Executive Orders jr-7

by Tom Clancy

  "I figure you picked tough ones, Pat. Did you pick fair ones?" the President asked.

  "Remember what I said a minute ago? I don't want this sort of power? I didn't dare do otherwise. Ehere reversed a conviction one of my best people got on a technicality— an issue of admissibility—and when he did it, we were all pretty mad. The issue was entrapment, where the line is. The defendant was guilty as hell, no doubt of it. But Judge… E looked at the arguments and probably made the right call, and that ruling is part of FBI guidelines now."

  Jack looked at the folders. It would be a full week's reading. This, as Arnie had told him a few days before, would be his most important act as President. No Chief Executive since Washington had been faced with the necessity of appointing the entire Supreme Court, and even that had been in an age when the national consensus on law had been far firmer and deeper than what existed in America now. Back then "cruel and unusual punishment" had meant the rack and burning at the stake—both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America—but in more recent rulings had been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons. So fine, Ryan thought, the prisons are too crowded, and then why not release dangerous criminals on society for fear of being cruel to convicted felons?

  Now he had the power to change that. All he had to do was select judges who took as harsh a view on crime as he did, an outlook he'd learned from listening to his father's occasional rant about a particularly vile crime, or an especially bat-brained judge who hadn't ever viewed a crime scene, and therefore never really known what the issues were. And for Ryan there was the personal element. He'd been the subject of attempted murder, as had his wife and children. He knew what it was all about, the outrage at facing the fact that there were people who could take a life as easily as buying candy at a drug store, who preyed on others as though they Were game animals, and whose actions cried out for retribution. He could remember looking into Scan Miller's eyes more than once and seeing nothing, nothing in there at all. No humanity, no empathy, no feelings—not even hatred, so outside the human community he'd taken himself that there was no returning…

  And yet.

  Ryan closed his eyes, remembering the moment, a loaded Browning pistol in his grip, his blood boiling in his veins but his hands like ice, the exquisite moment at which he could have ended the life of the man who had so wanted to end his own—and Cathy's, and Sally's, and Little Jack, yet unborn. Looking in his eyes, and finally seeing the fear at last, breaking through the shell of inhumanity… but how many times had he thanked a merciful God that he'd neglected to cock the hammer on his pistol? He would have done it. He'd wanted to do it more than anything in his life, and he could remember pulling the trigger, only to be surprised when it hadn't moved—and then the moment had passed away. Jack could remember killing. The terrorist in London. The one in the boat at the base of his cliff. The cook on the submarine. Surely he'd killed others—that horrible night in Colombia which had given him nightmares for years after. But Sean Miller was different. It hadn't been necessity for Miller. For him it had been justice of a sort, and he'd been there, and he'd been the Law, and, God, how he'd wanted to take that worthless life! But he hadn't. The Law that had ended the life of that terrorist and his colleagues had been well considered, cold and detached… as it had to be—and for that reason he had to select the best possible people to repopulate the Court, because the decisions they would make were not about one enraged man trying at the same time to protect and avenge his family. They would say what the law was for everyone, and that wasn't about personal desires. This thing people called civilization was about something more than one man's passion. It had to be. And it was his duty to make sure that it was, by picking the right people.

  "Yeah," Martin said, reading the President's face. "Big deal, isn't it?"

  "Wait a minute." Jack rose and walked out the door to the secretaries' room. "Which one of you smokes?" he asked there.

  "It's me," said Ellen Sumter. She was of Jack's age, and probably trying to quit, as all smokers of that age at least claimed. Without another question, she handed her President a Virginia Slim—the same as the crewwoman on his airplane, Jack realized—and a butane lighter. The President nodded his thanks and walked back into his office, lighting it. Before he could close the door, Mrs. Sumter raced to follow him with an ashtray taken from her desk drawer.

  Sitting down, Ryan took a long drag, eyes on the carpet, which was of the Great Seal of the President of the United States, covered though it was with furniture.

  "How the hell," Jack asked quietly, "did anybody ever decide that one man could have this much power? I mean, what I'm doing here—"

  "Yes, sir. Kind of like being James Madison, isn't it? You pick the people who decide what the Constitution really means. They're all in their late forties or fifties, and so they'll be there for a while," Martin told him. "Cheer up. At least it's not a game for you. At least you're doing it the right way. You're not picking women because they're women, or blacks because they're black. I gave you a good mix, color, bathrooms, and everything, but all the names have been redacted out—and you won't be able to tell who's who unless you follow cases, which you probably don't. I give you my word, sir, they're all good ones. I spent a lot of time assembling the list for you. Your guidelines helped, and they were good guidelines. For what it's worth, they're all people who think the way you do. People who like power scare me," the attorney said. "Good ones reflect a lot on what they're doing before they do it. Picking real judges who've made some hard calls— well, read their decisions. You'll see how hard they worked at what they did."

  Another puff. He tapped the folders. "I don't know the law well enough to understand all the points in there. I don't know crap about the law, except you're not supposed to break it."

  Martin grinned at that one: "Not a bad place to start when you think about it." He didn't have to go any further. Not every occupant of this office had thought of things quite that way. Both men knew it, but it wasn't the sort of thing one said to the sitting President.

  "I know the things I don't like. I know the things I'd like to see changed, but, God damn it" — Ryan looked up, eyes wide now—"do I have the right to make that sort of call?"

  "Yes, Mr. President, you do, because the Senate has to look over your shoulder, remember? Maybe they'll disagree on one or two. All these judges have been checked out by the FBI. They're all honest. They're all smart. None of them ever wanted or expected to make it to the Supreme Court except through a certiori grant. If you can't come up with nine you like, we'll search some more—better then if you have somebody else do it. The head of the Civil Rights Division is also a pretty good man—he's off to my left some, but he's another thinker."

  Civil rights, Jack thought. Did he have to make government policy on that, too? How was he supposed to know what might be the right way to treat people who might or might not be a little different from everybody else? Sooner or later you lost the ability to be objective, and then your beliefs took over—and were you then making policy based on personal prejudice? How were you supposed to know what was right? Jesus.

  Ryan took a last puff and stubbed the cigarette out, rewarded as always by a dizzying buzz from the renewed vice. "Well, I guess I have a lot of reading to do."

  "I'd offer you some help, but probably better that you try to do it yourself. That way, nobody pollutes the process—more than I've already done, that is. You want to keep that in mind. I might not be the best guy for this, but you asked me, and that's the best I have."

  "I suppose that's all any of us can do, eh?" Ryan observed, staring at the pile of folders.

  THE CHIEF OF the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice was a political appointee dating back to President Fowler. Formerly a corporate lawyer and lobbyist—it paid far better than the academic post he'd held before his first political appointment—he'd been politically active since before
his admission to law school, and as with so many occupants of official offices he had become, if not his post, then his vision of it. He had a constituency, even though he'd never been elected to anything, and even though his government service had been intermittent, a series of increasingly high posts made possible by his proximity to the power that rested in this city, the power lunches, the parties, the office visits made while representing people he might or might not really care about, because a lawyer had an obligation to serve the interests of his clients—and the clients chose him, not the reverse. One often needed the fees of the few to serve the needs of the many — which was, in fact, his own philosophy of government. Thus he'd unknowingly come to live Ben Jonson's dictum about "speaking to mere contraries, yet all be law." But he'd never lost his passion for civil rights, and he'd never lobbied for anything contrary to that core belief—of course, nobody since the 1960s had lobbied against civil rights per se, but he told himself that was important. A white man with stock originating well before the Revolutionary War, he spoke at all the right forums, and from that he'd earned the admiration of people whose political views were the same as his. From that admiration came power, and it was hard to say which as- pect of his life influenced the other more. Because of his early work in the Justice Department he'd won the attention of political figures. Because he'd done that work with skill, he'd also earned the attention of a powerful Washington law firm. Leaving the government to enter that firm, he'd used his political contacts to practice his profession more effectively, and from that effectiveness he'd generated additional credibility in the political world, one hand constantly washing the other until he couldn't really discern which hand was which. Along the way the cases he argued had become his identity in a process so gradual and seemingly so logical that he hardly knew what had taken place. He was what he'd argued for over the years.

  And that was the problem right now. He knew and admired Patrick Martin as a lesser legal talent who'd advanced at Justice by working exclusively in the courts—never even a proper United States Attorney (those were political appointments, mainly selected by senators for their home states), but rather one of the apolitical professional worker bees who did the real casework while their appointed boss worked on speeches, caseload management, and political ambition. And the fact of the matter was that Martin was a gifted legal tactician, forty-one and one in his formal trials, better yet as a legal administrator guiding young prosecutors. But he didn't know much about politics, the Civil Rights chief thought, and for that reason he was the wrong man to advise President Ryan.

  He had the list. One of his people had helped Martin put it together, and his people were loyal, because they knew that the real path to advancement in this city was to move in and out as their chief had done, and their chief could by lifting a phone get them that job at a big firm, and so one of them handed his chief the list, with the names not redacted out.

  The chief of the Civil Rights Division had only to read off the fourteen names. He didn't need to call up the paperwork on their cases. He knew them all. This one, at the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, had reversed a lower-court ruling and written a lengthy opinion questioning the constitutionality of affirmative action—too good a discourse, it had persuaded the Supreme Court in a sharply divided 5–4 decision. The case had been a narrow one, and the affirmation of it in Washington had been similarly narrow, but the chief didn't like any chips in that particular wall of stone.

  That one in New York had affirmed the government's position in another area, but in doing so had limited the applicability of the principle—and that case hadn't gone further, and was law for a large part of the country.

  These were the wrong people. Their view of judicial power was too circumscribed. They deferred too much to Congress and the state legislatures. Pat Martin's view of law was different from his own. Martin didn't see that judges were supposed to right what was wrong—the two had often debated the issue over lunch in conversations spirited but always good-natured. Martin was a pleasant man, and a sufficiently good debater that he was hard to move off any position, whether he was wrong or not, and while that made him a fine prosecutor he just didn't have the temperament, he just didn't see the way things were supposed to be, and he'd picked judges the same way, and the Senate might be dumb enough to consent to the selections, and that couldn't happen. For this sort of power, you had to pick people who knew how to exercise it in the proper way.

  He really had no choice. He bundled the list into an envelope and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket and made a phone call for lunch with one of his many contacts.

  30 PRESS

  THEY DID IT FOR THE morning news, so pervasive had become the influence of television. This was how reality was defined, changed, and announced. A new day had surely dawned. The viewer was left in little doubt. There was a new flag hanging behind the announcer, a green field, the color of Islam, with two small gold stars. He started off with an invocation from the Koran, and then went into political matters. There was a new country. It was called the United Islamic Republic. It would be comprised of the former nations of Iran and Iraq. The new nation would be guided by the Islamic principles of peace and brotherhood. There would be an elected parliament called a majlis. Elections, he promised, would be held by the end of the year. In the interim there would be a revolutionary council comprised of political figures from both countries, in proportion to population—which gave Iran the whip hand, the announcer didn't say; he didn't have to.

  There was no reason, he went on, for any other country to fear the UIR. The new nation proclaimed its goodwill for all Muslim nations, and all nations who had friendly relations with the former divided segments of the new land. That this statement was contradictory in numerous ways was not explored. The other Gulf nations, all of them Islamic, had not actually enjoyed friendly relations with either of the partners. The elimination of the former Iraqi weapons facilities would continue apace so that there would be no question of hostility to the international community. Political prisoners would be freed at once—

  "And now they can make room for the new ones," Major Sabah observed at PALM BOWL. "So, it's happened." He didn't have to phone anyone. The TV feed was being viewed all over the Gulf, and in every room with a functioning television the only happy face was the one on the screen—that is, until the scene changed to show spontaneous demonstrations at the various mosques, where people made their morning prayers, and walked outside to display their joy.

  "HELLO ALI," Jack said. He'd stayed up reading the folders Martin had left, knowing that the call would come, suffering, again, from a headache that he seemed to acquire just from walking into the Oval Office. It was surprising that the Saudis had been so long in authorizing the call from their Prince/Minister-Without-Portfolio. Maybe they'd just hoped to wish it away, a characteristic not exactly unique to that part of the world. "Yes, I'm watching the TV now." At the bottom of the display, like the captioning for the hearing-impaired, was a dialogue box being typed by intelligence specialists at the National Security Agency. The rhetoric was a little flowery, but the content was clear to everyone in the room. Adler, Vasco, and Goodley had come in as soon as the feed arrived, liberating Ryan from his reading, if not his headache.

  "This is very unsettling, if not especially surprising," the Prince said over the encrypted line.

  "There was no stopping it. I know how it looks to you, Your Highness," the President said tiredly. He could have indulged in coffee, but he did want to get some sleep tonight. "We are going to place our military at a higher state of readiness." "Is there anything you want us to do?" Ryan asked.

  "For the moment, just to know that your support has not changed." "It hasn't. I've told you before. Our security commitment to the Kingdom remains the same. If you want us to do something to demonstrate that, we're ready to take whatever steps seem reasonable and appropriate. Do you—"

  "No, Mr. President, we have no formal requests at this time." That statement was delivere
d in a tone that made Jack's eyes flicker off the speakerphone and to his visitors.

  "In that case, might I suggest that you have some of your people discuss options with some of mine?"

  "It must be kept quiet. My government has no wish to inflame the situation."

  "We'll do what we can. You can start talking to Admiral Jackson—he's J-3 in the—"

  "Yes, Mr. President, I met him in the East Room. I will have our working-level people contact him later today."

  "Okay. If you need me, Ali, I'm always at the end of the phone."

  "Thank you, Jack. I hope you will sleep well." You'll need it. We all will. And the line went dead. Ryan killed the button on the phone to make sure.

  "Opinions?"

  "Ali wants us to do something, but the King hasn't decided yet," Adler said.

  "They'll try to establish contacts with the UIR." Vasco took up the conversation. "Their first instinct will be to get a dialogue going, try to do a little business. The Saudis will take the lead. Figure Kuwait and the rest of the lesser states will let them handle the contacts, but we'll be hearing from them soon, probably through channels."

  "We have a good ambassador in Kuwait?" the President asked.

  "Will Bach," Adler said, with an emphatic nod. "Career FSO. Good man. Not real imaginative, but a good plugger, knows the language and culture, lots of friends in their royal family. Good commercial guy. He's been pretty effective as a middleman between our business-people and their government."