“Oh, that’s your little boy over there, Justin, right?” Russell smiled. The four-year-old was building a tower with hardwood blocks, which he would then tip over, to the general amusement of the room.
“I just don’t like guns, and I don’t like them around children.”
“Mrs. Walker, first of all, we’re cops. We know how to carry our firearms safely. Second, our regulations require us to be armed at all times. Third, I wish you would look at it this way: your son is as safe here with us as he’s ever going to be. You’ll never have to worry about having somebody come over and steal a kid off the playground outside, for example.”
“Why does she have to be here?”
Russell smiled reasonably. “Mrs. Walker, Katie over there didn’t become President. Her father did. Isn’t she entitled to a normal kid’s life, just like your Justin?”
“But it’s dangerous and—”
“Not while we’re around, it isn’t,” he assured her. She just turned away.
“Justin!” Her son turned to see his mother holding his jacket. He paused for a second, and with one finger pushed the blocks a fraction of an inch, waiting for the four-foot pile to teeter over like a falling tree.
“Budding engineer,” Russell heard through his earpiece. “I’ll check her tag number.” He nodded to the female agent in the doorway. In twenty minutes they’d have a new dossier to look over. Probably it would just say that Mrs. Walker was a New Age pain in the ass, but if she had a history of mental problems (possible), or a criminal record (unlikely), it would be something to remember. He scanned the room automatically, then shook his head. SANDBOX was a normal kid surrounded by normal kids. At the moment she was crayoning a blank sheet of paper, her face screwed into a look of intense concentration. She’d been through a normal day, a normal lunch, a normal nap, and soon would have an abnormal trip back to a decidedly abnormal home. She hadn’t noticed the discussion he’d just had with Justin’s mother. Well, kids were smart enough to be kids, which was more than one could say for a lot of their parents.
Mrs. Walker guided her son to the family car, a Volvo wagon to no one’s surprise, where she dutifully strapped him into the safety seat in the back. The agent memorized the tag number for processing, knowing that it would turn nothing of real importance, and knowing that they’d run it anyway, because there was always the off chance that...
It all came back just then, the reason why they had to be careful. Here they were, at Giant Steps, the same day-care center the Ryans had used since SHADOW was a munchkin, just off Ritchie Highway above Annapolis. The bad guys had used the 7-Eleven just across the road to stake out the location, then followed SURGEON in her old Porsche, using a custom van, and on the Route 50 bridge they’d pulled off a sweet little ambush, and later killed a state trooper in their escape. Dr. Ryan had been pregnant with SHORTSTOP then. SANDBOX had been far off into a future yet undreamed of at the time. All of this had a strange effect on Special Agent Marcella Hilton. Unmarried, again—she was twice divorced, with no kids of her own—being around kids had made her heart flutter a little, tough professional that she was. She figured it was part of her hormones, or the way the female brain was wired, or maybe she just liked kids and wished she had one of her own. Whatever it was, the thought that people would deliberately hurt little kids made her blood chill for a brief moment, like a blast of cold wind that came and went.
This place was too vulnerable. And there really were people out there who didn’t care a rat’s ass about hurting kids. And that 7-Eleven was still there. There were six agents on the SANDBOX detail now. That would be down to three or four in a couple of weeks. The Service wasn’t the all-powerful agency people thought it was. Oh, sure, it had a lot of muscle, and investigative clout which few suspected. Alone of the federal police forces, the United States Secret Service could knock on somebody’s door and walk in and conduct a “friendly” interview with someone who might represent a threat—an assumption based on evidence which might or might not be usable in a court of law. The purpose of such an interview would be to let the person know that he or she had an eye fixed firmly on him or her, and though that wasn’t strictly true—the Service had only about 1,200 agents nationwide—the mere thought of it was enough to scare the hell out of people who’d said the wrong thing into the wrong ear.
But those people weren’t the threat. As long as the agents did their job correctly, the casual threat wasn’t a deadly one. Those people almost always tipped their hand, and people like her knew what to look for. It was the ones their intelligence division didn’t hear about who constituted the real threat. Those could be deterred somewhat through a massive show of force, but the massive show was too expensive, too oppressive, too obvious not to attract notice and adverse comment. Even then she remembered another event, months after the near death of SURGEON, SHADOW, and the yet unborn SHORTSTOP. A whole squad, she thought. It was a case study at the Secret Service Academy at Beltsville. The Ryan house had been used to film a re-creation of the event. Chuck Avery—a good, experienced supervisory agent—and his whole squad taken out. As a rookie she’d watched the taped analysis of what had gone wrong, and even then she’d chilled at how easy it had been for that team to make a small mistake, that to be compounded by bad luck and bad timing....
“Yeah, I know.” She turned to see Don Russell, sipping from a plastic coffee cup while he got some fresh air. Another agent was on post inside.
“Did you know Avery?”
“He was two years ahead of me at the academy. He was smart, and careful, and a damned good shot. He dropped one of the bad guys then, in the dark from thirty yards, two rounds in the chest.” A shake of the head. “You don’t make little mistakes in this business, Marci.”
That is when the second chill came, the one that made you want to reach for your weapon, just to be sure that it was there, to tell yourself that you were ready to get the job done. That’s when you remembered, in this case, how cute a little kid could be, and how even if you took the hits you’d make damned sure your last conscious act on the planet would be to put every round through the bastard’s X-ring. Then you blinked, and the image went away.
“She’s a beautiful little girl, Don.”
“I’ve rarely seen an ugly one,” Russell agreed. This was the time when one was supposed to say, Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of her. But they didn’t say that. They didn’t even think it. Instead they looked around at the highway and the trees and the 7-Eleven across Ritchie Highway, wondering what they’d missed, and wondering how much money they could spend on surveillance cameras.
GEORGE WINSTON WAS used to being met. It was the ultimate perk, really. You got off the airplane—almost always an airplane in his case—and there was somebody to meet you and take you to the car whose driver knew the quickest way to where you were going. No hassles with Hertz and figuring the useless little maps out, and getting lost. It cost a lot of money, but it was worth it, because time was the ultimate commodity, and you were born with only so much to spend, and there was no passbook to tell you the exact amount. The Metroliner pulled into Union Station’s track 6. He’d gotten some reading done, and had himself a nice nap between Trenton and Baltimore. A pity the railroad couldn’t make money carrying passengers, but you didn’t have to buy air to fly in, while it was necessary to build a right-of-way for ground transport. Too bad. He collected his coat and briefcase and headed for the door, tipping the first-class attendant on the way out.
“Mr. Winston?” a man asked.
“That’s right.” The man held up a leather ID holder, identifying himself as a federal agent. He had a partner, Winston noted, standing thirty feet away with his topcoat unbuttoned.
“Follow me, please, sir.” With that they were merely three more busy people heading off to an important meeting.
THERE WERE MANY such dossiers, each of them so large that the data had to be edited so as not to overflow the file cabinets, and it was still more convenient to do it with paper
than a computer, because it was hard to get a computer that worked well in his native language. Checking up on the data would not be difficult. For one thing, there would be more press coverage to confirm or alter what he had. For another, he could confirm a lot very simply, merely by having a car drive past a few places once or twice, or by observing roads. There was little danger in that. However careful and thorough the American Secret Service might be, they were not omnipotent. This Ryan fellow had a family, a wife who worked, children who went to school; and Ryan himself had a schedule he had to keep. In their official home they were safe—reasonably so, he corrected himself, since no fixed place was ever truly safe—but that safety did not follow them everywhere, did it?
It was more than anything else a matter of financing and planning. He needed a sponsor.
“HOW MANY DO you need?” the dealer asked.
“How many do you have?” the prospective buyer asked.
“I can get eighty, certainly. Perhaps a hundred,” the dealer thought aloud, sipping at his beer.
“When?”
“A week will suffice?” They were in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, and a major center for this particular trade. “Biological research?”
“Yes, my client’s scientists have a rather interesting project under way.”
“What project might that be?” the dealer asked.
“That I am not at liberty to say,” was the not unexpected answer. Nor would he say who his client was. The dealer didn’t react, and didn’t particularly care. His curiosity was human, not professional. “If your services are satisfactory, we may be back for more.” The usual enticement. The dealer nodded and commenced the substantive bargaining.
“You must understand that this is not an inexpensive undertaking. I must assemble my people. They must find a small population of the creature you desire. There are the problems of capture and transport, export licenses, the usual bureaucratic difficulties.” By which he meant bribes. Trade in African green monkeys had picked up in the last few years. Quite a few companies used them for various experimental purposes. That was generally bad for the monkeys, but there were a lot of monkeys. The African green was in no way endangered, and even if they were, the dealer didn’t especially care. Animals were a national resource for his country, as oil was for the Arabs, to be marketed for hard currency. He didn’t get sentimental about them. They bit and spat, and were generally unpleasant little beggars, “cute” though they might appear to the tourists at Treetops. They also ate the crops tended by the numerous small farmers in the country, and were thoroughly detested for that reason, whatever the game wardens might say.
“These problems are not strictly our concern. Speed is. You will find that we arewilling to reward you handsomely in return for reliable service.”
“Ah.” The dealer finished his beer, and, lifting his hand, snapped his fingers for a refill. He named his price. It included his overhead, pay to the gatherers, the customs people, a policeman or two, and a mid-level government bureaucrat, plus his own net profit, which in the terms of the local economy was actually quite fair, he thought. Not everyone did.
“Agreed,” the buyer said without so much as a sip of his soft drink.
It was almost a disappointment. The dealer enjoyed haggling, so much a part of the African marketplace. He’d scarcely begun to depose on how difficult and involved his business was.
“A pleasure doing business with you, sir. Call me in... five days?”
The buyer nodded. He finished his drink and took his leave. Ten minutes after that, he made a call, the third such communication to the embassy in the day, and all for the same purpose. Though he didn’t know it, yet more such calls had been made in Uganda, Zaire, Tanzania, and Mali.
JACK REMEMBERED HIS first time in the Oval Office, the way you shuffled left to right from the secretaries’ room through what turned out to be a molded door set in a curved wall, much in the manner of an eighteenth-century palace, which the White House actually was, if a modest one in the context of the times. You tended to notice the windows first of all, especially on a sunny day. Their thickness made them look green, rather like the glass walls of an aquarium designed for a very special fish. Next you saw the desk, a large wooden one. It was always intimidating, all the more so if the President was standing there, waiting for you. All this was good, the President thought. It made his current job all the easier.
“George,” Ryan said, extending his hand.
“Mr. President,” Winston responded pleasantly, ignoring the two Secret Service agents standing immediately behind him, there to grab him if he did something untoward. You didn’t have to hear them. The visitor could feel their eyes on the back of his neck, rather like laser beams. He shook Ryan’s hand anyway, and managed a crooked smile. Winston didn’t know Ryan very well. They’d worked together well during the Japanese conflict. Previously they’d bumped into each other at a handful of minor social functions, and he knew of Ryan’s work in the market, discreet but effective. All that time in the intelligence business hadn’t been entirely wasted.
“Sit down.” Jack waved to one of the couches. “Relax. How was the trip down?”
“The usual.” A Navy mess steward appeared seemingly from nowhere and poured two cups of coffee, because it was that time of the day. The coffee, he found, was excellent, and the china exquisite with its gold trim.
“I need you,” Ryan said next.
“Sir, look, there was a lot of damage done to my—”
“Country.”
“I’ve never wanted a government job, Jack,” Winston replied at once, speaking rapidly.
Ryan didn’t even touch his cup. “Why do you think I want you? George, I’ve been there and done that, okay? More than once. I have to put a team together. I’m going to give a speech tonight. You might like what I’m going to say. Okay, first, I need somebody to run Treasury. Defense is okay for the moment. State’s in good hands with Adler. Treasury is first on my list of things that have to be filled with somebody new. I need somebody good. You’re it. Are you clean?” Ryan asked abruptly.
“What—bet your ass I am! I made all my money within the rules. Everybody knows that.” Winston bristled until he realized that he was expected to.
“Good. I need somebody who has the confidence of the financial community. You do. I need somebody who knows how the system really works. You do. I need somebody who knows what’s broke and needs fixing, and what isn’t and doesn’t. You do. I need somebody who isn’t political. You aren’t. I need a dispassionate pro—most of all, George, I need somebody who’s going to hate his job as much as I hate mine.”
“What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. President?”
Ryan leaned back for a second and closed his eyes before going on. “I started working inside when I was thirty-one. I got out once, and I did okay on the Street, but I got sucked back, and here I am.” The eyes opened. “Ever since I started with the Agency, I’ve had to watch how things work on the inside, and guess what? I never did like it. I started on the Street, remember, and I did okay then, too, remember? I figured I’d become an academic after I made my pile. History’s my first love, and I thought I’d teach and study and write, figure out how things worked and pass my knowledge along. I almost made it, and maybe things didn’t work out that way, exactly, but I’ve done a lot of studying and learning. So, George, I’m going to put a team together.”
“To do what?”
“Your job is to clean up Treasury. You’ve got monetary and fiscal policy.”
“You mean—”
“Yes.”
“No political bullshit?” He had to ask that.
“Look, George, I don’t know how to be a politician, and I don’t have time to learn. I never liked the game. I never liked most of the people in it. I just kept trying to serve my country as best I could. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I didn’t have a choice. You remember how it started. People tried to kill me and my family. I didn’t want to get sucked in,
but God damn it, I learned that somebody has to try to get the job done. I’m not going to do it alone anymore, George, and I’m not going to fill all the vacant posts with ticket-punchers who know how to work ‘the system,’ okay? I want people with ideas in here, not politicians with agendas.”
Winston set his cup down, managing not to rattle the saucer as he did so. He was a little surprised that his hand wasn’t shaking. The length and breadth of what Ryan proposed was quite a bit more than the job which he’d had every intention of declining. It would mean more than was obvious. He’d have to cut himself off from his friends—well, not really, but it meant that he would not make executive decisions based on what campaign contributions the Street would give the President as a result of the nice things that Treasury did for the trading houses up there. That’s the way the game had always been played, and though he’d never been a player, he’d talked often enough with those who were, working the system in the same old way, because that was how things were.
“Shit,” he whispered half to himself. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
As founder of the Columbus Group, he’d assumed a duty so basic that few ever thought about it, beyond those who actually undertook it—and not always enough of them. Literally millions of people, directly or indirectly, entrusted their money to him, and that gave him the theoretical ability to be a thief on the cosmic scale. But you couldn’t do that. For one thing, it was illegal, and you ran the risk of rather substandard federal housing as a result of it, with very substandard neighbors to boot. But that wasn’t the reason you didn’t. The reason was that those were people out there, and they trusted you to be honest and smart, and so you treated their money the same as you treated your own, or maybe even a little better, because they couldn’t gamble the way a rich man did. Every so often you’d get a nice letter from some widow, and that was nice, but it really came from inside. Either you were a man of honor or you were not, and honor, some movie writer had once said, was a man’s gift to himself. Not a bad aphorism, Winston told himself. It was also profitable, of course. You did the job in the right way, and chances were that people would reward you for it, but the real satisfaction was playing the game well. The money was merely a result of something more important, because money was transitory, but honor wasn’t.