Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (7 page)

Price spoke into her radio microphone, which was pinned to the collar of her suit jacket. “S
WORDSMAN
is moving. Bring the cars to the West Entrance.”

The agents of the Detail rose. As one person they unbuttoned their coats, and as they passed out the door, hands reached for their pistols.

“We'll shake you loose at five,” van Damm promised, adding, “Make sure you get the sleep you need.” His answer was a brief, empty stare, as Ryan left the room. There a White House usher put a coat on him—whose it was or where it might have come from, Jack didn't think to ask. He climbed into the Chevy Suburban backseat, and it moved off at once, with an identical vehicle in front, and three more behind. Jack could have avoided the sights, but not the sounds, for sirens were still wailing beyond the armored glass, and it would have been cowardice to look away in any case. The fire glow was gone, replaced by the sparkling of lights from scores of emergency vehicles, some moving, most not, on or around the Hill. The police were keeping downtown streets clear, and the presidential motorcade headed rapidly east, ten minutes later arriving at the Marine Barracks. Here everyone was awake now, properly uniformed, and every Marine in sight had a rifle or pistol in evidence. The salutes were crisp.

The home of the commandant of the Marine Corps dated back to the early nineteenth century, one of the few official buildings that hadn't been burned by the British during their visit in 1814. But the commandant was dead. A widower with grown children, he'd lived here alone until this last night. Now a full colonel stood on the porch in pressed utilities with a pistol belt around his waist and a full platoon spread around the house.

“Mr. President, your family is topside and all secure,” Colonel Mark Porter reported immediately. “We have a full rifle company deployed on perimeter security, and another one is on the way.”

“Media?” Price asked.

“I didn't have any orders about that. My orders were to protect our guests. The only people within two hundred meters are the ones who belong here.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Ryan said, not caring about the media, and heading for the door. A sergeant held it open, saluting as a Marine ought, and without thinking, Ryan returned it. Inside, a more senior NCO pointed him up the stairs—this one also saluted, as he was under arms. It was clear to Ryan now that he couldn't go anywhere alone. Price, another agent, and two Marines followed him up the stairs. The second-floor corridor had two Secret Service agents and five more Marines. Finally, at
11:54
, he walked into a bedroom to find his wife sitting.

“Hi.”

“Jack.” Her head turned. “It's all true?”

He nodded, then he hesitated before coming to sit next to Cathy. “The kids?”

“Asleep.” A pause. “They don't really know what's going on. I guess that makes four of us,” she added.

“Five.”

“The President's dead?” Cathy turned to see her husband nod. “I hardly got to know him.”

“Good guy. Their kids are at the House. Asleep. I didn't know if I was supposed to do anything. So I came here.” Ryan reached for his collar and pulled the tie loose. It seemed to take a considerable effort to do so. Better not to disturb the kids, he decided. It would have been hard to walk that far anyway. . “And now?”

“I have to sleep. They get me up at five.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don't know.” Jack managed to get out of his clothes, hoping that the new day would contain some of the answers that the night merely concealed.

PRE-DAWN

I
T WAS TO BE EXPECTED
that they'd be as exactly punctual as their electronic watches could make them. It seemed to Ryan that he'd hardly closed his eyes when the gentlest of taps at the door startled him off the pillow. There came the brief moment of confusion normal to the moment of awakening in any place other than one's own bed: Where am I? The first organized thought told him that he'd dreamed a lot of things, and maybe— But hard on the heels of that thought was the internal announcement that the worst of the dream was still real. He was in a strange place, and there was no other explanation for it. The tornado had swept him up into a whirling mass of terror and confusion, and then deposited him here, and here was neither
Kansas
nor Oz. About the best thing he could say, after five or ten seconds of orientation, was that he didn't have the expected headache from sleep-deprivation, and that he wasn't quite so tired. He slid out from under the covers. His feet found the floor, and he made his way to the door.

“Okay, I'm up,” he told the wooden door. Then he realized that his room didn't have an attached bathroom, and he'd have to open the door. That he did.

“Good morning, Mr. President.” A young and rather earnest-looking agent handed him a bathrobe. Again, it was the job of an orderly, but the only Marine he saw in the corridor was wearing a pistol belt. Jack wondered if there had been another turf fight the night before between the Marine Corps and the Secret Service to see who had primacy of place in the protection of their new Commander-in-Chief. Then he realized with a start that the bathrobe was his own.

“We got some things for you last night,” the agent explained in a whisper. A second agent handed over Cathy's rather tattered maroon housecoat. So, someone had broken into their home last night—must have, Jack realized, as he hadn't handed over his keys to anyone; and defeated the burglar alarm he'd installed a few years earlier. He padded back to the bed and deposited the housecoat there before heading back out. Yet a third agent pointed him down the hall to an unoccupied bedroom. Four suits were hanging on a poster bed, along with four shirts, all newly pressed by the look of them, along with half a score of ties and everything else. It wasn't so much pathos as desperation, Jack realized. The staff knew, or at least had an idea of what he was going through, and every single thing they could do to make things easier for him was being done with frantic perfection. Someone had even spit-shined his three pair of black shoes to Marine specifications. They'd never looked so good before, Ryan thought, heading for the bathroom—where, of course, he found all of his things, even his usual bar of Zest soap. Next to that was the skin-friendly stuff Cathy used. Nobody thought that being President was easy, but he was now surrounded by people who were grimly determined to eliminate every small worry he might have.

A warm shower helped loosen his muscles, and clouded the mirror with mist, which made things even better when he shaved. The usual morning mechanics were finished by
5:20
, and Ryan made his way down the stairs. Outside, he saw through a window, a phalanx of camouflage-clad Marines stood guard on the quad, their breathing marked by little white puffs. Those inside braced to attention as he passed. Perhaps he and his family had gotten a few hours of sleep, but no one else had. That was something he needed to remember, Jack told himself as the smells drew him to the kitchen.

“Attention on deck!” The voice of the sergeant-major of the Marine Corps was muted in deference to the sleeping children upstairs, and for the first time since dinner the previous night, Ryan managed a smile.

“Settle down, Marines.” President Ryan headed toward the coffeepot, but a corporal beat him there. The correct proportions of cream and sugar were added to the mug—again, someone had done some homework—before she handed it across.

“The staff is in the dining room, sir,” the sergeant-major told him.

“Thank you.” President Ryan headed that way.

They looked the worse for wear, making Jack feel briefly guilty for his shower-fresh face. Then he saw the pile of documents they'd prepared.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Andrea Price said. People started to rise from their chairs. Ryan waved them back down and pointed to
Murray
.

“Dan,” the President began. “What do we know?”

“We found the body of the pilot about two hours ago. Good ID. His name was Sato, as expected. Very experienced airplane driver. We're still looking for the co-pilot.”
Murray
paused. “The pilot's body is being checked for drugs, but finding that would be a surprise. NTSB has the flight recorder—they got that around four, and it's being checked out right now. We've recovered just over two hundred bodies—”

“President Durling?”

Price handled that one with a shake of the head. “Not yet. That part of the building—well, it's a mess, and they decided to wait for daylight to do the hard stuff.”

“Survivors?”

“Just the three people who we know to have been inside that part of the building at the time of the crash.”

“Okay.” Ryan shook his head as well. That information was important, but irrelevant. “Anything important that we know?”

Murray
consulted his notes. “The aircraft flew out of Vancouver International, B.C. They filed a false flight-plan for London Heathrow, headed east, departed Canadian airspace at
7:51
local time. All very routine stuff. We assume that he headed out a little while, reversed course, and headed southeast toward D.C. After that he bluffed his way through air-traffic control.”

“How?”

Murray
nodded to someone Ryan didn't know. “Mr. President, I'm Ed Hutchins, NTSB. It's not hard. He claimed to be a KLM charter inbound to
Orlando
. Then he declared an emergency. When there's an in-flight emergency, our people are trained to get the airplane on the ground ASAP. We were up against a guy who knew all the right buttons to push. There's no way anyone could have prevented this,” he concluded defensively.

“Only one voice on the tapes,”
Murray
noted.

“Anyway,” Hutchins continued, “we have tapes of the radar tracks. He simulated an aircraft with control difficulties, asked for an emergency vector to Andrews, and got what he wanted. From Andrews to the Hill is barely a minute's flying time.”

“One of our people got a Stinger off,” Price said, with somewhat forlorn pride.

Hutchins just shook his head. It was the gesture for this morning in
Washington
. “Against something that big, might as well have been a spitball.”

“Anything from
Japan
?”

“They're in a national state of shock.” This came from Scott Adler, the senior career official in the State Department, and one of Ryan's friends. “Right after you turned in, we got a call from the Prime Minister. It's not as though he hasn't had a bad week himself, though he sounds happy to be back in charge. He wants to come over to apologize personally to us. I told him we'd get back—”

“Tell him yes.”

“You sure, Jack?” Arnie van Damm asked.

“Does anybody think this was a deliberate act?” Ryan countered.

“We don't know,” Price responded first.

“No explosives aboard the aircraft,” Dan Murray pointed out. “If there had been—”

“I wouldn't be here.” Ryan finished his coffee. The corporal refilled it at once. “This is going to come down to one or two nuts, just like they all do.”

Hutchins nodded tentative agreement. “Explosives are fairly light. Even a few tons, given the carrying capacity of the 747-400, would not have compromised the mission at all, and the payoff would have been enormous. What we have here is a fairly straightforward crash. The residual damage was done by about half a load of jet fuel—upwards of eighty tons. That was plenty,” he concluded. Hutchins had been investigating airplane accidents for almost thirty years.

“It's much too early to draw conclusions,” Price warned.

“Scott?”

“If this was—hell,” Adler shook his head. “This was not an act by their government. They're frantic over there. The newspapers are calling for the heads of the people who suborned the government in the first place, and Prime Minister Koga was nearly in tears over the phone. Put it this way, if somebody over there planned this, they'll find out for us.”

“Their idea of due process isn't quite as stringent as ours,”
Murray
added. “Andrea is right. It is too early to draw conclusions, but all of the indications so far point to a random act, not a planned one.”
Murray
paused for a moment. “For that matter, we know the other side developed nuclear weapons, remember?” Even the coffee turned cold with that remark.

T
HIS ONE HE
found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he'd accidentally stepped on wasn't one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets at the shoulders. Three stripes on each of them, he saw. He wondered what that meant, too tired to do much in the way of thinking. The fireman turned and waved to his lieutenant, who in turn tapped the arm of a woman wearing a vinyl FBI windbreaker.

This agent walked over, sipping at a plastic cup and wishing she could light a cigarette—still too many lingering fumes for that, she grumbled.

“Just found this one. Funny place, but—” “Yeah, funny.” The agent lifted her camera and snapped a couple of pictures which would have the exact time electronically preserved on the frame. Next she took a pad from her pocket and noted the placement for body number four on her personal list. She hadn't seen many for her particular area of responsibility. Some plastic stakes and yellow tape would further mark the site; she started writing the tag for it. “You can turn him over.”

Under the body, they saw, was an irregularly shaped piece of flat glass—or glass-like plastic. The agent snapped another photo, and through the viewfinder things somehow looked more interesting than with the naked eye. A glance up showed a gap in the marble balustrade. Another look around revealed a lot of small metallic objects, which an hour earlier she'd decided were aircraft parts, and which had attracted the attention of an NTSB investigator, who was now conferring with the same fire-department officer with whom she'd been conferring a minute earlier. The agent had to wave three times to get his attention.

“What is it?” The NTSB investigator was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.

The agent pointed. “Check the shirt out.”

“Crew,” the man said, after putting them back on. “Maybe a driver. What's this?” It was his turn to point.

There was a strange delicacy to it. The white uniform shirt had a hole in it just to the right of the pocket. The hole was surrounded by a red-rust stain. The FBI agent held her flashlight close, and that showed that the stain was dried. The current temperature was just under twenty degrees. The body had been thrown into this harsh environment virtually at the moment of impact, and the blood about the severed neck was frozen, the purple-red color of some horrid plum sherbet. The blood on the shirt, she saw, had dried before having the chance to freeze.

“Don't move the body anymore,” she told the fireman. Like most FBI agents, she'd been a local police officer before applying to the federal agency. It was the cold that made her face pale.

“First crash investigation?” the NTSB man asked, seeing her face, and mistaking her pallor.

She nodded. “Yes, it is, but it's not my first murder.” With that she switched on her portable radio to call her supervisor. For this body she wanted a crime-scene team and full forensics.

T
HE TELEGRAMS CAME
from every government in the world. Most were long, and all had to be read—well, at least the ones from important countries.
Togo
could wait.

“Interior and Commerce are in town and standing by for a Cabinet meeting along with all the deputies,” van Damm said while Ryan flipped through the messages, trying to read and listen at the same time. “The Joint Chiefs, all the vices, are assembled, along with all the command CINCs to go over national security—”

“Threat Board?” Jack asked without looking up. Until the previous day he'd been President Durling's National Security Advisor, and it didn't seem likely that the world had changed too much in twenty-four hours.

Scott Adler handled the answer: “Clear.”

“
Washington
is pretty much shut down,”
Murray
said. “Radio and TV announcements for people to stay home, except for essential services. The D.C. National Guard is out. We need the warm bodies for the Hill, and the D.C. Guard is a military-police brigade. They might actually be useful. Besides, the firemen must be about worn out by now.”

“How long before the investigation gives us hard information?” the President asked.

“There's no telling that, Ja—Mister—”

Ryan looked up from the official Belgian telegram. “How long since we've known each other, Dan? I'm not God, okay? If you use my name once in a while, nobody's going to shoot you for it.”

It was
Murray
's turn to smile. “Okay. You can't predict with any major investigation. The breaks just come, sooner or later, but they do come,” Dan promised. “We have a good team of investigators out there.”

“What do I tell the media?” Jack rubbed his eyes, already tired from reading. Maybe Cathy was right. Maybe he did need glasses, finally. Before him was a printed sheet for his morning TV appearances, which had been selected by lot. CNN at
7:08
, CBS at
7:20
, NEC at
7:37
, ABC at
7:50
, Fox at
8:08
, all from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where the cameras were already set up. Someone had decided that a formal speech was too much for him, and not really appropriate to the situation until he had something substantive to deliver. Just a quiet, dignified, and above all, intimate introduction of himself to people reading their papers and drinking their morning coffee.