“But Washington–”
“For reasons of public safety, Washington is pretty well shut down, that is true–” She cut him off again, less
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from ill manners than from the fact that she only had four minutes to use, and she wanted to use them.
“The troops in the street. . . ?”
“Maria, the D.C. police and fire departments had the roughest night of all. It’s been a long, cold night for those people. The Washington, D.C., National Guard has been called out to assist the civilian agencies. That also happens after hurricanes and tornadoes. In fact, that’s really a municipal function. The FBI is working with the mayor to get the job done.” It was Ryan’s longest statement of the morning, and almost left him breathless, he was wound so tightly. That was when he realized that he was squeezing his hands to the point that his fingers were turning white, and Jack had to make a conscious effort to relax them.
“LOOKAT HIS arms,” the Prime Minister observed. “What do we know of this Ryan?”
The chief of her country’s intelligence service had a file folder in his lap which he had already memorized, having had the luxury of a working day to familiarize himself with the new chief of state.
“He’s a career intelligence officer. You know about the incident in London, and later in the States some years ago–”
“Oh, yes,” she noted, sipping her tea and dismissing that bit of history. “So, a spy …”
“A well-regarded one. Our Russian friends think very highly of him indeed. So does Century House,” said the army general, whose training went back to the British tradition. Like his Prime Minister, he’d been educated at Oxford, and, in his case, Sandhurst. “He is highly intelligent. We have reason to believe that in his capacity as Durling’s National Security Advisor he was instrumental in controlling American operations against Japan–”
“And us?” she asked, her eyes locked on the screen. How convenient it was to have communications satellites–and the American networks were all global now. Now you didn’t have to spend a whole day in an aircraft to go and see a rival chief of state–and then under con-
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trolled circumstances. Now she could see the man under pressure and gauge how he responded to it. Career intelligence officer or not, he didn’t look terribly comfortable. Every man had his limitations.
“Undoubtedly, Prime Minister.”
“He is less formidable than your information would suggest,” she told her adviser. Tentative, uncomfortable, rattled. . . out of his depth.
“WHEN DO YOU expect to be able to tell us more about what happened?” Maria asked.
“I really can’t say right now. It’s just too soon. Some things can’t be rushed, I’m afraid,” Ryan said. He vaguely grasped that he’d lost control of this interview, short as it was, and wasn’t sure why. It never occurred to him that the TV reporters were lined up outside the Roosevelt Room like shoppers in a checkout line, that each one wanted to ask something new and different–after the first question or two–and that each wanted to make an impression, not on the new President, but on the viewers, the unseen people behind the cameras who watched each morning show out of loyalty which the reporters had to strengthen whenever possible. As gravely wounded as the country was, reporting the news was the business which put food on their family tables, and Ryan was just one more subject of that business. That was why Arnie’s earlier advice on how they’d been instructed on what questions to ask had been overly optimistic, even coming from an experienced political pro. The only really good news was that the interviews were all time-limited–in this case by local news delivered by the various network affiliates at twenty-five minutes after the hour. Whatever tragedy had struck Washington, people needed to know about local weather and traffic in the pursuit of their daily lives, a fact perhaps lost on those inside the D.C. Beltway, though not lost on the local stations across the country. Maria was more gracious than she felt when the director cut her off. She smiled at the camera–
“We’ll be back.”
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–and Ryan had twelve minutes until NBC had at him. The coffee he’d had at breakfast was working on him now, and he needed to find a bathroom, but when he stood, the microphone wire nearly tripped him.
“This way, Mr. President,” Price pointed to the left, down the corridor, then right toward the Oval Office, Jack realized too late. He stopped cold on entering the room. It was still someone else’s in his mind, but a bathroom was a bathroom, and in this case, it was actually part of a sitting room off the office itself. Here, at least, there was privacy, even from the Praetorian Guard, which followed him like a pack of collies protecting a particularly valuable sheep. Jack didn’t know that when there was someone in this particular head, a light on the upper door frame lit up, and that a peephole in the office door allowed the Secret Service to know even that aspect of their President’s daily life.
Washing his hands, Ryan looked in the mirror, always a mistake at times like this. The makeup made him appear more youthful than he was, which wasn’t so bad, but also phony, the false ruddiness which his skin had never had. He had to fight off the urge to wipe it all off before coming back out to face NBC. This anchor was a black male, and on shaking hands with him, back in the Roosevelt Room, it was of some consolation that his makeup was even more grotesque than his own. Jack was oblivious to the fact that the TV lights so affected the human complexion that to appear normal on a television screen, one had to appear the clown to non-electronic eyes.
“What will you be doing today, Mr. President?” Nathan asked as his fourth question.
“I have another meeting with acting FBI Director Murray–actually we’ll be meeting twice a day for a while. I also have a scheduled session with the national security staff, then with some of the surviving members of Congress. This afternoon, we have a Cabinet meeting.”
“Funeral arrangements?” The reporter checked off another question from the list in his lap.
Ryan shook his head. “Too soon. I know it’s frustrating for all of us, but these things do take time.” He didn’t
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say that the White House Protocol Office had fifteen minutes of his afternoon to brief him on what was being planned.
“It was a Japanese airliner, and in fact a government-owned carrier. Do we have any reason to suspect–”
Ryan leaned forward at that one: “No, Nathan, we don’t. We’ve had communications with the Japanese government. Prime Minister Koga has promised full cooperation, and we are taking him at his word. I want to emphasize that hostilities with Japan are completely over. What happened was a horrible mistake. That country is working to bring to justice the people who caused that conflict to take place. We don’t yet know how everything happened–last night, I mean–but ‘don’t know’ means don’t know. Until we do, I want to discourage speculation. That can’t help anything, but it can hurt, and there’s been enough hurt for a while. We have to think about healing now.”
“DOMOARIGATO,” MUTTERED the Japanese Prime Minister. It was the first time he’d seen Ryan’s face or heard his voice. Both were younger than he’d expected, though he’d been informed of Ryan’s particulars earlier in the day. Koga noted the man’s tension and unease, but when he had something to say other than an obvious answer to an inane question–why did the Americans tolerate the insolence of their media?–the voice changed somewhat, as did the eyes. The difference was subtle, but Koga was a man accustomed to noting the smallest of nuance. It was one advantage of growing up in Japan, and all the more so for having spent his adult life in politics.
“He was a formidable enemy,” a Foreign Ministry official noted quietly. “And in the past he showed himself to be a man of courage.”
Koga thought about the papers he’d read two hours earlier. This Ryan had used violence, which the Japanese Prime Minister abhorred. But he had learned from two shadowy Americans who had probably saved his life from his own countrymen that violence had a place, just as
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surgery did, and Ryan had taken violent action to protect others, suffered in the process, then done so again before returning to peaceful pursuits. Yet again he’d displayed the same dichotomy, against Koga’s country, fighting with skill and ruthlessness, then showing mercy and consideration. A man of courage . . .
“And honor, I think.” Koga paused for a moment. So strange that there should already be friendship between two men who had never met, and who had only a week before been at war. “He is samurai.”