Arnie van Damm looked him over. “Well, Mr. President, good to see you still know how to dress.”
“Got a different tie?” Callie Weston asked.
“What’s wrong with red?” Ryan asked in reply.
“Too in-your-face.”
“What would you prefer?”
“Sky-blue is better.”
“Callie, I love your work, but, please, let me dress myself, okay?”
Callie Weston growled but let it slide.
“All ready?” Arnie asked.
“Too late to run away,” Ryan answered. And it was. From now on he was a willing, fire-in-the-belly candidate. Blood in his eyes and steel in his spine.
Van Damm said, “Sure I can’t talk you into—”
“No.” He and Arnie and Callie had batted around Georgetown—whether or not to include the assassination attempt in his announcement speech. Predictably, they’d argued for inclusion, but Ryan would have none of it. The incident would be raised during the campaign, but not by him. Nor would he avoid it.
“How’s the audience?” Ryan asked, closing the subject.
“All wired up,” Arnie replied. “It is otherwise a slow news day out there, and so they’ll be glad to see you. It gives them almost five minutes of airtime to fill. You will sell a lot of toothpaste for them, Jack. Hell, some of them actually like you.”
“Really? Since when?” Ryan asked.
“They’re not the enemy. They’re the press. They’re neutral observers. You ought to hang out with them, off-the-record talks. Have a beer with them. Let them come to like you. You’re a likable guy. Let it work for you.”
“I’ll think about it. Coffee?”
“They do it good here?”
“No complaints from me,” Jack told them. He wandered over to the room-service tray and sat down to pour another cup. His third. That would be his limit, lest the caffeine make him jumpy. At the White House, presidential coffee was all Jamaican Blue Mountain, from the former British colony, widely regarded as the best in all the world. That was a cup of coffee. Maybe it was the bauxite in the beans, Jack thought.
Again Ryan’s mind came back to the central question: If he won, how to put the country back on course? Governing so complex a country as the United States of America was an effective impossibility. Too many interests, each of them matters of life and death to somebody, and that somebody would be on TV or in the papers to make sure that his/her views got their proper—preferably loud—attention. The President might or might not pay attention. He/she had a staff to make sure that only the important stuff made it to his/her desk. But that made the President a hostage to the staff, and even a good man could be misdirected by the people that he or she had chosen for the job—and as a practical matter, selection of the staff was delegated to more senior staffers, all of whom had a sense of self-importance about them, as though a desk in the White House West Wing or the Old Executive Office Building was a personal gift from God’s Own Hand. Such people could and did shape the ideas of their President just by selecting the things he saw. And you’re going to fight for four more years of this? Ryan asked himself. You fucking idiot.
“I know that look,” Arnie said. “I know what you’re thinking. What can I say, Jack, except that I think you really are the best man for the job, and it’s necessary. I believe that down to my bones. How about you?”
“I’m getting there,” Ryan said.
“You see the business about Iran?” Arnie asked.
“Which part? Their nuclear program or the border exercise?”
“Both.”
“Same houses, different paint,” Jack said. “Tehran knows all it has to do is rattle a little saber and Kealty will react—or overreact. What’s he got Netters sending over there, a whole battle group?”
“Yep. Stennis. Pulled it back from a rotation home.”
“Idiot. They’ve got the President of the United States dancing on a string.” He checked his watch. “How much more time do I have?”
“Ten minutes,” Callie replied. “Can I talk you into some TV makeup?”
“No way in hell!” Ryan thundered in reply. “I’m not a ten-dollar hooker on Sixteenth Street.”
“They cost more than that now, Jack. Inflation, remember?”
Ryan stood and made his way to the bathroom. Losing bladder control was something else to be avoided, and not something he could do in front of cameras. As Ryan grew older, he found himself liking less to wait in line to take a leak. Part of the aging process, he figured. Well, he took his leak, zipped up, and walked back out to don his jacket.
“Off we go, guys?”
“Into the lion’s den, Mr. President.” Arnie called him Jack only in private. Callie Weston had the same privilege, which made her uncomfortable. On walking out of the room, Andrea Price-O’Day was there, along with other members of Jack’s detail, guns securely holstered.
“SWORDSMAN is moving,” Andrea told the rest of her team over her lapel microphone.
Jack walked to the elevator, which was, as usual, held for him, with yet another armed agent inside.
“Okay, Eddie,” Andrea said, and Eddie released the key he’d been holding, and the elevator went down to the second floor, which had the meeting room reserved for today’s announcement.
Forty seconds and the doors slid open, and the Secret Service team went out to lead the parade. There was a funnel of spectators, some of them ordinary citizens, remarkably enough, but the majority of them reporters of various flavors, and their TV cameras. Jack smiled at them—candidates had to smile all the time—waving to a few he knew by name from four years earlier. The smile threatened to make his face crack, Jack thought.
“Mr. President, please follow me,” the hotel manager said, shepherding the party to the back of the room. There was the lectern. Ryan went to it at once. Gripping the wood panel hard enough to make his hands hurt a little. It was his normal practice, and helped synchronize him with the task at hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack began. “Thank you for coming. I am here to announce my candidacy to run for the Presidency of the United States in this coming year.
“Since I left the Presidency three years ago, I’ve watched the current President’s term of office with disappointment. President Kealty has not responded well to the challenges our country has faced. In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers have died needlessly, victims of a rudderless policy of withdrawal. Even when a war is ill conceived, when you have a war, you are stuck with it, and you must play it out. Running away from a conflict is not a policy. President Kealty, as a United States Senator, was not a friend of our military services, and he has compounded his earlier errors to utilize those forces inefficiently, micromanaging their field activities from the Oval Office in such a way as to get our people killed instead of listening to the commanders on the ground.
“Moreover, President Kealty has also mismanaged our national economy. When I left office, America had a growing and healthy economy. In his first two years, President Kealty’s misguided tax policy has stopped that cold. In this last year, the economy bounced off the bottom and is now starting to grow again, but that is in spite of government policy, not because of it. Under my administration, we simplified tax policy. That put a lot of lawyers and accountants out of business—by the way, you might remember that I am still a CPA, and the new tax codes are to the point that I can’t comprehend them anymore. Maybe President Kealty is happy that, in his words, everybody pays his fair share of taxes, but revenues to the federal government have gone down, not up, and the resulting deficit is harming America every day.
“I can only regard Kealty’s first three years in the White House as a mistake for our country, and for that reason, I am here to try to get back there myself to correct the mistakes.
“On the issue of national security, our country needs a new and efficient look at where we are in the world. Who our enemies are, and how we need to deal with them. For starters, we need a better intelligence ser
vice. Fixing it will be a task of years, but the work must begin soon. You can’t deal with your enemies unless you know who they are, and where they are. You fight against enemies by supporting and then using your military assets efficiently. President Kealty has manifestly not done that well. National security is the first task of the federal government. Life, as Thomas Jefferson put it, comes before liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Protecting the nation’s life is the job of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. To that end, they must be properly supported, trained to perfection, and then allowed to do their job in accordance with the wishes and expertise of their professional officers, under strategic direction from the sitting President. President Kealty doesn’t seem to recognize that simple fact.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am here because someone has to replace the President, and that person, I think, is John Patrick Ryan. I call on your support, and the support of our citizens. America deserves better than what he’s done, and I offer myself, and my vision, to fix the problems that have been created in the last three years. My mission is to return America to the old truths that have stood us in good stead for two hundred years. Our people deserve better. I am here to give the people the things they need. And what is that?” he asked rhetorically.
“Freedom from fear. The people need to know they are safe in their homes and places of work. They need to know that their government is alert, looking for those who would wish to hurt our country, and ready to bring justice to those who attack Americans in America or anywhere else in the world.
“Freedom to live their lives without interference from people who live in Washington and seek to enforce their will on everyone else, whether they live in Richmond, Virginia, or Cody, Wyoming. Freedom is the common birthright of every American, and that birthright is something I will protect to the best of my ability.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is not the job of government to be the national nanny. The average citizen can look after his or her own needs without assistance from somebody who works here in Washington. America was founded because our citizens two-hundred-plus years ago didn’t want to live under the distant rule of people who didn’t know and didn’t especially care for their welfare. America is about freedom. Freedom to make your own decisions, freedom to live in peace with your neighbors. Freedom to take our kids to Disney World in Florida, or a trout stream in Colorado. Freedom means deciding what you want to do with your life. Freedom is the natural state of nature. That’s how God wanted us to live. The job of the President of the United States is to preserve, protect, and defend our country. When the President does that job, the citizens can live any way they wish. That is the objective of the President: to protect the people and then to leave them alone.
“That is what I propose to do. I will rebuild the military, allow it to train its uniformed members, give it proper support, and turn it loose to deal with our enemies. I will rebuild our intelligence community so that we can identify and counter those who want to hurt our country and our citizens before they can begin to take destructive action against us. I will reestablish a rational tax system that takes from the people only the money which the country needs to fulfill its proper functions, not suck the life out of its citizens while it tells them how they must live.
“One other thing recently came to my attention. President Kealty has turned the full weight of the United States Department of Justice loose on a distinguished soldier of the United States Army. That soldier was in Afghanistan looking for the Emir, Saif Rahman Yasin. The mission to apprehend him failed, probably due to poor intelligence, but in carrying out that mission, this soldier killed several enemy combatants. Now the Department of Justice is investigating him for murder. I’ve looked in to this particular incident. This soldier did exactly what soldiers have been doing since the beginning of time: He killed enemies of our country. Clearly President Kealty and I have very different ideas about what the armed forces of our country are supposed to do. This prosecution is a gross injustice. The government is supposed to serve the citizens, and a soldier in the United States Army is, in fact, a uniformed citizen. I call upon President Kealty to put an end to this outrage immediately.
“So thanks for coming. My campaign starts here and now. It will be a long one and probably a hard one, certainly harder than my first. But I am in the race, and we’ll see what the American people decide in November. Again, thanks for coming.”
Ryan stepped back from the lectern and took a deep breath. He needed a sip of water. This he got from a glass on the lectern. He looked over at Arnie and Callie, and got thumbs-up from both. Okay, that was done. The race was on. God help him.
Motherfucker!” Edward Kealty snarled at the TV. “Goddamned Dudley Do-Right riding to the rescue of a beleaguered nation! The worst part is, millions of sheep out there are buying his shit.”
McMullen and his staff had known Ryan’s announcement was coming and had been prepping Kealty for it; clearly, their efforts had failed. Kealty’s reaction was mostly anger, McMullen knew, but there was genuine worry there, too. Much of the American public was still uneasy with Kealty, due in large part to the way the election played out. The phrase “victory by forfeiture” had been common fodder on the political shows for a month following Kealty’s election, and while the polling numbers couldn’t quite encapsulate the country’s mood, McMullen suspected most people felt as though the election had been missing an essential ingredient—namely, a long and hard-fought contest between two candidates who’d bared their souls for the voters. Kealty had done this, or mostly done this, but his opponent hadn’t had the chance.
“How the hell did he find out about this thing with the Ranger?” Kealty demanded. “I want to know.”
“Impossible to know, sir.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Wes! Find out.”
“Yes, sir. We’re going to have to drop the prosecution.”
“Of the grunt? Yeah, I know, dammit. Dump it into Friday’s news cycle. Get rid of it. Where are we on opposition research?”
“Still working on it. Nothing we can sink our teeth into; the problem is Langley. A lot of stuff Ryan did there is still compartmentalized.”
“Get Kilborn—”
“There’ll be leaks. If the press finds out we’re digging into Ryan’s CIA past, it’ll backfire on us. We’ll have to find another way.”
“Whatever you need to do. This dickhead wants back in, fine, but I want it to hurt.”
Holy shit,” Sam Driscoll said from his hospital bed. “Here’s a face from the past. What the hell’re you doing here?”
John Clark smiled. “Heard through the grapevine you fucked up your shoulder playing badminton.”
“I wish. Sit down, man.”
“I come bearing gifts,” Clark said, then set his briefcase on the bed and opened it. Inside were two bottles of Sam Adams beer. He handed one to Driscoll, then opened his own.
Driscoll took a gulp and sighed. “How’d you know? The beer, I mean.”
“Remembered you talking about it after Somalia.”
“Some memory you got there. Got a little more gray, too, I see.”
“Look who’s talking.”
Driscoll took another long pull. “So what’s the real reason?”
“Mostly just wanted to check in, but I heard about the CID bullshit, too. Where’s that stand?”
“No idea. They’ve interviewed me three times. Best my lawyer can figure is some dickhead behind some desk is trying to figure out what to charge me with. It’s a cluster-fuck, John.”
“You got that right. Damned if you do the job, damned if you fail. What do the docs say about your shoulder?”
“Need one more surgery. The rock missed the big vessels in there but fucked up the tendons and ligaments. Figure three months’ recovery, then another three for rehab. They’re pretty confident, but I don’t think I’ll be swinging from the monkey bars again.”
“What about a humping rucksack?”
“Probabl
y not that, either. The doc that cut on me guesses I won’t be able to lift by elbow much above my ear.”
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
“Yeah, me, too. Gonna miss it. Gonna miss the guys.”
“You got your twenty, right?”
“And then some, but with this CID shit . . . Who knows?”
Clark nodded thoughtfully. “Well, you went out with a bang. Got some good intel from that cave. Hell, you could have glided down the mountain on that sand table.”
Driscoll laughed, then: “Wait a second. How do you know about that? Oh, yeah, scratch that. You’re still in, aren’t you?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘in.’”
A nurse walked into the room carrying a clipboard. Driscoll slipped his beer beneath the sheet; Clark lowered his out of sight. “Afternoon, Sergeant Driscoll. I’m Veronica. I’ll be with you until midnight. How’re we feeling?”
“Just fine, ma’am, and you?”
Veronica dutifully checked boxes on her clipboard and scribbled a few notes. “Can I get you anything? How’s your pain level, on a scale of one to—”
“Six-ish and holding steady,” Driscoll shot back with a smile. “Maybe a little ice cream with dinner?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Veronica flashed a smile, then turned and headed for the door. Over her shoulder, she said, “Just make sure those bottles disappear when you’re done with them, gentlemen.”
After Clark and Driscoll got done laughing, Driscoll asked, “What I mean by ‘in’ is government.”
“Then no. I came to offer you a job, Sam.” Here Clark knew he was overstepping his bounds a tad, but he doubted he’d have any trouble selling Driscoll’s qualifications.
“Doing what?”
“Sort of what you’ve been doing, but no rucksack and better wages.”
“You getting me into something illegal, John?”
“Nothing you won’t be comfortable with. Nothing you haven’t done before. Plus, it comes with a get-out-of-jail-free card. You’d have to relocate, though. Winters are colder than Georgia.”