“Thank you, and God bless America,” he concluded. The crowd stood and cheered. The band struck up. Ryan turned away from the armored podium to shake hands
986
again with the local officials, and made his way off the stage, waving as he did so. Arnie was waiting behind the curtain.
“For a phony, you still do pretty good.” Ryan didn’t have time to respond to that before Andrea came up.
“FLASH-traffic waiting for you on the bird, sir. From Mr. Adler.”
“Okay, let’s roll. Stay close,” he told his principal agent on the way out the back.
“Always,” Price assured him.
“Mr. President!” a reporter shouted. There were a bunch of them. He was the loudest this morning. He was one of the NEC team. Ryan turned and stopped. “Will you press Congress for a new gun-control law?”
“What for?”
“The attack on your daughter was–”
Ryan held his hand up. “Okay. As I understand it, the weapons used were of a type already illegal. I don’t see how a new law would accomplish much, unfortunately.”
“But gun-control advocates say–”
“I know what they say. And now they’re using an attack on my little girl, and the deaths of five superb Americans, to advance a political agenda of their own. What do you think of that?” the President asked, turning away.
“WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?”
He described his symptoms. His family physician was an old friend. They even played golf together. It wasn’t hard. At the end of every year, the Cobra representative had plenty of demonstrator clubs in nearly mint condition. Most were donated to youth programs or sold to country clubs as rental sticks. But some he could give to his friends, not to mention some Greg Norman autographs.
“Well, you have a temperature, one hundred and three, and that’s a little high. Your BP’s one hundred over sixty-five, and that’s a little low for you. Your color’s rotten–”
“I know, I feel sick.”
“You are sick, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Probably a flu bug you picked up in some bar, and all the air
987
travel doesn’t help much, either–and I’ve been telling you for years about cutting back on the booze. What happened is you picked something up, and other factors worsened it. Started Friday, right?”
“Thursday night, maybe Friday morning.”
“Played a round anyway?”
“Ended up with a snowman for my trouble,” he admitted, meaning a score of 80.
“I’d settle for that myself, healthy and stone-sober.” The doctor had a handicap of twenty. “You’re over fifty and you can’t wallow with the pigs at night and expect to soar with the eagles in the morning. Complete rest. A lot of liquids–non-alcoholic. Stay on the Tylenol.”
“No prescription?”
The doc shook his head. “Antibiotics don’t work on viral infections. Your immune system has to handle those, and it will if you let it. But while you’re here, I want to draw some blood. You’re overdue for a cholesterol check. I’ll send my nurse in. You have somebody here to drive you home?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to drive myself.”
“Good. Give it a few days. Cobra can do without you, and the golf courses will still be there when you feel better.”
“Thanks.” He felt better already. You always did when the doc told you that you weren’t going to die.
“HERE YOU GO.” Goodley handed the paper over. Few office buildings, even secure government ones, had the communications facilities that were shoehorned into the upper-level lounge area of the VC-25, whose call sign was Air Force One. “Not bad news at all,” Ben added.
SWORDSMAN skimmed it once, then sat down to read it more slowly. “Okay, fine, he thinks he can defuse the situation,” Ryan noted. “But he still doesn’t know what the goddamned situation is.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Does the working group have this?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Maybe they can make some sense out of it. Andrea?”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Tell the driver it’s time to get moving.” He looked around. “Where’s Arnie?”
“I’M CALLING YOU on a cellular,” Plumber said.
“Fine,” van Damm replied. “I’m on one, too, as a matter of fact.” The instruments on the aircraft were also secure, with STU-4 capability. He didn’t say that. He just needed a retort. John Plumber was no longer on his Christmas card list. Unfortunately, his direct line was still on Plumber’s Rolodex. What a shame he couldn’t change it. And he’d have to tell his secretary not to put this guy through anymore, at least not when he was traveling.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Good, John. Then I don’t have to say what I think.”
“Catch the broadcast tonight. I’ll be on at the end.”
“Why?”
“See for yourself, Arnie. So long.”
The chief of staff thumbed the kill switch on the phone and wondered what Plumber meant. He’d once trusted the man. Hell, he’d once trusted the man’s colleague. He could have told the President about the call, but decided not to. He’d just delivered a pretty good speech, distractions and all, doing well in spite of himself, because the poor son of a bitch really did believe in more than he knew. It wouldn’t be smart to drop something else on him. They’d tape the speech on the flight into California, and if it were fit to view, then he’d show it to POTUS.
“I DIDN’T KNOW there was a flu bug around,” he said, putting his shirt back on. It took time. The auto executive was sore all over.
“There always is. Just it doesn’t always make the news,” the physician replied, looking over the vital signs his nurse had just written down. “And you got it.” x “So?”
“So, take it easy. Don’t go to the office. No sense infecting your whole company. Ride it out. You should be fine by the end of the week.”
989
THE SNIE TEAM met at Langley. A ton of new information had come across from the Persian Gulf region, and they were sorting through it in a conference room on the sixth floor. Chavez’s photo of Mahmoud Haji Daryaei had been blown up by the in-house photo lab and was now hanging on the wall. Maybe somebody would throw darts at it, Ding thought.
“Track toads,” the former infantryman snorted, watching the Predator video.
“Kinda big to take on with a rifle, Sundance,” Clark observed. “Those things always scared the hell out of me.”
“LAWS rocket’ll do ’em fine, Mr. C.”
“What’s the range on a LAWS, Domingo?”
“Four, five hundred meters.”
“Those guns shoot two or three kilometers,” John pointed out. “Think about it.”
“I’m not up on the hardware,” Bert Vasco said. He waved at the screen. “What’s this mean?”
The answer came from one of CIA’s military analysts. “It means the UIR military is in much better shape than we’d expected.”
An Army major brought over from the Defense Intelligence Agency didn’t dispute that. “I’m fairly impressed. It was a pretty.vanilla exercise, nothing really complicated on the maneuver side, but they kept themselves organized for all of it. Nobody got lost–”
“You suppose they’re using GPS now?” the CIA analyst asked.
“Anybody who subscribes to Yachting magazine can buy the things. The price is down to four hundred bucks, last time I looked,” the officer told his civilian counterpart. “It means they can navigate their mobile forces a lot better. More than that, it means their artillery will become a whole lot more effective. If you know where your guns are, where your forward observer is, and where the target is in relation to him, then your first round is going to be pretty much on the money.”
“Fourfold increase in performance?”
“Easy,” the major replied. “That elderly gent on the
990
wall has a big stick to wave at his neighbors. I imagine he’ll let them know about it, too.”
“Bert?” Clark asked.
Vasco squirmed in his seat. “I’m starting to worry. This is going faster than I expected. If Daryaei didn’t have other things to worry about, I’d be more worried.”
“Like?” Chavez asked.
“Like he has a country to consolidate, and he has to know that if he starts rattling sabers, we’ll react.” The FSO paused. “Sure as hell, he wants to let his neighbors know who the big boy on the block is. How close is he to being able to do something?”
“Militarily?” the civilian analyst asked. He gestured to the guy from DIA.
“If we were not in the picture, now. But we are in the picture.”
“1 ASK NOW that you will join me in a moment of silence,” Ryan told the audience in Topeka. It was eleven here. That made it noon back home. Next stop Colorado Springs, then Sacramento, then, blessedly, home.
“YOU HAVE TO ask yourself what kind of man we have here,” Kealty said in front of cameras of his own. “Five men and women dead, and he doesn’t see the need for a law to control these guns. It’s just beyond my comprehension how anyone can be as coldly heartless as that. Well, if he doesn’t care about those brave agents, I do. How many Americans will have to die before he sees the need for this? Will he have to actually lose a family member? I’m sorry, I just can’t believe that remark,” the politician went on for the minicam.