by Tom Clancy
Dear God, he thought. People he knew were here. Not just Americans. Jack could see where a whole section of gallery had fallen down to the well of the chamber. The diplomatic gallery, if he remembered correctly. Various dignitaries and their families, many of whom he’d known, who had come to the Hill for the purpose of seeing him sworn. Did that make their deaths his fault?
He’d left the CNN building because of the need to do something, or that was what he’d told himself. Ryan wasn’t so sure now. Just a change of scenery, perhaps? Or was he merely drawn to the scene the same way the people at the perimeter of the Capitol grounds were, standing silently as he was, just looking, as he was, and not doing anything, as he was. The numbness hadn’t gone away. He’d come here expecting to find something to see and feel and then to do, but only discovered something else for his soul to shrink from.
“It’s cold here, Mr. President. At least get out of this damned spray,” Price urged.
“Okay.” Ryan nodded and headed back down the steps. The coat, he found, wasn’t all that warm. Ryan was shivering again, and he hoped it was merely from the cold.
The cameras had been slow setting up, but they were there now, Ryan saw. The little portable ones—Japanese made, all of them, he noted with a grunt—with their small, powerful lights. Somehow they’d managed to get past the police lines and the fire chiefs. Before each of them stood a reporter—the three he could see were all men—holding a microphone and trying to sound as though he knew more than anyone else did. Several lights were trained his own way, Jack noted. People all over the country and the world were watching him, expecting him to know what to do. How did such people ever adopt the illusion that senior government officials were any brighter than their family physician, or lawyer, or accountant? His mind trekked back to his first week as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, when the institution which he’d served then had similarly assumed that he knew how to command and lead a platoon—and when a sergeant ten years his senior had come to him with a family problem, expecting the “ell-tee,” who lacked both a wife and children, to know what to say to a man who had trouble with both. Today, Jack reminded himself, such a situation was called a “leadership challenge,” meaning that you didn’t have a clue about what to do next. But there were the cameras, and he had to do something.
Except he still didn’t have a clue. He’d come here hoping to find a catalyst for action, only to find increased feelings of helplessness. And maybe a question.
“Arnie van Damm?” He’d need Arnie, sure as hell.
“At the House, sir,” Price replied, meaning the White House.
“Okay, let’s head over there,” Ryan ordered.
“Sir,” Price said, after a moment’s hesitation, “that’s probably not safe. If there was—”
“I can’t run away, damn it. I can’t fly away on Kneecap. I can’t sneak off to Camp David. I can’t crawl into some damned hole. Can’t you see that?” He was frustrated rather than angry. His right arm pointed to the remains of the Capitol building. “Those people are dead, and I am the government for now, God help me, and the government doesn’t run away.”
“THAT LOOKS LIKE President Ryan there,” an anchorman said in his warm, dry studio. “Probably trying to get a handle on rescue operations. Ryan is a man not unaccustomed to crisis, as we all know.”
“I’ve known Ryan for six years,” a more senior network analyst opined, studiously not looking at the camera, so as to give the appearance of instructing the more highly paid anchorman who was trying to report on the event. Both had been in the studio to provide commentary for President Durling’s speech, and had read all the briefing material on Ryan, whom the analyst didn’t really know, though they’d bumped into each other at various dinners during the past few years. “He’s a remarkably low-key gentleman, but without question one of the brightest people in government service.” Such a statement could not go unchallenged. Tom the anchor leaned forward, half-looking at his colleague, and half at the cameras.
“But, John, he’s not a politician. He has no political background or experience. He’s a national-security specialist in an age when national security is not the issue it once was,” he pontificated.
John the analyst managed to stifle the reply that the statement so richly deserved. Someone else did not.
“Yeah,” Chavez grumbled. “And that airplane that took the building out was really a Delta flight that got lost. Jesus!” he concluded.
“It’s a great country we serve, Ding, my boy. Where else do people get paid five mill’ a year to be stupid?” John Clark decided to finish his beer. There was no sense in driving back to Washington until Mary Pat called. He was a worker bee, after all, and only the top-floor CIA types would be racing around now. And racing around they would be. They wouldn’t be accomplishing much, but at times like this you didn’t really accomplish much of anything, except to look harried and important ... and to the worker bees, ineffective.
WITH LITTLE TO show the public, the network reran tape of President Durling’s speech. The C-SPAN cameras in the chamber had been remotely controlled, and control-room technicians froze various frames to show the front row of senior government officials, and, again, the roll of the dead was cataloged: All but two of the Cabinet secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, senior agency directors, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Director Bill Shaw of the FBI, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Administrator of NASA, all nine Justices of the Supreme Court. The anchorman’s voice listed the names and the positions they’d held, and the tape advanced frame by frame until the moment when the Secret Service agents were shown racing into the chamber, startling President Durling and causing some brief confusion. Heads turned, looking for danger, and perhaps the quicker-minded among them had wondered about the presence of a gunman in the galleries, but then came three frames from a wide-shot camera that showed the blurred displacement of the back wall, followed by blackness. Anchor and commentator were then back on-screen, staring down at their desktop monitors, then back up at each other, and perhaps only now the full enormity of the event finally began to hit them, as it was hitting the new President.
“President Ryan’s principal task will be to rebuild the government, if he can,” John the analyst said, after a long moment’s pause. “My God, so many good men and women ... dead....” It had also occurred to him that a few years earlier, before becoming the senior network commentator, he would have been in that chamber, along with so many of his professional friends; and for him, also, the event finally broke past the shock, and his hands started quivering below the top of the desk. An experienced pro who did not allow his voice to shake, he nonetheless could not totally control the look on his face, which sagged with sudden, awful grief, and on the screen his face went ashen under the makeup.
“God’s judgment,” Mahmoud Haji Daryaei muttered over six thousand miles away, lifting the controller and muting the sound to eliminate extraneous twaddle.
God’s judgment. That made sense, didn’t it? America. The colossus that had thwarted so many, a godless land of godless people, at the pinnacle of her power, winner of yet another contest—now, grievously harmed. How else but by God’s will could such a thing happen? And what else could it mean but God’s own judgment, and God’s own blessing? Blessing on what? he wondered. Well, perhaps that would be clear with reflection.
He’d met Ryan once before, found him spiteful and arrogant—typically American—but not now. The cameras momentarily zoomed in to show a man clutching at his coat, his head turning left and right, mouth slightly open. No, not arrogant now. Stunned, not even aware enough to be frightened. It was a look he’d seen on men’s faces before. How interesting.
THE SAME WORDS and the same images were flooding the world now, delivered by satellites to over a billion pairs of eyes that’d been watching the news coverage, or been alerted to the event and had changed channels from morning shows in some countries, lunch and evening shows in others. His
tory had been made, and there was an imperative to watch.
This was particularly true of the powerful, for whom information was the raw material of power. Another man in another place looked at the electronic clock that sat next to the television on his desk and did some simple arithmetic. A horrid day was ending in America, while a morning was well begun where he sat. The window behind his desk showed a wide expanse of paving stones, a huge square, in fact, crisscrossed by people mainly traveling by bicycle, though the number of cars he saw was now substantial, having grown by a factor often over the past few years. But still bicycles were the main mode of transportation, and that wasn’t fair, was it?
He’d planned to change that, quickly and decisively in historical terms—and he was a serious student of history only to have his carefully laid plan killed aborning by the Americans. He didn’t believe in God, never had and never would, but he did believe in Fate, and Fate was what he saw before his eyes on the phosphor screen of a television set manufactured in Japan. A fickle woman, Fate was, he told himself as he reached for a handleless cup of green tea. Only days before she had favored the Americans with luck, and now, this.... So what was the intention of the Lady Fate? His own intentions and needs and will mattered more, the man decided. He reached for his phone, then thought better of it. It would ring soon enough, and others would ask his opinion, and he would have to answer with something, and so it was time to think. He sipped his tea. The heated water stung his mouth, and that was good. He would have to be alert, and the pain focused his mind inward, where important thoughts always began.
Undone or not, his plan hadn’t been a bad one. Poorly executed by his unwitting agents, largely because of the Lady Fate and her momentary largesse to America—but it had been a fine plan, he told himself yet again. He’d have another chance to prove that. Because of the Lady Fate. The thought occasioned a thin smile, and a distant look, as his mind probed the future and liked what it saw. He hoped the phone would not ring for a while, because he had to look further still, and that was best done without interference. It came to him after a moment’s further thought that the real objective of his plan had been accomplished, hadn’t it? He’d wished America to be crippled, and crippled America now was. Not in the manner he’d chosen, but crippled even so. Even better? he asked himself.
Yes.
And so, the game could go on, couldn’t it?
It was the Lady Fate, toying as she did with the ebb and flow of history. She wasn’t a friend or enemy of any man, really—or was she? The man snorted. Maybe she just had a sense of humor.
FOR ANOTHER PERSON, the emotion was anger. Days before had come the humiliation, the bitter humiliation of being told by a foreigner—nothing more than a former provincial governor!—what her sovereign nation must do. She’d been very careful, of course. Everything had been done with great skill. The government itself had not been implicated in anything more than extensive naval exercises on the open sea, which was, of course, free for the passage of all. No threatening notes had been dispatched, no official démarche issued, no position taken, and for their part the Americans hadn’t done anything more than—what was their arrogant phrase, “rattle their cage”?—and call for a meeting of the Security Council, at which there was nothing to be said, really, since nothing official had taken place, and her country had made no announcement. What they had done was nothing more than exercises, weren’t they? Peaceful exercises. Of course, those exercises had helped split the American capability against Japan—but she couldn’t have known ahead of time, could she? Of course not.
She had the document on her desk at this very moment: the time required to restore the fleet to full capability. But, no, she shook her head, it wouldn’t be enough. Neither she nor her country could act alone now. It would take time and friends, and plans, but her country had needs, and it was her job to see to those needs. It was not her job to accept commands from others, was it?
No.
She also drank tea, from a fine china cup, with sugar and a little milk in the English way, a product of her birth and station and education, all of which, along with patience, had brought her to this office. Of all the people around the world watching the same picture from the same satellite network, she probably understood the best what the opportunity was, how vast and appealing it had to be, all the sweeter that it had come so soon after she’d been dictated to in this very office. By a man who was now dead. It was too good to pass up, wasn’t it?
Yes.
“THIS IS SCARY, Mr. C.” Domingo Chavez rubbed his eyes—he’d been awake for more hours than his jet-lagged brain could compute—and tried to organize his thoughts. He was sprawled back on the living-room couch, shoeless feet up on the coffee table. The womenfolk in the house were off to bed, one in anticipation of work the next day, and the other with a college exam to face. The latter hadn’t figured that there might not be any school tomorrow.
“Tell me why, Ding,” John Clark commanded. The time for worrying himself about the relative skills of various TV personalities had passed, and his young partner was, after all, pursuing his master’s degree in international relations.
Chavez spoke without opening his eyes. “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in peacetime before. The world ain’t all that different from what it was last week, John. Last week, it was real complicated. We kinda won that little war we were in, but the world ain’t changed much, and we’re not any stronger than we were then, are we?”
“Nature abhors a vacuum?” John asked quietly.
“Sum’tim like that.” Chavez yawned. “Damned if we ain’t got one here and now.”
“NOT ACCOMPLISHING VERY much, am I?” Jack asked, in a voice both quiet and bleak. It was hitting him full force now. There was still a glow, though most of what rose into the sky now was steam rather than smoke. What went into the building was the most depressing sight. Body bags. Rubberized fabric with loop handles at the ends, and some sort of zipper in the middle. Lots of them, and some were coming out now, carried by pairs of firefighters, snaking down the wide steps around the fragments of broken masonry. It had just started, and would not end soon. He hadn’t actually seen a body during his few minutes up top. Somehow, seeing the first few bags was worse.
“No, sir,” Agent Price said, her face looking the same as his. “This isn’t good for you.”
“I know.” Ryan nodded and looked away.
I don’t know what to do, he told himself. Where’s the manual, the training course for this job? Whom do I ask? Where do I go?
I don’t want this job! his mind screamed at itself. Ryan reproached himself for the venality of the thought, but he’d come to this newly dreadful place as some sort of leadership demonstration, parading himself before the TV cameras as though he knew what he was about—and that was a lie. Perhaps not a malicious one. Just stupid. Walk up to the fire chief and ask how it’s going, as though anyone with eyes and a second-grade education couldn’t figure that one out!
“I’m open to ideas,” Ryan said at last.
Special Agent Andrea Price took a deep breath and fulfilled the fantasy of every special agent of the United States Secret Service all the way back to Pinkerton: “Mr. President, you really need to get your, cr, stuff” she couldn’t go that far—“together. Some things you can do and some things you can’t. You have people working for you. For starters, sir, figure out who they are and let them do their jobs. Then, maybe, you can start doing yours.”
“Back to the House?”
“That’s where the phones are, Mr. President.”
“Who’s head of the Detail?”
“It was Andy Walker.” Price didn’t have to say where he was now. Ryan looked down at her and made his first presidential decision.
“You just got promoted.”
Price nodded. “Follow me, sir.” It pleased the agent to see that this President, like all the others, could learn to follow orders. Some of the time, anyway. They’d made it all of ten feet before R
yan slipped on a patch of ice and went down, to be picked back up by two agents. It only made him look all the more vulnerable. A still photographer captured the moment, giving Newsweek its cover photo for the following week.
“AS YOU SEE, President Ryan is now leaving the Hill in what looks like a military vehicle instead of a Secret Service car. What do you suppose he’s up to?” the anchor asked.
“In all fairness to the man,” John the commentator said, “it’s unlikely that he knows at the moment.”
That opinion rang across the globe a third of a second later, to the general agreement of all manner of persons, friends and enemies alike.
SOME THINGS HAVE to be done fast. He didn’t know if they were the right things—well, he did, and they weren’t—but at a certain level of importance the rules got a little muddled, didn’t they? The scion of a political family whose public service went back a couple of generations, he’d been in public life practically since leaving law school, which was another way of saying that he hadn’t held a real job in his entire life. Perhaps he had little practical experience in the economy except as its beneficiary—his family’s financial managers ran the various trusts and portfolios with sufficient skill that he almost never bothered meeting with them except at tax time. Perhaps he had never practiced law though he’d had a hand in passing literally thousands of them. Perhaps he had never served his country in uniform—though he deemed himself an expert in national security. Perhaps a lot of things militated against doing anything. But he knew government, for that had been his profession for all of his active—not to say “working”—life, and at a time like this, the country needed someone who really knew government. The country needed healing, Ed Kealty thought, and he knew about that.
