by Tom Clancy
It was either an elegant roll or a truthful statement, Holtzman thought, and Arnie was too skillful a player for him to tell the difference right off. But the smart thing to do was finish the drink, which he did. A pity that his host preferred cheap booze to go along with his L. L. Bean shirts. Arnie didn't know how to dress, either. Or maybe that was a considered part of his mystique. The political game was so intricate as to be a cross between classical metaphysics and experimental science. You could never know it all, and finding out one part as often as not denied you the ability to find out another, equally important part. But that was why it was the best game in town.
"Okay, Arnie, I'll accept that."
"Good of you." Van Damm smiled, and refilled the glass. "So why did you call me?"
"It's almost embarrassing." Another pause. "I will not participate in the public hanging of an innocent man."
"You've done that before," Arnie objected.
"Maybe so, but they were all politicians, and they all had it coming in one way or another. I don't know what— okay, how about I'm not into child abuse? Ryan deserves a fair chance."
"And you're pissed about losing your story and the Pulitzer that—"
"I have two of them already," Holtzman reminded him. Otherwise, he would have been taken off the story by his managing editor, but internal politics at the Washington Post were as vicious as those elsewhere in the city.
"So?"
"So, I need to know about Colombia. I need to know about Jimmy Cutter and how he died."
"Jesus, Bob, you don't know what our ambassador went through down there today."
"Great language for invective, Spanish." A reporter's smile.
"The story can't be told, Bob. It just can't."
"The story will be told. It's just a question of who tells it, and that will determine how it's told. Arnie, I know enough now to write something, okay?"
As so often happened in Washington at times like this, everyone was trapped by circumstance. Holtzman had a story to write. Doing it the right way would, perhaps, resurrect his original story, put him in the running for another Pulitzer—it was still important to him, previous denials notwithstanding, and Arnie knew it—and tell whoever had leaked his story to Ed Kealty that he or she had better leave the Post before Holtzman nailed that name down and wrecked his or her career with a few well-placed whispers and more than a few dead-end assignments. Arnie was trapped by his duty to protect his President, and the only way to do it was to violate the law and his President's trust. There had to be an easier way, the chief of staff thought, to earn a living. He could have made Holtzman wait for his decision, but that would have been mere theatrics, and both men were past that.
"No notes, no tape recorder."
"Off the record. 'Senior official, not even 'senior administration official, " Bob agreed.
"And I can tell you who to confirm it with."
"They know it all?"
"Even more than I do," van Damm told him. "Hell, I just found out about the important part."
A raised eyebrow. "That's nice, and the same rules will apply to them. Who really knows about this?"
"Even the President doesn't know it all. I'm not sure if anybody knows it all."
Holtzman took another sip. It would be his last. Like a doctor in an operating room, he didn't believe in mixing alcohol and work.
FLIGHT 534 TOUCH ED down at Istanbul at 2:55 A.M. local time, after a flight of 1,270 miles and three hours, fifteen minutes. The passengers were groggily awake, having been, roused by the cabin staff thirty minutes earlier and told to put their seat-backs to the upright position in a series of languages. The landing was smooth, and a few of them raised the plastic shades on the windows to see that they were indeed on the ground at one more anonymous piece of real estate with white runway lights and blue taxiway lights, just like those all over the world. Those getting out stood at the proper time to stumble off into the Turkish night. The rest pushed their seats back for another snooze during the forty-five-minute layover, before the aircraft left yet another gate at 3:40 A.M. for the second half of the trip.
Lufthansa 601 was a European-made Airbus 310 twin-jet, roughly the same as the KLM Boeing in size and capacity. This one, too, had five travelers aboard, and left its gate at 2:55 for the nonstop flight to Frankfurt. The departure was routine in all details.
"THAT'S SOME STORY, Arnie."
"Oh, yeah. I didn't know the important parts until this week."
"How sure are you of this?" Holtzman asked.
"The pieces all fit." He shrugged again. "I can't say I liked hearing it. I think we would have won the election anyway, but, Jesus, the guy threw it. He tanked on a presidential election, but you know," van Damm said wistfully, "that might have been the most courageous and generous political act of the century. I didn't think he had it in him."
"Does Fowler know?"
"I haven't told him. Maybe I should."
"Wait a minute. Remember how Liz Elliot planted a story on me about Ryan and how—"
"Yes, that all folds into this. Jack went down personally to get those soldiers out. The guy next to him in the chopper was killed, and he's looked after the family ever since. Liz paid for it. She came apart the night the bomb went off in Denver."
"And Jack really did… you know that's one story that never came out all the way. Fowler lost it and almost launched a missile at Iran—it was Ryan, wasn't it? He's the one who stopped it." Holtzman looked down at his drink and decided on another sip. "How?"
"He got onto the Hot Line," Arnie replied. "He cut the President off and talked directly with Narmonov, and persuaded him to back things off some. Fowler flipped out and told the Secret Service to go arrest him, but by the time they got to the Pentagon, things were calmed down. It worked, thank God."
It took Holtzman a minute or so to absorb that, but again, the story fit with the fragments he knew. Fowler had resigned two days later, a broken man, but an honorable one who knew that his moral right to govern his country had died with his order to launch a nuclear weapon at an innocent city. And Ryan had also been shaken by the event, badly enough to leave government service at once, until Roger Durling had brought him back in.
"Ryan's broken every rule there is. Almost as if he likes it." But that wasn't fair, was it?
"If he hadn't, we might not be here." The chief of staff poured himself another. Holtzman waved him off. "You see what I mean about the story, Bob? If you tell it all, the country gets hurt."
"But then why did Fowler recommend Ryan to Roger Durling?" the reporter asked. "He couldn't stand the guy and—"
"Whatever his faults, and he has them, Bob Fowler is an honest politician, that's why. No, he doesn't like Ryan personally, maybe it's chemistry, I don't know, but Ryan saved him and he told Roger—what was it? 'Good man in a storm. That's it," Arnie remembered.
"Shame he doesn't know politics."
"He learns pretty fast. Might surprise you."
"He's going to gut the government if he gets the chance. I can't—I mean, I do like the guy personally, but his policies…"
"Every time I think I have him figured out, he swerves on me, and then I have to remind myself that he doesn't have an agenda," van Damm said. "He just does the job. I give him papers to read, and he acts on them. He listens to what people tell him—asks good questions, and always listens to the answers—but he makes his own decisions, as though he knows what's right and what's wrong—but the hell of it is, mostly he does. Bob, he's rolled me! But that's not it, either. Sometimes I'm not sure what it is with him, you know?"
"A total outsider," Holtzman observed quietly. "But—"
The chief of staff nodded. "Yeah, but. But he's being analyzed as though he's an insider with a hidden agenda, and they're playing the insider games as if they apply to him, but they don't."
"So the key to the guy is there's nothing to figure out… son of a bitch," Bob concluded. "He hates the job, doesn't he?"
"Most of the time. You
should have been there when he spoke in the Midwest. He got it then. All those people loving him, and he loved them back, and it showed—and it scared the shit out of him. Nothing to figure out? Exactly. Like they say in golf, the hardest thing to do is to hit a straight ball, right? Everybody's looking for curves. There aren't any."
Holtzman snorted. "So, what's the angle if there isn't an angle?"
"Bob, I just try to control the media, remember? Damned if I know how you report this, except to state the facts—you know, like you're supposed to do."
That was a lot for the journalist to take. He'd been in Washington for all of his professional life. "And every politician is supposed to be like Ryan. But they're not."
"This one is," Arnie shot back.
"How am I supposed to tell my readers that? Who'll believe it?"
"Ain't that the problem?" he breathed. "I've been in politics all my life, and I thought I knew it all. Hell, I do know it all. I'm one of the best operators ever was, everybody knows that, and all of a sudden this yahoo comes into the Oval Office and says the emperor's naked, and he's right, and nobody knows what to do about it except to say that he isn't. The system isn't ready for this. The system is only ready for itself."
"And the system will destroy anybody who says different." Holtzman snorted with the thought: If Hans Christian Andersen had written "The Emperor's Clothes" about Washington, then the kid who'd spoken the truth out loud would have been killed on the spot by the assembled crowd of insiders.
"It'll try," Arnie agreed.
"And what are we supposed to do about it?"
"You're the one who said that you don't want to officiate at the hanging of an innocent man, remember?"
"Where's that leave us?"
"Maybe to talk about the unruly mob," Arnie suggested, "or the emperor's corrupt court."
NEXT TO GO was Austrian Airlines 774. It was down to a routine now, and the arrangements were well within the technical parameters. The cans of shaving cream had been filled a bare forty minutes before departure. The proximity of the Monkey House to the airport helped, as did the time of day, and having people race the last few hundred meters to the gate was not unusual anywhere in the world, particularly for flights like this one. The «soup» was sprayed into the bottom of the can, by a plastic valve that was invisible to X-ray examination. The nitrogen went in the top to a separate insulated container located in the center of the cans. The process was clean and safe—for extra but really unnecessary safety, the cans were sprayed and wiped; that was just to make the travelers happy. The cans were quite cold, of course, though not dangerously so. As the liquid nitrogen boiled off, it would vent through a pressure valve into the ambient atmosphere, where it merely joined the air. Though nitrogen is an important element in explosives, by itself it is totally inert, clear, and odorless. Nor would it react chemically with the contents of the cans, and so the pressure-relief valve retained a precise quantity of the warming gas to act as a safe propel-lant for the «soup» when the time came.
The filling was done by the medical corpsmen in their protective suits—they refused to work without them, and ordering them otherwise would only have made them nervous and sloppy, and so the director indulged their fears.
Two groups of five remained to be done. The cans could really all have been prepared at the same time, Moudi knew, but no unnecessary chances were being taken, a thought that made him stop cold. No unnecessary chances? Sure.
DARYAEI DIDN'T SLEEP that night, which was unusual for him. Though with increasing years he found that he needed less of it, getting off to sleep had never been difficult for him. On a really quiet night, if the winds were right, he could hear the airliners bring their engines to the roar of takeoff power—a distant sound, rather like a waterfall, he sometimes thought, or perhaps an earthquake. Some fundamental sound of nature, distant and foreboding. And now he found himself listening for it, and with his imagination, wondering if he heard it or not.
Had he gone too fast? He was an old man in a country where so many died young. He remembered the diseases of his youth, and later he'd learned their scientific causes, mainly poor water and sanitation, for Iran had been a backward country for most of his lifetime, despite its long history of civilization and power. Then it had been resurrected by oil and the immense riches that had come with it. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah—King of kings! the phrase proclaimed—had begun to raise the country, but made the mistake of moving too fast and making too many enemies. In Iran's dark age, as in every other such time, secular power had devolved to the Islamic clergy, and in liberating the nation's peasantry, he'd trod on too many toes, making enemies of people whose power was spiritual and to whom the common folk looked for order in lives made chaotic by change. Even so, the Shah had almost succeeded, but not quite, and not quite was as damning a curse as the world produced for those who would be great.
What did such men think? Just as he himself was old, so the Shah had grown old and sick with cancer, and watched the work of a lifetime evaporate in a matter of weeks, his associates executed in a brief orgy of settled scores, bitter at his betrayal by his American friends. Had he thought that he'd gone too far—or not far enough? Daryaei didn't know, and now he would have liked to know, as he listened for the distant sounds of waterfalls in the still of a Persian night.
To move too fast was a grievous error, which the young learned and the old knew, but not to move enough, fast enough, far enough, strongly enough, that was what really denied goals to those who would be great. How bitter it must be to lie in bed, without the sleep one needed to think clearly, and wonder and curse oneself for chances missed and chances lost.
Perhaps he knew what the Shah had thought, Daryaei admitted to himself. His own country was drifting again. Even insulated as he was, he knew the signs. It showed up as subtle differences in dress, especially the dress of women. Not much, not quite enough for his true believers to persecute them, for even the true believers had softened their devotion, and there were gray areas into which people could venture to see what might happen. Yes, the people still believed in Islam, and yes, they still believed in him, but, really, the Holy Koran wasn't that strict, and their nation was rich, and to grow richer it needed to do business. How could it be a champion of the Faith unless it grew richer, after all? The best and brightest of Iran's young went abroad to be educated, for his country did not possess the schools that the infidel West had—and, for the most part, they came back, educated in skills which his country needed. But they also came back with other things, invisible, doubts and questions, and memories of a freewheeling life in a different society where the pleasures of the flesh were available to the weak, and all men were weak. What if all Khomeini and he had accomplished was to delay what the Shah had started? The people who had come back to Islam in reaction to Pahlavi were now drifting back to the promise of freedom he'd offered them. Didn't they know? Didn't they see? They could have all the trappings of power and all the blessings of what people called civilization and still remain faithful, still have the spiritual anchor—without which all was nothing.
But to have all that, his country needed to be more than it was, and so he could not afford to be not quite. Daryaei had to deliver the things that would show he'd been right all along, that uncompromising faith was the true root of power.
The assassination of the Iraqi leader, the misfortune that had befallen America—these things had to be a sign, didn't they? He'd studied them carefully. Now Iraq and Iran were one, and that had been the quest of decades— and at virtually the same instant, America had been crippled. It wasn't just Badrayn who was telling him things. He had his own America experts who knew the workings of that country's government. He knew Ryan from a single important meeting, had seen his eyes, heard the bold but hollow words, and so he knew the measure of the man who might be his principal adversary. He knew that Ryan had not, and by the laws of his country could not, have a replacement selected for himself, and so there was only this moment, an
d he had to act in it, or else assume for himself the curse of not quite.
No, he would not be remembered as another Moham-mad Pahlavi. If he did not covet the trappings of power, he lusted for the fact of it. Before his death he would lead all Islam. In a month he would have the oil of the Persian Gulf and the keys to Mecca, secular and spiritual power. From that his influence would expand in all directions. In but a few years his country would be a superpower in every way, and he would leave to his successors a legacy such as the world hadn't seen since Alexander, but with the added security that it was founded in the words of God. To achieve that end, to unite Islam, to fulfill the Will of Allah and the words of the Prophet Mohammed, he would do what was needed, and if that meant moving fast, then he would move fast. Overall, the process was a simple one, three simple steps, the third and most difficult of which was already established and nothing could stop, even if Badrayn's plans all failed completely.
Was he moving too fast? Daryaei asked himself for the last time. No, he was moving decisively, with surprise, with calculation, with boldness. That was what history would say.
"FLYING AT NIGHT is a big deal?" Jack asked.
"Sure is, for them it is," Robby replied. He liked briefing the President this way, late evening in the Oval Office, with a drink. "They've always been more parsimonious with equipment than they are with people. Helicopters— French ones in this case, same model the Coast Guard has a bunch of—cost money, and we haven't seen much in the way of night operations. The operation they're running is heavy on ASW. So maybe they're thinking about dealing with all those Dutch subs the Republic of China bought last year. We're also seeing a lot of combined operations with their air force."
"Conclusion?"
"They're training up for something." The Pentagon's Director of Operations closed his briefing book. "Sir, we—"
