Executive Orders

by Tom Clancy

  “How long at Justice?” Jack asked next, returning to his seat.

  “Twenty-three years. Four years in the FBI before that.” Martin poured a cup and decided to stand.

  “Here we go,” van Damm observed, unmuting the TV.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, with us here in our Washington bureau is Vice President Edward J. Kealty.” CNN’s chief political correspondent also looked as though he’d been dragged from his bed and genuinely shaken. Ryan noted that, of all the people he’d seen that day, Kealty looked the most normal. “Sir, you have something unusual to say.”

  “Yes, I do, Barry. I probably need to start by saying that this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in over thirty years of public life.” Kealty’s voice was quiet and restrained, speaking in the tone of an essay by Emerson, slow and clear, and painfully earnest. “As you know, President Durling asked me to resign from my post. The reason for this was a question of my conduct while a senator. Barry, it’s no secret that my personal conduct has not always been as exemplary as it should have been. That’s true of many people in public life, but it’s no excuse, and I do not claim that it is. When Roger and I discussed the situation, we agreed that it would be best for me to resign my office, allowing him to select a new running mate for the elections later this year. It was his further intention to have John Ryan fill my post as interim Vice President.

  “Barry, I was content with that. I’ve been in public life for a very long time, and the idea of retiring to play with my grandchildren and maybe teach a little bit actually looked pretty attractive. And so I agreed to Roger’s request in the interests of—well, really for the good of the country.

  “But I never actually resigned.”

  “Okay,” the correspondent said, holding his hands up as though to catch a baseball. “I think we need to be really clear on this, sir. What exactly did happen?”

  “Barry, I drove over to the State Department. You see, the Constitution specifies that when the President or Vice President resigns, the resignation is presented to the Secretary of State. I met with Secretary Hanson privately to discuss the issue. I actually had a letter of resignation prepared, but it was in the wrong form, and Brett asked me to redraft it. So I drove back, thinking that I could have it done and resubmitted the following day.

  “None of us expected the events of that evening. I was badly shaken by them, as were many. In my case, as you know, well, so many of the friends with whom I’d worked for years were just snuffed out by that brutal and cowardly act. But I never actually resigned my office.” Kealty looked down for a moment, biting his lip before going on. “Barry, I would have been content even with that. I gave my word to President Durling, and I had every intention of keeping it.

  “But I can’t. I just can’t,” Kealty went on. “Let me explain.

  “I’ve known Jack Ryan for ten years. He’s a fine man, a courageous man, and he’s served our country honorably, but he is, unfortunately, not the man to heal our country. What he said last night, trying to speak to the American people, proves it. How can we possibly expect our government to work under these circumstances without experienced, capable people to fill the offices left vacant?”

  “But he is the President—isn’t he?” Barry asked, scarcely believing what he was doing and what he was hearing.

  “Barry, he doesn’t even know how to do a proper investigation. Look at what he said last night about the plane crash. Hardly a week has passed and already he says he knows what happened. Can anyone believe that?” Kealty asked plaintively. “Can anyone really believe that? Who has oversight over this investigation? Who’s actually running it? To whom are they reporting? And to have conclusions in a week? How can the American people have confidence in that? When President Kennedy was assassinated, it took months. The investigation was run by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Why? Because we had to be sure, that’s why.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Vice President, but that really doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Barry, Ryan was never Vice President, because I never resigned. The post was never vacant, and the Constitution allows only one Vice President. He never even took the oath associated with the office.”

  “But—”

  “You think I want to do this? I don’t have a choice. How can we rebuild the Congress and the executive branch with amateurs? Last night Mr. Ryan told the governors of the states to send him people with no experience in government. How can laws be drafted by people who don’t know how?

  “Barry, I’ve never committed public suicide before. It’s like being one of the people, one of the senators at the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. I’m looking down into my open political grave, but I have to place the country first. I have to.” The camera zoomed in on his face, and the anguish there was manifest. One could almost see tears in his eyes as his voice proclaimed his selfless patriotism.

  “He always was good on TV,” van Damm noted.

  “I do have trouble believing all this,” Ryan said after a moment.

  “Believe it,” Arnie told him. “Mr. Martin? We could use some legal guidance.”

  “First of all, get someone over to State and check the Secretary’s office out.”

  “FBI?” van Damm asked.

  “Yes.” Martin nodded. “You won’t find anything, but that’s how it has to start. Next, check phone logs and notes. Next, we start interviewing people. That’s going to be a problem. Secretary Hanson’s dead, along with his wife, and President and Mrs. Durling, of course. Those are the people most likely to have knowledge on the facts of the issue. I would expect that we will develop very little hard evidence, and not very much useful circumstantial evidence.”

  “Roger told me that—” Martin cut him off.

  “Hearsay. You’re telling me that someone said to you what he was told by somebody else—not much use in any court of law.”

  “Go on,” Arnie said.

  “Sir, there really is no constitutional or statutory law on this question.”

  “And there’s no Supreme Court to rule on the issue,” Ryan pointed out. To that pregnant pause, he added: “What if he’s telling the truth?”

  “Mr. President, whether or not he’s telling the truth is really beside the point,” Martin replied. “Unless we can prove that he’s lying, which is unlikely, then he has a case of sorts. By the way, on the issue of the Supreme Court, assuming that you get a new Senate and make your nominations, all of the new Justices would ordinarily have to recuse themselves because you selected them. That probably leaves no legal solution possible.”

  “But if there’s no law on this issue?” the President—was he?—asked.

  “Exactly. This is a beauty,” Martin said quietly, trying to think. “Okay, a President or Vice President stops holding office when he or she resigns. Resignation happens when the office holder conveys the instrument of resignation—a letter suffices to the proper official. But the man who accepted the instrument is dead, and we will doubtless find that the instrument is missing. Secretary Hanson probably called the President to inform him of the resignation—”

  “He did,” van Damm confirmed.

  “But President Durling is also dead. His testimony would have had evidentiary value, but that isn’t going to happen, either. That puts us back to square one.” Martin didn’t like what he was doing, and he was having enough trouble trying to talk and think about the law at the same time. This was like a chessboard with no squares, just the pieces arrayed at random.

  “But—”

  “The phone logs will show there was a call, fine. Secretary Hanson might have said that the letter was poorly worded and would be fixed the following day. This is politics, not law. So long as Durling was President, Kealty had to leave, because—”

  “Of the sexual harassment investigation.” Arnie was getting it now.

  “You got it. His TV statement even covered that, and he did a nice job of neutralizing the issue, didn’t he?”

  “We�
��re back to where we started,” Ryan observed.

  “Yes, Mr. President.” That elicited a wry smile.

  “Nice to know that somebody believes.”

  INSPECTOR O’DAY AND three other agents from Headquarters Division left their car right in front of the building. When a uniformed guard came over to object, O’Day just flashed his ID and kept on going. He stopped at the main security desk and did the same.

  “I want your chief to meet me on the seventh floor in one minute,” he told the guard. “I don’t care what he’s doing. Tell him to come up right now.” Then he and his team walked to the elevator bank.

  “Uh, Pat, what the hell—”

  The other three had been picked more or less at random from the Bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility. That was the FBI’s own internal-affairs department. All experienced investigators with supervisory rank, their job was to keep the Bureau clean. One of them had even investigated a former Director. OPR’s charter was to respect nothing but the law, and the surprising thing was that, unlike similar organizations in city police forces, it retained, for the most part, the respect of the street agents.

  The lobby guard had called ahead to the guard post on the top floor. It was George Armitage this morning, working a different shift from the previous week.

  “FBI,” O’Day announced as the elevator door opened. “Where’s the Secretary’s office?”

  “This way, sir.” Armitage led them down the corridor.

  “Who’s been using the office?” the inspector asked.

  “We’re getting ready to move Mr. Adler in. We’ve just about got Mr. Hanson’s things out and—”

  “So people have been going in and out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  O’Day hadn’t expected that it would be much use bringing in the forensics team, but that would be done anyway. If there had ever been an investigation that had to go strictly by the book, this was the one.

  “Okay, we need to talk to everyone who’s been in or out of the office since the moment Secretary Hanson left it. Every single one, secretaries, janitors, everybody.”

  “The secretarial staff won’t be in for another half hour or so.”

  “Okay. You want to unlock the door?”

  Armitage did so, letting them into the secretaries’ room, and then through the next set of doors into the office itself. The FBI agents stopped cold there, the four of them just looking at first. Then one of them took post at the door to the main corridor.

  “Thank you, Mr. Armitage,” O’Day said, reading the name tag. “Okay, for the moment, we’re treating this as a crime scene. Nobody in or out without our permission. We need a room where we can interview people. I’d like you to make a written list of everyone you know to have been in here, with date and time if that’s possible.”

  “Their secretaries will have that.”

  “We want yours, too.” O’Day looked up the corridor and was annoyed. “We asked for your department chief to join us. Where do you suppose he is?”

  “He usually doesn’t get in until eight or so.”

  “Could you call him, please? We need to talk to him right now.”

  “You got it, sir.” Armitage wondered what the hell this was all about. He hadn’t seen the TV this morning, nor heard what was going on yet. In any case, he didn’t care all that much. Fifty-five and looking forward to retirement after thirty-two years of government service, he just wanted to do his job and leave.

  “GOOD MOVE, DAN,” Martin said into the phone. They were in the Oval Office now. “Back to you.” The attorney hung up and turned.

  “Murray sent one of his roving inspectors over, Pat O’Day. Good man, troubleshooter. He’s being backed up by OPR guys”—Martin explained briefly what that meant—“another smart move. They’re apolitical. With that done, Murray has to back away from things.”

  “Why?” Jack asked, still trying to catch up.

  “You appointed him acting Director. I can’t be involved much with this, either. You need to select someone to run the investigation. He has to be smart, clean, and not the least bit political. Probably a judge,” Martin thought. “Like a Chief Judge of a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s lots of good ones.”

  “Any ideas?” Arnie asked.

  “You have to get that name from somebody else. I can’t emphasize enough, this has to be clean in every possible respect. Gentlemen, we’re talking about the Constitution of the United States here.” Martin paused. He had to explain things. “That’s like the Bible for me, okay? For you, too, sure, but I started off as an FBI agent. I worked mainly civil-rights stuff, all those sheet-heads in the South. Civil rights are important, I learned that looking at the bodies of people who died trying to secure those rights for other people they didn’t even know. Okay, I left the Bureau, entered the bar, did a little private practice, but I guess I never stopped being a cop, and so I came back in. At Justice, I’ve worked OC, I’ve worked espionage, and now I just started running the Criminal Division. This is important stuff to me. You have to do it the right way.”

  “We will,” Ryan told him. “But it would be nice to know how.”

  That evoked a snort. “Damned if I know. On the substance of the issue, anyway. On the form, it has to appear totally clean, no questions at all. That’s impossible, but you have to try anyway. That’s the legal side. The political side I leave to you.”

  “Okay. And the crash investigation?” Ryan was slightly amazed with himself. He’d actually turned away from the investigation to something else. Damn.

  This time Martin smiled. “That pissed me off, Mr. President. I don’t like having people to tell me how to run a case. If Sato were alive, I could take him into court today. There won’t be any surprises. The thing Kealty said about the JFK investigation was pretty disingenuous. You handle one of these cases by running a thorough investigation, not by turning it into a bureaucratic circus. I’ve been doing that my whole life. This case is pretty simple—big, but simple—and for all practical purposes it’s already closed. The real help came from the Mounties. They did a nice job for us, a ton of corroborative evidence, time, place, fingerprints, catching people from the plane to interview. And the Japanese police—Christ, they’re ready to eat nails, they’re so angry about what happened. They’re talking to all of the surviving conspirators. You, and we, don’t want to know their interrogation methods. But their due process is not our problem. I’m ready to defend what you said last night. I’m ready to walk through everything we know.”

  “Do that, this afternoon,” van Damm told him. “I’ll make sure you get the press coverage.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you can’t be part of the Kealty thing?” Jack asked.

  “No, sir. You cannot allow the process to be polluted in any way.”

  “But you can advise me on it?” President Ryan went on. “I need legal counsel of some sort.”

  “That you do, and, yes, Mr. President, I can do that.”

  “You know, Martin, at the end of this—”

  Ryan cut his chief of staff off cold, even before the attorney could react. “No, Arnie, none of that. God damn it! I will not play that game. Mr. Martin, I like your instincts. We play this one absolutely straight. We get professionals to run it, and we trust them to be pros. I am sick and fucking tired of special prosecutors and special this and special that. If you don’t have people you can trust to do the job right, then what the hell are they doing there in the first place?”

  Van Damm shifted in his seat. “You’re a naïf, Jack.”

  “Fine, Arnie, and we’ve been running the government with politically aware people since before I was born, and look where it’s gotten us!” Ryan stood to pace around the room. It was a presidential prerogative. “I’m tired of all this. What ever happened to honesty, Arnie? What ever happened to telling the goddamned truth? It’s all a fucking game here, and the object of the game isn’t to do the right thing, the object of the game is to stay here. It
’s not supposed to be that way! And I’ll be damned if I’ll perpetuate a game I don’t like.” Jack turned to Pat Martin. “Tell me about that FBI case.”

  Martin blinked, not knowing why that had come up, but he told the story anyway. “They even made a bad movie about it. Some civil-rights workers got popped by the local Klukkers. Two of them were local cops, too, and the case wasn’t going anywhere, so the Bureau got involved under interstate commerce and civil rights statutes. Dan Murray and I were rookies back then. I was in Buffalo at the time. He was in Philly. They brought us down to work with Big Joe Fitzgerald. He was one of Hoover’s roving inspectors. I was there when they found the bodies. Nasty,” Martin said, remembering the sight and the horrid smell. “All they wanted to do was to get citizens registered to vote, and they got killed for it, and the local cops weren’t doing anything about it. It’s funny, but when you see that sort of thing, it isn’t abstract anymore. It isn’t a document or a case study or a form to fill out. It just gets real as hell when you look at bodies that’ve been in the ground for two weeks. Those Klukker bastards broke the law and killed fellow citizens who were doing something the Constitution says isn’t just okay—it’s a right. So, we got ’em, and put ’em all away.”

  “Why, Mr. Martin?” Jack asked. The response was exactly what he expected.

  “Because I swore an oath, Mr. President. That’s why.”

  “So did I, Mr. Martin.” And it wasn’t to any goddamned game.

  THE CUEING WAS somewhat equivocal. The Iraqi military used hundreds of radio frequencies, mainly FM VHF bands, and the traffic, while unusual for the overall situation, was routine in its content. There were thousands of messages, as many as fifty going at any given moment, and STORM TRACK didn’t begin to have enough linguists to keep track of them all, though it had to do just that. The command circuits for senior officers were well known, but these were encrypted, meaning that computers in KKMC had to play with the signals in order to make sense of what sounded like static. Fortunately a number of defectors had come across with examples of the encryption hardware, and others trickled over various borders with daily keying sequences, all to be handsomely rewarded by the Saudis.