“There goes the neighborhood,” John grumbled. Then it was time for business. “How’s Jack doing?”
“I’m scheduled to see him after lunch, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they canceled out. The poor bastard must be buried alive.”
“What I saw about how he got roped into this, is what the papers said true?”
“Yes, it is. So, we have a Kelly Girl for President,” the Deputy Director (Operations) posed as a multifaceted inside joke. “We’re going to do a comprehensive threat assessment. I want you two in on it.”
“Why us?” Chavez asked.
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“Because I’m tired of having all that done by the Intelligence Directorate. I tell you one thing that’s going to happen: we have a President now who understands what we do here. We’re going to beef up Operations to the point where I can pick up a phone, ask a question, and get an answer I can understand.”
“PLAN BLUE?” Clark asked, and received a welcome nod. “Blue” had been his last function before leaving the CIA’s training facility, known as “the Farm,” down near the Navy’s nuclear-weapons locker at Yorktown, Virginia. Instead of hiring a bunch of Ivy League intellectuals–at least they didn’t smoke pipes anymore–he had proposed that the Agency recruit cops, police officers right off the street. Cops, he reasoned, knew about using informants, didn’t have to be taught street smarts, and knew about surviving in dangerous areas. All of that would save training dollars, and probably produce better field officers. The proposal had been File-13’d by two successive DDOs, but Mary Pat had known about it from the beginning, and approved the concept. “Can you sell it?”
“John, you’re going to help me sell it. Look how well Domingo here has turned out.”
“You mean I’m not affirmative action?” Chavez asked.
“No, Ding, that’s only with his daughter,” Mrs. Foley suggested. “Ryan will go for it. He isn’t very keen on the Director. Anyway, for now I want you two to do your debrief on SANDALWOOD.”
“What about our cover?” Clark asked. He didn’t have to explain what he meant. Mary Pat had never got her hands dirty in the field–she was espionage, not the paramilitary side of the Operations Directorate–but she understood just fine.
“John, you were acting under presidential orders. That’s written down and in the book. Nobody’s going to second-guess anything you did, especially with saving Koga. You both have an Intelligence Star coming for that. President Durling wanted to see you and present the medals himself up at Camp David. I suppose Jack will, too.”
Whoa, Chavez thought behind unblinking eyes, but nice as that thought was, he’d been thinking about some-
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thing else on the three-hour drive up from Yorktown.
“When’s the threat-assessment start?”
“Tomorrow for our side of it. Why?” MP asked.
“Ma’am, I think we’re going to be busy.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” she replied, after nodding.
“1 HAVE TWO procedures scheduled for today,” Cathy said, surveying the breakfast buffet. Since they didn’t know what the Ryans liked to have in the morning, the staff had prepared some–actually quite a lot–of everything. Sally and Little Jack thought that was just great– even better, schools were closed. Katie, a recent graduate to real foods, gnawed at a piece of bacon in her hand while contemplating some buttered toast. For children, the immediate has the greatest importance. Sally, now fifteen (going on thirty, her father sometimes lamented), took the longest view of the three, but at the moment that was limited to how her social life would be affected. For all of them, Daddy was still Daddy, whatever job he might hold at the moment. They’d learn different, Jack knew, but one thing at a time.
“We haven’t figured that out,” her husband replied, selecting scrambled eggs and bacon for his plate. He’d need his energy today.
“Jack, the deal was that I could still do my work, remember?”
“Mrs. Ryan?” It was Andrea Price, still hovering around like a guardian angel, albeit with an automatic pistol. “We’re still figuring out the security issues and–”
“My patients need me. Jack, Bernie Katz and Hal Marsh can backstop me on a lot of things, but one of my patients today needs me. I have teaching rounds to prep for, too.” She checked her watch. “In four hours.” Which was true, Ryan didn’t have to ask. Professor Caroline Ryan, M.D., F.A.C.S., was top-gun for driving a laser around a retina. People came from all over the world to watch her work.
“But schools are–” Price stopped, reminding herself that she knew better.
“Not medical schools. We can’t send patients home.
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I’m sorry. I know how complicated things are for everybody, but I have people who depend on me, too, and I have to be there for them.” Cathy looked at the adult faces in the kitchen for a decision that would go her way. The kitchen staff–all sailors–moved in and out like mobile statues, pretending not to hear anything. The Secret Service people adopted a different blank expression, one with more discomfort in it.
The First Lady was supposed to be an unpaid adjunct to her husband. That was a rule which needed changing at some point. Sooner or later, after all, there would be a female President, and that would really upset the applecart, a fact well known but studiously ignored to this point in American history. The usual political wife was a woman who appeared at her husband’s side with an adoring smile and a few carefully picked words, who endured the tedium of a campaign, and the surprisingly brutal handshakes– certainly Cathy Ryan would not subject her surgeon’s hands to that, Price thought suddenly. But this First Lady actually had a job. More than that, she was a physician with a Lasker Memorial Public Service Award shortly to sit on her mantel (the awards dinner had yet to he held), and if she had learned anything about Cathy Ryan, Price knew that she was dedicated to her profession, not merely to her husband. However admirable that might be, it would be a royal pain in the ass to the Service, Price was sure. Worse yet, the principal agent assigned to Mrs. Dr. Ryan was Roy Altman, a tall bruiser of a former paratrooper whom she’d not yet met. That decision had been made for Roy’s size as well as his savvy. It never hurt to have one obvious bodyguard close aboard, and since the First Lady appeared to many as a soft target, one of Roy’s functions was to make the casual troublemaker think twice on that basis alone. Other members of her Detail would be virtually invisible. One of Altman’s other functions was to use his bulk to block bullets, something the agents trained for but didn’t dwell on.
Each of the Ryan kids would have to be protected as well, in a sub-detail that routinely split into segments. Katie’s had been the hardest to select–because agents had fought for the job. The boss there would be the old-
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est member of the team, a grandfather named Don Russell. Little Jack would get a youngish male principal who was a serious sports fan, while Sally Ryan drew a female agent just over thirty, single, and hip (Price’s term rather than the agent’s), wise in the ways of young men and mall-shopping. The idea was to make the family as comfortable as was possible with the necessity of being followed everywhere except the bathroom by people with loaded firearms and radios. It was, in the end, a hopeless task, of course. President Ryan had the background to accept the need for all of this. His family would learn to endure it.
“Dr. Ryan, when will you have to leave?” Price asked.
“About forty minutes. It depends on traf—-”
“Not anymore,” Price corrected the First Lady. The day would be bad enough. The idea had been to use the previous day to brief the Vice President’s family in on all the things that had to be done, but that plan had been shot completely to hell, along with so many other things. Alt-man was in another room, going over maps. There were three viable land routes to Baltimore: Interstate-95, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and US Route 1, all of them packed every morning with rush-hour traffic which a Secret Service convoy would disrupt to a fare-thee-well; worse, for any potential assassin, the routes were too predictable, narrowing down as they did on nearing Baltimore. Johns Hopkins Hospital had a helicopter pad atop its pediatrics building, but nobody had yet considered the political fallout that could result from hopping the First Lady to work every day in a Marine Corps VH-60. Maybe that was a viable option now, Price decided. She left the room to confer with Altman, and suddenly the Ryan family was alone, having breakfast as though they were still a normal family.
“My God, Jack,” Cathy breathed.
“I know.” Instead of talking, they enjoyed the silence for a full minute, both of them looking down at their breakfast, poking things around with forks instead of eating.