“Raman, where’s that from?” Jack asked, on the way to the elevator.
“Mother Lebanese, father Iranian, came over in ’79, when the Shah had his problems. Dad was close to the regime.”
“So what do you think of the Iraq situation?” the President asked.
“Sir, I hardly even speak the language anymore.” The agent smiled. “Now, if you want to ask me about who’s lookin’ good in the NCAA finals, I’m your man.”
“Kentucky,” Ryan said decisively. The White House elevator was old, pre-Art Deco in the interior finishings, with worn black buttons, which the President wasn’t allowed to push. Raman did that for him.
“Oregon’s going all the way. I’m never wrong, sir. Ask the guys. I won the last three pools. Nobody’11 bet against
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me anymore. The finals will be Oregon and Duke–my school–and Oregon will win by six or eight. Well, maybe less if Maceo Rawlings has a good night,” Raman added.
“What did you study at Duke?”
“Pre-law, but I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Actually I decided that criminals shouldn’t have any rights, and so I figured I’d rather be a cop, and I joined the Service.”
“Married?” Ryan wanted to know the people around him. At one level, it was mere good manners. At another, these people were sworn to defend his life, and he couldn’t treat them like employees.
“Never found the right girl–at least not yet.”
“Muslim?”
“My parents were, but after I saw all the trouble religion caused them, well”–he grinned–“if you ask around, they’ll tell you my religion is ACC basketball. I never miss a Duke game on the TV. Damned shame Oregon’s so tough this year. But that’s one thing you can’t change.”
The President chuckled at the truth of that statement. “Aref, you said, your first name?”
“Actually, they call me Jeff. Easier to pronounce,” Raman explained as the door opened. The agent positioned himself in the center of the doors, blocking a direct line of sight to POTUS. A member of the Uniform Division was standing there, along with two more of the Detail, all of them known by sight to Raman. With a nod, he walked out, with Ryan in tow, and the group turned west, past the side corridor that led to the bowling alley and the carpenter shops.
“Okay, Jeff, an easy day planned,” Ryan told him unnecessarily. The Secret Service knew his daily schedule before he did.
“Easy for us, maybe.”
They were waiting for him in the Oval Office. The Fo-leys, Bert Vasco, Scott Adler, and one other person stood when the President walked in. They’d already been scanned for weapons and nuclear material.
“Ben!” Jack said. He paused to set his early morning papers on the desk, and joined his guests.
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“Mr. President,” Dr. Ben Goodley replied with a smile.
“Ben’s prepared the morning brief,” Ed Foley explained.
Since not all of the morning visitors were part of the inner circle, Raman would stay in the room, lest somebody leap across the coffee table and try to strangle the President. A person didn’t need a firearm to be lethal. A few weeks of study and practice could turn any reasonably fit person into enough of a martial-arts expert to kill an unwary victim. For that reason, members of the Detail carried not only pistols, but also Asps, police batons made of telescoping steel segments. Raman watched as this Good-ley–a carded national intelligence officer–handed out the briefing sheets. Like many members of the Secret Service, he got to hear nearly everything. The “EYES-ONLY PRESIDENT” sticker on a particularly sensitive folder didn’t really mean that. There was almost always someone else in the room, and while the Detail members professed even among themselves not to pay any attention to such things, what that really meant was that they didn’t discuss them very much. Not hearing and not remembering were something else. Cops were not trained or paid to forget things, much less to ignore them.
In that sense, Raman thought, he was the perfect spy. Trained by the United States of America to be a law enforcement officer, he had performed brilliantly in the field, mainly in counterfeiting cases. He was a proficient marksman, and a very organized thinker–a trait revealed all the way back in his schooling; he’d graduated from Duke summa cum laude, with nothing less than an A grade on his transcript, plus he’d been a varsity wrestler. It was useful for an investigator to have a good memory, and he did. Photographic, in fact, a talent which had attracted the Detail leadership to him early on, because the agents protecting the President needed to be able to recognize a particular face instantly from the scores of photographs which they carried when the Boss was out pressing flesh. During the Fowler administration, as a junior agent gazetted to the Detail from the St. Louis field office to cover a fund-raising dinner, he’d ID’d and detained a suspected presidential stalker who’d turned out to have a .22 automatic
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in his pocket. Raman had pulled the man from the crowd so quietly and skillfully that the subject’s processing into the Missouri state mental-health system had never made the papers, which was just what they tried to achieve. The young agent had “Detail” written all over him, the then-Director of the United States Secret Service had decided on reviewing the case, and so Raman had been transferred over soon after Roger Durling’s ascension to the Presidency. As a junior member of the Detail he’d stood boring hours on post, run alongside the Presidential limousine, and gradually worked his way up rather rapidly for a young man. He’d worked the punishing hours without complaints, only commenting from time to time that, as an immigrant, he knew how important America was, and as his distant ancestors might have served Darius the Great as one of the “Immortals,” so he relished doing the same for his new country. It was so easy, really, much easier than the task his brother–ethnic, not biological–had performed in Baghdad a short time earlier. Americans, whatever they might say to pollsters, truly loved immigrants in their large and foolish hearts. They knew much, and they were always learning, but one thing they had yet to learn was that you could never look into another human heart.
“No assets we can use on the ground,” Mary Pat was saying.
“Good intercepts, though,” Goodley went on. “NSA is really coming through for us. The whole Ba’ath leadership is in the jug, and I don’t think they’re going to be coming out, at least not standing up.”
“So Iraq is fully decapitated?”
“A military ruling council, colonels and junior generals. Afternoon TV showed them with an Iranian mullah. No accident,” Bert Vasco said positively. “The least that comes out of this is a rapprochement with Iran. At most, the two countries merge. We’ll know that in a couple of days–two weeks at the outside.”
“The Saudis?” Ryan asked.
“They’re having kittens, Jack,” Ed Foley replied at once. “I talked with Prince Ali less than an hour ago. They cobbled together an aid package that would just about
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have paid off our national debt in an effort to buy the new Iraqi regime–did it overnight, biggest goddamned letter of credit ever drafted–but nobody’s answering the phone. That has ’em shook in Riyadh. Iraq’s always been willing to talk business. Not now.”
And that would be what frightened all the states on the Arabian Peninsula, Ryan knew. It wasn’t well appreciated in the West that the Arabs were businessmen. Not ideologues, not fanatics, not lunatics, but businessmen. Theirs was a maritime trading culture that predated Islam, a fact remembered in America only in remakes of Sinbad the Sailor movies. In that sense they were very like Americans, despite the difference in language, clothing, and religion, and just like Americans they had trouble understanding people who were not willing to do business, to reach an accommodation, to make some sort of exchange. Iran was such a country, changed from the previous state of affairs under the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini into a theocracy. They’re not like us was the universal point of concern for any culture. They’re not like us ANYMORE would be a very frightening development for Gulf States who’d always known that, despite political differences, there had always been an avenue of commonality and communication.
“Tehran?” Jack asked next. Ben Goodley took the question unto himself.
“Official news broadcasts welcome the development– the routine offers of peace and renewed friendship, but nothing beyond that at this point,” Goodley said. “Officially, that is. Unofficially, we’re getting all sorts of intercept traffic. People in Baghdad are asking for instructions, and people in Tehran are giving them. For the moment they’re saying to let the situation develop apace. The revolutionary courts come next. We’re seeing a lot of Islamic clergy on TV, preaching love and freedom and all that nice stuff. When the trials start, and people start backing into walls to pose for rifle-fire, then there’s going to be a total vacuum.”