The worst part of all, however, was that he had to be dressed all the time. Except in bed or in the bathroom, the President had to be properly dressed—or what would the staff think? So, Ryan couldn’t walk out into the corridor without pants and at least some kind of shirt. At home, a normal person would have padded around barefoot in his shorts, but while a truck driver might have that freedom in his own home, the President of the United States did not have that freedom in his.
Then he had to smile wryly at the mirror. He bitched to himself about the same things every morning, and if he really wanted to change them, he could. But he was afraid to, afraid to take action that would cause people to lose their jobs. Aside from the fact that it would really look shitty in the papers—and practically everything he did made it into the news—it would feel bad to him, here, shaving every morning. And he didn’t really need to walk out to the box and get the paper in the morning, did he?
And if you factored out the dress code, it wasn’t all that bad. The breakfast buffet was actually quite nice, though it wasted at least five times the food it actually served. His cholesterol was still in the normal range, and so Ryan enjoyed eggs for his morning meal two or even three times a week, somewhat to his wife’s distaste. The kids opted mainly for cereal or muffins. These were still warm from the downstairs kitchen and came in all sorts of healthy—and tasty—varieties.
The Early Bird was the clipping service the government provided for senior officials, but for breakfast SWORDSMAN preferred the real paper, complete with cartoons. Like many, Ryan lamented the retirement of Gary Larson and the attendant loss of the morning Far Side, but Jack understood the pressure of enforced daily output. There was also a sports page to be read, something the Early Bird left out completely. And there was CNN, which started in the White House breakfast room promptly at seven.
Ryan looked up when he heard the warning that kids should not see what they were about to show. His kids, like all other kids, stopped what they were doing to look.
“Eww, gross!” Sally Ryan observed, when some Chinese guy got shot in the head.
“Head wounds do that,” her mother told her, wincing even so. Cathy did surgery, but not that sort. “Jack, what’s this all about?”
“You know as much as I do, honey,” the President told the First Lady.
Then the screen changed to some file tape showing a Catholic Cardinal. Then Jack caught “Papal Nuncio” off the audio, leaning to reach for the controller to turn the sound up.
“Chuck?” Ryan said, to the nearest Secret Service agent. “Get me Ben Goodley on the phone, if you could.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” It took about thirty seconds, then Ryan was handed the portable phone. “Ben, what the hell’s this thing out of Beijing?”
In Jackson, Mississippi, Reverend Gerry Patterson was accustomed to rising early in preparation for his morning jog around the neighborhood, and he turned on the bedroom TV while his wife went to fix his hot chocolate (Patterson didn’t approve of coffee any more than he did of alcohol). His head turned at the words “Reverend Yu,” then his skin went cold when he heard, “a Baptist minister here in Beijing . . .” He came back into the bedroom just in time to see a Chinese face go down, and shoot out blood as from a garden hose. The tape didn’t allow him to recognize a face.
“My God . . . Skip . . . God, no . . .” the minister breathed, his morning suddenly and utterly disrupted. Ministers deal with death on a daily basis, burying parishioners, consoling the bereaved, entreating God to look after the needs of both. But it was no easier for Gerry Patterson than it would have been for anyone else this day, because there had been no warning, no “long illness” to prepare the mind for the possibility, not even the fact of age to reduce the surprise factor. Skip was— what? Fifty-five? No more than that. Still a young man, Patterson thought, young and vigorous to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to his flock. Dead? Killed, was it? Murdered? By whom? Murdered by that communist government? A Man of God, murdered by the godless heathen?
Oh, shit,” the President said over his eggs. “What else do we know, Ben? Anything from SORGE?” Then Ryan looked around the room, realizing he’d spoken a word that was itself classified. The kids weren’t looking his way, but Cathy was. “Okay, we’ll talk about it when you get in.” Jack hit the kill button on the phone and set it down.
“What’s the story?”
“It’s a real mess, babe,” SWORDSMAN told SURGEON. He explained what he knew for a minute or so. “The ambassador hasn’t gotten to us with anything CNN didn’t just show.”
“You mean with all the money we spend on CIA and stuff, CNN is the best source of information we have?” Cathy Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously.
“You got it, honey,” her husband admitted.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Jack tried to explain: “CIA can’t be everywhere, and it would look a little funny if all our field spooks carried video-cams everywhere they went, you know?”
Cathy made a face at being shut down so cavalierly. “But—”
“But it’s not that easy, Cathy, and the news people are in the same business, gathering information, and occasionally they get there first.”
“But you have other ways of finding things out, don’t you?”
“Cathy, you don’t need to know about things like that,” POTUS told FLOTUS.
That was a phrase she’d heard before, but not one she’d ever learned to love. Cathy went back to her morning paper while her husband graduated to the Early Bird. The Beijing story, Jack saw, had happened too late for the morning editions, one more thing to chuff up the TV newsies and annoy the print ones. Somehow the debate over the federal education budget didn’t seem all that important this morning, but he’d learned to scan the editorials, because they tended to reflect the questions the reporters would ask at the press conferences, and that was one way for him to defend himself.
By 7:45, the kids were about ready for their drive to school, and Cathy was ready for her flight to Hopkins. Kyle Daniel went with her, with his own Secret Service detail, composed exclusively of women who would look after him at the Hopkins daycare center rather like a pack of she-wolves. Katie would head back to her daycare center, the rebuilt Giant Steps north of Annapolis. There were fewer kids there now, but a larger protective detail. The big kids went to St. Mary’s. On cue, the Marine VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter eased down on the South Lawn helipad. The day was about to start for real. The entire Ryan family took the elevator downstairs. First Mom and Dad walked the kids to the west entrance of the West Wing, where, after hugs and kisses, three of the kids got into their cars to drive off. Then Jack walked Cathy to the helicopter for the kiss goodbye, and the big Sikorsky lifted off under the control of Colonel Dan Malloy for the hop to Johns Hopkins. With that done, Ryan walked back to the West Wing, and inside to the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was waiting for him.
“How bad?” Jack asked his national security adviser.
“Bad,” Goodley replied at once.
“What was it all about?”
“They were trying to stop an abortion. The Chinese do them late-term if the pregnancy is not government-approved. They wait until just before the baby pops out and zap it in the top of the head with a needle before it gets to take a breath. Evidently, the woman on the tape was having an unauthorized baby, and her minister—that’s the Chinese guy who gets it in the head, a Baptist preacher educated, evidently, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, would you believe? Anyway, he came to the hospital to help. The Papal Nuncio, Renato Cardinal DiMilo, evidently knew the Baptist preacher pretty well and came to offer assistance. It’s hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it blew up real bad, as the tape shows.”
“Any statements?”
“The Vatican deplores the incident and has requested an explanation. But it gets worse. Cardinal DiMilo is from the DiMilo family. He has a brother, Vincenzo DiMilo, who’s in the Italian parliament—he was a cabinet minister a while back—and so the Italian government has issued its own protest. Ditto the German government, because the Cardinal’s aide is a German monsignor named Schepke, who’s a Jesuit, and he got a little roughed up, and the Germans aren’t very happy either. This Monsignor Schepke was arrested briefly, but he was released after a few hours when the Chinese remembered he had diplomatic status. The thinking at State is that the PRC might PNG the guy, just to get him the hell out of the country and make the whole thing all go away.”