by Tom Clancy
“Think, John. If they could get close to him, they can get close to anybody. Ain’t no pension plan in the dictator business, y’know? The security around him is, like, real, real tight—but somebody got a shooter in close and blew him into the next dimension. That’s scary, Mr. C.”
John Clark continually had to remind himself that Domingo Chavez was no dummy. He might still speak with an accent—not because he had to, but because it was natural for him to; Chavez, like Clark, had a gift for language—and he might still interlace his speech with terms and grammar remembered from his days as an Army sergeant, but God damn if he wasn’t the quickest learner John had ever met. He was even learning to control his temper and passion. When it suited him to, John corrected himself.
“So? Different culture, different motivation, different—”
“John, I’m talking about a capability. The political will to use it, ’mano. And patience. It must have taken years. Sleeper agents I know about. First time I saw a sleeper shooter.”
“Could have been a regular guy who just got pissed and—”
“Who was willing to die? I don’t think so, John. Why not pop the guy on the way to the latrine at midnight and try to get the hell out of Dodge? No way, Mr. C. Gomer there was making a statement. Wasn’t just his, either. He was delivering a message for his boss, too.”
Clark looked up from his briefing papers and thought about that one. Another government employee might have dismissed the observation as something out of his purview, but Clark had been suborned into government service as a result of his inability to see limits on his activities. Besides that, he could remember being in Iran, being part of a crowd shouting “Death to America!” at blindfolded captives from the U.S. embassy. More than that, he remembered what members of that crowd had said after Operation Blue Light had gone to shit, and how close it had been—how near the Khomeini government had been to taking out its wrath on Americans and turning an already nasty dispute into a shooting war. Even then, Iranian fingerprints were on all manner of terrorist operations worldwide, and America’s failure to address the fact hadn’t helped matters.
“Well, Domingo, that’s why we need more field officers.”
SURGEON HAD ONE more reason not to like her husband’s presidency. She couldn’t see him on the way out the door, for one thing. He was in with somebody—well, it had to do with what she’d seen on the morning news, and that was business, and sometimes she’d had to scoot out of the house unexpectedly for a case at Hopkins. But she didn’t like the precedent.
She looked at the motorcade. Nothing else to call it, a total of six Chevy Suburbans. Three were tasked to getting Sally (now code-named SHADOW) and Little Jack (SHORTSTOP) to school. The other three would conduct Katie (SANDBOX) to her day-care center. Partly, Cathy Ryan admitted, that was her fault. She didn’t want the children’s lives disrupted. She wouldn’t countenance changing their schools and friends because of the misfortune that had dropped on their lives. None of this was the kids’ fault. She’d been dumb enough to agree to Jack’s new post, which had lasted all of five minutes, and as with many things in life, you had to accept the consequences. One consequence was increased travel time to their classes and finger-painting, just to keep friends, but, damn it... there was no right answer.
“Good morning, Katie!” It was Don Russell, squatting down for a hug and a kiss from SANDBOX. Cathy had to smile at that. This agent was a godsend. A man with grandchildren of his own, he truly loved kids, especially little ones. He and Katie had hit it right off. Cathy kissed her youngest good-bye, and her bodyguard—it was just outrageous, a child needed a bodyguard! But Cathy remembered her own experiences with terrorists, and she had to accept that, too. Russell lifted SANDBOX into her car seat, strapped her in, and the first set of three vehicles pulled away.
“Bye, Mom.” Sally was going through a phase in which she and Mom were friends, and didn’t kiss. Cathy accepted that without liking it. It was the same with Little Jack: “See ya, Mom.” But John Patrick Ryan Jr. was boy enough to demand a front seat, which he’d get this one time. Both sub-details were augmented due to the manner in which the Ryan family had come to the White House, with a total of twenty agents assigned to protect the children for the time being. That number would come down in a month or so, they’d told her. The kids would ride in normal cars instead of the armored Suburbans. In the case of SURGEON, her helicopter was waiting.
Damn. It was all happening again. She’d been pregnant with Little Jack, then to learn that terrorists were... why the hell had she ever agreed to this? The greatest indignity of all, she was married to supposedly the world’s most powerful man, but he and his family both had to take orders from other people.
“I know, Doc.” It was the voice of Roy Altman, her principal agent. “Hell of a way to live, isn’t it?”
Cathy turned. “You read minds?”
“Part of the job, ma’am, I know—”
“Please, my name is Cathy. Jack and I are both ‘Doctor Ryan.’ ”
Altman nearly blushed. More than one First Lady had taken on royal airs with the accession of her husband to POTUS, and the children of politicians weren’t always fun to guard, but the Ryan family, the Detail members had already agreed, were not at all like the people they usually had to guard. In some ways that was bad news, but it was hard not to like them.
“Here.” He handed over a manila folder. It was her caseload for the day.
“Two procedures, then follow-ups,” she told him. Well, at least she could do paperwork on the flight. That was convenient, wasn’t it?
“I know. We’ve arranged with Professor Katz to keep us posted—so we can keep up with your schedule,” Altman explained.
“Do you do background checks on my patients, too?” Cathy asked, thinking it a joke.
It wasn’t. “Yes. Hospital records provide names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers. We run NCIC checks, and checks against our own file of—uh, of people we keep an eye on.”
The look that pronouncement generated wasn’t exactly friendly, but Altman didn’t take it personally. They walked back into the building, then back out a few minutes later to the waiting helicopter. There were news cameras, Cathy saw, to record the event, as Colonel Hank Goodman lit up his engines.
In the operations room for the U.S. Secret Service, a few blocks away, the status board changed. POTUS (President of the United States) was shown by the red LED display as in the White House. FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) was shown as in transit. SHADOW, SHORTSTOP, and SANDBOX were covered on a different board. The same information was relayed by secure digital radio link to Andrea Price, sitting and reading the paper outside the Oval Office. Other agents were already at St. Mary’s Catholic School and the Giant Steps Day Care Center, both near Annapolis, and at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Maryland State Police knew that the Ryan children were rolling along U.S. Route 50, and had additional cars posted along the travel route for an obvious police presence. At the moment, yet another Marine helicopter was following SURGEON’S, and a third, with a team of heavily armed agents aboard, was pacing the three children. Were there a serious assassin out there, then he would see the overt display of force. The agents in the moving vehicles would be at their usual alert state, scanning for cars, filing them away for the chance that the same one would show up a little too much. Unmarked Secret Service cars would maneuver around independently, doing much the same thing while being disguised as ordinary commuters. The Ryans would never really know how much security was arrayed around them, unless they asked, and few ever wanted to know.
A normal day was under way.
THERE WAS NO denying it now. She didn’t need Dr. Moudi to tell her. The headaches had worsened, the fatigue had gotten worse. As with young Benedict Mkusa, she’d thought, then hoped it might be a recurrence of her old malaria, the first time she’d ever entertained that sort of thought. But then the pains had come, not in the joints, but in the stomach first of all, and that had been like watching an advan
cing weather front, the tall white clouds that led a massive, violent storm, and there was nothing for her to do but wait and dread what was approaching, for she knew everything that was to be. Part of her mind still denied it, and another part tried to hide away in prayer and faith, but as with a person at a horror movie, face covered by denying hands, her eyes still peeked sideways to see what was coming, the horror all the worse because of her useless retreat from it.
The nausea was worse, and soon she’d be unable to control it with her will, strong as that was.
She was in one of the hospital’s few private rooms. The sun was still bright outside, the sky clear, a beautiful day in the unending African spring-summer season. An IV tree was next to her bed, running sterile saline into her arm, along with some mild analgesics and nutrients to fortify her body, but really it was a waiting game. Sister Jean Baptiste could do little else but wait. Her body was limp with fatigue, and so pained that turning her head to look at the flowers out the window required a minute of effort. The first massive surge of nausea came almost as a surprise, and somehow she managed to grasp the emesis tray. She was still nurse enough and detached enough to see the blood there, even as Maria Magdalena took the tray away from her, to empty it into a special container. Fellow nurse, and fellow nun, she was dressed in sterile garb, wearing rubber gloves and a mask as well, her eyes unable to conceal her sorrow.
“Hello, Sister.” It was Dr. Moudi, dressed much the same way, his darker eyes more guarded above the green mask. He checked the chart hanging at the foot of the bed. The temperature reading was only ten minutes old, and still rising. The telex from Atlanta concerning her blood had arrived even more recently, inspiring his immediate walk to the isolation building. Her fair skin had been pale only a few hours earlier. Now it appeared slightly flushed, and dry. Moudi thought they’d work to cool the patient down with alcohol, maybe ice later, to fight the fever. That would be bad for the Sister’s dignity. They did indeed dress chastely, as women should, and the hospital gown she now wore was ever demeaning to that virtue. Worse still, however, was the look in her eyes. She knew. But he still had to say it.
“Sister,” the physician told her, “your blood has tested positive for Ebola antibodies.”
A nod. “I see.”
“Then you also know,” he added gently, “that twenty percent of the patients survive this disease. You are not without hope. I am a good doctor. Sister Magdalena here is a superb nurse. We will support you as best we can. I am also in contact with some of my colleagues. We will not give up on you. I require that you do not give up on yourself. Talk to your God, good lady. He will surely listen to someone of your virtue.” The words came easily, for Moudi was after all a physician, and a good one. He surprised himself by half wishing for her survival.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Moudi turned to the other nun before leaving. “Please keep me informed.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
Moudi walked out of the room, turning left toward the door, removing his protective garb as he went, and dumping the articles into the proper container. He made a mental note to speak to the administrator to be sure that the necessary precautions were strictly enforced. He wanted this nun to be the last Ebola case in this hospital. Even as he spoke, part of the WHO team was on its way to the Mkusa family, where they would interview the grief-stricken parents, along with neighbors and friends, to learn where and how Benedict might have encountered the infection. The best guess was a monkey bite.
But only a guess. There was little known about Ebola Zaire, and most of the unknowns were important. Doubtless it had been around for centuries, or even longer than that, just one more lethal malady in an area replete with them, not recognized as anything more than “jungle fever” by physicians as recently as thirty years before. The focal center of the virus was still a matter of speculation. Many thought a monkey carried it, but which monkey no one knew—literally thousands had been trapped or shot in the effort to determine that, with no result. They weren’t even sure that it was really a tropical disease—the first properly documented outbreak of this class of fever had actually taken place in Germany. There was a very similar disease in the Philippines.
Ebola appeared and disappeared, like some sort of malignant spirit. There was an apparent periodicity to it. The recognized outbreaks had occurred at eight- to ten-year intervals—again, unexplained and slightly suspect, because Africa was still primitive, and there was ample reason to believe that victims could contract the disease and die from it in but a few days, without the time to seek medical help. The structure of the virus was somewhat understood and its symptoms recognized, but its mechanism was still a mystery. That was troubling to the medical community, because Ebola Zaire had a mortality rate of roughly eighty percent. Only one in five of its victims survived, and why that happened was just one more entry in the “unknown” column. For all of those reasons, Ebola was perfect.
So perfect that it was one of the most feared organisms known to man. Minute quantities of the virus were in Atlanta, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and a handful of other institutions, where it was studied under conditions resembling those of a science-fiction novel, the doctors and technicians in virtual space suits. There wasn’t even enough known about Ebola to do work on a vaccine. The four known varieties the fourth had been discovered in a bizarre incident in America; but that strain, while uniformly lethal to monkeys, incomprehensibly had no serious effects on humans—were too different. Even now scientists in Atlanta, some of whom he knew, were peering into electron microscopes to map the structure of this new version, later to compare it with samples of other known strains. That process could take weeks and, probably, as with all previous efforts, would yield only equivocal results.
Until the true focal center of the disease was discovered, it remained an alien virus, something almost from another planet, deadly and mysterious. Perfect.
Patient Zero, Benedict Mkusa was dead, his body incinerated by gasoline, and the virus dead with him. Moudi had a small blood sample, but that wasn’t really good enough. Sister Jean Baptiste was something else, however. Moudi thought about it for a moment, then lifted the phone to call the Iranian embassy in Kinshasa. There was work to be done, and more work to prepare. His hand hesitated, the receiver halfway from the desk to his ear. What if God did listen to her prayers? He might, Moudi thought, He just might. She was a woman of great virtue who spent as much of her day in prayer as any Believer in his home city of Qom, whose faith in her God was firm, and who had devoted her life to service of those in need. Those were three of Islam’s Five Pillars, to which he could add a fourth—the Christian Lent wasn’t so terribly different from the Islamic Ramadan. These were dangerous thoughts, but if Allah heard her prayers, then what he intended to do was not written, and would not happen, and if her prayers were not heard ... ? Moudi cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder and made the call.
“MR, PRESIDENT, WE can’t ignore it anymore.”
“Yeah, I know, Arnie.”
It came down to a technical issue, oddly enough. The bodies had to be identified positively, because a person wasn’t dead until there was a piece of paper that said so, and until that person was declared dead, if that person had been a senator or congressperson, then his or her post wasn’t vacant, and no new person could be selected for it, and Congress was an empty shell. The certificates would be going out today, and within an hour, governors of “the several states” would be calling Ryan for advice or to advise what they would be doing unbidden. At least one governor would today resign his post and be appointed to the United States Senate by his succeeding lieutenant governor in an elegant, if obvious, political payoff, or so the rumors said.
THE VOLUME OF information was stunning, even to someone familiar with the sources. It went back over fourteen years. The timing could scarcely have been better, however, since that was about the time the major newspapers and magazines had gone to electronic media, which was easily cross-l
oaded to the World Wide Web, and for which the media empires could charge a modest fee for material which otherwise would have been stored in their own musty basements or at most sold to college libraries for practically nothing. The WWW was still a fairly new and untested source of income, but the media had seized it by the throat, since now for the first time news was less volatile than it had been in the past. It was now a ready source for its own reporters, for students, for those with individual curiosity, and for those whose curiosity was more strictly professional. Best of all, the huge number of people doing a keyword search would make it impossible for anyone to check all the inquiries.
He was careful anyway—rather, his people were. The inquiries being made on the Web were all happening in Europe, mainly in London, through brand-new Internet-access accounts which would last no longer than the time required to download the data, or which came from academic accounts to which numerous people had access. Keywords RYAN JOHN PATRICK, RYAN JACK, RYAN CAROLINE, RYAN CATHY, RYAN CHILDREN, RYAN FAMILY, and a multitude of others were inputted, and literally thousands of “hits” had resulted. Many were spurious because “Ryan” was not that uncommon a name, but the vetting process was not all that difficult.
The first really interesting clips came when Ryan had been thirty-one and had first come into the public spotlight in London. Even the photos were there, and though they took time to download, they were worth waiting for. Especially the first. That one showed a young man sitting on a street, covered with blood. Well, wasn’t that inspirational? The subject of the photograph actually looked quite dead in it, but he knew that wounded people often appeared that way. Then had come another set of photos of a wrecked automobile and a small helicopter. In the intervening years the data on Ryan was surprisingly scarce, mainly squibs about his testifying before the American Congress behind closed doors. There were additional hits concerning the end of the Fowler presidency—immediately after the initial confusion it had been reported that Ryan himself had prevented a nuclear-missile launch... and Ryan himself had hinted at it to Daryaei... but that story had never been officially confirmed, and Ryan himself had never discussed the matter with anyone. That was important. That said something about the man. But that could also be set aside.
