“Like being in a zoo,” Caroline Ryan, FLOTUS, SURGEON, observed to her husband, behind a charming smile. She’d raced home–the helicopter helped–just in time to change into a new white slinky dress and a gold necklace that Jack had bought her for Christmas … a few weeks, he remembered, before the terrorists had tried to kill her on the Route 50 bridge in Annapolis.
“With golden bars,” her husband, POTUS, SWORDSMAN, replied, fronting a smile of his own that was as fake as a three-dollar bill.
“So what are we?” she asked as the assembled senators-designate applauded their entrance. “Lion and lioness? Bull and cow? Peacock and peahen? Or two lab bunnies waiting to have shampoo poured in our eyes?”
“Depends on who’s doing the beholding, baby.” Ryan was holding his wife’s hand, and together they walked to the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Washington.” Ryan had to pause for another round of applause. That was something else he’d have to learn. People applauded the President for damned near anything. Just as well that his bathroom had a door. He reached into his pocket and
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pulled out some three-by-five cards, the way Presidents always kept their speaking points. The cards had been prepared by Gallic Weston, and the hand-printing was large enough that he didn’t need his reading glasses. Even so he’d come to expect a headache. He had one every day from all the reading.
“Our country has needs, and they’re not small ones. You’re here for the same reason I am. You’ve been appointed to fill in. You have jobs which many of you never expected, and which some of you may not have wanted.” This was vain flattery, but the sort they wanted to hear– more accurately, which they wanted to be seen to hear on the C-SPAN cameras in the corners of the room. There were perhaps three people in the room who were not career politicians, and one of those was a governor who’d done the me-you dance with his lieutenant governor and so come to Washington to fill out the term of a senator from another party. That was a curveball which the papers had only started writing about. The polarity of the Senate would change as a result of the 747 crash, because the control of thirty-two of America’s state houses hadn’t quite been in line with the makeup of the Congress.
“That’s good,” Ryan told them. “There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who more than once answered his country’s call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work. One of our great cities is named in memory of that gentleman,” Jack added, nodding to a new senator from Ohio–his home was in Dayton, which was close enough.
“You would not be here if you didn’t understand what many of those needs are. But my real message for you, today, is that we must work together. We do not have the time and our country does not have the time for us to bicker and fight.” He had to pause for applause again. Annoyed by the delay, Ryan managed to look up with an appreciative smile and nod.
“Senators, you will find me an easy man to work with. My door is always open, I know how to answer a phone, and the street goes both ways. I will discuss any issue. I
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will listen to any point of view. There are no rules other than the Constitution which I have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.
“The people out where you come from, out there beyond Interstate 495, expect all of us to get the job done. They don’t expect us to get reelected. They expect us to work for them to the best of our ability. We work for them. They don’t work for us. We have the duty to perform for them. Robert E. Lee once said that ‘duty’ is the most sublime word in our language. It’s even more sublime and even more important now, because none of us has been elected to our offices. We represent the people of a democracy, but in every case we have come here in a way that simply wasn’t supposed to happen. How much greater, then, is our personal duty to fulfill our roles in the best possible manner?” More applause.
“There is no higher trust than that which fate has conferred on us. We are not medieval noblemen blessed by birth with high station and great power. We are the servants, not the masters, to those whose consent gives us what power we have. We live in the tradition of giants. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and so many other members of your house of the Congress must be your models. ‘How stands the Union?’ Webster is said to ask from his grave. We will determine that. The Union is in our hands. Lincoln called America the last and best hope of mankind, and in the past twenty years America has given truth to that judgment by our sixteenth President. America is still an experiment, a collective idea, a set of rules called the Constitution to which all of us, within and without the Beltway, give allegiance. What makes us special is that brief document. America isn’t a strip of dirt and rock between two oceans. America is an idea and a set of rules we all follow. That’s what makes us different, and in holding true to that, we in this room can make sure that the country we pass on to our successors will be the same one entrusted to us, maybe even a little bit improved. And now”–Ryan turned to the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, the nation’s most senior appellate judge, up from Richmond–“it’s time for you to join the team.”
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Judge William Staunton came to the microphone. Every senatorial spouse held a Bible, and every senatorial appointee placed his left hand on it, raising the other.
“I–state your name …”
As Ryan watched, the new senators were duly sworn. At least it looked solemn enough. The oaths were spoken. A few of the new legislators kissed the Bibles, either from personal religious conviction or because they were close to the cameras. Then they kissed their wives, most of whom beamed. There was a collective intake of breath, and then they all looked around at one another, and the White House staff came into the room with drinks just after the cameras were turned off, because now the real work started. Ryan got himself a glass of Perrier and walked into the middle of the room, smiling despite his fatigue and his unease at performing political duties.
THE PHOTOS CAME in one more time. Security at Khartoum airport had not improved, and this time three American intelligence officers were snapping photos of the people walking down the stairs. Everyone around was surprised that no newspeople had yet twigged to the story. A stream of official cars–probably the entire complement for this poor nation–ferried the visitors away. When the process was complete, the 737 airliner went back east, and the spooks drove off to the embassy. Two others of their number were camped out at the dwellings assigned to the Iraqi generals–this tidbit had come from the station chiefs contact in the Sudanese Foreign Ministry. When those photos had been taken, the additional officers also drove back, and in the embassy darkroom the frames were processed, blown up, and faxed off via satellite. At Langley, Bert Vasco identified every face, assisted by a pair of CIA desk officers and a set of mug shots in the CIA files.
“That’s it,” the State Department officer pronounced. “That’s the whole military leadership. But not one civilian out of the Ba’ath Party.”
“So we know who the sacrificial goats are.” That observation came from Ed Foley.
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“Yep,” Mary Pat answered with a nod. “And it gives a chance for the senior surviving officers to arrest them, ‘process’ them, and show loyalty to the new regime. Shit,” she concluded. “Too fast.” Her station chief in Riyadh was all dressed up with no place to go. The same was true of some Saudi diplomats who’d hastily put together a program of fiscal incentives for the notional new Iraqi regime. It would now be unnecessary.
Ed Foley, the new DCI-designate, shook his head in admiration. “I didn’t think they had it in ’em. Killing our friend, sure, but coaxing the leadership out this fast and this smooth, who would’ve thunk it?”
“You got me there, Mr. Foley,” Vasco agreed. “Somebody must have brokered the deal–but who?”
“Get buzzin’, worker bees,” Ed Foley told the desk officers, with a wry smile. “Everything you can develop, ASAP.”
IT LOOKED LIKE some sort of awful stew, the darkened human blood and the red-brown nephritic mush of monkey kidneys, just sitting there, marinating in flat, shallow glass trays under dim lights shielded to keep ultraviolet light from harming the viruses. There wasn’t much to do at this point except to monitor the environmental conditions, and simple analog instruments did that. Moudi and the director walked in, wearing their protective garb, to check the sealed culturing chambers for themselves. Two-thirds of Jean Baptiste’s blood was now deep-frozen in case something went wrong with their first effort at reproducing the Ebola Mayinga virus. They also checked the room’s multi-stage ventilation systems, because now the building was truly a factory of death. The precautions were double-sided. As in this room they strove to give the virus a healthy place to multiply, just outside the door the army medical corpsmen were spraying every square millimeter to make sure that it was the only such place–and so the virus had to be isolated and protected from the disinfectant as well. Thus the air drawn into the culture chambers had to be carefully filtered, lest in their effort to stay