Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (196 page)

“Suction!” the director commanded. An orderly appeared at his side with a plastic tube leading to a vacuum bottle, and the sound of it was obscene. The process lasted fully ten minutes, with the doctors standing back while the orderly moved the suction tube around, like a maid cleaning a house. Another three liters of contaminated, virus-rich blood for the lab.

The body was supposed to be a Temple of Life, the Holy Koran taught. Moudi looked down to see one transformed into—what? A factory of death, more surely than the building in which he stood. The director moved back in, and Moudi watched his hands uncover the liver, more carefully than before. Perhaps he’d been spooked by the blood in the abdominal cavity. Again the blood vessels were cut, the connective tissue cut away. The director set his instruments down, and without being so bidden, Moudi reached in to lift out the organ and set it on the tray which, again, an orderly removed.

“I wonder why the spleen behaves so differently?”

DOWNSTAIRS, OTHER MEDICAL orderlies were at work. One by one, the monkey cages were lifted from the orderly piles in the storage room. The African greens had been fed, and they were still recovering from the shock of their travel. That somewhat reduced their ability to scratch and bite and fight the gloved hands moving the cages. But the panic of the animals returned soon enough when they arrived in another room. This part of the operation was being handled ten at a time. Once in the killing room, when the doors were all tightly closed, the monkeys knew. The unlucky ones got to watch as one cage at a time was set on a table. The door to each was opened, and into the cage went a stick with a metal-band loop on the end. The loop went over the head of each monkey and was yanked tight, usually to the faint crackling sound of the broken neck. In every case the animal went taut, then fell limp, usually with the eyes open and outraged at the murder. The same instrument pulled the dead animal out. And when the loop was loosened, the body was tossed to a soldier, who carried it to the next room. The others saw and screeched their rage at the soldiers, but the cages were too small to give them room to dodge. At best one might interpose an arm in the loop, only to have that broken as well. Intelligent enough to see and know and understand what was happening to them, the African greens found it not unlike sitting in a lone tree on the savanna, watching a leopard climb up, and up, and up ... and there was nothing they could do but screech. The noise was troublesome to the soldiers, but not that troublesome.

In the next room, five teams of medical corpsmen worked at five separate tables. Clamps affixed at the neck and at the base of the tail helped keep the bodies in place. One soldier, using a curved knife, would slice open the back, tracing up the backbone, and then the other would make a perpendicular cut, pulling the hide apart to expose the inner back. The first would then remove the kidneys and hand them to the second, and while the small organs went into a special container, he would remove the body, tossing it into a plastic trash barrel for later incineration. By the time he returned to pick up his knife, the other team member would have the next monkey corpse fixed in place. It took about four minutes per iteration of the procedure. In ninety minutes, all the African green monkeys were dead. There was some urgency to this. All the raw material for their task was biological, and all subject to biological processes. The slaughtering crew handed off their product through double-doored openings cut into the walls, leading to the Hot Lab.

There things were different. Every man in the large room wore the blue plastic suit. Every motion was slow and careful. They’d been well drilled and well briefed, and what little might have been overlooked in their training had recently been recounted by the medical corpsmen selected by lot to treat the Western woman upstairs, in every dreadful detail. When something was carried from one place to another, an announcement was made, and people made a path.

The blood was in a warming tank, and air bubbled through it. The simian kidneys, two large buckets of them, were taken to a grinding machine—actually not terribly different from the kind of food processor found in gourmet kitchens. This reduced the kidneys to mush, which was moved from one table to another and layered onto trays, along with some liquid nutrients. It struck more than one of the people in the lab that what they were doing was not at all unlike baking a cake or other confection. The blood was poured generously into the trays. About half was used in that way. The rest, divided into plastic containers, went into a deep-freezer cooled by liquid nitrogen. The Hot Lab was kept warm and moist, not at all unlike the jungle. The lights were not overly bright, and shielded to contain whatever ultra-violet radiation the fluorescent might emit. Viruses didn’t like UV. They needed the right environment in which to grow, and the kidneys of the African green monkey were just that, along with nutrients, proper temperature, correct humidity, and just a pinch of hate.

“YOU’VE LEARNED SO much?” Daryaei asked.

“It’s their media, their newspeople,” Badrayn explained.

“They’re all spies!” the mullah objected.

“Many think so,” Ali said with a smile. “But they aren’t, really. They are—how does one explain them? Like medieval heralds. They see what they see and they tell what they see. They are loyal to no one except themselves and their profession. Yes, it is true that they spy, but they spy on
everyone,
their own people most of all. It’s mad, I admit, but it’s true even so.”

“Do they believe in anything?” That was a hard one for his host to grasp.

Another smile. “Nothing that I’ve ever identified. Oh, yes, the American ones are devoted to Israel, but even that is an exaggeration. It took me years to understand that. Like dogs, they will turn on anyone, bite any hand, no matter how kind. They search and they see and they tell. And so, on this Ryan fellow, I’ve been able to learn everything—his home, his family, the schools his children attend, the number of the office his wife works in, everything.”

“What if some of the information is lies?” Daryaei asked suspiciously. As long as he’d dealt with the West, the nature of their reporters was just too foreign to him to be fully understood.

“It’s all easily verified. His wife’s workplace, for example. I’m sure there must be some of the faithful on staff at that hospital. It’s simply a matter of approaching one and asking a few harmless questions. Their home, well, that will be guarded. The same is true of the children. It’s a conundrum for all such people. They must have some protection to move about, but the protection can be seen, and that tells one where they are, and who they are. Given the information I’ve developed, we even know where to start looking.” Badrayn kept his remarks short and simple. It wasn’t that Daryaei was a fool he most assuredly was not—just that he was insular. One advantage to all his years in Lebanon was that Ali had been exposed to much and had learned much. Most of all, he’d learned that he needed a sponsor, and in Mahmoud Haji Daryaei he had a prospective one. This man had plans. He needed people. And for one reason or another, he didn’t fully trust his own. Badrayn didn’t wonder why. Whatever the reason was, it was good fortune, and not to be questioned.

“How well protected are such people?” the mullah asked, his hand playing with his beard. The man hadn’t shaved in nearly twenty-four hours.

“Very well indeed,” Badrayn replied, noting something odd about the question and filing that fact away. “American police agencies are quite effective. The crime problem in America has nothing to do with their police. They simply don’t know what to do after the criminals are caught. As applied to their President ... ?” Ali leaned back for a stretch. “He will be surrounded by a highly trained group of expert marksmen, well motivated, and utterly faithful.” Badrayn added these words to his presentation to see if his interlocutor’s eyes changed. Daryaei was weary, and there was such a change. “Otherwise, protection is protection. The procedures are straightforward. You do not need my instruction on that.”

“America’s vulnerability?”

“It’s severe. Their government is in chaos. Again, you know this.”

“They are difficult to measure, these Americans ... ,” Daryaei mused.

“Their military might is formidable. Their political will is unpredictable, as someone we both ...
knew
found out to his misfortune. It is a mistake to underestimate them. America is like a sleeping lion, to be treated with care and respect.”

“How does one defeat a lion?”

That one caught Badrayn short for a second or two. Once on a trip to Tanzania he’d been advising the government on how to deal with insurgents—he’d gone into the bush for a day, driving with a colonel in that country’s intelligence service. There he’d spotted a lion, an old one which had nonetheless managed a kill all by himself. Perhaps the wildebeest had been crippled. Then there came into view a troop of hyenas, and seeing that, the Tanzanian colonel had stopped the Soviet-made Zil jeep and handed binoculars to Badrayn, and told him to observe and so learn a lesson about insurgents and their capacities. It was something he’d never forgotten. The lion, he remembered, was a large one, perhaps old, perhaps slowed down from his prime, but still powerful and forbidding to behold, even from two hundred meters away, a creature of undeniable magnificence. The hyenas were smaller, doglike creatures, with their broken-back gait, an odd canter that must have been very efficient. They gathered first in a little group, twenty meters from the lion, which was trying to feed on his kill. And then the hyenas had moved, forming a circle around the lion, and whichever one was directly behind the powerful cat would move in to nip at the hindquarters, and the lion would turn and roar and dart a few meters, and that hyena would withdraw quickly—but even as that happened, another one would advance behind the lion for another nip. Individually, the hyenas would have had no more chance against this king of the grasslands than a man with a knife would have against a soldier armed with a machine gun, but try though he might, the lion could not protect his kill—nor even himself—and in just five minutes the lion was on the defensive, unable even to run properly, because there was always a hyena behind him, nipping at his balls, forcing the lion to run in a way that was pathetically comical, dragging his bottom on the grass as he tried to maneuver. And finally the lion just went away, without a roar, without a backward glance, while the hyenas took the kill, cackling in their odd, laughing barks, as though finding amusement in their usurpation of the greater animal’s labor. And so the mighty had been vanquished by the lesser. The lion would get older, and weaker, and someday would be unable to defeat a real hyena attack aimed at his own flesh. Sooner or later, his Tanzanian friend had told him, the hyenas got them all. Badrayn looked at his host’s eyes again.

“It can be done.”

20

NEW ADMINISTRATIONS

T
HERE WERE THIRTY OF them in the East Room—all men, much to his surprise—with their wives. As Jack walked into the reception his eyes scanned the faces. Some pleased him. Some did not. Those who did were as scared as he was. It was the confident, smiling ones who worried the President.

What was the right thing to do with them? Even Arnie didn’t know the answer, though he had run through several approaches. Be very strong and intimidate them? Sure, Ryan thought, and tomorrow the papers would say he was trying to be King Jack I. Take it easy? Then he’d be called a wimp who was unable to take his proper leadership position. Ryan was learning to fear the media. It hadn’t been all that bad before. As a worker bee, he’d been largely ignored. Even as Durling’s National Security Advisor, he’d been thought of as a ventriloquist’s dummy. But now the situation was very different, and there was not a single thing he could say that could not, and
would
not, be twisted into whatever the particular listener wanted to say himself. Washington had long since lost the capacity for objectivity. Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth. Where had all these people been educated that the truth didn’t matter to them?

Ryan’s problem was that he really didn’t
have
a political philosophy per se. He believed in things that worked, that produced the promised results and fixed whatever was broken. Whether those things adhered to one political slant or another was less important than the effects they had. Good ideas worked, even though some of them might seem crazy. Bad ideas didn’t, even though some of them seemed sensible as hell. But Washington didn’t think that way. Ideologies
were
facts in this city, and if the ideologies didn’t work, people would deny it; and if the ones with which they disagreed
did
work, those who’d been opposed would never admit it, because admitting error was more hateful to them than any form of personal misconduct. They’d sooner deny God than deny their ideas. Politics had to be the only arena known to man in which people took great action without caring much for the real-world consequences, and to which the real world was far less important than whatever fantasy, right, left, or center, they’d brought to this city of marble and lawyers.

Jack looked at the faces, wondering what political baggage they’d brought along with their hanging bags. Maybe it was a weakness that he didn’t understand how that all worked, but for his part, he had lived a life in which mistakes got real people killed—and in Cathy’s case, made people blind. For Jack, the victims were people with real names and faces. For Cathy, they were those whose faces she had
touched
in an operating room. For political figures, they were abstractions far more distant than their closely held ideas.

“Like being in a zoo,” Caroline Ryan, FLOTUS, SURGEON, observed to her husband, behind a charming smile. She’d raced home—the helicopter helped—just in time to change into a new white slinky dress and a gold necklace that Jack had bought her for Christmas ... a few weeks, he remembered, before the terrorists had tried to kill her on the Route 50 bridge in Annapolis.