“Wait a minute, he called—”
“They have our number at Wilmer.”
“The direct residence?” That one even bypassed Signals, though it, like all White House lines, was bugged. Or probably was. Ryan hadn’t asked, and probably didn’t want to know.
“They had it for home, didn’t they?” Cathy asked. “Me surgeon, me treat patients, me professor, always on call when me have patients—especially the pain-in-the-ass ones.”
“Interruptions.” Jack lay down next to his wife. “You don’t really want another baby, do you?”
“What I want is to make love to my husband. I can’t be picky about timing anymore, can I?”
“Has it been that bad?” He kissed her gently.
“Yes, but I’m not mad about it. You’re trying very hard. You remind me of my new residents—older, though.” She touched his face and smiled. “If something happens, it happens. I like being a woman.”
“I rather like it myself.”
27
RESULTS
SOME OF THEM HAD DEGREES in psychology. It was a common and favored degree for law-enforcement officers. Some even had advanced degrees, and one member of the Detail had a doctorate, having done his dissertation on the sub-specialty of profiling criminals. All were at the least gifted amateurs in the science of reading minds; Andrea Price was one of these. SURGEON had a spring in her step as she walked out to her helicopter. SWORDSMAN walked her out to the ground-floor door and kissed her good-bye—the kiss was routine, the walk-out and the hand-holding were not, or hadn’t been lately. Price shared a glance with two of her agents, and they read one another’s minds, as cops can do, and they judged it to be good, except for Raman, who was as smart as the rest of them, but rather more straitlaced. He devoted more passion to sports than anything else, and Price imagined him in front of his TV every night. He probably knew even how to program his VCR. Well, there were many personality types in the Service.
“What’s today look like?” POTUS asked, turning away when the Black Hawk lifted off.
“SURGEON is airborne,” Andrea heard in her earpiece. “Everything’s clear,” the overwatch people reported from their perches on the government buildings around the White House. They’d been scanning the perimeter for the last hour, as they did every day. There were the usual people out there, the “regulars,” known by sight to the Detail members. These were people who seemed to turn up a lot. Some were just fascinated by the First Family, whichever family it might be. For them, the White House was America’s real soap opera, Dallas writ large, and the trappings, the mechanics, really, of life in this most famous of dwellings drew them for some reason that Service psychologists struggled to understand, because for the armed agents on the Detail, “regulars” were dangerous by their very existence. And so the snipers on the Old Executive Office Building—OEOB—and Treasury knew them all by sight through their powerful spotting glasses, and knew them all by name, too, because Detail members were out there, too, disguised as street rats or passersby. At one time or another, the “regulars” had all been trailed to whatever homes they might have, and identified, and investigated, quietly. Those with irregularities were profiled for personality type—they all had a few kinks—and then they’d be carefully scanned by the Detail members who worked outside for weapons—up to and including being bumped into by a “jogger” and expertly groped while being helped to their feet during the embarrassed apology. But that danger was past, for now.
“Didn’t you check your schedule last night?” Price asked, distracted from her duties into asking a dumb question.
“No, decided to catch some TV,” SWORDSMAN lied, not knowing that they spotted the lie. He didn’t even blush, Price saw. For her part, she didn’t allow her face to change. Even POTUS was allowed to have a secret or two, or at least the illusion of it.
“Okay, here’s my copy.” She handed it over. Ryan scanned the first page, which took him to lunch. “SecTreas is on the way in for breakfast right after CARDSHARP.”
“What do you guys call George?” Jack asked, entering the West Wing.
“TRADER. He likes that,” Andrea reported.
“Just so you pronounce it right.” Which wasn’t a bad line for 7:50 A.M., POTUS thought. But it was hard to tell. The Detail liked nearly all of his jokes. Maybe they were just being polite?
“Good morning, Mr. President.” Goodley stood, as usual, when Jack entered the Oval Office.
“Hi, Ben.” Ryan dropped the schedule down on his desk, made a quick scan for important documents, and took his seat. “Go.”
“You stole my thunder talking with the crew last night. We have gornischt on Mr. Zhang. I could give you the long version, but I imagine you’ve already heard it.” The President nodded for him to go on.
“Okay, developments in the Taiwan Strait. The PRC has fifteen surface ships at sea, two formations, one of six, one of nine. I have compositions if you want, but they’re all destroyers and frigates. Deployed in regular squadron groupings, the Pentagon tells us. We have an EC-135 listening in. We have a submarine, Pasadena, camped between the two groups, with two more boats en route from central Pacific, timed to arrive in-area in thirty-six and fifty hours, respectively. CINCPAC, Admiral Seaton, is up to speed and tasking out a full surveillance package. His parameters are on Secretary Bretano’s desk now. I’ve discussed it over the phone. Sounds like Seaton knows his business.
“Political side, the ROC government is taking no official notice of the exercise. They put out a press release to that effect, but their military is in contact with ours—through CINCPAC. We’ll have people in their listening posts”—Goodley checked his watch—“may be there already. State doesn’t think this is a very big deal, but they’re watching.”
“Overall picture?” Ryan asked.
“Could just be routine, but we wish their timing was a little better. They’re not overtly pushing anything.”
“And until they do, we don’t push back. Okay, we take no official notice of this exercise. Let’s keep our deployments quiet. No press releases, no briefings to the media. If we get any questions, it’s no big deal.”
Goodley nodded. “That’s the plan, Mr. President.
“Next, Iraq, again, we have little in the way of direct information. Local TV is on a religious kick. It’s all Shi’a. The Iranian clergymen we’ve been seeing are getting a lot of air time. The TV news coverage is almost entirely religion-based. The anchors are getting rhapsodic. The executions are done. We don’t have a full body count, but it’s over one hundred. That appears to be over. The Ba’ath leadership is gone for good. The littler fish are in the can. There was some stuff about how merciful the provisional government was to the ‘lesser criminals’—that’s a quote. The ‘mercy’ is religiously justified, and it seems that some of the ‘lesser criminals’ have come back to Jesus excuse me, back to Allah—in one big hurry. There’s TV pictures of them sitting with an imam and discussing their misdeeds.
“Next indicator, we’re seeing more organized activity within the Iranian military. Troops are training. We’re getting intercepts of tactical radio traffic. It’s routine, but there’s a lot of it. They had an all-nighter at Foggy Bottom to go over all this stuff. The Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Rutledge, set it up. He evidently ran the I and R division pretty ragged.” The State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research was the smaller and much poorer cousin to the intelligence community, but in it were a handful of very astute analysts whose diplomatic perspective occasionally gave insights the intelligence community missed.
“Conclusions?” Jack asked. “From the all-nighter, I mean.”
“None.” Of course, Goodley could have added, but didn’t. “I’ll be talking to them in an hour or so.”
“Pay attention to what I and R says. Pay particular attention to—”
“Bert Vasco. Yes,” Goodley agreed. “He’s all right, but I’ll bet the seventh floor is giving him a pain in the ass. I talked to him t
wenty minutes ago. He says, are you ready, forty-eight hours. Nobody agrees with that. Nobody,” CARDSHARP emphasized.
“But ... ?” Ryan rocked back in his chair.
“But I won’t bet against him, boss. I have nothing to support his assessment. Our desk people at CIA don’t agree. State won’t back him up—they didn’t even give it to me; I got it from Vasco directly, okay? But, you know, I am not going to say he’s wrong.” Goodley paused, realizing that he was not sounding like every other NIO. “We have to consider this one, boss. Vasco has good instincts, and he’s got balls, too.”
“We’ll know quickly enough. Right or wrong, I agree that he’s the best guy over there. Make sure Adler talks to him, and tell Scott I don’t want him stomped, regardless of how it turns out.”
Ben nodded emphatically as he made a note. “Vasco gets high-level protection. I like that, sir. It might even encourage other people to make a gut call once in a while.”
“The Saudis?”
“Nothing from them. Almost like they’re catatonic. I think they’re afraid to ask for any help until there’s a reason for it.”
“Call Ali within the hour,” the President ordered. “I want his opinion.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if he wants to talk to me, at any time, night or day, tell him he’s my friend, and I always have time for him.”
“And that’s the morning news, sir.” He rose and stopped. “Who ever decided on CARDSHARP, by the way?”
“We did,” Price said from the far end of the room. Her left hand went up to her earpiece. “It’s in your file. You evidently played a good game of poker in your frat house.”
“I won’t ask you what my girlfriends said about me,” the acting National Security Advisor said, on his way out the door.
“I didn’t know that, Andrea.”
“He’s even won some money at Atlantic City. Everybody underestimates him ‘cause of his age. TRADER just pulled in.”
Ryan checked his agenda. Okay, this was about George’s appearance before the Senate. The President took a minute to review his morning appointment list, while a Navy mess steward brought in a light breakfast tray.
“Mr. President, the Secretary of the Treasury,” Agent Price announced at the side door to the corridor.
“Thank you, we can handle this alone,” Ryan said, rising from his desk as George Winston came in.
“Morning, sir,” SecTreas said, as the door closed quietly. He was dressed in one of his handmade suits, and was carrying a manila folder. Unlike his President, the Secretary of the Treasury was used to wearing a jacket most of the time. Ryan took his off and dropped it on the desk. Both sat on the twin couches, with the coffee table between them.
“Okay, how are things across the street?” Ryan asked, pouring himself some coffee, with the caffeine in this morning.
“If I ran my brokerage house like that, the SEC would have my hide on the barn door, my head over the fireplace, and my ass in Leavenworth. I’m going to—hell, I’ve already started bringing in some of my administrative folks down from New York. There are just too many people over there whose only job is looking at each other and telling them how important they all are. Nobody’s responsible for anything. Damn it, at Columbus Group, we often make decisions by committee, but we make by-God decisions in time for them to matter. There are too many people, Mr. Pres—”
“You can call me Jack, at least in here, George, I—” The door to the secretaries’ room opened and the photographer came in with his Nikon. He didn’t say anything. He rarely did. He just snapped away, and the rubric was for everyone to pretend he simply wasn’t there. It would have been a hell of an assignment for a spy, Ryan thought.
“Fine. Jack, how far can I go?” TRADER asked.
“I already told you that. It’s your department to run. Just so you tell me about it first.”
“I’m telling you, then. I’m going to cut staff. I’m going to set that department up like a business.” He stopped for a second. “And I’m going to rewrite the tax code. God, I didn’t know how screwed up it was until two days ago. I had some in-house lawyers come in and—”
“It has to be revenue-neutral. We can’t go dicking around with the budget. None of us has the expertise yet, and until the House of Representatives is reconstituted—” The photographer left, having caught the President in a great pose, both hands extended over the coffee tray.
“Playmate of the Month,” Winston said, with a hearty laugh. He lifted a croissant and buttered it. “We’ve run the models. The effect on revenue will be neutral on the basis of raw numbers, Jack, but there will probably be an overall increase in usable funds.”
“Are you sure? Don’t you need to study all the—”
“No, Jack. I don’t need to study anything. I brought Mark Gant in to be my executive assistant. He knows computer modeling better than anybody I’ve ever met. He spent last week chewing through the—didn’t anybody ever tell you? They never stop looking at the tax system over there. Study? I pick up the phone, and inside half an hour I’ll have a thousand-page document on my desk telling me how things were in 1952, what the tax code then did in every segment of the economy—or what people think it did, as opposed to what they thought then that it did, or as opposed to what the studies in the 1960s said they thought that it did.” SecTreas paused for a bite. “Bottom line? Wall Street is far more complex, and uses simpler models, and those models work. Why? Because they’re simpler. And I’m going to tell the Senate that in ninety minutes, with your permission.”
“You’re sure you’re right on this, George?” POTUS asked. That was one of the problems, perhaps the largest of all. The President couldn’t check everything that was done in his name—even checking one percent would have been an heroic feat—but he was responsible for it all. It was that knowledge that had doomed so many Presidents to micro-managerial failure. “Jack, I’m sure enough to bet my investors’ money on it.”
Two pairs of eyes met over the table. Each man knew the measure of the other. The President could have said that the welfare of the nation was a matter of greater moment than the few billions of dollars Winston had managed at the Columbus Group, but he didn’t. Winston had built his investment house from nothing. Like Ryan, a man of humble origins, he’d created a business in a ferociously competitive environment on the basis of brains and integrity. Money entrusted to him by his clients had to be more precious than his own, and because it had always been so, he’d grown rich and powerful, but never forgotten the how and why of it all. The first important public-policy statement to be made by Ryan’s administration would ride on Winston’s savvy and honor. The President thought it over for a second, and then he nodded.
“Then run with it, TRADER.” But then Winston had his misgivings. It was instructive to the President that even so powerful a figure as the Secretary of the Treasury lowered his eyes for a second, and then said something quieter and less positive than his confident assertion of five seconds earlier.
“You know, politically this is going to—”
“What you’re going to say to the Senate, George, is it good for the country as a whole?”
“Yes, sir!” An emphatic nod of the head.
“Then don’t wimp out on me.”
SecTreas wiped his mouth with the monogrammed napkin, and looked down again. “You know, after this is all over and we go back to normal life, we really have to find a way to work together. There aren’t many people like us, Ryan.”
“Actually there are,” the President said, after a moment’s reflection. “The problem is that they never come here to work. You know who I learned that from? Cathy,” Jack told him. “She fucks up, somebody goes blind, but she can’t run away from making the call, can she? Imagine, you fuck up, and somebody loses his sight forever—or dies. The guys who work the emergency room are really on the ragged edge, like when Cathy and Sally went into Shock-Trauma. You blow the call, and somebody is gone forever. Big deal, George, bigger than tra
ding equities like we used to do. Same thing with cops. Same thing with soldiers. You have to make the call, right now, or something really bad happens. But those kinds of people don’t come here to Washington, do they? And mainly that sort of guy goes to the place he—or she—has to be, where the real action is,” Ryan said, almost wistfully. “The really good ones go where they’re needed, and they always seem to know where that is.”
“But the really good ones don’t like the bullshit. So they don’t come here?” Winston asked, getting his own course in Government 101, and finding Ryan a teacher of note.
“Some do. Adler at State. Another guy over there I’ve discovered, name of Vasco. But those are the ones who buck the system. The system works against them. Those are the ones we have to identify and protect. Mostly little ones, but what they do isn’t little. They keep the system running, and mainly they go unnoticed because they don’t care much about being noticed. They care about getting it done, serving the people out there. You know what I’d really like to do?” Ryan asked, for the first time revealing something from the depths of his soul. He hadn’t even had the guts to say this to Arnie.
“Yeah, set up a system that really works, a system that recognizes the good ones and gives them what they deserve. You know how hard that is in any organization? Hell, it was a struggle at my shop, and Treasury has more janitors than I had trading executives. I’m not even sure where to start a job like that,” Winston said. He would be one to grasp the scope of the dream, his President thought.