“MR, PRESIDENT, WE can’t ignore it anymore.”
“Yeah, I know, Arnie.”
It came down to a technical issue, oddly enough. The bodies had to be identified positively, because a person wasn’t dead until there was a piece of paper that said so, and until that person was declared dead, if that person had been a senator or congressperson, then his or her post wasn’t vacant, and no new person could be selected for it, and Congress was an empty shell. The certificates would be going out today, and within an hour, governors of “the several states” would be calling Ryan for advice or to advise what they would be doing unbidden. At least one governor would today resign his post and be appointed to the United States Senate by his succeeding lieutenant governor in an elegant, if obvious, political payoff, or so the rumors said.
THE VOLUME OF information was stunning, even to someone familiar with the sources. It went back over fourteen years. The timing could scarcely have been better, however, since that was about the time the major newspapers and magazines had gone to electronic media, which was easily cross-loaded to the World Wide Web, and for which the media empires could charge a modest fee for material which otherwise would have been stored in their own musty basements or at most sold to college libraries for practically nothing. The WWW was still a fairly new and untested source of income, but the media had seized it by the throat, since now for the first time news was less volatile than it had been in the past. It was now a ready source for its own reporters, for students, for those with individual curiosity, and for those whose curiosity was more strictly professional. Best of all, the huge number of people doing a keyword search would make it impossible for anyone to check all the inquiries.
He was careful anyway—rather, his people were. The inquiries being made on the Web were all happening in Europe, mainly in London, through brand-new Internet-access accounts which would last no longer than the time required to download the data, or which came from academic accounts to which numerous people had access. Keywords RYAN JOHN PATRICK, RYAN JACK, RYAN CAROLINE, RYAN CATHY, RYAN CHILDREN, RYAN FAMILY, and a multitude of others were inputted, and literally thousands of “hits” had resulted. Many were spurious because “Ryan” was not that uncommon a name, but the vetting process was not all that difficult.
The first really interesting clips came when Ryan had been thirty-one and had first come into the public spotlight in London. Even the photos were there, and though they took time to download, they were worth waiting for. Especially the first. That one showed a young man sitting on a street, covered with blood. Well, wasn’t that inspirational? The subject of the photograph actually looked quite dead in it, but he knew that wounded people often appeared that way. Then had come another set of photos of a wrecked automobile and a small helicopter. In the intervening years the data on Ryan was surprisingly scarce, mainly squibs about his testifying before the American Congress behind closed doors. There were additional hits concerning the end of the Fowler presidency—immediately after the initial confusion it had been reported that Ryan himself had prevented a nuclear-missile launch... and Ryan himself had hinted at it to Daryaei... but that story had never been officially confirmed, and Ryan himself had never discussed the matter with anyone. That was important. That said something about the man. But that could also be set aside.
His wife. There was ample press coverage on her, too, including in one article the number of her office at her hospital. A skilled surgeon. That was nice—a recent piece said that she’d continue that. Excellent. They knew where to look for her.
The children. The youngest—yes, the youngest used the same day-care center that the oldest had used. There was a photo of that, too. A feature article on Ryan’s first White House job had even identified the school the older ones attended....
This was all quite amazing. He’d initiated the research effort in the knowledge that he’d get all or most of this information, but even so, here was in a single day more information than ten people in the field could have gathered—at considerable risk of exposure—in a week. The Americans were so foolish. They practically invited attack. They had no idea of secrecy or security. It was one thing for a leader to appear in public with his family from time to time—everyone did that. It was quite another to let everyone know things that nobody really needed to know.
The document package—it came to over 2,500 pages—would be collated and cross-referenced by his staff. There were no plans to take action on any of it. It was just data. But that could change.
“YOU KNOW, I think I like flying in,” Cathy Ryan observed to Roy Altman.
“Oh?”
“Less wear and tear on the nerves than driving myself. I don’t suppose that’ll last,” she added, moving into the food line.
“Probably not.” Altman was constantly looking around, but there were two other agents in the room, doing their best to look invisible and failing badly at it. Though Johns Hopkins was an institution with fully 2,400 physicians, it was still a professional village of sorts where nearly everyone knew nearly everyone else, and doctors didn’t carry guns. Altman was staying close, the better to learn his principal’s routine, and she didn’t seem to mind. He’d been in with her for the two morning procedures, and teacher that she was, Cathy had explained every step of the process in minute detail. This afternoon she’d be doing teaching rounds with a half dozen or so students. It was Altman’s first educational experience on the job—at least in something that had value in an area other than politics, a field he’d learned to detest. His next observation was that SURGEON ate like the proverbial bird. She got to the end of the line and paid for her lunch and Altman’s, over his brief protest.
“This is my turf, Roy.” She looked around, and spotted the man she wanted to lunch with, heading that way with Altman in tow. “Hey, Dave.”
Dean James and his guest stood up. “Hi, Cathy! Let me introduce a new faculty member, Pierre Alexandre. Alex, this is Cathy Ryan—”
“The same one who—”
“Please, I’m still a doctor, and—”
“You’re the one on the Lasker list, right?” Alexandre stopped her cold with that one. Cathy’s smile lit up the room.
“Yes.”
“Congratulations, Doctor.” He held out his hand. Cathy had to set her tray down to take it. Altman watched with eyes that tried to be neutral, but conveyed something else. “You must be with the Service.”
“Yes, sir. Roy Altman.”
“Excellent. A lady this lovely and this bright deserves proper protection,” Alexandre pronounced. “I just got out of the Army, Mr. Altman. I’ve seen you guys at Walter Reed. Back when President Fowler’s daughter came back from Brazil with a tropical bug, I managed the case.”
“Alex is working with Ralph Forster,” the dean explained as everyone sat down.
“Infectious diseases,” Cathy told her bodyguard.
Alexandre nodded. “Just learning the ropes at the moment. But I have a parking pass, so I guess I really belong.”
“I hope you’re as good a teacher as Ralph is.”
“A great doc,” Alexandre agreed. Cathy decided she’d like the newbie. She next wondered about the accent and the southern manners. “Ralph flew down to Atlanta this morning.”
“Anything special happening?”
“A possible Ebola case in Zaire, African male, age eight. The e-mail came through this morning.”
Cathy’s eyes narrowed at that. Though she was in a completely different field of medicine, like all physicians she got Morbidity and Mortality Report, and she kept current on everything she could. Medicine is a field in which education never stops. “Just one?”
“Yep.” Alexandre nodded. “Seems the kid had a monkey bite on his arm. I’ve been over there. I deployed out of Detrick for the last mini-outbreak in 1990.”
“With Gus Lorenz?” Dean James asked. Alexandre shook his head.
“No, Gus was doing something else then. The team leader was George Westphal.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, yeah, he—”
“Died,” Alex confirmed. “We, uh, kept it quiet, but he got it. I attended him. It wasn’t real great to watch.”
“What did he do wrong? I didn’t know him well,” James said, “but Gus told me he was a rising star. UCLA, as I recall.”
“George was brilliant, best man on structures I ever met, and he was as careful as any of us, but he got it anyway, and we never figured out how that happened. Anyway, that mini-outbreak killed sixteen people. We had two survivors, both females, both in their early twenties, and nothing remarkable about them that we could ever find. Maybe they were just lucky,” Alexandre said, not really believing it. Things like this happened for some reason or other. It was just that he hadn’t found it, though it was his job to find it. “In any case, only eighteen total victims, and that was lucky. We were over there for six or seven weeks. I took a shotgun into the woods and blew up about a hundred monkeys, trying to find a carrier. No dice. That strain is called Ebola Zaire Mayinga. I imagine right now they’re comparing it to what this little kid contracted. Ebola’s a slippery little bastard.”
“Just one?” Cathy asked.
“That’s the word. Method of exposure unknown, as usual.”
“Monkey bite?”
“Yeah, but we’ll never find the monkey. We never do.”
“It’s that deadly?” Altman asked, unable to hold back from joining the conversation.
“Sir, the official guess is eighty percent mortality. Put it this way. If you pull your pistol out and shoot me in the chest, right here, right now, my odds arebetter than beating this little bug.” Alexandre buttered his roll and remembered visiting Westphal’s widow. It was bad for the appetite. “Probably a lot better, what with the surgeons we have working over in Halstead. You have much better odds with leukemia, much better odds with lymphoma. Somewhat worse odds with AIDS, but that agent gives you ten years. Ebola gives you maybe ten days. That’s about as deadly as it gets.”
11
MONKEYS
RYAN HAD DONE ALL OF his own writing. He’d published two books on naval history—that now seemed like a previous lifetime summoned to memory on a hypnotist’s couch—and uncounted papers for CIA. Each of these he had done himself, once on a typewriter and later on a series of personal computers. He had never enjoyed the writing—it was ever difficult work—but he had enjoyed the solitude of it, alone in his own little intellectual world and safe from any sort of interruption as he formed his thoughts and adjusted their method of presentation until they were as close to perfect as he could achieve. In that way, they were always his thoughts, and there was integrity in the process.
No longer.
The chief speechwriter was Callie Weston, short, petite, dirty blond, and a wizard with words who, like many of the enormous White House staff, had come aboard with President Fowler and never managed to leave.
“You didn’t like my speech for the church?” She was also irreverent.
“Honestly, I just decided that I had to say something else.” Then Jack realized he was defending himself to someone he scarcely knew.
“I cried.” She paused for effect, staring into his eyes with the unblinking gaze of a poisonous snake for several seconds, manifestly sizing him up. “You’re different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have to understand, Mr. President. President Fowler kept me around because I made him sound compassionate—he’s rather a cold fish in most things, poor guy. President Durling kept me around because he didn’t have anybody better. I bump heads all the time with staffers across the street. They like to edit my work. I don’t like being edited by drones. We fight. Arnie protects me a lot because I went to school with his favorite niece—and I’m the best around at what I do—but I’m probably the biggest pain in the ass on your staff. You need to know that.” It was a good explanation, but not to the point.
“Why am I different?” Jack asked.
“You say what you really think instead of saying what you think people think they want to hear. It’s going to be hard writing for you. I can’t dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I’m paid to write, and I have to learn to write like you talk. It’s going to be tough,” she told him, already girding herself for the challenge.
“I see.” Since Ms. Weston was not an inner-circle staff member, Andrea Price was leaning against the wall (it would have been in a corner, except the Oval Office didn’t have one) and observing everything with a poker face—or trying to. Ryan was learning to read her body language. Clearly Price didn’t much care for Weston. He wondered why. “Well, what can you turn out in a couple of hours?”
“Sir, that depends on what you want to say,” the speechwriter pointed out. Ryan told her in a few brief sentences. She didn’t take notes. She merely absorbed it, smiled, and spoke again.
“They’re going to destroy you. You know that. Maybe Arnie hasn’t told you yet, maybe nobody on the staff has, or ever will, but it’s going to happen.” That remark jolted Agent Price from her spot on the wall, just enough that her body was standing instead of leaning.
“What makes you think I want to stay here?”
She blinked. “Excuse me. I’m not really used to this.”
“This could be an interesting conversation, but I—”
“I read one of your books day before yesterday. You’re not very good with words—not very elegant, that’s a technical judgment—but you do say things clearly. So I have to dial back my rhetoric style to make it sound like you. Short sentences. Your grammar is good. Catholic schools, I guess. You don’t bullshit people. You say it straight.” She smiled. “How long for the speech?”
“Call it fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be back in three hours,” Weston promised, and stood. Ryan nodded, and she walked out of the room. Then the President looked at Agent Price.
“Spit it out,” he ordered.
“She’s the biggest pain in the ass over there. Last year she attacked some junior staffer over something. A guard had to pull her off him.”
“Over what?”
“The staffer said some nasty things about one of her speeches, and speculated that her family background was irregular. He left the next day. No loss,” Price concluded. “But she’s an arrogant prima donna. She shouldn’t have said what she did.”
“What if she’s right?”
“Sir, that’s not my business, but any—”
“Is she right?”
“You are different, Mr. President.” Price didn’t say whether she thought that was a good or bad thing, and Ryan didn’t ask.
The President had other things to do in any case. He lifted his desk phone, and a secretary answered.
“Could you get me George Winston at the Columbus Group?”
“Yes, Mr. President, I’ll get him for you.” She didn’t have that number immediately to mind, and so she lifted another phone for the Signals Office. Down there a Navy petty officer had the number on a Post-It note, and read it off. A moment later he handed the Post-It to the Marine in the next chair over. The Marine fished in her purse, found four quarters, and handed them over to the smirking squid.
“Mr. President, I have Mr. Winston,” the intercom phone said.
“George?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How fast can you get down here?”
‘Jack—Mr. President, I’m trying to put my business back together and—”
“How fast?” Ryan asked more pointedly.
Winston had to think for a second. His Gulfstream crew wasn’t standing by for anything today. Getting to Newark Airport ... “I can catch the next train.”
“Let me know which one you’re on. I’ll have someone waiting for you.”
“Okay, but you need to know that I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. See you in a few hours.” Ryan hung up, then looked up to Price. “Andrea, have an agent and a car meet him at the station.” r />
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Ryan decided that it was nice to give orders and have them carried out. A man could get used to this.
“I DON’T LIKE guns!” She said it loudly enough that a few heads turned, though the kids immediately turned back to their blocks and crayons. There was an unusual number of adults around, three of whom had spiraling cords leading to earpieces. Those heads all turned to see a “concerned” (that was the word everyone used in such a case) mother. As head of this detail, Don Russell walked over.
“Hello.” He held up his Secret Service ID. “Can I help you?”
“Do you have to be here!”
“Yes, ma’am, we do. Could I have your name, please?”
“Why?” Sheila Walker demanded.
“Well, ma’am, it’s nice to know who you’re talking to, isn’t it?” Russell asked reasonably. It was also nice to get background checks on such people.
“This is Mrs. Walker,” said Mrs. Marlene Daggett, owner-operator of Giant Steps Day Care Center.