Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

computer to Moscow? If everything was so goddamned secret, why were the

Russians in on it? And if it were this goddamned important, why wait for a

commercial flight? A State Department employee of long standing, he knew

(hut it was foolish to question the logic of government U|K*I atmns, It uas |iisl

Ihul he was something of an idealist.

The rest of the trip went normally enough, right to tin- embassy, sel in

wcsl-ccntral Moscow, by the river. Inside the building, the1 two men went to

Ihc communications room, where the courier opened his bag, handed over Us

contents, and headed off for a shower and a bed, his questions never to Ix-

answered, he was sure.

The rest of the work had been done by Russians at remarkable speed. The

phone line to Interfax led in turn to RVS, thence by military fiberoptic line

•II (he way to Vladivostok, where another similar line, laid by Nippon Tele-

phone & Telegraph, led to the Japanese home island of Honshu. The laptop

had an internal modem, which was hooked to the newly installed line and

•witched on. Then it was time to wait, typically, though everything else had

been done at the best possible speed.

ll was one-thirty when Ryan got home to Peregrine Cliff. He’d dispensed

with his GSA driver, instead letting Special Agent Robberton drive him, and

he pointed the Secret Service agent toward a guest room before heading to

his own bed. Not surprisingly, Cathy was still awake.

“Jack, what’s going on?”

“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?” he asked as his first dodge. Com-

ing home had been something of a mistake, if a necessary one. He needed

fresh clothing more than anything else. A crisis was bad enough. For senior

Administration officials to look frazzled and haggard was worse, and the

press would surely pick up on it. Worst of all, it was visually obvious. The

average Joe seeing the tape on network TV would know, and worried offi-

cers made for worried troopers, a lesson Ryan remembered from the Basic

Officers’ Course at Quantico. And so it was necessary to spend two hours in

• car that would better have been spent on the sofa in his office.

Cathy rubbed her eyes in the darkness. ‘ ‘Nothing in the morning. I have to

deliver a lecture tomorrow afternoon on how the new laser system works to

some foreign visitors.”

“From where?”

“Japan and Taiwan. We’re licensing the calibration system we developed

and-what’s wrong?” she asked when her husband’s head snapped around.

It’s just paranoia, Ryan told himself. Just a dumb coincidence, nothing

more than that. Can’t be anything else. But he left the room without a word.

Robberton was undressing when he got to the guest room, his holstered pis-

tol hanging on the bedpost. The explanation took only a few seconds, and

Robberton lifted a phone and dialed the Secret Service operations center two

blocks from the White House. Ryan hadn’t even known that his wife had a

code name.

“SURGEON”-well, that was obvious, Ryan thought-“needs a friend

tomorrow … at Johns Hopkins … oh, yeah, she’ll be fine. Seeya.” Robber-

ton hung up. “Good agent, Andrea Price. Single, willowy, brown hair, jusl

joined the detail, eight years on the street. I worked with her dad when I was

a new agent. Thanks for telling me that.”

“See you around six-thirty, Paul.”

“Yeah.” Robberton lay right down, giving every indication of someone

who could go to sleep at will. A useful talent, Ryan thought.

“What was that all about?” Caroline Ryan demanded when her husband

returned to the bedroom. Jack sat down on the bed to explain.

“Cathy, uh, tomorrow at Hopkins, there’s going to be somebody with

you. Her name is Andrea Price. She’s with the Secret Service. And she’ll be

following you around.”

“Why?”

“Cathy, we have several problems now. The Japanese have attacked the

U.S. Navy, and have occupied a couple of islands. Now, you can’t-”

“They did what?”

“You can’t tell that to anyone,” her husband went on. “Do you under-

stand? You can’t tell that to anybody, but since you are going to be with

some Japanese people tomorrow, and because of who I am, the Secret Ser-

vice wants to have somebody around you, just to make totally certain that

things are okay.” There would be more to it than that. The Secret Service

was limited in manpower, and was not the least bit reticent about asking for

assistance from local police forces. The Baltimore City Police, which main-

tained a high-profile presence at Johns Hopkins at all times-the hospital

complex was not located in the best of areas-would probably assign a de-

tective to back up Ms. Price.

“Jack, are we in any danger?” Cathy asked, remembering distant times

and distant terrors, when she’d been pregnant with little Jack, when the Ul-

ster Liberation Army had invaded their home. She remembered how pleased

she’d been, and the shame she’d felt for it, when the last of them had been

executed for multiple murder-ending, she’d thought, the worst and most

fearful episode of her life.

For his part, Jack realized that it was just one more thing that they hadn’t

thought through. If America were at war, he was the National Security Advi-

sor to the President, and, yes, that made him a high-value target. And his

wife. And his three children. Irrational? What about war was not?

“I don’t think so,” he replied after a moment’s consideration, “but, well,

we might want to-we might have some additional houseguests. I don’t

know. I’ll have to ask.”

“You said they attacked our navy?”

“Yes, honey, but you can’t-”

“That means war, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, honey.” He was so exhausted that he was asleep thirty

seconds after hitting the pillow, and his last conscious thought was a recog-

nition that he knew very little of what he needed to know in oulrr i

his wife’s questions, or, for that matter, his own.

Nobody was sleeping in lower Manhattan, at least nobody whom others

might think important. It occurred to more than one tired trailing executive

lo observe that they were really earning their money now, but the truth ol the

matter was that they were accomplishing very little. Proud executives all,

they looked around trading rooms filled with computers whose collective

value was something only the accounting department knew, and whose cur-

rent utility was approximately zero. The European markets would soon

open. And do what? everyone wondered. There was ordinarily a nightwatch

here whose job it was to trade European equities, to keep track of the Euro-

dollar market, the commodities and metals market, and all the economic ac-

tivity that occurred on the eastern side of the Atlantic as well as the western.

On most days it was like the prologue to a book, a precursor to the real ac-

tion, interesting but not overly vital except, perhaps, for flavor, because the

real substance was decided here in New York City.

But none of that was true today. There was no guessing what would hap-

pen this day. Today Europe was the only game in town, and all of the rules

had been swept away. The people who manned the computers for this part of

the watch cycle were often considered second-string by those who showed

up at eight in the morning, which was both untrue and unfair, but in any

community there had to be internal competition. This time, as they showed

up at their accustomed and ungodly hour, the people who did this regularly

noted the presence of front-row executives, and felt a combination of unease

and exhilaration. Here was their chance to show their stuff. And here was

their chance to screw up, live and in color.

It started exactly at four in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

“Treasuries.” The word was spoken simultaneously in twenty houses as

European banks that still had enormous quantities of U.S. T-Bills as a hedge

against the struggling European economies and their currencies suddenly

felt quite uneasy about holding them. It seemed odd to some that the word

had been slow to get out to their European cousins on Friday, but it was

always that way, really, and the opening moves, everyone in New York

thought, were actually rather cautious. It was soon clear why. There were

plenty of “asks,” but not many “bids.” People were trying to sell Treasury

Notes, but the interest in buying them was less enthusiastic. The result was

prices that dropped just as fast as European confidence in the dollar.

“This is a steal, down three thirty-seconds already. What can we do?”

That question, too, was asked in more than one place, and in each the answer

was identical:

“Nothing,” a word in every case spoken with disgust. There followed

something else, usually a variant of Fucking Europeans, depending on the

“I don’t see nothin’, sir.” Jones blinked and looked back at the fan-fold