Executive Orders

  “OH, GOD,” the commentator groaned.

  The cameras zoomed in as two of the 3rd Regiment soldiers pulled the injured paratrooper clear. The sergeant took his place. The casket was lifted back up in seconds, its polished oak clearly gouged and defaced by the fall.

  “OKAY. SOLDIERS,” the sergeant said from his new place. “By the left.”

  “Daddy,” whimpered Mark Durling, age nine. “Daddy.” Everyone close by heard it in the silence that had followed the accident. The soldiers bit their lips. The Secret Service agents, already shamed and wounded by the loss of a President, took a second to look down or at one another. Jack instinctively wrapped his arms around the boy, but still didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to say. What else could possibly go wrong? the new President wondered as Mrs. Durling followed her husband up the steps and inside.

  “Okay, Mark.” Ryan placed his arm around the youngster’s shoulder and guided him to the door, without thinking about it taking the place of a favored uncle for a few yards. If there were only a way to take away their sorrow, even for a few seconds. The thought was an impossible one, and all it did for Jack was to give him another layer of sadness, as what he added to himself didn’t detract a whit from what the children felt.

  It was warmer inside, which was noticed by those less caught up in the emotion of the moment. Fluttering protocol officers took their places. Ryan and his family went to the first pew on the right. The Durling party went opposite them. The caskets sat side by side on catafalques in the sacristy, and beyond them were three more, those of a senator and two members of the House, “representing” one last time. The organ played something Ryan had heard before but didn’t recognize. At least it wasn’t Mozart’s grim Masonic procession with its repeating, brutal chant, about as uplifting as a film of the Holocaust. The clergymen were lined up in front, their faces professionally composed. In front of Ryan, in the slot usually occupied by hymnals, was another copy of his speech.

  THE SCENE ON the TV screen was such to make anyone in his chosen profession either ill or excited in a manner beyond sex. If only ... but such opportunities as this one only happened by accident, never allowing the time to prepare anything. Preparation was everything for a mission like this. Not that it would have been technically hard, and he allowed his mind to consider the method. A mortar, perhaps. You could mount one of those in the back of an ordinary delivery truck such as one might find in any city in the known world. Walk the rounds down the roof of the building, dropping it on the targets. You’d get off at least ten, maybe fifteen or twenty, and though the selection would be random, a target was a target, and terror was terror, and that was his profession.

  “Look at them all,” he breathed. The cameras traced along the pews. Mostly men, some women, sitting in no order that he could discern, some chatting in whispers, most not, with blank expressions as their eyes surveyed the inside of the church. Then the children of the dead American President, a son and a daughter with the beaten look of those who’d been touched by the harsh reality of life. Children bore the burden surprisingly well, didn’t they? They’d survive, all the more so that they were no longer of any political significance, and so his interest in them was as clinical as it was pitiless. Then the camera was on Ryan again, closing in on his face and allowing some careful examination.

  HE HADN’T SAID good-bye to Roger Durling yet. There hadn’t been time for Jack to compose his mind and concentrate on the thought, the week had been so busy, but now he found his eyes staring at just that one coffin. He’d hardly known Anne, and the three others in the sacristy were strangers to him, actually chosen at random for their religious affiliations. But Roger had been a friend. Roger had brought him back from private life, given him an important job, and trusted him to run it, taking Jack’s advice most of the time, confiding in him, chiding and disciplining on occasion, but always as a friend. It had been a tough job, all the harder with the conflict that had developed with Japan—even for Jack, now that it was over, it was no longer a “war,” because war was a thing of the past. No longer a part of the real world that was progressing beyond such barbarism. Durling and Ryan had gotten through that, and while the former had wanted to move on to finish the job in other ways, he had also recognized that for Ryan the race had ended. And so, as a friend, he’d given Jack a golden bridge back to private life, a capstone on a career of public service that had turned into a trap.

  But if he’d offered the job to someone else, where would I have been that night? Jack asked himself. The answer was simple. He would have been in the front row of the House chamber, and now he would have been dead. President Ryan blinked hard at the realization. Roger had saved his life. Probably not just his own. Cathy—and maybe the kids—would have been in the gallery, along with Anne Durling.... Was life really that fragile as to turn on such small events? Throughout the city at this moment, other bodies lay in other caskets for other ceremonies, most for adults but some for the children of other victims who’d chosen that night to bring their families to the joint session.

  Mark Durling was whimpering now. His elder sister, Amy, pulled his head inward to her. Jack turned his head slightly, allowing his peripheral vision to take it in. They’re just kids, dear God, why do kids have to go through this? The thought hammered home in an instant. Jack bit his lip and looked down at the floor. There was no one to be a target for his anger. The perpetrator of this crime was dead himself, his body in yet another box in the Washington, D.C., morgue, and some thousands of miles away, such family as the man had left behind bore the additional burden of shame and guilt placed on them. This was why people called all violence senseless. There was nothing to learn from any of this, only the lingering harm of lives lost and lives wrecked—and lives spared for no particular reason other than mere chance. Like cancer or other serious illness, this sort of violence struck with no discernible plan, and no real defense, just one dead man who had decided not to enter alone such afterlife as he believed in. What the hell was anyone supposed to learn from this? Ryan, long a student of human behavior, grimaced and continued to look down, his ears focusing on the sounds of an orphaned child in the hollow echoes of a stone church.

  HE’S WEAK. IT was obvious on his face. This supposed man, this President, was struggling to hold back tears. Didn’t he know that death was part of life? He’d caused death, hadn’t he? Didn’t he know what death was? Was he only learning now? The other faces did know. One could see that. They were somber, because at a funeral it was expected that one had to be somber, but all life came to an end. Ryan ought to know. He’d faced danger—but that was long ago, he reminded himself, and over time men forget such things. Ryan had had ample cause to forget life’s vulnerabilities, protected as he’d been as a government official. It amazed the man how much one could learn from a few seconds’ examination of a human face.

  That made things easier, didn’t it?

  SHE WAS FIVE rows back, but was on the aisle, and though the Prime Minister of India could see only the back of President Ryan’s head, she, too, was a student of human behavior. A chief of state couldn’t act like this. A chief of state was, after all, an actor on the world’s most important stage, and you had to learn what to do and how to behave. She’d been going to funerals of various sorts all of her life, because political leaders had associates- not always friends—young and old, and one had to show respect by appearing, even for those one had detested. In the latter case, it could be amusing. In her country the dead were so often burned, and then she could tell herself that, perhaps, the body was still alive as it burned. Her eyebrows flickered up and down in private amusement at the thought. Especially for the ones you detested. It was such good practice. To appear saddened. Yes, we had our differences, but he was always someone to be respected, someone you could work with. someone whose ideas were always worth serious attention. With practice over the years, you got good enough that the survivors believed the lies—partly because they wanted to believe. You learned to smile j
ust so, and to show grief just so, and to speak just so. You had to. A political leader could rarely allow true feelings to show. True feelings told others what your weaknesses were, and there were always those to use them against you—and so over the years you hid them more and more, until eventually you had few, if any, true feelings left. And that was good, because politics wasn’t about feelings.

  Clearly this Ryan fellow didn’t know that, the Prime Minister of “the world’s largest democracy” told herself. As a result, he was showing what he really was, and worse still, for him, he was doing so in front of a third of the world’s highest political leaders, people who would see and learn and file their thoughts away for future use. Just as she was doing. Marvelous, she thought, keeping her face somber and sad in honor of someone she’d thoroughly detested. When the organist began the first hymn, she lifted her book, turned the page to the proper number, and sang along with everyone else.

  THE RABBI WENT first. Each clergyman was given ten minutes, and each of them was an expert—more properly, each was a genuine scholar in addition to his calling as a man of God. Rabbi Benjamin Fleischman spoke from the Talmud and the Torah. He spoke of duty and honor and faith, of a merciful God. Next came the Reverend Frederick Ralston, the Senate Chaplain—he’d been out of town that night, and so spared of a more restrained participation in the events of the day. A Southern Baptist and distinguished authority on the New Testament, Ralston spoke of Christ’s Passion in the garden, of his friend Senator Richard Eastman of Oregon, who lay in the sacristy, universally respected as an honorable member of the Congress, segucing then into praise of the fallen President, a devoted family man, as all knew....

  There was no “right” way to handle such things, Ryan thought. Maybe it would be easier if the minister/ priest/rabbi had time to sit with the grieving, but that hadn’t happened in this case, and he wondered—

  No, this isn’t right! Jack told himself. This was theater. It wasn’t supposed to be that. There were kids sitting a few feet across the aisle to his left, and for them this wasn’t theater at all. This was a lot simpler for them. It was Mom and Dad, ripped out of their lives by a senseless act, denying them the future that life was supposed to guarantee them, love and guidance, a chance to grow in a normal way into normal people. Mark and Amy were the important ones here, but the lessons of this service, which were supposed to help them, were instead aimed at others. This whole event was apolitical exercise, something to reassure the country, renew people’s faith in God and the world and their country, and maybe the people out there behind the twenty-three cameras in the church needed that, but there were people in greater need, the children of Roger and Anne Durling, the grown sons of Dick Eastman, the widow of David Kohn of Rhode Island, and the surviving family of Marissa Henrik of Texas. Those were real people, and their personal grief was being subordinated to the needs of the country. Well, the country be damned! Jack thought, suddenly angry at what was happening, and at himself for not grasping it early enough to change things around. The country had needs, but those needs could not be so great as to overshadow the horror fate had inflicted on kids. Who spoke for them? Who spoke to them?

  Worst of all for Ryan, a Catholic, Michael Cardinal O’Leary, Archbishop of Washington, was no better. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called ...” For Mark and Amy, Jack’s mind raged, their father wasn’t a peacemaker. He was Dad, and Dad was gone, and that wasn’t an abstraction. Three distinguished, learned, and very decent members of the clergy were preaching to a nation, but right before them were children who got a few kind words of lip service, and that was all. Somebody had to speak to them, for them, about their parents. Somebody had to try to make things better. It wasn’t possible, but someone had to try, damn it! Maybe he was President of the United States. Maybe he had a duty to the millions behind the cameras, but Jack remembered the time his wife and daughter had been in Baltimore’s Shock-Trauma Center, hovering between life and death, and that hadn’t been a damned abstraction, either. That was the problem. That was why his family had been attacked. That was why all these people had died—because some misguided fanatic had seen them all as abstractions instead of human beings with lives and hopes and dreams—and kids. It was Jack’s job to protect a nation. He’d sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and he would do that to the best of his ability. But the purpose of the Constitution was pretty simple—to secure the blessings of liberty for people, and that included kids. The country he served and the government he was trying to lead were nothing more or less than a mechanism to protect individual people. That duty was not an abstraction. The reality of that duty sat ten feet to his left, holding back tears as best they could, and probably failing, because there was no feeling lonelier than what those kids were suffering right now, while Mike O’Leary spoke to a country instead of a family. The theater had lasted long enough. There came another hymn, and then it was Ryan’s turn to rise and walk to the pulpit.

  Secret Service agents turned around, again sweeping the nave, because now SWORDSMAN was an ideal target. Getting to the lectern, he saw that Cardinal O’Leary had done as instructed and set the presidential binder on the wooden top. No, Jack decided. No. His hands grasped the sides of the lectern to steady himself. His eyes swept briefly across the assembly, and then looked down on the children of Roger and Anne Durling. The pain in their eyes broke his heart. They’d borne all the burdens placed on them by duties never theirs to carry. They’d been told by some unnamed “friends” to be braver than would have been asked of any Marine at such a time, probably because, “Mom and Dad would want you to.” But bearing pain in quiet dignity was not the business of children. That was what adults were supposed to do, as best they could. Enough, Jack told himself, my duty starts here. The first duty of the strong was ever to protect the weak. His hands squeezed on the polished oak, and the self-inflicted pain helped compose his thoughts.

  “Mark, Amy, your father was my friend,” he said gently. “It was my honor to work for him and help him as best I could——but you know, he was probably even more help for me. I know you always had to understand that Dad and Mom had important jobs, and didn’t always have time for the really important things, but I can tell you that your father did everything he could to spend time with you, because he loved you more than anything in the world, more than being President, more than all the things that came along with that, more than anything—except maybe your Mom. He loved her a lot, too....”

  WHAT RUBBISH! YES, one cared for children. Daryaei did, but children grew to adulthood no matter what. Their place was to learn, and to serve, and someday to do the deeds of adults. Until then, they were children, and the world told them what must be. Fate did. Allah did. Allah was merciful, even though life was hard. He had to admit that the Jew had spoken well, citing scripture quoted exactly the same way in their Torah and his Holy Koran. He would have chosen a different passage, but that was a matter of taste, wasn’t it? Theology allowed such things. It had all been a wasted exercise, but formal occasions such as this usually were. This Ryan fool was wasting his chance to rally his nation, to appear strong and sure, thus to consolidate his hold on his government. Talking to children at such a time!

  HIS POLITICAL HANDLERS must be having a collective heart attack, the Prime Minister thought, and it required all of the self-control learned over a political lifetime to keep her face composed. Then she decided to change her expression to sympathy. After all, he might be watching her, and she was a woman and a mother, after all, and she would be meeting with him later today. She tilted her head slightly to the right, so as to give herself a better view of the scene and the man. He might like that, too. In another minute or so, she’d pull a tissue from her purse to wipe her eyes.

  “I wish I’d had the chance to get to know your mom better. Cathy and I were looking forward to that. I wanted Sally and Jack and Katie and you to become friends. Your dad and I talked a little about that. I guess that won’t be
happening the way we wanted it to.” That impromptu thought made Jack’s stomach do a flip. They were crying now, because he’d told them without words that now it was okay to cry. Jack couldn’t let himself do that. Not for the others. He had to be strong now for them, and so he gripped the lectern harder still until his hands really hurt, and he welcomed the pain for the discipline it imposed on him.

  “You probably want to know why this had to happen. I don’t know, kids. I wish I did. I wish somebody did, so that I could go to that person for the answers. But I’ve never found that person,” Jack went on.

  “JESUS,” CLARK MANAGED to say in the grumbly voice that men used to prevent a sob. In his CIA office, as with all senior officials, was a TV set, and every channel was covering this. “Yeah, I’ve looked once or twice myself, man.”

  “You know something, John?” Chavez was under more control. It was a man’s place to be calm at such times, so that the women and kids could cling to him. Or so his culture told him. Mr. C., on the other hand, was just full of surprises. As always.

  “What’s that, Domingo?”

  “He gets it. We’re working for somebody who gets it.”

  John turned at that. Who’d believe it? Two CIA paramilitary officers, thinking the same thoughts as their President. It was nice to know that he’d read Ryan correctly from the first moment. Damn, just like his dad. A pity Fate had denied him the chance to know that Ryan. He next wondered if Jack would succeed as President. He wasn’t acting like one of the others. He was acting like a real person. But why was that so bad? Clark asked himself.