“What is the news from Washington, Jack?”
“All I know is what I saw on CNN at the embassy. Nothing official yet, and even if there were, you know the rules better than I do, Avi. Is there a good place to eat around here?”
That had already been planned, of course. Two minutes and a hundred yards later, they were in the back room of a quiet mom-and-pop place where both men’s security guards could keep an eye on things. Ben Jakob ordered two Heinekens.
“Where you’re going, they do not serve beer.”
“Tacky, Avi. Very tacky,” Ryan replied after his first sip.
“You are taking Alden’s place in Riyadh, I understand.”
“How could the likes of me ever take Dr. Alden’s place anywhere?”
“You will be making your presentation about the same time Adler makes his. We are interested to hear it.”
“In that case you will not mind waiting, I guess.”
“No preview, not even one professional to another?”
“Especially not one professional to another.” Jack drank his beer right out of the bottle. The menu, he saw, was in Hebrew. “Guess I’ll have to let you order.... That damned fool!” I’ve been left holding the bag before, but never one this big.
“Alden.” It was not a question. “He’s my age. Good God, he should know that experienced women are both more reliable and more knowledgeable.” Even in affairs of the heart, his terminology was professional.
“He might even pay more attention to his wife.”
Ben Jakob grinned. “I keep forgetting how Catholic you are.”
“That’s not it, Avi. What lunatic wants more than one woman in his life?” Ryan asked deadpan.
“He’s gone. That’s the evaluation of our embassy.” But what does that mean?
“Maybe so. Nobody asked me for an opinion. I really respect the guy. He gives the President good advice. He listens to us, and when he disagrees with the Agency, he generally has a good reason for doing so. He caught me short on something six months back. The man is brilliant. But playing around like that ... well, I guess we all have our faults. What a damn-fool reason to lose a job like that. Can’t keep his pants zipped.” And what timing, Jack raged at himself.
“Such people cannot be in government service. They are too easy to compromise.”
“The Russians are getting away from honey traps ... and the girl was Jewish, wasn’t she? One of yours, Avi?”
“Doctor Ryan! Would I do such a thing?” If a bear could laugh, it would have sounded like Avi Ben Jakob’s outburst.
“Can’t be your operation. There was evidently no attempt at blackmail.” Jack nearly crossed the line with that one. The General’s eyes narrowed.
“It was not our operation. You think us mad? Dr. Elliot will replace Alden.”
Ryan looked up from his beer. He hadn’t thought about that. Oh, shit ...
“Both your friend and ours,” Avi pointed out.
“How many government ministers have you disagreed with in the last twenty years, Avi?”
“None, of course.”
Ryan snorted and finished off the bottle. “What was that you said earlier, the part about one professional to another, remember?”
“We both do the same thing. Sometimes, when we are very lucky, they listen to us.”
“And some of the times they listen to us, we’re the ones who’re wrong....”
General Ben Jakob didn’t alter his steady, relaxed gaze into Ryan’s face when he heard that. It was yet another sign of Ryan’s growing maturity. He genuinely liked Ryan as a man and as a professional, but personal likes and dislikes had little place in the intelligence trade. Something fundamental was happening. Scott Adler had been to Moscow. Both he and Ryan had visited Cardinal D’Antonio in the Vatican. As originally planned, Ryan was supposed to backstop Adler here with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, but Alden’s astounding faux pas had changed that.
Even for an intelligence professional, Avi Ben Jakob was a singularly well-informed man. Ryan waffled on the question of whether or not Israel was America’s most dependable ally in the Middle East. That was to be expected from an historian, Avi judged. Whatever Ryan thought, most Americans did regard Israel that way, and as a result, Israelis heard more from inside the American government than any other country—more even than the British, who had a formal relationship with the American intelligence community.
Those sources had informed Ben Jakob’s intelligence officers that Ryan was behind what was going on. That seemed incredibly unlikely. Jack was very bright, almost as smart as Alden, for example, but Ryan had also defined his own role as a servant, not a master, an implementer of policy, not a maker of it. Besides, the American President did not like Ryan, and had not hidden the fact from his inner circle. Elizabeth Elliot was reported to hate him, Avi knew. Something that had happened before the election, an imagined slight, a harsh word. Well, government ministers were notoriously touchy. Not like Ryan and me, General Ben Jakob thought. Both he and Ryan had faced death more than once, and perhaps that was their bond. They didn’t have to agree on everything. There was respect between them.
Moscow, Rome, Tel Aviv, Riyadh. What could he deduce from that?
Scott Adler was Secretary of State Talbot’s picked man, a highly skilled professional diplomat. Talbot was also bright. President Fowler might not have been terribly impressive, but he had selected superior cabinet officers and personal advisers. Except for Elliot, Avi corrected himself. Talbot used Deputy Secretary Adler to do his important advance work. And when Talbot himself entered formal negotiations, Adler was always at his side.
The most amazing thing, of course, was that not one of the Mossad’s informants had a clue what was going on. Something important in the Middle East, they said. Not sure what ... I heard that Jack Ryan at the Agency had something to do with it. ... End of report.
It should have been infuriating, but Avi was used to that. Intelligence was a game where you never saw all the cards. Ben Jakob’s brother was a pediatrician with similar problems. A sick child rarely told him what was wrong. Of course, his brother could always ask, or point, or probe....
“Jack, I must tell my superiors something,” General Ben Jakob said plaintively.
“Come on, General.” Jack turned and waved for another beer. “Tell me, what the hell happened on the Mount?”
“The man was—is deranged. In the hospital they have a suicide watch on him. His wife had just left him, he came under the influence of a religious fanatic, and ...” Ben Jakob shrugged. “It was terrible to see.”
“That’s true, Avi. Do you have any idea the political fix you’re in now?”
“Jack, we’ve been dealing with this problem for—”
“I thought so. Avi, you are one very bright spook, but you do not know what’s happening this time. You really don’t.”
“So tell me.”
“I didn’t mean that and you know it. What happened a couple days ago has changed things forever, General. You must know that.”
“Changed to what?”
“You’re going to have to wait. I have my orders, too.”
“Does your country threaten us?”
“Threaten? That will never happen, Avi. How could it?” Ryan warned himself that he was talking too much. This guy is good, Jack reminded himself.
“But you cannot dictate policy to us.”
Jack bit off his reply. “You’re very clever, General, but I still have my orders. You have to wait. I’m sorry that your people in D.C. can’t help you, but neither can I.”
Ben Jakob changed tack yet again. “I’m even buying you a meal, and my country is not so rich as yours.”
Jack laughed at his tone. “Good beer, too, and as you say, I can’t do this where you say I’m going. If that’s where I’m going....”
“Your air crew has already filed the flight plan. I checked.”
“So much for secrecy.” Jack accepted the new bottle with a smile for the waiter.
“Avi, let it rest for a while. Do you really think that we’d do anything to compromise your country’s security?”
Yes! the General thought, but he couldn’t say that of course. Instead he said nothing. But Ryan wasn’t buying, and used the silence to change the course of the discussion himself.
“I hear you’re a grandfather now.”
“Yes. My daughter added to the gray in my beard. A daughter of her own. Leah.”
“You have my word: Leah will have a secure country to grow up in, Avi.”
“And who will see to that?” Ben Jakob asked.
“The same people who always have.” Ryan congratulated himself for the answer. The poor guy really was desperate for information, and he was sad that Avi had made it so obvious. Well, even the best of us can be pushed into corners....
Ben Jakob made a mental note to have the file on Ryan updated. The next time they met, he wanted to have better information. The General wasn’t a man who enjoyed losing at anything.
Dr. Charles Alden contemplated his office. He wasn’t leaving quite yet, of course. It would harm the Fowler Administration. His resignation, signed and sitting on the green desk blotter, was for the end of the month. But that was just for show. As of today, his duties were at an end. He’d show up, read the briefing papers, scribble his notes, but Elizabeth Elliot would do the briefs now. The President had been regretful, but his usual cool self. Sorry to lose you, Charlie, really sorry, especially now, but I’m afraid there’s just no other way.... He’d managed to retain his dignity in the Oval Office despite the rage he’d felt. Even Arnie van Damm had been human enough to observe, “Oh, shit, Charlie!” Though enraged at the political damage to his boss, van Damm had at least mixed a little humanity and locker-room sympathy with his anger. But not Bob Fowler, champion of the poor and the helpless.
It was worse with Liz. That arrogant bitch, with her silence and her eloquent eyes. She’d get the credit for what he had done. She knew it, and was already basking in it.
The announcement would be made in the morning. It had already been leaked to the press. By whom was anyone’s guess. Elliot, displaying her satisfaction? Arnie van Damm, in a rapid effort at damage control? One of a dozen others?
The transition from power to obscurity comes fast in Washington. The embarrassed look on the face of his secretary. The forced smiles of the other bureaucrats in the West Wing. But obscurity comes only after a blaze of publicity to announce the fact: like the flare of light from an exploding star, public death is preceded by dazzling fanfare. That was the media’s job. The phone was ringing off the hook. There had been twenty of them waiting outside his house in the morning, cameras at the ready, sunlike lights blazing in his face. And knowing what it had to be even before the first question.
That foolish little bitch! With her cowlike eyes and cowlike udders and broad, cowlike hips. How could he have been so stupid! Professor Charles Winston Alden sat in his expensive chair and stared at his expensive desk. His head was bursting with a headache that he attributed to stress and anger. And he was right. But he failed to allow for the fact that his blood pressure was nearly double what it should have been, driven to new heights by the stress of the moment. He similarly failed to consider the fact that he had not taken his antihypertensive medication in the past week. A prototypical professor, he was always forgetting the little things while his methodical mind picked apart the most intricate of problems.
And so it came as a surprise. It started at an existing weakness in part of the Circle of Willis, the brain’s own blood-beltway. Designed to get blood to any part of the brain, as a means of bypassing vessels that might become blocked with age, the vessel carried a huge amount of blood. Twenty years of high blood pressure, and twenty years of his taking his medication only when he remembered that he had an upcoming doctor’s appointment, and the added stress of seeing his career stop with a demeaning personal disgrace, culminated in a rupture of the vessel on the right side of his head. What had been a searing migraine headache became death itself. Alden’s eyes opened wide, and his hands flew up to grasp his skull as though to hold it together. It was too late for that. The rip widened, allowing more blood to escape. This both deprived important parts of his brain of the oxygen needed to function and further boosted intracranial pressure to the point that other brain cells were squeezed to extinction.
Though paralyzed, Alden did not lose consciousness for quite some time, and his brilliant mind recorded the event with remarkable clarity. Already unable to move, he knew that death was coming for him. So close, he thought, his mind racing to outrun death. Thirty-five years to get here. All those books. All those seminars. The bright young students. The lecture circuit. The talk shows. The campaigns. All to get here. I was so close to accomplishing something important. Oh, God! To die now, to die like this! But he knew that death was here, that he had to accept it. He hoped that someone would forgive him. He hadn’t been a bad man, had he? He’d tried so hard to make a difference, to make the world a better place, and now on the brink of something really important ... so much the better for everyone if this had happened while mounted on that foolish little cow ... better still, he knew in one final moment, if his studies and his intellect had been his only pass—
Alden’s disgrace and de facto firing determined the fact that his death would take long to discover. Instead of being buzzed by his secretary every few minutes, it took nearly an hour. Because she was intercepting all calls to him, none were forwarded. It would not have mattered in any case, though it would cause his secretary some guilt for weeks to come. Finally, when she was ready to leave for the day, she decided that she had to tell him so. She buzzed him over the intercom and got no response. Frowning, she paused, then buzzed him again. Still nothing. She next rose and walked to the door, knocking on it. Finally she opened it and screamed loudly enough that the Secret Service agents outside the Oval Office in the opposite corner of the building heard her. The first to arrive was Helen D’Agustino, one of the President’s personal bodyguards, who’d been walking the corridors to loosen up after sitting most of the day.
“Shit!” And that fast her service revolver was out. She’d never seen so much blood in her life, all coming out of Alden’s right ear and puddling on his desk. She shouted an alert over her radio transmitter. It had to be a head shot. Her sharp eyes swept the room, tracking over the front sight of her Model 19 Smith & Wesson. Windows intact. She darted across the room. Nobody here. So, what then?
Next she felt with her left hand for Alden’s pulse on the carotid artery. Of course there was none, but training dictated that she had to check. Outside the room, all exits to the White House were blocked, guns were drawn, and visitors froze in their tracks. Secret Service agents were conducting a thorough check of the entire building.
“Goddamn!” Pete Connor observed as he entered the room.
“Sweep is complete!” a voice told both of them through their earpieces. “Building is clear. HAWK is secure.” “Hawk” was the President’s code name with the Secret Service. It displayed the agents’ institutional sense of humor, both for its association with the President’s name and its ironic dissonance with his politics.
“Ambulance is two minutes out!” the communications center added. They could get an ambulance faster than a helicopter.
“Stand easy, Daga,” Connor said. “I think the man had a stroke.”
“Move!” This was a Navy chief medical corpsman. The Secret Service agents were trained in first aid, of course, but the White House always had a medical team standing by, and the corpsman was first on the scene. He carried the sort of duffel bag carried by corpsmen in the field, but didn’t bother opening it. There was just too much blood on the desk, he saw instantly, and the top of the puddle was congealing. The corpsman decided not to disturb the body—it was a potential crime scene, and the Secret Service guys had briefed him on that set of rules—most of the blood had come out Dr. Alden’s right ear. There was a trickle from the left one also,
and postmortem lividity was already starting in what parts of the face he could see. Diagnoses didn’t come much easier than that.
“He’s dead, probably been close to an hour, guys. Cerebral hemorrhage. Stroke. Isn’t this guy a hypertensive?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Special Agent D’"Agustino said after a moment.
“You’ll have to post him to be sure, but that’s what he died of. Blowout.”
A physician arrived next. He was a Navy captain, and confirmed his chiefs observation.
“This is Connor, tell the ambulance to take it easy. PILGRIM is dead, looks like from natural causes. Repeat, PILGRIM is dead,” the principal agent said over his radio.
The postmortem examination would check for many things, of course. Poison. Possible contamination of his food or water. But the White House environment was monitored on a continuous basis. D’Agustino and Connor shared a look. Yes, he had suffered from high blood pressure, and he sure as hell had had a bad day. Just about as bad as they get.
“How is he?” Heads turned. It was HAWK, the President himself, with a literal ring of agents around him, pressing through the door. And Dr. Elliot behind him. D’Agustino made a mental note that they’d have to make up a new code name for her. She wondered if HARPY might suffice. Daga didn’t like the bitch. No one on the Presidential Security Detail did. But they weren’t paid to like her, or, for that matter, even to like the President.
“He’s dead, Mr. President,” the doctor said. “It appears he suffered a massive stroke.”
The President took the news without a visible reaction. The Secret Service agents reminded themselves that he’d seen his wife through a multiyear battle against multiple sclerosis, finally losing her while still governor of Ohio. It must have drained the man, they thought, wanting it to be true. It must have stripped all of his emotions away. Certainly there were few emotions left in him. He made a clucking sound, and grimaced, and shook his head, and then he turned away.