“Those cocksuckers!” Ryan snarled, to the surprise of Andrea Price, who happened to be in the room just then.
“Anything I need to know about, sir?” she asked, his voice had been so furious.
“No, Andrea, just that thing on CNN this morning.” Ryan paused, blushing that she’d heard his temper let go again—and in that way. “By the way, how’s your husband doing?”
“Well, he bagged those three bank robbers up in Philadelphia, and they did it without firing a shot. I was a little worried about that.”
Ryan allowed himself a smile. “That’s one guy I wouldn’t want to have a shoot-out with. Tell me, you saw CNN this morning, right?”
“Yes, sir, and we replayed it at the command post.”
“Opinion?”
“If I’d’ve been there, my weapon would have come out. That was cold-blooded murder. Looks bad on TV when you do dumb stuff like that, sir.”
“Sure as hell does,” the President agreed. He nearly asked her opinion on what he ought to do about it. Ryan respected Mrs. O’Day’s (she still went by Price on the job) judgment, but it wouldn’t have been fair to ask her to delve into foreign affairs, and, besides, he already had his mind pretty well made up. But then he speed-dialed Adler’s direct line on his phone.
“Yes, Jack?” Only one person had that direct line.
“What do you make of the SORGE stuff?”
“It’s not surprising, unfortunately. You have to expect them to circle wagons.”
“What do we do about it?” SWORDSMAN demanded.
“We say what we think, but we try not to make it worse than it already is,” SecState replied, cautious as ever.
“Right,” Ryan growled, even though it was exactly the good advice he’d expected from his SecState. Then he hung up. He reminded himself that Arnie had told him a long time ago that a president wasn’t allowed to have a temper, but that was asking a hell of a lot, and at what point was he allowed to react the way a man needed to react? When was he supposed to stop acting like a goddamned robot?
“You want Callie to work up something for you in a hurry?” Arnie asked over the phone.
“No,” Ryan replied, with a shake of the head. “I’ll just wing it.”
“That’s a mistake,” the Chief of Staff warned.
“Arnie, just let me be me once in a while, okay?”
“Okay, Jack,” van Damm replied, and it was just as well the President didn’t see his expression.
Don’t make things worse than they already are, Ryan told himself at his desk. Yeah, sure, like that’s possible . . .
“Hi, Pap,” Robby Jackson was saying in his office at the northwest corner of the West Wing. “Robert, have you seen—”
“Yes, we’ve all seen it,” the Vice President assured his father. “And what are y’all going to do about it?”
“Pap, we haven’t figured that out yet. Remember that we have to do business with these people. The jobs of a lot of Americans depend on trade with China and—”
“Robert”—the Reverend Hosiah Jackson used Robby’s proper name mainly when he was feeling rather stern—”those people murdered a man of God—no, excuse me, they murdered two men of God, doing their duty, trying to save the life of an innocent child, and one does not do business with murderers.”
“I know that, and I don’t like it any more than you do, and, trust me, Jack Ryan doesn’t like it any more than you do, either. But when we make foreign policy for our country, we have to think things through, because if we screw it up, people can lose their lives.”
“Lives have already been lost, Robert,” Reverend Jackson pointed out.
“I know that. Look, Pap, I know more about this than you do, okay? I mean, we have ways of finding out stuff that doesn’t make it on CNN,” the Vice President told his father, with the latest SORGE report right in his hand. Part of him wished that he could show it to his father, because his father was easily smart enough to grasp the importance of the secret things that he and Ryan knew. But there was no way he could even approach discussing that sort of thing with anyone without a TS/SAR clearance, and that included his wife, just as it included Cathy Ryan. Hmm, Jackson thought—maybe that was something he should discuss with Jack. You had to be able to talk this stuff over with someone you trusted, just as a reality check on what was right and wrong. Their wives weren’t security risks, were they?
“Like what?” his father asked, only halfway expecting an answer.
“Like I can’t discuss some things with you, Pap, and you know that. I’m sorry. The rules apply to me just like they do to everybody else.”
“So, what are we going to do about this?”
“We’re going to let the Chinese know that we are pretty damned angry, and we expect them to clean their act up, and apologize, and—”
“Apologize!” Reverend Jackson shot back. “Robert, they murdered two people!”
“I know that, Pap, but we can’t send the FBI over to arrest their government for this, can we? We’re very powerful here, but we are not God, and as much as I’d like to hurl a thunderbolt at them, I can’t.”
“So, we’re going to do what?”
“We haven’t decided yet. I’ll let you know when we figure it out,” TOMCAT promised his father.
“Do that,” Hosiah said, hanging up far more abruptly than usual.
“Christ, Pap,” Robby breathed into the phone. Then he wondered how representative of the religious community his father was. The hardest thing to figure was public reaction. People reacted on a subintellectual level to what they saw on TV. If you showed some chief of state tossing a puppy dog out the window of his car, the ASPCA might demand a break in diplomatic relations, and enough people might agree to send a million telegrams or e-mails to the White House. Jackson remembered a case in California where the killing of a dog had caused more public outrage than the kidnap-murder of a little girl. But at least the bastard who’d killed the girl had been caught, tried, and sentenced to death, whereas the asshole who’d tossed the little dog into traffic had never been identified, despite the ton of reward money that had been raised. Well, it had all happened in the San Francisco area. Maybe that explained it. America wasn’t supposed to make policy on the basis of emotion, but America was a democracy, and therefore her elected officials had to pay attention to what the people thought—and it wasn’t easy, especially for rational folk, to predict the emotions of the public at large. Could the television image they’d just seen, theoretically upset international trade? Without a doubt, and that was a very big deal.
Jackson got up from his desk and walked to Arnie’s office. “Got a question,” he said, going in.
“Shoot,” the President’s Chief of Staff replied.
“How’s the public going to react to this mess in Beijing?”
“Not sure yet,” van Damm answered.
“How do we find out?”
“Usually you just wait and see. I’m not into this focus-group stuff. I prefer to gauge public opinion the regular way: newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and the mail we get here. You’re worried about this?”
“Yep.” Robby nodded.
“Yeah, so am I. The Right-to-Lifers are going to be on this like a lion on a crippled gazelle, and so are the people who don’t like the PRC. Lots of them in Congress. If the Chinese think they’re going to get
MFN this year, they’re on drugs. It’s a public relations nightmare for the PRC, but I don’t think they’re capable of understanding what they started. And I don’t see them apologizing to anybody.”
“Yeah, well, my father just tore me a new asshole over this one,” Vice President Jackson said. “If the rest of the clergy picks this one up, there’s going to be a firestorm. The Chinese have to apologize loud and fast if they want to cut their losses.”
Van Damm nodded agreement. “Yeah, but they won’t. They’re tod damned proud.”
“Pride goeth before the fall,” TOMCAT observed.
“Only after you feel the pain from the broken assbone, Admiral,” van Damm corrected the Vice President.
Ryan entered the White House press room feeling tense. The usual cameras were there. CNN and Fox would probably be running this news conference live and maybe C-SPAN as well. The other networks would just tape it, probably, for use in their news feeds to the local stations and their own flagship evening news shows. He came to the lectern and took a sip of water before staring into the faces of the assembled thirty or so reporters.
“Good morning,” Jack began, grasping the lectern tightly, as he tended to do when angry. He didn’t know that reporters knew about it, too, and could see it from where they sat.