by Tom Clancy
“Good statement on TV, just about right.” The chief of staff sat down on the other side of the table. He appeared quiet and competent, as always, and Ryan didn’t reflect on the effort such an appearance required of a man who’d lost more friends than Ryan had.
“I’m not even sure what the hell I said,” Jack replied, searching his mind for memories that had vanished.
“That’s about normal for an ad-lib,” van Damm allowed. “It was still pretty good. I always thought your instincts were okay. You’re going to need ’em.”
“First thing?” Jack asked.
“Banks, stock markets, all federal offices are closed, call it ’til the end of the week—maybe beyond that. We have a state funeral to plan for Roger and Anne. National week of mourning, probably a month for the flags to be at half-staff. We had a bunch of ambassadors in the chamber, too. That means a ton of diplomatic activity on top of everything else. We’ll call that housekeeping stuff—I know,” van Damm said with a raised hand. “Sorry. You have to call it something.”
“Who—”
“We have a Protocol Office here, Jack,” van Damm pointed out. “They’re already in their cubbyholes and working on this for you. We have a team of speechwriters; they’ll prepare your official statements. The media people will want to see you—what I mean by that is, you have to appear in public. You have to reassure people. You have to instill confidence—”
“When?”
“In time for the morning TV shows at the latest, CNN, all the networks. I’d prefer that we go on camera within the hour, but we don’t have to. We can cover that by saying you’re busy. You will be,” Arnie promised. “You’ll have to be briefed on what you can say and what you can’t before you go on TV. We’ll lay the law down to the newsies on what they may and may not ask, and in a case like this they’ll cooperate. Figure you have a week of kind treatment to lean on. That’s your press honeymoon, and that’s as long as it’ll last.”
“And then?” Jack asked.
“And then you’re the by-God President and you’ll have to act like it, Jack,” van Damm said bluntly. “You didn’t have to take the oath, remember?”
That statement made Ryan’s head jerk back as his peripheral vision caught the stony looks on the others in the room—all of them Secret Service at the moment. He was the new Boss, and their eyes weren’t so very different now from those in the portraits on the walk in from the East Wing. They expected him to do the right thing. They’d support him, protect him from others and from himself, but he had to do the job. They wouldn’t let him run away, either. The Secret Service was empowered to protect him from physical danger. Arnie van Damm would try to protect him from political danger. Other staffers would serve and protect, too. The housekeeping staff would feed him, iron his shirts, and fetch coffee. But none of them would allow Ryan to run away, either from his place or his duties.
It was a prison.
But what Arnie had just said was true. He could have refused to take the oath, couldn’t—no, Ryan thought, looking down at the polished oak tabletop. Then he would have been damned for all eternity as a coward—worse, he would have been damned in his own mind as the same thing, for he had a conscience that was more harmful an enemy than any outsider. It was his nature to look in the mirror and see not enough there. As good a man as he knew himself to be, he was never good enough, driven by—what? The values he’d learned from his parents, his educators, the Marine Corps, the many people he’d met, the dangers he’d faced? All those abstract values, did he use them, or did they use him? What had brought him to this point? What had made him what he was and what, really, was John Patrick Ryan? He looked up, around the room, wondering what they thought he was, but they didn’t know, either. He was the President now, the giver of orders, which they would carry out; the man who made speeches which others would analyze for nuance and correctness; the man who decided what the United States of America would do, then to be judged and criticized by others who never really knew how to do the thing to which they objected. But that wasn’t a person; that was a job description. Inside of that had to be a man—or someday soon, a woman—who thought it through and tried to do the right thing. And for Ryan, less than an hour and a half before, the right thing had been to take the oath. And to try to do his best. The judgment of history was ultimately less important than what he’d judge of himself, looking in the mirror every morning at not enough. The real prison was, and would always be, himself.
Damn.
THE FIRE WAS out now, Chief Magill saw. His people would have to be careful. There were always hot spots, places where the fire had died, not from the cooling water but rather from lack of oxygen, and waited for the chance to flare back up, to surprise and kill the unwary. But his people were wary, and those little flares of malevolent life would not be important in the greater scheme of things for this fire site. Hoses were already being rolled, and some of his people were taking their trucks back to their houses. He’d stripped the entire city of apparatus for this fire, and he had to send much of it back, lest a new fire go unanswered, and more people die unnecessarily.
He was surrounded by others now, all wearing one-layer vinyl jackets with large yellow letters to proclaim who they were. There was an FBI contingent, another from Secret Service, the D.C. Metropolitan Police, NTSB, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and his own fire investigators, all looking for someone to be in charge so that they could claim command themselves. Instead of holding an informal meeting and establishing their own chain of command, they stood mostly in homogeneous little knots, probably waiting for someone else to tell them who was running things. Magill shook his head. He’d seen it before.
The bodies were coming out faster now. For the moment they were being taken to the D.C. Armory, about a mile north of the Hill just off the railroad tracks. Magill didn’t envy the identification teams, though he hadn’t yet troubled himself to descend into the crater—that’s how he thought of it at the moment—to see how badly destroyed things were.
“Chief?” a voice asked behind him. Magill turned.
“Yeah?”
“NTSB. Can we start looking for the flight recorder?” The man pointed to the rudder fin. Though the tail assembly of the aircraft was anything but intact, you could tell what it had once been, and the so-called black box—actually painted Day-Glo orange—would be somewhere in there. The area was actually fairly clean. The rubble had been catapulted westward for the most part, and they might actually have a chance of recovering it quickly.
“Okay.” Magill nodded and pointed to a pair of firefighters to accompany the crash team.
“Could you also tell your people as much as possible not to move the aircraft parts around? We need to reconstruct the event, and it helps to leave things pretty much in place.”
“The people—the bodies come first,” Magill pointed out. The federal official nodded with a grimace. This wasn’t fun for anyone.
“I understand.” He paused. “If you find the flight crew, please don’t move them at all. Call us, and we’ll handle it. Okay?”
“How will we know?”
“White shirts, shoulder boards with stripes on them, and they’ll be Japanese, probably.”
It should have sounded crazy, but it didn’t. Magill knew that bodies often did survive airplane crashes in the most incredible outward condition, so intact that only a trained eye could see the signs of fatal injury on first inspection. It often unnerved the civilians who were usually the first to arrive at a scene. It was so strange that the human body seemed more robust than the life it contained. There was a mercy to it, for the survivors were spared the hellish ordeal of identifying a piece of burned, torn meat, but that mercy was balanced by the cruelty of recognizing someone that could not talk back. Magill shook his head and had one of his senior people relay the special order.
The firefighters down below had enough of them already. The first special order, of course, had been to locate and
remove the body of President Roger Durling. Everything was secondary to that, and a special ambulance was standing by for his body alone. Even the First Lady, Anne Durling, would have to wait a little for her husband, one last time. A contractor’s mobile crane was maneuvering into the far side of the building to lift out the stone cubes that covered the podium area like a battered pile of children’s hardwood blocks; in the harsh light it seemed that only the letters and numbers painted on their sides were lacking to make the illusion complete.
PEOPLE WERE STREAMING in to all the government departments, especially the senior officials. It was hardly the usual thing for the VIP parking slots to fill up at midnight, but this night they did, and the Department of State was no exception. Security personnel were called in as well, for an attack on one government agency was an attack on all, and even though the nature of the attack on the government devalued the advantage of calling in people armed with handguns, it didn’t really matter. When A happened, B resulted, because it was written down somewhere that B was what you did. The people with the handguns looked at one another and shook their heads, knowing that they’d be getting overtime pay, which put them one up on the big shots who’d storm in from their places in Chevy Chase and suburban Virginia, race upstairs, and then just chat with one another.
One such person found his parking place in the basement and used his key-card to activate the VIP elevator to the seventh floor. What made him different was that he had a real mission for the evening, albeit one he’d wondered about all the way in from his Great Falls home. It was what he thought of as a gut check, though that term hardly applied here. Yet what else could he do? He owed Ed Kealty everything, his place in Washington society, his career at State, so many other things. The country needed someone like Ed right now. So Ed had told him, making a strong case for the proposition, and what he himself was doing was ... what? A small voice in the car had called it treason, but, no, that wasn’t so, because “treason” was the only crime defined in the Constitution, cited there as giving “aid and comfort” to the enemies of his country, and whatever Ed Kealty was doing, he wasn’t doing that, was he?
It came down to loyalty. He was Ed Kealty’s man, as were many others. The relationship had started at Harvard, with beers and double dates and weekends at his family’s house on the water, the good times of a lively youth. He’d been the working-class guest of one of America’s great families—why? Because he’d caught Ed’s youthful eye. But why that? He didn’t know, had never asked, and probably would never find out. That was the way of friendship. It just happened, and only in America could a working-class kid who’d scratched into Harvard on a scholarship get befriended by the great son of a great family. He would have done well on his own, probably. No one but God had given him his native intelligence. No one but his parents had encouraged his development of that gift and taught him manners and ... values. The thought caused his eyes to close as the elevator doors opened. Values. Well, loyalty was one of those values, wasn’t it? Without Ed’s patronage he would have topped out, maybe, as a DAS, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. The first word had long since been expunged from the title painted in gold letters on his office door. In a just world, he would have been in the running for the removal of the next word from the title as well, for wasn’t he as good with foreign policy as anyone else on the seventh floor? Yes, he surely was, and that would not have come to be without his having been Ed Kealty’s man. Without the parties where he’d met the other mover-shakers, and talked his way to the top. And the money. He’d never taken a bribe of any sort, but his friend had advised him wisely (the advice having come from his own advisers, but that didn’t matter) on investments, allowing him to build up his own financial independence and, by the way, buy a five-thousand-square-foot home in Great Falls, and to put his own son into Harvard, not on a scholarship, for Clifton Rutledge III was the son of somebody now, not merely the issue of a worker’s loins. All the work he might have done entirely on his own would not have brought him to this place, and loyalty was owed, wasn’t it?
That made it a little easier for Clifton Rutledge II (actually his birth certificate said Clifton Rutledge, Junior, but “Jr.” wasn’t quite the suffix for a man of his station), Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
The rest was mere timing. The seventh floor was always guarded, all the more so now. But the guards all knew him, and it was merely a matter of looking like he knew what he was doing. Hell, Rutledge told himself, he might just fail, and that could well be the best possible outcome—“Sorry, Ed, it wasn’t there....” He wondered if that was an unworthy thought as he stood there by his office door, listening for footsteps that would match in speed the beating of his heart. There would be two guards on the floor now, walking about separately. Security didn’t have to be all that tight at a place like this. Nobody got into State without a reason. Even in daytime, when visitors came in, they needed escorts to wherever they were going. At this time of night, things were tighter still. The number of elevators in service was reduced. Key-card access was needed to get all the way to the top floor, and a third guard was always at the elevator banks. So it was just timing. Rutledge checked his watch for several cycles of footsteps, and found that the intervals were regular to within ten seconds. Good. He just had to wait for the next one.
“Hi, Wally.”
“Good evening, sir,” the guard replied. “Bad night.”
“Do us a favor?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Coffee. No secretaries to get the machines going. Could you skip down to the cafeteria and have one of their people bring an urn up here? Have them set it up in the conference room up the hall. We’ll be having a meeting in a few minutes.”
“Fair enough. Right away?”
“If you could, Wally.”
“Be back in five, Mr. Rutledge.” The guard strode off with purpose, turned right twenty yards away and disappeared from view.
Rutledge counted to ten and headed the other way. The double doors to the Secretary of State’s office were not locked. Rutledge walked right in through the first set, then through the second, turning on the lights as he did so. He had three minutes. Half of him hoped that the document would be locked away in Brett Hanson’s office vault. In that case he would surely fail, since only Brett, two of his assistants, and the chief of security had the combination, and that did have an anti-tamper alarm on it. But Brett had been a gentleman, and a careless one at that, always so trusting on the one hand and forgetful on the other, the sort who never locked his car or even his house, unless his wife made him. If it were in the open, it would be in one of two places. Rutledge pulled open the center drawer of the desk and found the usual array of pencils and cheap pens (he was always losing them) and paper clips. One minute gone, as Rutledge carefully shuffled through the desk. Nothing. It was almost a relief, until he examined the desktop, and then he nearly laughed. Right there on the blotter, tucked into the leather edging, a plain white envelope addressed to the Secretary of State, but without a stamp. Rutledge took it from its place, holding the envelope by the edges. Unsealed. He moved the flap and extracted the contents. A single sheet of paper, two typed paragraphs. It was at this point that Cliff Rutledge got a chill. The exercise had been theoretical to this point. He could just replace it, forget he’d been here, forget about the phone call, forget about everything. Two minutes.
Would Brett have receipted it? Probably not. Again, he’d been a gentleman about everything. He would not have humiliated Ed that way. Ed had done the honorable thing by resigning, and Brett would have responded honorably, undoubtedly shaken his hand with a sorrowful look, and that would have been that. Two minutes fifteen.
Decision. Rutledge tucked the letter in his jacket pocket, headed for the door, switched off the lights, and returned to the corridor, stopping short of his own office door. There he waited half a minute.
“Hi, George.”
“Hello, Mr. Rutledge.”
“I ju
st sent Wally down to get coffee for the floor.”
“Good idea, sir. Bad night. Is it true that ”
“Yeah, afraid so. Brett was probably killed with all the rest.”
“Damn.”
“Might be a good idea to lock his office up. I just checked the door and—”
“Yes, sir.” George Armitage pulled out his key ring and found the proper one. “He’s always so—”
“I know.” Rutledge nodded.
“You know, two weeks ago I found his vault unlocked. Like, he turned the handle but forgot to spin the dial.” A shake of the head. “I guess he never got hisself robbed, eh?”
“That’s the problem with security,” the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs sympathized. “The big boys never seem to pay attention, right?”
HOW BEAUTIFUL IT was. Who had done it? The question had a cursory answer. The TV reporters, with little else to do, kept telling their cameras to look at the tail fin. He remembered the logo well enough, having long ago participated in an operation that had blown up an aircraft with the red crane on its rudder fin. He almost regretted it now, but envy prevented that. It was a matter of propriety. As one of the world’s foremost terrorists—he used the word within his own mind, and in that private place relished the term, though he couldn’t use it elsewhere—such an event ought to have been his doing, not the work of some amateur. For that’s who it had been. An amateur whose name he would learn in due course, along with everyone else on earth—from television coverage. The irony was striking enough. Since puberty he’d devoted himself to the study and practice of political violence, learning, thinking, planning—and executing such acts, first as a participant, then as a leader/commander. And now what? Some amateur had outstripped him, had outstripped the entire clandestine world to which he belonged. It would have been embarrassing except for the beauty of the event.
