Locked On

58

Four days after returning from Dubai, Jack Ryan Jr. had an appointment that he could not cancel. It was November 6, Election Day, and Jack headed up to Baltimore in the late morning to be with his family.

Jack Ryan Sr. headed down to his local polling place in the morning with Cathy, surrounded by reporters. After that he returned home to spend the day with his family, with plans to head down to the Marriott Waterfront to give his acceptance speech that evening.

Or his concession speech, depending on the results in a few key battleground states.

The Clark controversy had hurt him, there was no denying this. Every show from 60 Minutes to Entertainment Tonight had found an angle on the story, and every talking head on the news had something to say about it. Ryan took the high road throughout the last few weeks of his campaign, he’d made his statements regarding his friend, and he’d done his best to frame the story as a political attack on him, Jack Ryan, and not honest justice.

This worked with his base, and it swayed some undecided. But the unanswered questions as to the actual relationship between Jack Ryan and the mysterious man on the run from the government tipped many undecided toward Edward Kealty. The media framed the Ryan — Clark relationship as if the latter were the personal assassin for the former.

And whatever one could say about President Kealty, there was certainly no chance he possessed that particular skeleton in his closet.

When Jack Junior arrived at his parents’ house in the early afternoon, he drove through the security cordon, and a few members of the press took a picture of the yellow Hummer with Jack behind the wheel, but his windows were tinted and he wore aviator sunglasses.

When he came in through the kitchen he saw his dad standing there, alone in his shirtsleeves.

The two men embraced, and then Senior took a step back.

“What’s with the shades?”

Jack Junior took off his sunglasses, revealing bruising around his right eye. It was faint but still gray, and it was plain that it had been much worse.

In addition to the bruised skin, blood vessels in his eye had broken, and much of the eye was bright red.

Ryan Sr. looked at his son’s face for a moment and then said, “Quick, before your mom comes downstairs. Into the study.”

A minute later, the two men stood in the study with the door closed. Senior kept his voice down. “Jesus, Jack, what the hell happened to you?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“I don’t give a damn. What do all the parts of your body I can’t see look like?”

Jack smiled. Sometimes his dad said things that showed him that the old man understood. “Not too bad. It’s getting better.”

“This happened in the field?”

“Yeah. I need to just leave it at that. Not for me. For you. You’re about to be the President, after all.”

Jack Ryan Sr. sighed slowly, leaned forward, and looked into his son’s eyeball. “Your mother is going to throw a—”

“I’ll keep my shades on.”

Senior looked at Junior. “Son. I couldn’t have pulled that trick over on Mom thirty years ago. It sure as hell won’t work now.”

“What should I do?”

Senior thought it over. “You’ll show her. She’s an ophthalmic surgeon, for crying out loud. I want her to check you out. Tell her you don’t want to talk about it. She won’t like it, not one bit, but you are not lying to your mother. We can keep details from her, but we aren’t lying.”

“Okay,” the son said.

“It’s a slippery slope, but we just have to do what’s right.”

“Yeah.”

Dr. Cathy Ryan came into the study a minute later, and within seconds she had led her son by the arm into the bathroom. Here Cathy had Junior sit at the vanity while she held his eye open and checked it carefully with a penlight.

“What happened?” Her voice was clipped and professional. The eye was his mom’s area of expertise, and she would, or at least Jack hoped she would, view an injury here more professionally and dispassionately than she would had he hurt something else.

“I got hit with something.”

Dr. Ryan did not stop examining her patient to say, “No shit, Sherlock. What did you get hit with?”

Her husband was correct — Cathy did not like her questions about the origins of the injury being deflected.

Jack Junior responded guardedly, “I guess you could say I bumped heads with a guy.”

“Any vision issues? Headaches?”

“At first, yes. Bled a little from that cut on the nose. But not anymore.”

“Well, he got you right in your orbit. This is a nasty subcutaneous hematoma. How long ago?”

“Five days, give or take.”

Cathy let go of his eye and stepped back. “You should have come right over. The trauma necessary to cause this amount of hemorrhaging on the eye and the tissue around it could have easily detached your retina.”

Jack wanted to say something clever, but he caught a look from his dad. Now was not the time to be cute. “Okay. If it happens again, I will—”

“Why would it happen again?”

Junior shrugged. “It won’t. Thanks for checking it out.” He started to get up from the chair.

“Sit back down. I can’t do anything for the subcutaneous hematoma, but I can mask that bruising on your nose and orbit.”

“How?”

“I’m going to get some makeup to cover that up.”

Junior groaned. “It’s not that bad, Mom.”

“It’s bad enough. You are going to have your picture taken tonight, like it or not, and I am sure you don’t want that image of you going out to the world.”

Senior agreed. “Son, half the newspapers will go to press with a headline about how I smacked you when I learned you voted for Kealty.”

Jack Junior laughed at the thought. He knew there was no point arguing. “Okay. Dad wears makeup every time he goes on TV, I guess it won’t kill me.”

The election returns began coming in during the early evening. The family and some of the key staff sat in the living room of a suite at the Marriott Waterfront, although Ryan Sr. spent much of the evening standing in the kitchen, talking to his kids or his senior staff, preferring to hear reports shouted in from the living room to actually watching all the play-by-play and pontificating himself.

By nine p.m., a tight race turned for the GOP when Ohio and Michigan both went his way. Florida took until nearly ten, but by the close of polling stations on the West Coast, the matter was decided.

John Patrick Ryan Sr. won with fifty-two percent of the vote, tighter than the margin he’d carried into the last month of the campaign, and most news organizations claimed this had to do with two things: the Kealty administration’s capture of the Emir, and Jack Ryan’s murky association with a man wanted for multiple murders.

It said little for Kealty that Ryan had managed to overcome both of these events to defeat him.

Jack Ryan stood on a stage at the Marriott Waterfront with his wife and children. Balloons fell, music played. When he spoke to the adoring crowd, he thanked his family first and foremost, and the American people for giving him the opportunity to represent them for a second four-year term.

His speech was upbeat, heartfelt, and even funny in places. But soon enough he came around to the two central issues of the election’s home stretch. He called on President Kealty to halt his administration’s pursuit of federal charges against Saif Yasin. Ryan said it would be a waste of resources, as he would order the Emir into military custody as soon as he took office.

He then asked President Kealty to reveal details of the sealed indictment to his transition team. He did not use the phrase “Put up or shut up,” but that was the implication.

The President-elect reiterated his support for Clark and the men and women in the military and intelligence communities.

As soon as they left the stage, Jack Junior called Melanie. He’d seen her once since his return from Dubai. He’d told her he’d been on a business trip to Switzerland, where he’d banged his eye and the bridge of his nose against a tree branch when he and his coworkers tried their hand at snowboarding.

He missed her tonight, and wished she could be with him right now, here amid all the excitement and celebration. But they both knew that if she showed up on the arm of the son of the former and next President of the United States, it would invite a lot of scrutiny. Melanie had not even met Jack Junior’s parents yet, and this hardly seemed like the venue for that.

But Jack found a sofa in one of the suites the Ryan campaign had reserved for the evening, and he sat and chatted with Melanie until the rest of the family was ready to head back home.