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But what Jack did is different from what they did. My husband fought to protect me and Sally, and Little Jack, who wasn’t even born yet.”
“You like being a doctor?”
“I love my work. I wouldn’t leave it for anything.”
“But usually a First Lady–”
“I know what you want to say. I’m not a political wife. I practice medicine. I’m a research scientist, and I work in the best eye institute in the world. I have patients waiting for me now. They need me–and you know, I need them, too. My job is who I am. I’m also a wife and a mother, and I like nearly everything about my life.”
“Except this?” Krystin asked, with a smile.
Cathy’s blue eyes twinkled. “I really don’t have to answer that, do I?” And Matthews knew she had the tagline for the interview.
“What sort of man is your husband?”
“Well, I can’t be totally objective, can I? I love him. He’s risked his life for me and my children. Whenever I’ve needed him, he was there. And I do the same for him. That’s what love and marriage mean. Jack is smart. He’s honest. I guess he’s something of a worrier. Sometimes he’ll wake up in the middle of the night–at home, I mean–and spend half an hour looking out the windows at the water. I don’t think he knows that I know that.”
“Does he still do that?”
“Not lately. He’s pretty tired when he gets to bed. These are the worst hours he’s ever worked.”
“His other government posts, at CIA, for example, there are reports that he–”
Cathy stopped that one with a raised hand. “I do not have a security clearance. I don’t know, and probably I don’t want to know. It’s the same with me. I am not allowed to discuss confidential patient information with Jack, or anyone else outside the faculty here.”
“We’d like to see you with patients and–” FLOTUS shook her head, stopping the question dead.
“No, this is a hospital, not a TV studio. It’s not so much my privacy as that of my patients. To them, I am not the First Lady. To them, I am Dr. Ryan. I’m not a
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celebrity. I’m a physician and a surgeon. To my students, I’m a professor and teacher.”
“And reportedly one of the best in the world at what you do,” Matthews added, just to see the reaction.
A smile resulted. “Yes, I’ve won the Lasker prize, and the respect of my colleagues is a gift that’s worth more than money–but you know, that isn’t it, either. Sometimes–not very often–but sometimes after a major procedure, I’m the one who takes the-bandages off in a darkened room, and we turn the lights up slowly, and I see it. I can see it on the patient’s face. I fixed the eyes, and they work again, and the look you see on his or her face– well, nobody’s in medicine for the money, at least not here at Hopkins. We’re here to make sick people well, and for me to preserve and restore sight, and the look you see when that job is done is like having God tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Nice job.’ That’s why I’ll never, never leave medicine,” Cathy Ryan said, almost lyrically, knowing that they’d use this on TV tonight, and hoping that maybe some bright young high-school kid would see her face and hear the words and decide to think about medicine. If she had to put up with this waste of her time, perhaps she could use it to serve her art.
It was a pretty good sequence, Krystin Matthews thought, but with only two minutes and thirty seconds of air time, they would not be able to use it. Better the part about how she hated being First Lady. Everybody was used to hearing doctors talk.
24
ON THE FLY
THE RETURN TO THE AIR-plane was quick and efficient. The governor went his way. The people who’d lined the sidewalks were mainly back to their jobs, and those who turned and looked were shoppers who probably wondered what the sirens were all about–or if they knew, were annoyed with the noise. Ryan was able to lean back in the plush leather seats, deflated by the fatigue that comes after a stressful moment.
“So, how’d I do?” he asked, looking out the window as Indiana passed by at seventy miles per hour. He smiled inwardly at the thought of driving this fast in the outskirts of a city without getting a ticket.
“Very well, actually,” Callie Weston said first. “You talked like a teacher.”
“I was a teacher once,” the President said. And with luck, I may be again someday.
“That’s okay for a speech like this, but for others you’ll need a little fire,” Arnie observed.
“One thing at a time,” Callie advised the chief of staff. “You crawl before you walk.”
“Same speech in Oklahoma, right?” POTUS asked.
“A few changes, but no big deal. Just remember you’re not in Indiana anymore. Sooner State, not Hoosier State. Same line about tornadoes, but football instead of basketball.”
“They also lost both senators, but they still have a congressman left, and he’ll be on the dais with you,” van Damm advised.
“How’d he make it?” Jack asked idly.
“Probably getting laid that night,” was the curt answer. “You’ll announce a new contract for Tinker Air Force Base. It means about five hundred new jobs, consolidating a few operations at the new location. That’ll make the local papers happy.”
BEN GOODLEY D! DN’T know if he was the new National Security Advisor or not. If so, he was rather young for the job, but at least the President he served was well grounded in foreign affairs. That made him more a high-class secretary than an adviser. It was a function he didn’t mind. He’d learned much in his brief time at Langley, and bad advanced rapidly, becoming one of the youngest men ever to win the coveted NiO card because he knew how to organize information, and because he had the political savvy to grade the important stuff. He especially liked working directly for President Ryan. Goodley knew that he could play it straight with the Boss, and that Jack–he still thought of him by that name, though he could no longer use it–would always let him know what he was thinking. It would be another learning experience for Dr. Goodley, and a priceless one for someone whose new life dream was someday becoming DCI on merit and not through politics.
On the wall opposite his desk was the sort of clock that shows the sun position for the entire world. He’d ordered it the very day he’d arrived–and to his surprise it had appeared literally overnight, instead of perking its way through five levels of procurement bureaucracy. He’d heard stories that the White House was one portion of the government that actually did work, and had not believed them–the Harvard graduate had been in government service about four years now, and figured he knew what worked and what didn’t. The surprise was welcome, and the clock, he’d found from his work in the CIA Operations Center, was an instant reference, better than the array of regular clocks that some places had. Your eye instantly saw where noon was and could automatically grasp what time it was anywhere in the world. More to the point, you instantly knew if something was happening at an unusual hour, and that told you as much as the Signals Intelligence–SIG!NT–bulletin. Such as the one that had just come in over his personal fax machine that was connected to his STU-4 secure phone.
The National Security Agency was in the habit of post-
ing periodic summaries of activity across the world. Its own watch center was staffed by senior military people, and while their outlook was more technical and less political than his own, they were not fools. Ben had gotten to know many of them by name in addition to reputation, and had also learned their individual strengths. The USAF colonel who had command of the NSA Watch Center on weekday afternoons didn’t bother people with trivia. That was left to lower-level people and lower-level signals. When the colonel put his name on something, it was usually worth reading. And so it was just after noon, Washington time.
Goodley saw that the FLASH concerned Iraq. That was another thing about the colonel. He didn’t go using CRITIC headers for the fun of it, as some did. Ben looked up to check the wall clock. After sundown, local time, a time of relaxation for some, and action for others. The action would be the sort to last all night, the better to get things accomplished without interference, so that the next day would be genuinely new, and genuinely different.
“Oh, boy,” Goodley breathed. He read down the page again, then turned his swivel chair and picked up the phone, touching the #3 speed-dial button.