The trilling note caused his eyes to open with a curse. He’d gone to bed only an hour earlier.
“Yes.”
“Call Yousif.” And the circuit went dead. As a further security measure, the call had come through several cutouts, and the message itself was too short to give much opportunity to the electronic-intelligence wizards in the employ of his numerous enemies. The final measure was more clever still. He immediately dialed yet another cellular number and repeated the message he’d just heard. A clever enemy who might have tracked the message through the cellular frequencies would probably have deemed him just another cutout. Or maybe not. The security games one had to play in this modern age were a genuine drag on day-to-day life, and one could never know what worked and what did not–until one died of natural causes, which was hardly worth waiting for.
Grumbling all the more, he rose and dressed and walked outside. His car was waiting. The third cutout had been his driver. Together with two guards, they drove to
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a secure location, a safe house in a safe place. Israel might be at peace, and even the PLO might have become part of a democratically elected regime–was the world totally mad?–but Beirut was still a place where all manner of people could operate. The proper signal was displayed there–it was the pattern of lighted and unlighted windows–showing that it was safe for him to exit the car and enter the building. Or so he’d find out in thirty seconds or so. He was too drowsy to care. Fear became boring after a life time of it.
There was the expected cup of coffee, bittersweet and strong, on the plain wooden table. Greetings were exchanged, seats taken, and conversation begun.
“It is late.”
“My flight was delayed,” his host explained. “We require your services.”
“For what purpose?”
“One might call it diplomacy,” was the surprising answer. He went on to explain.
“TEN MINUTES,” the President heard.
More makeup. It was 8:20. Ryan was in place. Mary Abbot applied the finishing touches to his hair, which merely increased the feeling that Ryan was an actor instead of a … politician? No, not that. He refused to accept the label, no matter what Arnie or any of the others might say. Through the open door to his right, Callie Wes-ton stood by the secretary’s desk, giving him a smile and a nod to mask her own unease. She had written a masterpiece–she always felt that way–and now it would be delivered by a rookie. Mrs. Abbot walked around to the front of the desk, occulting some of the TV lights to look at her work from the perspective of the viewer, and pronounced it good. Ryan merely sat there and tried not to fidget, knowing that soon he’d start sweating under the makeup again, and that it would itch like a son of a bitch, and that he couldn’t scratch at it no matter what, because Presidents didn’t itch or scratch. There were probably people out there who didn’t think that Presidents had to use the toilet or shave or maybe even tie their shoes.
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“Five minutes, sir. Mike check.”
“One, two, three, four, five,” Ryan said dutifully.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the director called from the next room.
Ryan had occasionally wondered about this sort of thing. Presidents delivering these official statements–a tradition going back at least as far as FDR and his “fireside chats,” which he’d first heard about from his mother–always seemed confident and at ease, and he’d always wondered how they ever managed to bring that off. He felt neither. One more layer of tension for him. The cameras were probably on now, so that the directors could be sure they were working, and somewhere a tape machine was recording the look on his face and the way his hands were playing with the papers in front of him. He wondered if the Secret Service had control of that tape, or whether they trusted the TV people to be honorable about such things . . . surely their own anchorpeople occasionally tipped over their coffee cups or sneezed or snarled at an assistant who messed up right before airtime . . . oh, yes, those taped segments were called bloopers, weren’t they… ? He was willing to bet, right there, right then, that the Service had a lengthy tape of presidential miscues.
“Two minutes.”
Both cameras had TelePrompTers. These were odd contraptions. A TV set actually hung from the front of each camera, but on those small sets the picture was inverted left-to-right because just above it was a tilted mirror. The camera lens was behind the mirror, shooting through it, while on it the President saw the text of his speech reflected. It was an otherworldly feeling talking to a camera you couldn’t really see to millions of people who weren’t really there. He’d actually be talking to his speech, as it were. Ryan shook his head as the speech text was fast-tracked, to make sure the scrolling system worked.
“One minute, stand by.”
Okay. Ryan adjusted himself in the seat. His posture worried him. Did he plant his arms on the desktop? Did he hold his hands in his lap? He’d been told not to lean back in the chair, because it was both too casual and too arrogant-looking, but Ryan tended to move around a lot,
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and holding still made his back hurt–or was it something he just imagined? A little late for that now. He noted the fear, the twisting heat in his stomach. He tried to belch, and then stifled it.
“Fifteen seconds.”
Fear almost became panic. He couldn’t run away now. He had to do the job. This was important. People depended on him. Behind each camera was an operator. There were three Secret Service agents to watch over them. A director-assistant was there as well. They were his only audience, but he could barely make them out, hidden as they were in the glare of the lights, and they wouldn’t react anyway. How would he know what his real audience thought?
Oh, shit.
A minute earlier, network anchors had come on to tell people what they already knew. Their evening TV shows would be put back a time for a presidential address. Across the country an indeterminate number of people lifted their controllers to switch to a cable channel as soon as they saw the Great Seal of the President of the United States of America. Ryan took a deep breath, compressed his lips, and looked into the nearer of the two cameras. The red light went on. He counted to two and began.
“Good evening.
“My fellow Americans, I’m taking this time to report to you on what has been happening in Washington for the past week, and to tell you about what will be happening over the next few days.
“First of all, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, assisted by the Secret Service, the National Transportation Safety Board, and other federal agencies, have taken the lead in investigating the circumstances surrounding the tragic deaths of so many of our friends, with praiseworthy assistance from the Japanese national police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Full information will be released this evening, and will be in your morning papers. For now I will give you the results of the investigation to date.
“The crash of the Japan Airlines 747 into the Capitol
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building was the deliberate act of one man. His name was Torajiro Sato. He was a senior captain with that airline. We’ve learned quite a lot about Captain Sato. We know that he lost both a brother and a son during our conflict with his country. Evidently he was unbalanced by this, and decided, on his own, to take his revenge.
“After flying his airliner to Vancouver, Canada, Captain Sato faked a flight order to London, ostensibly to replace a disabled aircraft with his own. Prior to takeoff, Captain Sato murdered his co-pilot in cold blood, a man with whom he had worked for several years. He then continued on entirely alone, the whole time with a dead man strapped in the seat next to him.” Ryan paused, his eyes tracking the words on the mirror. His mouth felt like raw cotton as a cue on the TelePrompTer told him to turn the page.
“Okay, how can we be sure of this?
“First, the identities of both Captain Sato and his copilot have been verified by the FBI, using DNA testing. Separate tests conducted by the Japanese national police have produced identical results. An independent laboratory checked these tests with their own, and again the results were the same. The possibility of a mistake in these tests is virtually zero.
“The other flight-crew members who remained in Vancouver have been interviewed both by the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and they are certain that Captain Sato was aboard the aircraft. We have similar eyewitness reports from local officials of the Canadian Ministry of Transport, and from American passengers on the flight–more than fifty people have positively identified him. We have Captain Sato’s fingerprints on the bogus flight plan. Voice-print analysis of the cockpit tapes also confirms the pilot’s identity. There is, therefore, no question of the identity of the flight crew of the aircraft.