Probably. Not certainly, however. Ryan had been in the spook business too long to make that mistake. When you made certainty assumptions about things you weren’t really sure about, you frequently walked right into a stone wall headfirst, and that could hurt. Ryan punched a button on his desk. “Ellen?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Later today, I need Scott Adler and the Foleys in here. It’ll take about an hour. Find me a hole in the schedule, will you?”
“About two-thirty, but it means putting off the Secretary of Transportation’s meeting about the air-traffic-control proposals.”
“Make it so, Ellen. This one’s important,” he told her.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
It was by no means perfect. Ryan preferred to work on things as they popped into his mind, but as President you quickly learned that you served the schedule, not the other way around. Jack grimaced. So much for the illusion of power.
Mary Pat Foley strolled into her office, as she did nearly every morning, and as always turned on her computer—if there was one thing she’d learned from SORGE, it was to turn the damned thing all the way off when she wasn’t using it. There was a further switch on her phone line that manually blocked it, much as if she’d pulled the plug out of the wall. She flipped that, too. It was an old story for an employee of an intelligence service. Sure, she was paranoid, but was she paranoid enough?
Sure enough, there was another e-mail from cgood@jadecastle.com. Chet Nomuri was still at work, and this download took a mere twenty-three seconds. With the download complete, she made sure she’d backed it up, then clobbered it out of her in-box so that no copies remained even in the ether world. Next, she printed it all up and called down for Joshua Sears to do the translations and some seat-of-the-pants analysis. SORGE had become routine in handling if not in importance, and by a quarter to nine she had the translation in hand.
“Oh, Lord. Jack’s just going to love this one,” the DDO observed at her desk. Then she walked the document to Ed’s larger office facing the woods. That’s when she found out about the afternoon trip to the White House.
Mary Abbot was the official White House makeup artist. It was her job to make the President look good on TV, which meant making him look like a cheap whore in person, hut that couldn’t be helped. Ryan had learned not to fidget too much, which made her job easier, but she knew he was fighting the urge, which both amused and concerned her.
“How’s your son doing at school?” Ryan asked.
“Just fine, thank you, and there’s a nice girl he’s interested in.”
Ryan didn’t comment on that. He knew that there had to be some boy or boys at St. Mary’s who found his Sally highly interesting (she was pretty, even to disinterested eyes), but he didn’t want to think about that. It did make him grateful for the Secret Service, however. Whenever Sally went on a date, there would be at least a chase car full of armed agents close by, and that would take the starch out of most teenaged boys. So, the USSS did have its uses, eh? Girl children, Jack thought, were God’s punishment on you for being a man. His eyes were scanning his briefing sheets for the mini-press conference. The likely questions and the better sorts of answers to give to them. It seemed very dishonest to do it this way, but some foreign heads of government had the question prescreened so that the answers could be properly canned. Not a bad idea in the abstract, Jack thought, but the American media would spring for that about as quickly as a coyote would chase after a whale.
“There,” Mrs. Abbot said, as she finished touching up his hair. Ryan stood, looked in the mirror, and grimaced as usual.
“Thank you, Mary,” he managed to say.
“You’re welcome, Mr. President.”
And Ryan walked out, crossing the hall from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, where the TV equipment was set up. The reporters stood when he entered, as the kids at St. Matthew’s had stood when the priest came into class. But in third grade, the kids asked easier questions. Jack sat down in a rocking swivel chair. Kennedy had done something similar to that, and Arnie thought it a good idea for Jack as well. The gentle rocking that a man did unconsciously in the chair gave him a homey look, the spin experts all thought—Jack didn’t know that, and knowing it would have caused him to toss the chair out the window, but Arnie did and he’d eased the President into it merely by saying it looked good, and getting Cathy Ryan to agree. In any case, SWORDSMAN sat down, and relaxed in the comfortable chair, which was the other reason Arnie had foisted it on him, and the real reason why Ryan had agreed. It was comfortable.
“We ready?” Jack asked. When the President asked that, it usually meant Let’s get this fucking show on the road! But Ryan thought it was just a question.
Krystin Matthews was there to represent NBC. There were also reporters from ABC and Fox, plus a print reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Ryan had come to prefer these more intimate press conferences, and the media went along with it because the reporters were assigned by lot, which made it fair, and everyone had access to the questions and answers. The other good thing from Ryan’s perspective was that a reporter was less likely to be confrontational in the Oval Office than in the raucous locker-room atmosphere of the pressroom, where the reporters tended to bunch together in a mob and adopt a mob mentality.
“Mr. President,” Krystin Matthews began. “You’ve recalled both the trade delegation and our ambassador from Beijing. Why was that necessary?”
Ryan rocked a little in the chair. “Krystin, we all saw the events in Beijing that so grabbed the conscience of the world, the murder of the cardinal and the minister, followed by the roughing-up—to use a charitable term for it—of the minister’s widow and some members of the congregation.”
He went on to repeat the points he’d made in his previous press conference, making particular note of the Chinese government’s indifference to what had happened.
“One can only conclude that the Chinese government doesn’t care. Well, we care. The American people care. And this administration cares. You cannot take the life of a human being as casually as though you are swatting an insect. The response we received was unsatisfactory, and so, I recalled our ambassador for consultations.”
“But the trade negotiations, Mr. President,” the Chicago Tribune broke in.
“It is difficult for a country like the United States of America to do business with a nation which does not recognize human rights. You’ve seen for yourself what our citizens think of all this. I believe you will find that they find those murders as repellent as I do, and, I would imagine, as you do yourself.”
“And so you will not recommend to Congress that we normalize trading relations with China?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, I will not so recommend, and even if I did, Congress would rightly reject such a recommendation.”
“At what time might you change your position on this issue?”
“At such time as China enters the world of civilized nations and recognizes the rights of its common people, as all other great nations do.”
“So you are saying that China today is not a civilized country?”
Ryan felt as though he’d been slapped across the face with a cold, wet fish, but he smiled and went on. “Killing diplomats is not a civilized act, is it?”
“What will the Chinese think of that?” Fox asked.
“I cannot read their minds. I do call upon them to make amends, or at least to consider the feelings and beliefs of the rest of the world, and then to reconsider their unfortunate action in that light.”
“And what about the trade issues?” This one came from ABC.
“If China wants normalized trade relations with the United States, then China will have to open its markets to us. As you know, we have a law on the books here called the Trade Reform Act. That law allows us to mirror-image other countries’ trade laws and practices, so that whatever tactics are used against us, we can then use those very same tactics with respect to trade with them. Tomorrow, I will direct the Department of State and the Department of Commerce to set up a working group to implement TRA with respect to the People’s Republic,” President Ryan announced, making the story for the day, and a bombshell it was.
Christ, Jack,” the Secretary of the Treasury said in his office across the street. He was getting a live feed from the Oval Office. He lifted his desk phone and punched a button. “I want a read of the PRC’s current cash accounts, global,” he told one of his subordinates from New York. Then his phone rang.