winced inwardly to hear himself quoted in this way, but who could not turn on his own colleague in public.

"Tom, I have served my country to the best of my ability for a number of years, but just as you cannot reveal your news sources, so our intelligence agencies cannot reveal many of the things they do, for fear of getting real people killed."

"But, Mr. President, you have done that. You have killed people."

"Yes, I have, and more than one President has been a soldier or—"

"Wait a minute," Cathy interrupted, and now her eyes were flaring. "I want to say something. Jack joined CIA after our family was attacked by terrorists. If he hadn't done those things back then, none of us would be alive. I was pregnant with our son then, and they tried to kill me and our daughter in my car in Annapolis and—"

"Excuse me, Mrs. Ryan, but we have to take a break now."

"This has to stop, Tom. This has to stop right now," Ryan said forcefully. "When people talk about field operations in the open, real people can get killed. Do you understand that?" The camera lights were off, but the tapes were still rolling.

"Mr. President, the people have a right to know, and it's my job to report the facts. Have I lied about anything?"

"I can't even comment on that, and you know it," Ryan said, having almost snarled an accurate answer. Temper, Jack, temper, he reminded himself. A President can't have a temper, damned sure not on live TV. Damn, Marko would never cooperate with the—or would he? He was Lithuanian, and maybe he might like the idea of becoming a national hero, though Jack figured he might just talk him out of such a thing. But Gerasimov was something else. Ryan had disgraced the man, threatened him with death—at the hands of his own countrymen, but that didn't matter to a man like him—and stripped him of all his power. Gerasimov now enjoyed a life far more comfortable than anything he might have enjoyed in the Soviet Union, which he had sought to maintain and rule, but he wasn't the sort of man to enjoy comfort so much as power. Gerasimov had aspired to the sort of position Ryan now enjoyed himself, and would have felt very comfortable in this office or another like it. But those who aspired to power were most often those who misused it, which distinguished him from Jack in one more way. Not that it mattered at the moment. Gerasimov would talk. Sure as hell. And they knew where he was.

So what do I do now?

"We're back in the Oval Office with President and Mrs. Ryan," Donner intoned for anyone who might have forgotten.

"Mr. President, you are an expert in national security and foreign affairs," Plumber said before his colleague could speak. "But our country faces more problems than that. You now have to reestablish the Supreme Court. How do you propose to do that?"

"I asked the Justice Department to send me a list of experienced judges from federal appeals courts. I'm going over that list now, and I hope to make my nominations to the Senate in the next two weeks."

"Normally the American Bar Association assists the government in screening such judges, but evidently that's not being done in this case. May I ask why, sir?"

"Tom, all of the judges on the list have been through that process already, and since then all have sat on the appeals bench for a minimum often years."

"The list was assembled by prosecutors?" Donner asked.

"By experienced professionals in the Justice Department. The head of the search group is Patrick Martin, who just took over the Criminal Division. He was assisted by other Justice Department officials, like the head of the Civil Rights Division, for example."

"But they're all prosecutors, or people whose job it is to prosecute cases. Who suggested Mr. Martin to you?"

"It's true that I don't personally know the Department of Justice all that well. Acting FBI Director Murray recommended Mr. Martin to me. He did a good job supervising the investigation of the airplane crash into the Capitol building, and I asked him to assemble the list for me."

"And you and Mr. Murray have been friends for a long time."

"Yes, we have." Ryan nodded.

"On another of those intelligence operations, Mr. Murray accompanied you, didn't he?"

"Excuse me?" Jack asked.

"The CIA operation in Colombia, when you played a role in breaking up the Medellin cartel."

"Tom, I'm going to say this one last time: I will not discuss intelligence operations, real ones or made-up ones, at all—ever. Are we clear on that?"

"Mr. President, that operation resulted in the death of Admiral James Cutter. Sir," Donner went on, a sincerely pained expression on his face, "a lot of stories are coming out now about your tenure at CIA. These stories are going to break, and we really want you to have the chance to set the record straight as rapidly as possible. You were not elected to this office, and you have never been examined in the way that political candidates usually are. The American people want to know the man who sits in this office, sir."

"Tom, the world of intelligence is a secret world. It has to be. Our government has to do many things. Not all of those things can be discussed openly. Everyone has secrets. Every viewer out there has them. You have them. In the case of the government, keeping those secrets is vitally important to the well-being of our country, and also, by the way, to the safety of the lives of the people who do our country's business. Once upon a time the media respected that rule, especially in times of war, but also in other times. I wish you still did."

"But at what point, Mr. President, does secrecy work against our national interests?" "That's why we have a law that mandates Congress's right to oversee intelligence operations. If it were just the Executive Branch making these decisions, yes, you would have just cause to worry. But it isn't that way. Congress also examines what we do. I have myself reported to Congress on many of these things."

"Was there a secret operation to Colombia? Did you participate in it? Did Daniel Murray accompany you there after the death of then-FBI Director Emil Jacobs?"

"I have nothing to say on that or on any of the other stories you brought up." And there was another commercial break.

"Why are you doing this?" To everyone's surprise, the question came from Cathy.

"Mrs. Ryan—"

"Dr. Ryan," she said at once.

"Excuse me, Dr. Ryan, these allegations must be laid to rest."

"We've been through this before. Once people tried to break our marriage up—and that was all lies, too, and—"

"Cathy," Jack said quietly. Her head turned toward his.

"I know about that one, Jack, remember?" she whispered.

"No, you don't. Not really."

"That's the problem," Tom Donner pointed out. "These stories will be followed up. The people want to know. The people have a right to know."

Had the world been just, Ryan thought, he would have stood, tossed the microphone to Donner, and asked him to leave his house, but that wasn't possible, and so here he was, supposedly powerful, trapped by circumstance like a criminal in an interrogation room. Then the camera lights came back on.

"Mr. President, I know this is a difficult subject for you."

"Tom, okay, I will say this. As part of my service with CIA, I occasionally had to serve my country in ways that cannot be revealed for a very long time, but at no time have I ever violated the law, and every such activity was fully reported to the appropriate members of the Congress. Let me tell you why I joined CIA.

"I didn't want to. I was a teacher. I taught history at the Naval Academy. I love teaching, and I had time to write a couple of history books, and I like that, too. But then a group of terrorists came after me and my family. There were two very serious attempts to kill us—all of us. You know that. It was all over the media when it happened. I decided then that my place was in the Agency. Why? To protect others against the same sort of dangers. I never liked it all that much, but it was the job I decided I had to do. Now I'm here, and you know what? I don't much like this job, either. I don't like the pressure. I don't like the responsibility. No one person should have this much power. But I am here, and I swore an oath to do my best, and I'm doing that."

"But, Mr. President, you are the first person to sit in 'this office who's never been a political figure. Your views on many things have never been shaped by public opinion, and what is disturbing to a lot of people is that you seem to be leaning on others who have never achieved high office, either. The danger, as some people see it, is that we have a small group of people who lack political experience but who are shaping policy for our country for some time to come. How do you answer that concern?"

"I haven't even heard that concern anywhere, Tom."

"Sir, you've also been criticized for spending too much time in this office and not enough out among the people. Could that be a problem?" Now that he'd sunk the hook, Donner could afford to appear plaintive.

"Unfortunately I do have a lot of work to do, and this is where I have to do that work. For the team I've put together, where do I start?" Jack asked. Next to him, Cathy was seething. Now her hand felt cold in his. "Secretary of State, Scott Adler, a career foreign service officer, son of a Holocaust survivor. I've known Scott for years. He's the best man I know to run State. Treasury, George Winston, a self-made man. He was instrumental in saving our financial system during the conflict with Japan; he has the respect of the financial community, and he's a real thinker. Defense, Anthony Bretano, is a highly successful engineer and businessman who's already making needed reforms at the Pentagon. FBI, Dan Murray, a career cop, and a good one. You know what I'm doing with my choices, Tom? I'm picking pros, people who know the work because they've done it, not political types who just talk about it. If you think that's wrong, well, I'm sorry about that, but I've worked my way up inside the government, and I have more faith in the professionals I've come to know than I do in the political appointees I've seen along the way. And, oh, by the way, how is that different from a politician who selects the people he knows—or, worse, people who contributed to his campaign organization?"

"Some would say that the difference is that ordinarily people selected to high office have much broader experience."

"I would not say that, and I have worked under such people for years. The appointments I've made are all people whose abilities I know. Moreover, a President is supposed to have the right, with the assent of the people's elected representatives, to pick people he can work with."

"But with so much to do, how do you expect to succeed without experienced political guidance? This is a political town."

"Maybe that's the problem," Ryan shot back. "Maybe the political process that we've all studied over the years gets in the way more than it helps. Tom, I didn't ask for this job, okay? The idea, when Roger asked me to be Vice President, was that I serve out the remaining term and leave government service for good. I wanted to go back to teaching. But then that dreadful event happened, and here I am. I am not a politician. I never wanted to be one, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not a politician now. Am I the best man for this job? Probably not. I am, however, the President of the United States, and I have a job to do, and I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. That's all I can do."

"And that's the last word. Thank you, Mr. President."

Jack barely waited for the camera lights to go off a final time before unclipping the microphone from his tie and standing. The two reporters didn't say a word. Cathy glared at them.

"Why did you do that?"

"Excuse me?" Donner replied.

"Why do people like you always attack people like us? What have we done to deserve it? My husband is the most honorable man I know."

"All we do is ask questions."

"Don't give me that! The way you ask them and the questions you choose, you give the answers before anyone has a chance to say anything."

Neither reporter responded to that. The Ryans left without another word. Then Arnie came in. "Okay," he observed, "who set this up?"

"THEY GUTTED HIM like a fish," Holbrook thought aloud. They were due for some time off, and it was always a good thing to know your enemy.

"This guy's scary," Ernie Brown thought, considering things a little more deeply. "At least, politicians you can depend on to be crooks. This guy, Jesus, he's going to try to—we're talking a police state here, Pete."

It was actually a frightening thought for the Mountain Man. He'd always thought that politicians were the worst thing in creation, but suddenly he realized that they were not. Politicians played the power game because they liked it, liked the idea of power and jerking people around because it made them feel big. Ryan was worse. He thought it was right.

"God damn," he breathed. "The court he wants to appoint…"

"They made him look like a fool, Ernie."

"No, they didn't. Don't you get it? They were playing their game."