by Tom Clancy
“I know a little. I got briefed in on some of it when President Durling asked Jack to be Vice President, but I can’t—”
He held up his hand. “I know. I still have a security clearance because I still drive up to Fort Detrick once in a while.”
“It isn’t like the movies. You don’t do stuff like that and have a drink, kiss the girl, and drive away. He used to have nightmares and I—well, I’d hug him in his sleep and usually that calmed him down, then when he wakes up, he pretends it never happened at all. I know some of it, not all. When we were in Moscow last year, a Russian comes up and says that he had a gun to Jack’s head once”—Altman’s head turned at that one—“but he said it like a joke or something, then he said the gun wasn’t loaded. Then we had dinner together, like we were pals or something, and I met his wife—pediatrician, would you believe it? She’s a doc and her husband is the head Russian spy and—”
“It does sound a little far-fetched,” Dr. Alexandre agreed with a judiciously raised eyebrow, and then a real laugh happened on the other side of the table.
“It’s all so crazy,” she concluded.
“You want crazy? We have two Ebola cases reported in Sudan.” Now that her mood had changed, he could talk about his problems.
“Funny place for that virus to turn up. Did they come in from Zaire?”
“Gus Lorenz is checking that out. I’m waiting for him to get back to me,” Professor Alexandre reported. “It can’t be a local outbreak.”
“Why’s that?” Altman asked.
“Worst possible environment,” Cathy explained, finally picking at her lunch. “Hot, dry, lots of direct sun. The UV from the sunlight kills it.”
“Like a flamethrower,” Alex agreed. “And no jungle for a host animal to live in.”
“Only two cases?” Cathy asked with a mouthful of salad. At least, Alexandre thought, he’d gotten her to eat. Yep, he still had a good bedside manner, even in a cafeteria.
He nodded. “Adult male and a little girl, that’s all I know right now. Gus is supposed to run the tests today, probably already has.”
“Damn, that’s a nasty little bug. And you still don’t know the host.”
“Twenty years of looking,” Alex confirmed. “Never found one sick animal—well, the host wouldn’t be sick, but you know what I mean.”
“Like a criminal case, eh?” Altman asked. “Poking around for physical evidence?”
“Pretty much,” Alex agreed. “Just we’re trying to search a whole country, and we’ve never figured exactly what we’re looking for.”
DON RUSSELL WATCHED as the cots went out. After lunch—today it was ham-and-cheese sandwiches on wheat bread, glass of milk, and an apple—the kids all went down for their afternoon nap. An altogether good idea, all the adults thought. Mrs. Daggett was a superb organizer, and the kids all knew the routine. The beds came out of the storage room, and the kids knew their spaces. SANDBOX was getting along well with young Megan O’Day. Both usually dressed in Oshkosh B’gosh outfits decorated with flowers or bunnies—at least a third of the kids had them; it was a popular label. The only hard part was parading the children into the bathrooms so that no “accidents” happened during the naps - some happened anyway, but that was kids for you. It took fifteen minutes, less than before because two of his agents helped. Then the kids were all down in their cots, with their blankets and bears, and the lights went down. Mrs. Daggett and her helpers found chairs to sit in and books to read.
“SANDBOX is sleeping,” Russell said, stepping outside for some fresh air.
“Sounds like a winner,” the mobile team thought, sitting in the den of the house across the street. Their Chevy Suburban was parked in the family garage. There were three agents there, two of whom were always on watch, seated close to the window which faced Giant Steps. Probably playing cards, ever a good way to pass dead time. Every fifteen minutes—not quite regularly in case someone was watching—Russell or another of the crew would walk around the grounds. TV cameras kept track of traffic on Ritchie Highway. One of the inside people was always positioned to cover the doors in and out of the center. At the moment it was Marcella Hilton; young and pretty, she always had her purse with her. A special purse of a type made for female cops, it had a side pocket she could just reach into for her SigSauer 9mm automatic, and two spare magazines. She was letting her hair grow to something approaching hippie length (he’d had to tell her what a hippie was) to accentuate her “disguise.”
He still didn’t like it. The place was too easy to approach, too close to the highway with its heavy volume of traffic, and there was a parking lot within plain sight, a perfect spot for notional bad guys to do surveillance. At least reporters had been shooed away. On that one SURGEON had been ruthlessly direct. After an initial spate of stories about Katie Ryan and her friends, the foot had come down hard. Now visiting journalists who called were told, firmly but politely, to stay away. Those who came anyway had to talk to Russell, whose grandfatherly demeanor was saved for the children at Giant Steps. With adults he was simply intimidating, usually donning his Secret Service sunglasses, the better to appear like Schwarzenegger, who was shorter than he by a good three inches.
But his sub-detail had been cut down to six. Three directly on site, and three across the street. The latter trio had shoulder weapons, Uzi submachine guns and a scoped M-16. In another location, six would have been plenty, but not this one, he judged. Unfortunately, any more than that would have made this day-care center appear to be an armed camp, and President Ryan was having trouble enough.
“WHAT’S THE WORD. Gus?” Alexandre asked, back in his office before starting afternoon rounds. One of his AIDS patients had taken a bad turn, and Alex was trying to figure what to do about it.
“ID is confirmed. Ebola Mayinga, same as the two Zairean cases. The male patient isn’t going to make it, but the child is reportedly recovering nicely.”
“Oh? Good. What’s the difference in the cases?”
“Not sure, Alex,” Lorenz replied. “I don’t have much patient information, just first names, Saleh for the male and Sohaila for the child, ages and such.”
“Arabic names, right?” But Sudan was an Islamic country.
“I think so.”
“It would help to know what’s different about the cases.”
“I made that point. The attending physician is an Ian MacGregor, sounds pretty good, University of Edinburgh, I think he said. Anyway, he doesn’t know any differences between them. Neither has any idea how they were exposed. They appeared at the hospital at roughly the same time, in roughly the same shape. Initial presentation was as flu and/or jet lag, he said—”
“Travel from where, then?” Alexandre interrupted.
“I asked. He said he couldn’t say.”
“How come?”
“I asked that, too. He said he couldn’t say that, either, but that it had no apparent connection with the cases.” Lorenz’s tone indicated what he thought of that. Both men knew it had to be local politics, a real problem in Africa, especially with AIDS.
“Nothing more in Zaire?”
“Nothing,” Gus confirmed. “That one’s over. It’s a head-scratcher, Alex. Same disease turned up in two different places, two thousand miles apart, two cases each, two dead, one dying, one apparently recovering. MacGregor has initiated proper containment procedures at his hospital, and it sounds as though he knows his business.” You could almost hear the shrug over the phone.
What the Secret Service guy had said over lunch was right on target, Alexandre thought. It was more detective work than medicine, and this one didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, like some sort of serial-murder case with no clues. Entertaining in book form, maybe, but not in reality.
“Okay, what do we know?”
“We know that Mayinga strain is alive and kicking. Visual inspection is identical. We’re running some analysis on the proteins and sequences, but my gut says it’s a one-to-one match.”
“Go
d damn, what’s the host, Gus? If we could only find that!”
“Thank you for that observation, Doctor.” Gus was annoyed—enraged—in the same way and for the same reason. But it was an old story for both of them. Well, the older man thought, it had taken a few thousand years to figure malaria out. They’d been playing with Ebola for only twenty-five or so. The bug had been around, probably, for at least that long, appearing and disappearing, just like a fictional serial killer. But Ebola didn’t have a brain, didn’t have a strategy, didn’t even move of its own accord. It was super-adapted to something very limited and exceedingly narrow. But they didn’t know what. “It’s enough to drive a man to drink, isn’t it?”
“I imagine a stiff shot of bourbon will kill it, too, Gus. I have patients to see.”
“How do you like regular clinical rounds, Alex?” Lorenz missed them, too.
“Good to be a real doc again. I just wish my patients had a little more hope. But that’s the job, ain’t it?”
“I’ll fax you data on the structural analysis on the samples if you want. The good news is that it seems pretty well contained,” Lorenz repeated.
“I’d appreciate it. See ya, Gus.” Alexandre hung up. Pretty well contained? That’s what we thought before ... But then his thoughts shifted, as they had to. White male patient, thirty-four, gay, resistant TB that came out of left field. How do we stabilize him? He lifted the chart and walked out of his office.
“SO I’M THE wrong guy to help with the court selections?” Pat Martin asked.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Arnie answered. “We’re all the wrong guy for everything.”
“Except you,” the President noted with a smile.
“We all make errors of judgment,” van Damm admitted. “I could have left with Bob Fowler, but Roger said he needed me to keep this shop running, and—”
“Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “That’s how I got here, too. So, Mr. Martin?”
“No laws were broken by any of this.” He’d spent the last three hours going over the CIA files and Jack’s dictated summary of the Colombian operations. Now one of his secretaries, Ellen Sumter, knew about some rather restricted things—but she was a presidential secretary, and besides, Jack had gotten a smoke out of it. “At least not by you. Ritter and Moore could be brought up on failure to fully report their covert activities to the Congress, but their defense would be that the sitting President told them to do it that way, and the Special and Hazardous Operations guidelines appended to the oversight statute give them an arguable defense. I suppose I could get them indicted, but I wouldn’t want to prosecute the case myself,” he went on. “They were trying to work on the drug problem, and most jurors wouldn’t want to hurt them for doing so, especially since the Medellin cartel came apart partly as a result. The real problem on that one is the international-relations angle. Colombia’s going to be pissed, sir, and with very good reason. There are issues of international law and treaties which applied to the activity, but I’m not good enough in that field to render an opinion. From the domestic point of view, it’s the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The President is Commander-in-Chief. The President decides what is or is not in the country’s security interest as part of his executive powers. The President can, therefore, take whatever action he deems appropriate to protect those interests—that’s what executive power means. The brake on that, aside from statutory violations that mainly apply inside the country, is found in the checks and balances exercised by the Congress. They can deny funds to prevent something, but that’s about all. Even the War Powers Resolution is written in such a way as to let you act first before they try and stop you. You see, the Constitution is flexible on the really important issues. It’s designed for reasonable people to work things out in a reasonable way. The elected representatives aresupposed to know what the people want, and act accordingly, again, within reasonable limits.”
The people who wrote the Constitution, Ryan wondered to himself, were they politicians or something else?
“And the rest?” the chief of staff asked.
“The CIA operations? Not even close to any sort of violation, but again the problem is one of politics. Speaking for myself—I used to run espionage investigations, remember—Mr. President, what beautiful jobs they were. But the media is going to have a ball,” he warned.
Arnie thought that was a pretty good start. His third President didn’t have to worry about going to jail. The political stuff came after that, which was, for him, a first of sorts.
“Closed hearings or open?” van Damm asked.
“That’s political. The main issue there is the international side. Best to kick that one around with State. By the way, you’ve got me right against the edge here, ethically speaking. Had I discovered a possible violation against you in any of these three cases, I’d be unable to discuss them with you. As it is, my cover is to say that you, Mr. President, asked me for an opinion on the possible criminal violations of others, to which inquiry I must, as a federal official, respond as part of my official duties.”
“You know, it would be nice if everybody around me didn’t talk like a lawyer all the time,” Ryan observed crossly. “I have real problems to deal with. A new country in the Middle East that doesn’t like us, the Chinese making trouble at sea for reasons I don’t understand, and I still don’t have a Congress.”
“This is a real problem,” Arnie told him. Again.
“I can read.” Ryan gestured to the pile of clippings on his desk. He’d just discovered that the media graced him with early drafts of adverse editorials scheduled to run the next day. How nice of them. “I used to think CIA was Alice in Wonderland. That’s not even Triple-A ball. Okay, the Supreme Court. I’ve read over about half of the list. They’re all good people. I’ll have my selections this time next week.”
“ABA is going to raise hell,” Arnie said.
“Let ’em. I can’t show weakness. I’ve learned that much last night. What’s Kealty going to do?” the President asked next.
“The only thing he can do, weaken you politically, threaten you with scandal, and force you to resign.” Arnie held his hand up again. “I’m not saying it makes sense.”
“Damned little in this town does, Arnie. That’s why I’m trying.”
ONE CRUCIAL ELEMENT in the consolidation of the new country was, of course, its military. The former Republican Guards divisions would keep their identity. There had to be a few adjustments in the officer corps. The executions of previous weeks hadn’t totally expunged undesirable elements, but in the interest of amity, the new eliminations were made into simple retirements—the departure briefings were forcefully direct: Step out of line and disappear. It was not a warning to be disregarded. The departing of ficers invariably nodded their submission, grateful to be allowed to live.
These units had mainly survived the Persian Gulf War—at least a majority of their personnel had, and the shock of their treatment at American hands had been assuaged by their later campaigns to crush rebellious civilian elements, replacing part of their swagger and much of their bravado. Their equipment had been replaced from stocks and other means, and that would soon be augmented as well.
The convoys moved out of Iran, down the Abadan highway, through border checkpoints already dismantled. They moved under cover of darkness, and with a minimum of radio traffic, but that didn’t matter to satellites.
“THREE DIVISIONS, HEAVIES at that,” was the instant analysis at I-TAC, the Army’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center, a windowless building located in the Washington Navy Yard. The same conclusion was rapidly reached at DIA and CIA. A new Order of Battle assessment for the new country was already under way, and though it was not yet complete, the first back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that the UIR had more than double the military power of all the other Gulf states combined. It would probably be worse when all the factors were fully evaluated.
“Headed where, exactly, I wonder,” the senior watch officer said aloud as t
he tapes were rewound.
“Bottom end of Iraq has always been Shi’a, sir,” a warrant officer area specialist reminded the colonel.
“And that’s the closest part to our friends.”
“Roge-o.”
MAHMOUD HAJI DARYAEI had much to think about, and he usually tried to do it outside, not inside, a mosque. In this case it was one of the oldest in the former country of Iraq, within sight of the world’s oldest city, Ur. A man of his God and his Faith, Daryaei was also a man of history and political reality who told himself that all came together in a unified whole that defined the shape of the world, and that all had to be considered. It was easy in moments of weakness or enthusiasm (the two were the same in his mind) to tell himself that certain things were written by Allah’s own immortal hand, but circumspection was also a virtue taught by the Koran, and he found he was able to achieve that most easily by walking outside a holy place, usually in a garden, such as this mosque had.
Civilization had started here. Pagan civilization, to be sure, but all things began somewhere, and it was not the fault of those who had first built this city five thousand years before that God had not yet fully revealed Himself. The faithful who had built this mosque and its garden had also rectified the oversight.
The mosque was in disrepair. He bent down to pick up a piece of tile that had fallen off the wall. It was blue, the color of the ancient city, a color somewhere between that of sky and sea, made by local artisans to the same shade and texture for more than fifty centuries, adopted in turn for temples to pagan statues, palaces of kings, and now a mosque. One could pluck a new one off a building or dig ten meters into the earth to find one over three thousand years old, and the two would be indistinguishable. In that there was such continuity here as at no other place in the world. A kind of peace came from it, especially in the chill of a cloudless midnight, when he alone was walking here, and even his bodyguards were out of sight, knowing their leader’s mood.
