“They’re the most arrogant sons of bitches I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve met all sorts of big shots in my time, movers and shakers, but even the worst of them know when they need my money to do business, and when they know that, their manners get better. When you shoot a gun, you try to make sure you don’t have it aimed at your own dick.”
That made Ryan laugh, while Arnie cringed. You weren’t supposed to talk that way to the President of the United States, but some of these people knew that you could talk that way to John Patrick Ryan, the man.
“By the way, along those lines, I liked what you told that Chinese diplomat.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Their dicks aren’t big enough to get in a pissing contest with us. Nice turn of phrase, if not exactly diplomatic.”
“How did you know that?” Gant asked, the surprise showing on his face. “I never repeated that to anybody, not even to that jerk Rutledge.”
“Oh, we have ways,” Jack answered, suddenly realizing that he’d revealed something from a compartment named SORGE. Oops.
“Sounds like something you say at the New York Athletic Club,” SecTreas observed. “But only if you’re four feet or so away from the guy.”
“But it appears it’s true. At least in monetary terms. So, we have a gun we can point at their heads?”
“Yes, sir, we sure do,” Gant answered. “It might take them a month to figure it out, but they won’t be able to run away from it for very long.”
“Okay, make sure State and the Agency find this out. And, oh, tell CIA that they’re supposed to get this stuff to me first. Intelligence estimates are their job.”
“They have an economics unit, but they’re not all that good,” Gant told the others. “No surprise. The smart people in this area work The Street, or maybe academia. You can make more money at Harvard Business School than you can in government service.”
“And talent goes where the money is,” Jack agreed. Junior partners at medium-sized law firms made more than the President, which sometimes explained the sort of people who ended up here. Public service was supposed to be a sacrifice. It was for him—Ryan had proven his ability to make money in the trading business, but for him service to his country had been learned from his father, and at Quantico, long before he’d been seduced into the Central Intelligence Agency and then later tricked into the Oval Office. And once here, you couldn’t run away from it. At least, not and keep your manhood. That was always the trap. Robert Edward Lee had called duty the most sublime of words. And he would have known, Ryan thought. Lee had felt himself trapped into fighting for what was at best a soiled cause because of his perceived duty to his place of birth, and therefore many would curse his name for all eternity, despite his qualities as a man and a soldier. So, Jack, he asked himself, in your case, where do talent and duty and right and wrong and all that other stuff lie? What the hell are you supposed to do now? He was supposed to know. All those people outside the White House’s campus-like grounds expected him to know all the time where the right thing was, right for the country, right for the world, right for every working man, woman, and innocent little kid playing T-ball. Yeah, the President thought, sure. You’re anointed by the wisdom fairy when you walk in here every day, or kissed on the ear by the muse, or maybe Washington and Lincoln whisper to you in your dreams at night. He sometimes had trouble picking his tie in the morning, especially if Cathy wasn’t around to be his fashion adviser. But he was supposed to know what to do with taxes, defense, and Social Security—why? Because it was his job to know. Because he happened to live in government housing at One Thousand Six Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue and had the Secret goddamned Service protect him everywhere he went. At the Basic School at Quantico, the officers instructing newly commissioned Marine second lieutenants had told them about the loneliness of command. The difference between that and what he had here was like the difference between a fucking firecracker and a nuclear weapon. This kind of situation had started wars in the past. That wouldn’t happen now, of course, but it had once. It was a sobering thought. Ryan took a last puff on his fifth smoke of the day and killed it in the brown glass ashtray he kept hidden in a desk drawer.
“Thanks for bringing me this. Talk it over with State and CIA,” he told them again. “I want a SNIE on this, and I want it soon.”
“Right,” George Winston said, standing for the underground walk back to his building across the street.
“Mr. Gant,” Jack added. “Get some sleep. You look like hell.”
“I’m allowed to sleep in this job?” TELESCOPE asked.
“Sure you are, just like I am,” POTUS told him with a lop-sided smile. When they left, he looked at Arnie: “Talk to me.”
“Speak to Adler, and have him talk to Hitch and Rutledge, which you ought to do, too,” Arnie advised.
Ryan nodded. “Okay, tell Scott what I need, and that I need it fast.”
Good news,” Professor North told her, as she came back into the room.
Andrea Price-O’Day was in Baltimore, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, seeing Dr. Madge North, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“Really?”
“Really,” Dr. North assured her with a smile. “You’re pregnant.”
Before anything else could happen, Inspector Patrick O’Day leapt to his feet and lifted his wife in his arms for a powerful kiss and a rib-cracking hug.
“Oh,” Andrea said almost to herself. “I thought I was too old.”
“The record is well into the fifties, and you’re well short of that,” Dr. North said, smiling. It was the first time in her professional career that she’d given this news to two people carrying guns.
“Any problems?” Pat asked.
“Well, Andrea, you are prime-ep. You’re over forty and this is your first pregnancy, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She knew what was coming, but she didn’t invite it by speaking the word.
“That means that there is an increased likelihood of Down’s syndrome. We can establish that with an amniocentesis. I’d recommend we do that soon.”
“How soon?”
“I can do it today if you wish.”
“And if the test is ... ?”
“Positive? Well, then you two have to decide if you want to bring a Down’s child into the world. Some people do, but others don’t. It’s your decision to make, not mine,” Madge North told them. She’d done abortions in her career, but like most obstetricians, she much preferred to deliver babies.
“Down’s—how and ... I mean ...” Andrea said, squeezing her husband’s hand.
“Look, the odds are very much in your favor, like a hundred to one or so, and those are betting odds. Before you worry about it, the smart thing is to find out if there’s anything to worry about at all, okay?”
“Right now?” Pat asked for his wife.
Dr. North stood. “Yes, I have the time right now.”
“Why don’t you take a little walk, Pat?” Special Agent Price-O’Day suggested to her husband. She managed to keep her dignity intact, which didn’t surprise her husband.
“Okay, honey.” A kiss, and he watched her leave. It was not a good moment for the career FBI agent. His wife was pregnant, but now he had to wonder if the pregnancy was a good one or not. If not—then what? He was an Irish Catholic, and his church forbade abortion as murder, and murders were things he’d investigated—and even witnessed once. Ten minutes later, he’d killed the two terrorists responsible for it. That day still came back to him in perverse dreams, despite the heroism he’d displayed and the kudos he’d received for all of it.
But now, he was afraid. Andrea had been a fine step-mother for his little Megan, and both he and she wanted nothing in all the world more than this news—if it was, really, good news. It would probably take an hour, and he knew he couldn’t spend it sitting down in a doctor’s outer office full of pregnant women reading old copies of People and US Weekly. But where to go? Whom to see?
Okay. He sto
od and walked out, and decided to head over to the Maumenee Building. It ought not be too hard to find. And it wasn’t.
Roy Altman was the telltale. The big former paratrooper who headed the SURGEON detail didn’t stand in one place like a potted plant, but rather circulated around, not unlike a lion in a medium-sized cage, always checking, looking with highly trained and experienced eyes for something that wasn’t quite right. He spotted O’Day in the elevator lobby and waved.
“Hey, Pat! What’s happening?” All the rivalry between the FBI and the USSS stopped well short of this point. O‘Day had saved the life of SANDBOX and avenged the deaths of three of Altman’s fellow agents, including Roy’s old friend, Don Russell, who’d died like a man, gun in hand and three dead assassins in front of him. O’Day had finished Don’s work.
“My wife’s over being checked out,” the FBI inspector answered.
“Nothing serious?” Altman asked.
“Routine,” Pat responded, and Altman caught the scent of a lie, but not an important one.
“Is she around? While I’m here, I thought I’d stop over and say hi.”
“In her office.” Altman waved. “Straight down, second on the right.”
“Thanks.”
“Bureau guy coming back to see SURGEON,” he said into his lapel mike.
“Roger,” another agent responded.
O’Day found the office door and knocked.
“Come in,” the female voice inside said. Then she looked up. “Oh, Pat, how are you?”
“No complaints, just happened to be in the neighborhood, and—”
“Did Andrea see Madge?” Cathy Ryan asked. FLOTUS had helped make the appointment, of course.
“Yeah, and the little box doodad has a plus sign in it,” Pat reported.
“Great!” Then Professor Ryan paused. “Oh, you’re worried about something.” In addition to being an eye doctor, she knew trouble when she saw it.
“Dr. North is doing an amniocentesis. Any idea how long it takes?”
“When did it start?”
“Right about now, I think.”
Cathy knew the problem. “Give it an hour. Madge is very good, and very careful in her procedures. They tap into the uterus and withdraw some of the amniotic fluid. That will give them some of the tissue from the embryo, and then they examine the chromosomes. She’ll have the lab people standing by. Madge is senior staff, and when she talks, people listen.”
“She seems pretty competent.”
“She’s a wonderful doc. She’s my OB. You’re worried about Down’s, right?”
A nod. “Yep.”
“Nothing you can do but wait.”
“Dr. Ryan, I’m—”
“My name’s Cathy, Pat. We’re friends, remember?” There was nothing like saving the life of a woman’s child to get on her permanent good side.
“Okay, Cathy. Yeah, I’m scared. It’s not—I mean, Andrea’s a cop, too, but—”
“But being good with a gun or just being tough doesn’t help much right now, does it?”
“Not worth a damn,” Inspector O’Day confirmed quietly. He was about as used to being frightened as he was of flying the Space Shuttle, but potential danger to his wife and/or kid—kids now, maybe—the kind of danger in which he was utterly helpless—well, that was one of the buttons a capricious Fate could push while she laughed.
“The odds are way in your favor,” Cathy told him.
“Yeah, Dr. North said so ... but ...”
“Yeah. And Andrea’s younger than I am.”
O’Day looked down at the floor, feeling like a total fucking wimp. More than once in his life, he’d faced down armed men—criminals with violent pasts—and intimidated them into surrender. Once in his life he’d had to use his Smith & Wesson 1076 automatic in anger, and both times he’d double-tapped the heads of the terrorists, sending them off to Allah—so they’d probably believed—to answer for the murder of the innocent woman. It hadn’t been easy, exactly, but neither had it been all that hard. The endless hours of practice had made it nearly as routine as the working of his service automatic. But this wasn’t danger to himself. He could deal with that. The worst danger, he was just learning, was to those you loved.
“Pat, it’s okay to be scared. John Wayne was just an actor, remember?”
But that was it. The code of manhood to which most Americans subscribed was that of the Duke, and that code did not allow fear. In truth it was about as realistic as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but foolish or not, there it was.
“I’m not used to it.”
Cathy Ryan understood. Most doctors did. When she’d been a straight ophthalmic surgeon, before specializing in lasers, she’d seen the patients and the patients’ families, the former in pain, but trying to be brave, the latter just scared. You tried to repair the problems of one and assuage the fears of the other. Neither task was easy. The one was just skill and professionalism; the other involved showing them that, although this was a horrid emergency which they’d never experienced before, for Cathy Ryan, M.D., FACS, it was just another day at the office. She was the Pro from Dover. She could handle it. SURGEON was blessed with the demeanor that inspired confidence in all she met.
But even that didn’t apply here. Though Madge North was a gifted physician, she was testing for a predetermined condition. Maybe someday it could be fixed—genetic therapy offered that hope, ten years or so down the line—but not today. Madge could merely determine what already was. Madge had great hands, and a good eye, but the rest of it was in God’s hands, and God had already decided one way or the other. It was just a matter of finding out what His decision had been.
“This is when a smoke comes in handy,” the inspector observed, with a grimacing smirk.
“You smoke?”
He shook his head. “Gave it up a long time ago.”
“You should tell Jack.”
The FBI agent looked up. “I didn’t know he smokes.”
“He bums them off his secretary every so often, the wimp,” Cathy told the FBI agent, with almost a laugh. “I’m not supposed to know.”
“That’s very tolerant for a doc.”
“His life’s hard enough, and it’s only a couple a day, and he doesn’t do it around the kids, or Andrea’d have to shoot me for ripping his face off.”
“You know,” O’Day said, looking down again and speaking from the cowboy boots he liked to wear under his blue FBI suit, “if it comes back that it’s a Down’s kid, what the hell do we do then?”
“That’s not an easy choice.”
“Hell, under the law I don’t get a choice. I don’t even have a say in it, do I?”
“No, you don’t.” Cathy didn’t venture that this was an inequity. The law was firm on the point. The woman—in this case, the wife—alone could choose to continue the pregnancy or terminate it. Cathy knew her husband’s views on abortion. Her own views were not quite identical, but she did regard that choice as distasteful. “Pat, why are you borrowing trouble?”
“It’s not under my control.”
Like most men, Cathy saw, Pat O’Day was a control freak. She could understand that, because so was she. It came from using instruments to change the world to suit her wishes. But this was an extreme case. This tough guy was deeply frightened. He really ought not to be, but it was a question of the unknown for him. She knew the odds, and they were actually pretty good, but he was not a doctor, and all men, even the tough ones, she saw, feared the unknown. Well, it wasn’t the first time she’d baby-sat an adult who needed his hand held—and this one had saved Katie’s life.
“Want to walk over to the day-care center?”
“Sure.” O’Day stood.
It wasn’t much of a walk, and her intention was to remind O’Day what this was all about—getting a new life into the world.
“SURGEON’S on the way to the playpen,” Roy Altman told his detail. Kyle Daniel Ryan—SPRITE—was sitting up now, and playing very simply with very rudimentary toys under
the watchful eyes of the lionesses, as Altman thought of them, four young female Secret Service agents who fawned over SPRITE like big sisters. But these sisters all carried guns, and they all remembered what had nearly happened to SANDBOX. A nuclear-weapons-storage site was hardly as well-guarded as this particular day-care center.
Outside the playroom was Trenton “Chip” Kelley, the only male agent on the detail, a former Marine captain who would have frightened the average NFL lineman with a mere look.
“Hey, Chip.”
“Hi, Roy. What’s happening?”
“Just strolling over to see the little guy.”
“Who’s the muscle?” Kelley saw that O’Day was carrying heat, but decided he looked like a cop. But his left thumb was still on the button of his “crash alarm,” and his right hand was within a third of a second of his service automatic.
“Bureau. He’s cool,” Altman assured his subordinate.
“’ Kay.” Kelley opened the door.
“Who’d he play for?” O’Day asked Altman, once inside.
“The Bears drafted him, but he scared Ditka too much.” Altman laughed. “Ex-Marine.”
“I believe it.” Then O’Day walked up behind Dr. Ryan. She’d already scooped Kyle up, and his arms were around her neck. The little boy was babbling, still months away from talking, but he knew how to smile when he saw his mommy.
“Want to hold him?” Cathy asked.
O’Day cradled the infant somewhat like a football. The youngest Ryan examined his face dubiously, especially the Zapata mustache, but Mommy’s face was also in sight, and so he didn’t scream.
“Hey, buddy,” O’Day said gently. Some things came automatically. When holding a baby, you don’t stand still. You move a little bit, rhythmically, which the little ones seemed to like.
“It’ll ruin Andrea’s career,” Cathy said.
“Make for a lot better hours for her, and be nice to see her every night, but, yeah, Cathy, be kinda hard for her to run alongside the car with her belly sticking out two feet.” The image was good enough for a laugh. “I suppose they’ll put her on restricted duty.”
“Maybe. Makes for a great disguise, though, doesn’t it?”