“Pre-law, but I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Actually I decided that criminals shouldn’t have any rights, and so I figured I’d rather be a cop, and I joined the Service.”
“Married?” Ryan wanted to know the people around him. At one level, it was mere good manners. At another, these people were sworn to defend his life, and he couldn’t treat them like employees.
“Never found the right girl—at least not yet.”
“Muslim?”
“My parents were, but after I saw all the trouble religion caused them, well”—he grinned—“if you ask around, they’ll tell you my religion is ACC basketball. I never miss a Duke game on the TV. Damned shame Oregon’s so tough this year. But that’s one thing you can’t change.”
The President chuckled at the truth of that statement. “Aref, you said, your first name?”
“Actually, they call me Jeff. Easier to pronounce,” Raman explained as the door opened. The agent positioned himself in the center of the doors, blocking a direct line of sight to POTUS. A member of the Uniform Division was standing there, along with two more of the Detail, all of them known by sight to Raman. With a nod, he walked out, with Ryan in tow, and the group turned west, past the side corridor that led to the bowling alley and the carpenter shops.
“Okay, Jeff, an easy day planned,” Ryan told him unnecessarily. The Secret Service knew his daily schedule before he did.
“Easy for us, maybe.”
They were waiting for him in the Oval Office. The Foleys, Bert Vasco, Scott Adler, and one other person stood when the President walked in. They’d already been scanned for weapons and nuclear material.
“Ben!” Jack said. He paused to set his early morning papers on the desk, and joined his guests.
“Mr. President,” Dr. Ben Goodley replied with a smile.
“Ben’s prepared the morning brief,” Ed Foley explained.
Since not all of the morning visitors were part of the inner circle, Raman would stay in the room, lest somebody leap across the coffee table and try to strangle the President. A person didn’t need a firearm to be lethal. A few weeks of study and practice could turn any reasonably fit person into enough of a martial-arts expert to kill an unwary victim. For that reason, members of the Detail carried not only pistols, but also Asps, police batons made of telescoping steel segments. Raman watched as this Goodley—a carded national intelligence officer—handed out the briefing sheets. Like many members of the Secret Service, he got to hear nearly everything. The “EYES-ONLY PRESIDENT” sticker on a particularly sensitive folder didn’t really mean that. There was almost always someone else in the room, and while the Detail members professed even among themselves not to pay any attention to such things, what that really meant was that they didn’t discuss them very much. Not hearing and not remembering were something else. Cops were not trained or paid to forget things, much less to ignore them.
In that sense, Raman thought, he was the perfect spy. Trained by the United States of America to be a law enforcement officer, he had performed brilliantly in the field, mainly in counterfeiting cases. He was a proficient marksman, and a very organized thinker—a trait revealed all the way back in his schooling; he’d graduated from Duke summa cum laude, with nothing less than an A grade on his transcript, plus he’d been a varsity wrestler. It was useful for an investigator to have a good memory, and he did. Photographic, in fact, a talent which had attracted the Detail leadership to him early on, because the agents protecting the President needed to be able to recognize a particular face instantly from the scores of photographs which they carried when the Boss was out pressing flesh. During the Fowler administration, as a junior agent gazetted to the Detail from the St. Louis field office to cover a fund-raising dinner, he’d ID’d and detained a suspected presidential stalker who’d turned out to have a .22 automatic in his pocket. Raman had pulled the man from the crowd so quietly and skillfully that the subject’s processing into the Missouri state mental-health system had never made the papers, which was just what they tried to achieve. The young agent had “Detail” written all over him, the then-Director of the United States Secret Service had decided on reviewing the case, and so Raman had been transferred over soon after Roger Durling’s ascension to the Presidency. As a junior member of the Detail he’d stood boring hours on post, run alongside the Presidential limousine, and gradually worked his way up rather rapidly for a young man. He’d worked the punishing hours without complaints, only commenting from time to time that, as an immigrant, he knew how important America was, and as his distant ancestors might have served Darius the Great as one of the “Immortals,” so he relished doing the same for his new country. It was so easy, really, much easier than the task his brother—ethnic, not biological—had performed in Baghdad a short time earlier. Americans, whatever they might say to pollsters, truly loved immigrants in their large and foolish hearts. They knew much, and they were always learning, but one thing they had yet to learn was that you could never look into another human heart.
“No assets we can use on the ground,” Mary Pat was saying.
“Good intercepts, though,” Goodley went on. “NSA is really coming through for us. The whole Ba’ath leadership is in the jug, and I don’t think they’re going to be coming out, at least not standing up.”
“So Iraq is fully decapitated?”
“A military ruling council, colonels and junior generals. Afternoon TV showed them with an Iranian mullah. No accident,” Bert Vasco said positively. “The least that comes out of this is a rapprochement with Iran. At most, the two countries merge. We’ll know that in a couple of days—two weeks at the outside.”
“The Saudis?” Ryan asked.
“They’re having kittens, Jack,” Ed Foley replied at once. “I talked with Prince Ali less than an hour ago. They cobbled together an aid package that would just about have paid off our national debt in an effort to buy the new Iraqi regime—did it overnight, biggest goddamned letter of credit ever drafted—but nobody’s answering the phone. That has ’em shook in Riyadh. Iraq’s always been willing to talk business. Not now.”
And that would be what frightened all the states on the Arabian Peninsula, Ryan knew. It wasn’t well appreciated in the West that the Arabs were businessmen. Not ideologues, not fanatics, not lunatics, but businessmen. Theirs was a maritime trading culture that predated Islam, a fact remembered in America only in remakes of Sinbad the Sailor movies. In that sense they were very like Americans, despite the difference in language, clothing, and religion, and just like Americans they had trouble understanding people who were not willing to do business, to reach an accommodation, to make some sort of exchange. Iran was such a country, changed from the previous state of affairs under the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini into a theocracy. They’re not like us was the universal point of concern for any culture. They’re not like us ANYMORE would be a very frightening development for Gulf States who’d always known that, despite political differences, there had always been an avenue of commonality and communication.
“Tehran?” Jack asked next. Ben Goodley took the question unto himself.
“Official news broadcasts welcome the development—the routine offers of peace and renewed friendship, but nothing beyond that at this point,” Goodley said. “Officially, that is. Unofficially, we’re getting all sorts of intercept traffic. People in Baghdad are asking for instructions, and people in Tehran are giving them. For the moment they’re saying to let the situation develop apace. The revolutionary courts come next. We’re seeing a lot of Islamic clergy on TV, preaching love and freedom and all that nice stuff. When the trials start, and people start backing into walls to pose for rifle-fire, then there’s going to be a total vacuum.”
“Then Iran takes over, probably, or maybe runs Iraq like a puppet on a string,” Vasco said, flipping through the latest set of intercepts. “Goodley may be right. I’m reading this SIGINT stuff for the first time. Excuse me, Mr. President, but I’ve been concentrating on the
political side. This stuff is more revealing than I expected it to be.”
“You’re saying it means more than I think it does?” the NIO asked.
Vasco nodded without looking up. “I think it might. This is not good,” the desk officer opined darkly.
“Later today, the Saudis are going to ask us to hold their hand,” Secretary Adler pointed out. “What do I tell them?”
Ryan’s reply was so automatic that it startled him. “Our commitment to the Kingdom is unchanged. If they need us, we’re there, now and forever.” And with two sentences, Jack thought a second later, he had committed the full power and credibility of the United States of America to a non-democratic country seven thousand miles away. Fortunately, Adler made it easier for him.
“I fully agree, Mr. President. We can’t do anything else.” Everyone else nodded agreement, even Ben Goodley. “We can do that quietly. Prince Ali understands, and he can make the King understand that we’re not kidding.”
“Next stop,” Ed Foley said, “we have to brief Tony Bretano in. He’s pretty good, by the way. Knows how to listen,” the DCI-designate informed the President. “You plan to do a cabinet meeting about this?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. I think we should play this one cool. America is observing regional developments with interest, but there’s nothing for us to get excited about. Scott, you handle the press briefing through your people.”
“Right,” SecState replied.
“Ben, what do they have you doing at Langley now?”
“Mr. President, they went and made me a senior watch officer for the Operations Center.”
“Good briefing,” Ryan told the younger man, then turned to the DCI. “Ed, he works for me now. I need an NIO who speaks my language.”
“Gee, do I at least get a decent relief pitcher back?” Foley replied with a laugh. “This kid’s a good prospect, and I expect to be in the pennant race this fall.”
“Nice try, Ed. Ben, your hours just got worse. For now, you can have my old office around the corner. The food’s a lot better here,” the President promised.
Throughout it all, Aref Raman stood still, leaning against the white-painted walls while his eyes flickered automatically from one visitor to another. He was trained not to trust anyone, with the possible exceptions of the President’s wife and kids. No one else. Of course, they all trusted him, including the ones who had trained him not to trust anyone, because everybody had to trust somebody.
It was just a matter of timing, really, and one of the things his American education and professional training had conferred upon him was the patience to wait for the chance to make the proper move. But other events on the other side of the globe were bringing that moment closer. Behind expressionless eyes Raman thought that maybe he needed guidance. His mission was no longer the random event he’d promised to fulfill twenty years earlier. That he could do almost any time, but he was here now, and while anyone could kill, and while a dedicated person could kill almost anyone, only a truly skilled assassin could kill the proper person at the proper moment in pursuit of a larger goal. So deliciously ironic, he thought, that while his mission came from God, every factor in its accomplishment had come directly from the Great Satan himself, embodied in the life of one man who could best serve Allah by departing this life at just the proper moment. Picking the moment would be the hard part, and so after twenty years, Raman decided that he might just have to break cover after all. There was a danger in that, but, he judged, a slight one.
“YOUR OBJECTIVE IS a bold one,” Badrayn said calmly. Inwardly he was anything but calm. It was breathtaking.
“The meek do not inherit the earth,” Daryaei replied, having for the first time explained his mission in life to someone outside his own inner circle of clerics.
It was a struggle for both of them to act like gamblers around a poker table, while they discussed a plan that would change the shape of the world. For Daryaei it was a concept toward which he’d labored and thought and planned for more than a generation, the culmination of everything he’d ever done in life, the fulfillment of a dream, and such a goal as to put his name aside that of the Prophet himself—if he achieved it. The unification of Islam. That was how he typically expressed it in his inner circle.
Badrayn merely saw the power. The creation of a new superstate centered on the Persian Gulf, a state with immense economic power, a huge population, self-sustaining in every detail and able to expand across Asia and Africa, perhaps fulfilling the wishes of the Prophet Mohammed, though he didn’t pretend to know what the founder of his religion would or would not have wished. He left that to men like Daryaei. For Badrayn the game was simply power, and religion or ideology merely defined the team identities. His team was this one because of where he’d been born, and because he’d once looked closely at Marxism and decided it was insufficient to the task.
“It is possible,” Badrayn said after a few more seconds of contemplation.
“The historical moment is unique. The Great Satan”—he didn’t really like to fall into ideological cant in discussions of statecraft, but sometimes there was no avoiding it—“is weak. The Lesser Satan is destroyed, with its Islamic republics ready to fall into our laps. They need an identity, and what better identity could there be than the Holy Faith?”
And that was entirely true, Badrayn agreed with a silent nod. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its replacement with the so-called Confederation of Independent States had merely generated a vacuum not yet filled. The southern tier of “republics” were still economically tied to Moscow, rather like a series of carts hitched to a dying horse. They’d always been rebellious, unsettled mini-nations whose religion had set them apart from the atheist empire, and now they were all struggling to establish their own economic identity so that they could once and for all separate themselves from the center of a dead country to which they’d never truly belonged. But they couldn’t sustain themselves economically, not in the modern age. They all needed another patron, another guide into the new century. That new leadership had to mean money, and lots of it, plus the unifying banner of religion and culture long denied them by Marxism-Leninism. In return, the republics would provide land and people. And resources.
“The obstacle is America, but you do not need me to tell you that,” Badrayn observed unnecessarily. “And America is too large and powerful to destroy.”
“I’ve met this Ryan. But first, you tell me what you think of him.”
“He’s no fool, and no coward,” Badrayn said judiciously. “He has shown physical bravery, and he is well versed in intelligence operations. He is well educated. The Saudis trust him, as do the Israelis.” Those two countries mattered at this moment. So did a third: “The Russians know and respect him.”
“What else?”
“Do not underestimate him. Do not underestimate America. We have both seen what happens to those who do,” Badrayn said.
“But America’s current state?”
“What I have seen tells me that President Ryan is working hard to reconstitute the government of his country. It is a huge task, but America is a fundamentally stable country.”
“What about the problem in the succession?”
“This I do not understand,” Badrayn admitted. “I haven’t seen enough news reports to understand the issues.”
“I have met Ryan,” Daryaei said, finally revealing his own thoughts. “He is an assistant, nothing more. He appears strong, but is not. Were he a man of strength, he would deal with this Kealty directly. The man commits treason, does he not? But this is not important. Ryan is one man. America is one country. Both can be attacked, at the same time, from more than one direction.”
“Lion and hyenas,” Badrayn noted, then explained himself. Daryaei was so pleased with the idea that he didn’t object to his own place in the metaphor.
“Not one great attack, but many small ones?” the cleric asked.
“It has worked before.”
“And what of
many large ones? Against America, and against Ryan. For that matter, what if Ryan were to fall? What would happen then, my young friend?”
“Within their system of government, chaos would result. But I would counsel caution. I would also recommend allies. The more hyenas and the more directions, the better to harry the lion. As for attacking Ryan personally,” Badrayn went on, wondering why his host had said that, and wondering if it was an error, “the President of the United States is a difficult target, well protected and well informed.”
“So I am told,” Daryaei replied, behind dark eyes devoid of expression. “What other countries would you recommend as our allies?”
“Have you paid close attention to the conflict between Japan and America?” Badrayn asked. “Did you ever wonder why some large dogs did not bark at all?” It was a funny thing about large dogs. They were always hungry. More than once now, however, Daryaei had talked about Ryan and his protection. One dog was the hungriest of all. It would make for an interesting pack.
“MAYBE IT JUST malfunctioned.”
The Gulfstream representatives were sitting in a room with Swiss civil-aviation officials, along with the chief of flight operations of the corporation which owned the jets. His written records showed that the aircraft had been properly maintained by a local firm. All parts had come from the approved suppliers. The Swiss corporation which did the maintenance had ten years of accident-free history behind it, regulated in turn by the same government agency which oversaw the investigation.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the Gulfstream rep agreed. The flight-data recorder was a robust piece of hardware, but they didn’t always survive crashes, because every crash was different. A careful search by USS Radford had failed to turn up the locator pings. Absent that, the bottom was too deep for an undirected search, and then there was the issue of the Libyans, who didn’t want ships poking around their waters. Had the missing aircraft been an airliner, the issue might have been pushed, but a business jet with a crew of two and three reported passengers—one of them with a deadly plague—wasn’t important enough. “Without the data, there isn’t much to be said. Engine failure was reported, and that could mean bad fuel, bad maintenance—”