“NOT ACCOMPLISHING VERY much, am I?” Jack asked, in a voice both quiet and bleak. It was hitting him full force now. There was still a glow, though most of what rose into the sky now was steam rather than smoke. What went into the building was the most depressing sight. Body bags. Rubberized fabric with loop handles at the ends, and some sort of zipper in the middle. Lots of them, and some were coming out now, carried by pairs of firefighters, snaking down the wide steps around the fragments of broken masonry. It had just started, and would not end soon. He hadn’t actually seen a body during his few minutes up top. Somehow, seeing the first few bags was worse.
“No, sir,” Agent Price said, her face looking the same as his. “This isn’t good for you.”
“I know.” Ryan nodded and looked away.
I don’t know what to do, he told himself. Where’s the manual, the training course for this job? Whom do I ask? Where do I go?
I don’t want this job! his mind screamed at itself. Ryan reproached himself for the venality of the thought, but he’d come to this newly dreadful place as some sort of leadership demonstration, parading himself before the TV cameras as though he knew what he was about—and that was a lie. Perhaps not a malicious one. Just stupid. Walk up to the fire chief and ask how it’s going, as though anyone with eyes and a second-grade education couldn’t figure that one out!
“I’m open to ideas,” Ryan said at last.
Special Agent Andrea Price took a deep breath and fulfilled the fantasy of every special agent of the United States Secret Service all the way back to Pinkerton: “Mr. President, you really need to get your, cr, stuff” she couldn’t go that far—“together. Some things you can do and some things you can’t. You have people working for you. For starters, sir, figure out who they are and let them do their jobs. Then, maybe, you can start doing yours.”
“Back to the House?”
“That’s where the phones are, Mr. President.”
“Who’s head of the Detail?”
“It was Andy Walker.” Price didn’t have to say where he was now. Ryan looked down at her and made his first presidential decision.
“You just got promoted.”
Price nodded. “Follow me, sir.” It pleased the agent to see that this President, like all the others, could learn to follow orders. Some of the time, anyway. They’d made it all of ten feet before Ryan slipped on a patch of ice and went down, to be picked back up by two agents. It only made him look all the more vulnerable. A still photographer captured the moment, giving Newsweek its cover photo for the following week.
“AS YOU SEE, President Ryan is now leaving the Hill in what looks like a military vehicle instead of a Secret Service car. What do you suppose he’s up to?” the anchor asked.
“In all fairness to the man,” John the commentator said, “it’s unlikely that he knows at the moment.”
That opinion rang across the globe a third of a second later, to the general agreement of all manner of persons, friends and enemies alike.
SOME THINGS HAVE to be done fast. He didn’t know if they were the right things—well, he did, and they weren’t—but at a certain level of importance the rules got a little muddled, didn’t they? The scion of a political family whose public service went back a couple of generations, he’d been in public life practically since leaving law school, which was another way of saying that he hadn’t held a real job in his entire life. Perhaps he had little practical experience in the economy except as its beneficiary—his family’s financial managers ran the various trusts and portfolios with sufficient skill that he almost never bothered meeting with them except at tax time. Perhaps he had never practiced law though he’d had a hand in passing literally thousands of them. Perhaps he had never served his country in uniform—though he deemed himself an expert in national security. Perhaps a lot of things militated against doing anything. But he knew government, for that had been his profession for all of his active—not to say “working”—life, and at a time like this, the country needed someone who really knew government. The country needed healing, Ed Kealty thought, and he knew about that.
So, he lifted his phone and made a call. “Cliff, this is Ed ...”
1
STARTING NOW
THE FBI’S EMERGENCY command center on the fifth floor of the Hoover building is an odd-shaped room, roughly triangular and surprisingly small, with room for only fifteen or so people to bump shoulders. Number sixteen to arrive, tieless and wearing casual clothes, was Deputy Assistant Director Daniel E. Murray. The senior watch officer was his old friend, Inspector Pat O’Day. A large-framed, rugged man who raised beef cattle as a hobby at his northern Virginia home—this “cowboy” had been born and educated in New Hampshire, but his boots were custom-made—O’Day had a phone to his car, and the room was surprisingly quiet for a crisis room during a real crisis. A curt nod and raised hand acknowledged Murray’s entry. The senior agent waited for O’Day to conclude the call.
“What’s going on, Pat?”
“I was just on the phone with Andrews. They have tapes of the radar and stuff. I have agents from the Washington Field Office heading there to interview the tower people. National Transportation Safety Board will have people there, too, to assist. Initial word, looks like a Japan Airlines 747 kamikaze’d in. The Andrews people say the pilot declared an emergency as an unscheduled KLM flight and drove straight over their runways, hung a little left, and ... well ...” O’Day shrugged. “WFO has people on the Hill now to commence the investigation. I’m assuming this one goes on the books as a terrorist incident, and that gives us jurisdiction.”
“Where’s the ADIC?” Murray asked, meaning the Assistant Director in Charge of the Bureau’s Washington office, quartered at Buzzard’s Point on the Potomac River.
“St. Lucia with Angie, taking a vacation. Tough luck for Tony.” The inspector grunted. Tony Caruso had gotten away only three days earlier. “Tough day for a lot of people. The body count’s going to be huge, Dan, lots worse’n Oklahoma. I’ve sent out a general alert for forensics experts. Mess like this, we’ll have to identify a lot of bodies from DNA. Oh, the TV guys are asking how it’s possible for the Air Force to let this happen.” A shake of the head accompanied the conclusion. O’Day needed somebody to dump on, and the TV commentators were the most attractive target of opportunity. There would be others in due course; both hoped the FBI would not be one of them.
“Anything else we know?”
Pat shook his head. “Nope. It’s going to take time, Dan.”
“Ryan?”
“Was on the Hill, should be on his way to the White House. They caught him on TV. He looks kinda rocky. Our brothers and sisters at USSS are having a really bad night, too. The guy I talked to ten minutes ago almost lost it. We might end up having a jurisdictional conflict over who runs the investigation.”
“Great.” Murray snorted. “We’ll let the AG sort that one—” But there wasn’t an Attorney General, and there wasn’t a Secretary of the Treasury for him to call.
Inspector O’Day didn’t have to run through it. A federal statute empowered the United States Secret Service as lead agency to investigate any attack on the President. But another federal statute gave FBI jurisdiction over terrorism. A local statute for murder also brought the Washington Metropolitan Police in, of course. Toss in the National Transportation Safety Board—until proven otherwise, it could merely be a horrible aircraft accident—and that was just the beginning. Every agency had authority and expertise. The Secret Service, smaller than the FBI, and with fewer resources, did have some superb investigators, and some of the finest technical experts around. NTSB knew more about airplane crashes than anyone in the world. But the Bureau had to be the lead agency for this investigation, didn’t it? Murray thought. Except that Director Shaw was dead, and without him to swing the clout club ...
Jesus, Murray thought. He and Bill went back to the Academy together. They’d worked in the same squad as rookie street agents in riverside Philadelphia,
chasing bank robbers ...
Pat read his face and nodded. “Yeah, Dan, takes time to catch up, doesn’t it? We’ve been gutted like a fish, man.” He handed over a sheet from a legal pad with a handwritten list of known dead.
A nuclear strike wouldn’t have hurt us this badly, Murray realized as he scanned the names. A developing crisis would have given ample strategic warning, and slowly, quietly, senior people would have left Washington for various places of safety, many of them would have survived—or so the planners went—and after the strike there would have been some sort of functioning government to pick up the pieces. But not now.
RYAN HAD COME to the White House a thousand times, to visit, to deliver briefings, for meetings important and otherwise, and most recently to work in his own office as National Security Advisor. This was the first time he hadn’t had to show ID and walk through the metal detectors—more properly, he did walk straight through one from force of habit, but this time, when the buzzer went off, he just kept walking without even reaching for his keys. The difference in demeanor of the Secret Service agents was striking. Like anyone else, they were comforted by familiar surroundings, and though the entire country had just had another lesson in how illusory “safety” was, the illusion was real enough for trained professionals to feel more at ease within the substance of a lie. Guns were holstered, coats buttoned, and long breaths taken as the entourage came in through the East Entrance.
An inner voice told Jack that this was now his house, but he had no wish to believe it. Presidents liked to call it the People’s House, to use the political voice of false modesty to describe a place for which some of them would have willingly run over the bodies of their own children, then say that it wasn’t really all that big a thing. If lies could stain the walls, Jack reflected, then this building would have a very different name. But there was greatness here, too, and that was more intimidating than the pettiness of politics. Here James Monroe had promulgated the Monroe Doctrine and propelled his country into the strategic world for the first time. Here Lincoln had held his country together through the sheer force of his own will. Here Teddy Roosevelt had made America a real global player, and sent his Great White Fleet around the world to announce America. Here Teddy’s distant cousin had saved his country from internal chaos and despair, with little more than a nasal voice and an up-angled cigarette holder. Here Eisenhower had exercised power so skillfully that hardly anyone had noticed his doing anything at all. Here Kennedy had faced down Khrushchev, and nobody had cared that doing so had covered a multitude of blunders. Here Reagan had plotted the destruction of America’s most dangerous enemy, only to be accused of sleeping most of the time. What ultimately counted more—the achievements or the dirty little secrets committed by imperfect men who only briefly stepped beyond their weaknesses? But those brief and halting steps made up the sort of history that lived, while the rest was, mainly, forgotten—except by revisionist historians who just didn’t get the fact that people weren’t supposed to be perfect.
But it still wasn’t his house.
The entrance was a tunnel of sorts, which headed under the East Wing, where the First Lady—until ninety minutes earlier Anne Durling had her offices. By law the First Lady was a private citizen—an odd fiction for someone with a paid staff—but in reality her functions were often hugely important, however unofficial they might be. The walls here were those of a museum, not a home, as they walked past the small White House theater, where the President could watch movies with a hundred or so close personal friends. There were several sculptures, many by Frederic Remington, and the general motif was supposed to be “pure” American. The paintings were of past presidents, and Ryan’s eyes caught them—their lifeless eyes seemed to look down at him with suspicion and doubt. All the men who had gone before, good and bad, whether judged well or poorly by historians, they looked at him—
I’m an historian, Ryan told himself. I’ve written a few books. I’ve judged the actions of others from a safe distance of both time and space. Why didn’t he see this? Why didn’t he do that? Now, too late, he knew better. He was here now, and from the inside it looked very different. From the outside you could see in, looking around first to catch all the information and analyze it as it passed by, stopping it when you had to, even making it go backward, the better to understand it all, taking your time to get things exactly right.
But from the inside it wasn’t that way at all. Here everything came directly at you like a series of onrushing trains, from all directions at once, moving by their own time schedules, leaving you little room to maneuver or reflect. Ryan could sense that already. And the people in the paintings had mainly come to this place with the luxury of time to think about their ascension, with the luxury of trusted advisers, and of good will. Those were benefits he didn’t have. To historians, however, they wouldn’t matter for much more than a cursory paragraph, or maybe even a whole page, before the writer moved on with pitiless analysis.
Everything he said or did, Jack knew, would be subjected to the 20/20 vision of hindsight—and not just from this moment forward. People would now look into his past for information on his character, his beliefs, his actions good and bad. From the moment the aircraft had struck the Capitol building, he was President, and every breath he’d drawn since would be examined in a new and unforgiving light for generations to come. His daily life would have no privacy, and even in death he would not be safe from scrutiny by people who had no idea what it was like merely to walk into this oversized dwelling-office-museum and know that it was your prison into all eternity. The bars were invisible, perhaps, but even more real because of it.
So many men had lusted for this job, only to find how horrid and frustrating it was. Jack knew that from his own historical readings, and from seeing three men at close quarters who’d occupied the Oval Office. At least they had come here with eyes supposedly open, and perhaps they could be blamed for having minds smaller than their egos. How much the worse for someone who’d never wished for it? And would history judge Ryan more kindly for it? That was worth an ironic snort. No, he’d come to this House at a time when his country needed, and if he didn’t meet that need, then he’d be cursed for all future time as a failure, even though he’d come to the job only by accident—condemned by a man now dead to do the job which the other man had craved.
For the Secret Service, this was a time to relax a little. Lucky them, Ryan thought, allowing bitterness to creep into his mind, unfair or not. It was their job to protect him and his family. It was his job now to protect them and theirs, and those of millions of others.
“This way, Mr. President.” Price turned left into the ground-floor corridor. Here Ryan first saw the White House staff people, standing there to see their new charge, the man whom they would serve to the best of their abilities. Like everyone else, they just stood and looked, without knowing what to say, their eyes evaluating the man and without revealing what they thought, though they would surely exchange views in the privacy of their locker or lunchrooms at the first possible moment. Jack’s tie was still crooked in his collar, and he still wore the turnout coat. The water spray that had frozen in his hair and given him an undeserved gray look was melting now. One of the staff members raced out of sight as the entourage continued west. He reappeared a minute later, darting through the security detail and handing Ryan a towel.
“Thank you,” Jack said in surprise. He stood still for a moment and started drying his hair. There he saw a photographer running backward and aiming his camera, snapping merrily away. The Secret Service didn’t impede him in any way. That, Ryan thought, made him a member of the staff, the official White House photographer whose job it was to memorialize everything. Great, my own people spy on me! But it wasn’t time to interfere with anything, was it?
“Where are we going, Andrea?” Jack asked as they passed yet more portraits of Presidents and First Ladies, all staring at him ...
“The Oval Office. I thought ...”
“Si
tuation Room.” Ryan stopped dead, still toweling off. “I’m not ready for that room yet, okay?”
“Of course, Mr. President.” At the end of the wide corridor they turned left into a small foyer walled with cheap-looking wood latticework, and then right to go outside again, because there wasn’t a corridor from the White House into the West Wing. That’s why no one had taken his coat, Jack realized.
“Coffee,” Jack ordered. At least the food service would be good here. The White House Mess was run by Navy stewards, and his first presidential cup of coffee was poured into an exquisite cup from a silver pot, by a sailor whose smile was both professional and genuine, and who, like everyone else, was curious about the new Boss. It occurred to Ryan that he was like a creature in the zoo. Interesting, even fascinating—and how would he adapt to the new cage?
Same room, different seat. The President sat in the middle of the table so that aides could assemble on both sides. Ryan picked his place and sat in it naturally enough. It was only a chair, after all. The so-called trappings of power were merely things, and the power itself was an illusion, because such power was always accompanied by obligations that were greater still. You could see and exercise the former. The latter could only be felt. Those obligations came with the air, which suddenly seemed heavy in this windowless room. Jack sipped at his coffee briefly, looking around. The wall clock said 11:14 P.M. He’d been President for ... what? Ninety minutes? About the time for the drive from his home to ... his new home ... depending on traffic.
“Where’s Arnie?”
“Right here, Mr. President,” Arnold van Damm said as he came through the door. Chief of staff to two Presidents, he would now set an all-time record as chief of staff to a third. His first President had resigned in disgrace. His second was dead. Would the third one be the charm—or did bad things always come in threes? Two adages, equally quoted, and mutually exclusive. Ryan’s eyes just bored in on him, asking the question that he couldn’t voice: What do I do now?