So it was with lions, it would seem. Even one so powerful could be outmaneuvered by lesser creatures if the time and the setting were right, and that was both the lesson and the task of the day. Finished with his prayers, Daryaei called for Badrayn. The younger man was a skilled tactician and gatherer of information. He needed the direction of one schooled in strategy, but with that guidance he would be very useful indeed.
IT HAD BEEN conclusively decided in an hour’s conversation with his country’s leading experts that the President could do absolutely nothing at all. The next move was simply to wait and watch and see. Any citizen could do it, but America’s leading experts could wait and watch and see a little faster than anyone else, or so they told themselves. That would all be done for the President, of course, and so Ryan walked out of the Situation Room, up the steps, and outside to see wet, cold rain falling on the South Lawn beyond the overhang of the walkway. The coming day promised to be blustery, with March arriving, typically, like a lion, then to be replaced by a lamb. Or so the aphorism went. At the moment it just looked gloomy, however nurturing the rain might be to ground recovering from a cold, bitter winter.
“This will finish off the last of the snow,” Andrea Price said, surprising herself by speaking unbidden to her principal.
Ryan turned and smiled. “You work harder than I do, Agent Price, and you’re a—”
“Girl?” she asked with a weary smile.
“My chauvinism must be showing. I beg your pardon, ma’am. Sorry, I was just wishing for a cigarette. Quit years ago—Cathy bullied me into it. More than once,” Jack admitted with good humor. “It can be tough, being married to a doctor.”
“It can be tough, being married.” Price was wedded to her job, with two failed relationships to prove it. Her problem, if one could call it that, was in possessing the same devotion to duty that only men were supposed to have. It was a simple enough fact, but one which first a lawyer and then an advertising executive had failed to grasp.
“Why do we do it, Andrea?” Ryan asked.
Special Agent Price didn’t know, either. The President necessarily was a father figure to her. He was the man supposed to have the answers, but after years on the Detail, she knew better. Her father had always had such answers, or so it had seemed in her youth. Then she’d grown, finished her education, joined the Service, worked her way rapidly up a steep and slippery ladder, and in the process lost her way in life somehow. Now she was at the pinnacle of her profession, alongside the nation’s “father,” only to learn that life didn’t allow people to know what they wanted and needed to know. Her job was hard enough. His was infinitely worse, and maybe it was better for the President to be something other than the decent and honorable gentleman John Patrick Ryan was. Maybe a son of a bitch could survive better here ...
“No answer?” Ryan smiled at the rain. “I think you’re supposed to say that somebody has to do it. Jesus, I just tried to seduce thirty new senators. You know that? Seduce,” Jack repeated. “Like they were girls or something, and like I was that kind of guy—and I don’t have a fucking clue.” The voice stopped cold and the head shook in surprise at what he’d said. “Sorry, excuse me.”
“That’s okay, Mr. President. I’ve heard the word before, even from other presidents.”
“Who do you talk to?” Jack asked. “Once upon a time, I’d talk to my father, my priest, to James Greer when I worked for him, or Roger, until a few weeks ago. Now they all ask me. You know, they told me at Quantico, at the Basic Officers’ School, that command could be lonely. Boy, they weren’t kidding. They really weren’t kidding.”
“You have one hell of a good wife, sir,” Price pointed out, envying both of them for that.
“There’s always supposed to be somebody smarter than you. The person you go to when you’re just not sure. Now they come to me. I’m not smart enough for that.” Ryan paused, just then hearing what Price had told him. “You’re right, but she’s busy enough, and I’m not supposed to burden her with my problems.”
Price decided to laugh. “You are a chauvinist, Boss.”
That snapped his head around. “I beg your pardon, Ms. Price!” Ryan said in a voice that sounded cross until a presidential laugh followed it. “Please don’t tell the media I said that.”
“Sir, I don’t tell reporters where the bathroom is.”
The President yawned. “What’s tomorrow look like?”
“Well, you’re in the office all day. I imagine this Iraq business will wreck your morning. I’ll be out early, back in the afternoon. I’m going to do a walk-around tomorrow, to check security arrangements for all the kids. We have a meeting to see if there’s a way to get SURGEON to work and back without the helicopter—”
“That is funny, isn’t it?” Ryan observed.
“A FLOTUS with a real job is something the system never really allowed for.”
“Real job, hell! She makes more money than I do, has for ten years, except for when I was back in the market. The papers haven’t picked up on that, either. She’s a great doc.”
His words were meandering, Price saw. He was too tired to think straight. Well, that happened to Presidents, too. Which was why she was around.
“Her patients love her, that’s what Roy says. Anyway, I’m going to look over arrangements for all your children—routine, sir, I’m responsible for all of the arrangements for your family. Agent Raman will stand post with you for most of the day. We’re moving him up. He’s coming along very nicely,” Special Agent Price reported.
“The one who got the fire coat to disguise me back on the first night?” Jack asked.
“You knew?” Price asked in return. The President turned to enter the White House proper. The grin was one of exhaustion, but for all that the blue eyes twinkled at his principal agent.
“I’m not that dumb, Andrea.”
No, she decided, it wasn’t better to have a son of a bitch as POTUS.
21
RELATIONSHIPS
PATRICK O’DAY WAS A widower whose life had changed in a particularly cruel and abrupt way after a late-life marriage. His wife, Deborah, had been a fellow agent in the Laboratory Division, an expert on forensic investigation, which had occasioned a great deal of travel out of headquarters, until one afternoon, flying into Colorado Springs, her aircraft had crashed into the ground for reasons still undetermined. It had been her first field assignment after maternity leave, and she’d left behind a daughter, Megan, aged fourteen weeks.
Megan was two and a half now, and Inspector O’Day was still wrestling with how he should introduce Megan to her mother. He had videotapes and photographs, but were he to point to dyed paper or a phosphor screen and tell his daughter, “That’s Mommy,” might it make her think that all life was artificial? What effect would it have on her development? It was one more question in the life of a man supposed to find answers. The single fatherhood enforced on him by fate had made him all the more devoted as a father, and this on top of a professional career in which he’d worked no less than six kidnappings all the way to conclusion. Six four, two hundred wiry pounds, he had sacrificed his Zapata mustache to the requirements of Headquarters Division, but tough guy among tough guys, his attention to his daughter would have made his colleagues chuckle. Her hair was blondish and long, and each morning he brushed it to silky smoothness after dressing her in colorful toddler clothes and helping her with her tiny sneaks. For Megan, Daddy was a great big protective bear who towered into the blue sky, and snatched her off the ground like a rocket so that she could wrap her arms around his neck.
“Oof!” Daddy said. “You hug too hard!”
“Did I hurt?” Megan asked in mock alarm. It was part of the morning routine.
A smile. “No, not this time.” With that, he walked out of the house and opened the door to his muddy pickup, carefully strapped her into her car seat, and set her lunch box and blanky between them. It was six-thirty, and they were on their way to a new day-care center. O’Day could not star
t his truck without looking down at Megan, the image of her mother, a daily realization that always made him bite his lip and close his eyes and shake his head, wondering again why the 737 had rolled and plunged straight into the ground with his wife of sixteen months in seat 18-F.
The new day-care center was more convenient to his route to work, and the people next door loved it for their twin boys. He turned left onto Ritchie Highway, and found the place right across from a 7-Eleven where he could get a pint of coffee for the commute in on U.S. 50. Giant Steps, nice name.
Hell of a way to make a living, Pat thought, parking his truck. Marlene Daggett was always there at six, tending to the children of the bureaucrats who trekked to D.C. every morning. She even came out to meet them for the first arrival.
“Mr. O’Day! And this is Megan!” the teacher announced with stunning enthusiasm for so early an hour. Megan had her doubts, and looked up at her daddy. She turned back in surprise to see something special. “Her name is Megan, too. She’s your bear, and she’s been waiting all day for you.”
“Oh.” The little girl seized the brown-furred creature and hugged it, name tag and all. “Hello.”
Mrs. Daggett looked up in a way that told the FBI agent, it works every time. “You have your blanky?”
“Right here, ma’am,” O’Day told her, also handing over the forms he’d completed the night before. Megan had no medical problems, no allergies to medicine, milk, or food; yes, in case of a real emergency you can take her to the local hospital; and the inspector’s work and pager numbers, and his parents’ number, and the number of Deborah’s parents, who were damned good grandparents. Giant Steps was well organized. O’Day didn’t know how well organized only because there was something Mrs. Daggett wasn’t supposed to talk casually about. His identity was being checked out by the Secret Service.
“Well, Miss Megan, I think it’s time for us to play and make some new friends.” She looked up. “We’ll take good care of her.”
O’Day got back into his truck with the usual minor pain that attended leaving his daughter behind—anywhere, no matter the time or place—and jumped across the street to the 7-Eleven for his commute coffee. He had a conference scheduled at nine o’clock to go over further developments on the crash investigation—they were down to T-crossing and I-dotting now—followed by a day of administrative garbage which would at least not prevent him from picking his little girl up on time. Forty minutes later, he pulled into FBI Headquarters at Tenth and Pennsylvania. His post as roving inspector gave him a reserved parking place. From there he walked, this morning, to the indoor pistol range.
An expert marksman since Boy Scouts, Pat O’Day had also been a “principal firearms instructor” at several FBI field offices, which meant that he’d been selected by the SAC to supervise weapons training for the other agents—always an important part of a cop’s life, even though few ever fired their side arms in anger.
The range was rarely busy this time of day—he got in at 7:25—and the inspector selected two boxes of Federal 10mm hollow-points for his big stainless Smith & Wesson 1076 automatic, along with a couple of standard “Q” targets and a set of ear protectors. The target was a simple white cardboard panel with an outline of the vital parts of a human body. The shape resolved itself into the rough size and configuration of a farmer’s steel milk can, with the letter “Q” in the center, about where the heart would be. He attached the target to the spring-clip on the traveler, set the distance for thirty feet, and hit the travel switch. As it moved downrange, he let his thoughts idle, contemplating the sports page and the new Orioles lineup in spring-training camp. The range hardware was programmable. On arriving at its destination, the target turned sideways, and became nearly invisible. Without looking, O’Day dialed the timer to a random setting and continued to look downrange, his hands at his side. Now his thinking changed. There was a Bad Guy there. A serious Bad Guy. Convicted felon, now cornered. A Bad Guy who had told informants that he’d never go back inside, never be taken alive. In his long career, Inspector O’Day had heard that one many times, and whenever possible he’d given the subject the opportunity to keep his word—but they all folded, dropped their gun, wet their pants, or even broke down into tears when confronted by real danger instead of the kind more easily considered over beers or a joint. But not this time. This Bad Guy was serious. He had a hostage. A child, perhaps. Maybe even his own little Megan. The thought made his eyes narrow. A gun to her head. In the movies, the Bad Guy would tell you to drop your weapon, but if you did that, all you were guaranteed was a dead cop and a dead hostage, and so you talked to your Bad Guy. You made yourself sound calm and reasonable and conciliatory, and you waited for him to relax, just a little, just enough to move the gun away from the hostage’s head. It might take hours, but sooner or later——
—the timer clicked, and the target card turned to face the agent. O’Day’s right hand moved in a blur, snatching the pistol from its holster. Simultaneously, his right foot moved backward, his body pivoted and crouched slightly, and the left hand joined the right on the rubber grips when the gun was halfway up. His eyes acquired the gunsights at the bottom of his peripheral vision, and the moment they were aligned with the head of the “Q” target, his finger depressed the trigger twice, firing so fast that both ejected cartridge cases were in the air at the same time. It was called a double-tap, and O’Day had practiced it for so many years that the sounds almost blended in the air, and the two-shot echo was just returning from the steel backstop when the empty cases pinged off the concrete floor, but by then there were two holes in the head of the target, less than an inch apart, between and just above where the eyes would be. The target flipped side-on, less than a second after it had turned, rather nicely simulating the fall of the subject to the ground.
Yes.
“I think you got ’em there, Tex.”
O’Day turned, startled from his fantasy by a familiar voice. “Morning, Director.”
“Hey, Pat.” Murray yawned, a set of ear protectors dangling in his left hand. “You’re pretty fast. Hostage scenario?”
“I try to train for the worst possible situation.”
“Your little girl.” Murray nodded. They all did that, because the hostage had to be important enough in your mind. “Well, you got him. Show me again,” the Director ordered. He wanted to watch O’Day’s technique. There was always something to learn. After the second iteration, there was one ragged hole in the target’s notional forehead. It was actually rather intimidating for Murray, though he considered himself an expert marksman. “I need to practice more.”
O’Day relaxed his routine now. If you could do it with your first shot of the day—and he’d done it with all four—you still had it figured out. Two minutes and twenty shots later, the target’s head was an annulus. Murray, in the next lane, was busy in the standard Jeff Cooper technique, two rapid shots into the chest, followed by a slower aimed round into the head. When both were satisfied that their targets were dead, it was time to contemplate the day.
“Anything new?” the Director asked.
“No, sir. More follow-up interviews on the JAL case are coming in, but nothing startling.”
“What about Kealty?”
O’Day shrugged. He was not allowed to interfere with the OPR investigation, but he did get daily summaries. A case of this magnitude had to be reported to somebody, and though supervision of the case was entirely under the purview of OPR, the information developed also went to the Director’s office, filtered through his lead roving inspector. “Dan, enough people went in and out of Secretary Hanson’s office that anybody could have walked off with the letter, assuming there was one, which, our people think, there probably was. At least Hanson talked to enough people about it—or so those people tell us.”
“I think that one will just blow over,” Murray observed.
“GOOD MORNING, Mr. President.”
Another day in the routine. The kids were off. Cathy was off. Ryan emerge
d from his quarters suited and tied—his jacket was buttoned, which was unusual for him, or had been until moving in here—and his shoes shined by one of the valet staff. Except that Jack still couldn’t think of this place as a home. More like a hotel, or the VIP quarters he’d had while traveling on Agency business, albeit far more ornate and with much better service.
“You’re Raman?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir,” Special Agent Aref Raman replied. He was six feet and solidly built, more a weight lifter than a runner, Jack thought, though that might come from the body armor that many of the Detail members wore. Ryan judged his age at middle thirties. Good-looking in a Mediterranean sort of way, with a shy smile and eyes as blue as SURGEON’S. “SWORDSMAN is moving,” he said into his microphone. “To the office.”
“Raman, where’s that from?” Jack asked, on the way to the elevator.
“Mother Lebanese, father Iranian, came over in ’79, when the Shah had his problems. Dad was close to the regime.”
“So what do you think of the Iraq situation?” the President asked.
“Sir, I hardly even speak the language anymore.” The agent smiled. “Now, if you want to ask me about who’s lookin’ good in the NCAA finals, I’m your man.”
“Kentucky,” Ryan said decisively. The White House elevator was old, pre—Art Deco in the interior finishings, with worn black buttons, which the President wasn’t allowed to push. Raman did that for him.
“Oregon’s going all the way. I’m never wrong, sir. Ask the guys. I won the last three pools. Nobody’ll bet against me anymore. The finals will be Oregon and Duke—my school—and Oregon will win by six or eight. Well, maybe less if Maceo Rawlings has a good night,” Raman added.
“What did you study at Duke?”