Ryan leaned back in his chair. Like much else in the Oval Office, it was new. On the credenza behind him, all of Durling’s family and personal photos had been removed. The papers on the desk had been taken away for examination by the presidential secretarial staff. What remained or what had been substituted were accoutrements from White House stores. The chair at least was a good one, expensively designed to protect the back of its occupant, and it would soon be substituted for a custom-designed chair fitted to his own back by a manufacturer
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who performed the service for free and–remarkably– without public fanfare. Sooner or later he’d have to work in this place, Jack had decided a few minutes earlier. The secretaries were here, and it wasn’t fair to make them trek across the building, up and down stairs. Sleeping in this place was another issue entirely–for the moment; that, too, had to change, didn’t it? So, he thought, staring across the desk at Murray, murder.
“Shot?”
Dan shook his head. “Knife right in the heart, only one penetration. The wound looked to our agent to be from a thin blade, like a steak knife. From the cockpit tapes, it appears that it was done prior to takeoff. Looks like we can time-stamp that pretty exactly. From just prior to engine start-up to the moment of impact, the only voice on the tapes is the pilot. His name was Sato, a very experienced command pilot. The Japanese police have gotten a pile of data to us. It would seem that he lost a brother and a son in the war. The brother commanded a destroyer that got sunk with all hands. The son was a fighter pilot who cracked up on landing after a mission. Both on the same day or near enough. So, it was personal. Motive and opportunity, Jack,” Murray allowed himself to say, for they were almost alone in the office. Andrea Price was there, too. She didn’t quite approve; she had not yet been told exactly how far back the two men went.
“That’s pretty fast on the ID,” Price observed.
“It has to be firmed up,” Murray agreed. “We’ll do that with DNA testing just to be sure. The cockpit tape is good enough for voice-print analysis, or so they told our agent. The Canadians have radar tapes tracking the aircraft out of their airspace, so confirming the timing of the event is simple. We have the aircraft firmly ID’d from Guam to Japan to Vancouver, and into the Capitol building. Like they say, it’s all over but the shouting. There will be a lot of shouting. Mr. President”–Andrea Price felt better this time–“it will be at least two months before we have every lead and tidbit of information nailed down, and I suppose it’s possible that we could be wrong, but for all practical purposes, in my opinion and that of our senior agents at the scene, this case is well on its way to being closed.”
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“What could make you wrong?” Ryan asked.
“Potentially quite a few things, but there are practical considerations. For this to be anything other than the act of a single fanatic–no, that’s not fair, is it? One very angry man. Anyway, for this to be a conspiracy, we have to assume detailed planning, and that’s hard to support. How would they know the war was going to be lost, how did they know about the joint session–and if it were planned as a war operation, like the NTSB guy said, hell, ten tons of high explosives would have been simple to load aboard.”
“Or a nuke,” Jack interjected.
“Or a nuke.” Murray nodded. “That reminds me: the Air Force attache is going to see their nuclear-weapons-fabrication facility today. It took the Japanese a couple of days to figure out where it was. We’re having a guy who knows the things flying over there right now.” Murray checked his notes. “Dr. Woodrow Lowell–oh, I know him. He runs the shop at Lawrence Livermore. Prime Minister Koga told our ambassador that he wants to hand over the damned things PDQ and get them the hell out of his country.”
Ryan turned his chair around. The windows behind him faced the Washington Monument. That obelisk was surrounded by a circle of flagpoles, all of whose flags were at half-staff. But he could see that people were lined up for the elevator ride to the top. Tourists who’d come to D.C. to see the sights. Well, they were getting a bargain of sorts, weren’t they? The Oval Office windows, he saw, were incredibly thick, just in case one of those tourists had a sniper rifle tucked under his coat. . . .
“How much of this can we release?” President Ryan asked.
“I’m comfortable with releasing a few things,” Murray responded.
“You sure?” Price asked.
“It’s not as though we have to protect evidence for a criminal trial. The subject in the case is dead. We’ll chase down all the possibilities of co-conspirators, but the evidence we let go today will not compromise that in any way. I’m not exactly a fan of publicizing criminal evidence, but
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the people out there want to know something, and in a case like this one, you let them have it.”
Besides, Price thought, it makes the Bureau look good. With that silent observation, at least one government agency started returning to normal.
“Who’s running this one at Justice?” she asked instead.
“Pat Martin.”
“Oh? Who picked him?” she asked. Ryan turned to see the discourse on this one.
Murray almost blushed. “I guess I did. The President said to pick the best career prosecutor, and that’s Pat. He’s been head of the Criminal Division for nine months. Before that he ran Espionage. Ex-Bureau. He’s a particularly good lawyer, been there almost thirty years. Bill Shaw wanted him to become a judge. He was talking to the AG about it only last week.”
“You sure he’s good enough?” Jack asked. Price decided to answer.
“We’ve worked with him, too. He’s a real pro, and Dan’s right, he’s real judge material, tough as hell, but also extremely fair. He handled a mob counterfeiting case my old partner ramrodded in New Orleans.”
“Okay, let him decide what to let out. He can start talking to the press right after lunch.” Ryan checked his watch. He’d been President for exactly twelve hours.
COLONEL PIERRE ALEXANDRE, U.S. Army, retired, still looked like a soldier, tall and thin and fit, and that didn’t bother the dean at all. Dave James immediately liked what he saw as his visitor took his seat, liked him even more for what he’d read in the man’s c.v., and more still for what he’d learned over the phone. Colonel Alexandre–“Alex” to his friends, of which he had many–was an expert in infectious disease who’d spent twenty productive years in the employ of his government, divided mainly between Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington and Fort Detrick in Maryland, with numerous field trips sprinkled in. Graduate of West Point and the University of Chicago Medical School, Dr. James saw. Good, his eyes again sweeping
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over the residency and other professional-experience entries. The list of published articles ran to eight single-spaced pages. Nominated for a couple of important prizes, but not lucky yet. Well, maybe Hopkins could change that. His dark eyes were not especially intense at the moment. By no means an arrogant man, Alexandre knew who and what he was–better yet, knew that Dean James knew.
“I know Gus Lorenz,” Dean James said with a smile. “We interned together at Peter Brent Brigham.” Which Harvard had since consolidated into Brigham and Women’s.
“Brilliant guy,” Alexandre agreed in his best Creole drawl. It was generally thought that Gus’s work on Lassa and Q fever put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. “And a great doc.”
“So, why don’t you want to work with him in Atlanta? Gus tells me he wants you pretty bad.”
“Dean James–”
“Dave,” the Dean said.
“Alex,” the colonel responded. There was something to be said for civilian life, after all. Alexandre thought of the dean as a three-star equivalent. Maybe four stars. Johns Hopkins carried a lot of prestige. “Dave, I’ve worked in a lab damned near all my life. I want to treat patients again. CDC would just be more of the same. Much as I like Gus–we did a lot of work together in Brazil back in 1987; we get along just fine,” he assured the dean. “I am tired of looking at slides and printouts all the time.” And for the same reason he’d turned down one hell of an offer from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to head up one of their new labs. Infectious diseases were a coming thing in medicine, and both men hoped that it wasn’t too late. Why the hell, James wondered, hadn’t this guy made general-officer rank? Maybe politics, the dean thought. The Army had that problem, too, just as Hopkins did. But their loss . . .