people would have cared to learn. Cathy had spent over twenty years learning to be a gourmet cook, and when time allowed (rarely) she’d sneak down to the capacious White House kitchen to trade ideas and recipes with the head chef. For the moment, however, she was curled up in a comfortable chair making notes on her patient files and sipping at her wineglass, while Jack watched TV, for a change
But the President wasn’t really watching TV. His eyes were pointed in that direction, but his mind was looking at something else. It was a look his wife had learned to understand in the past year, almost like open-eyed sleep while his brain churned over a problem. In fact, it was something she did herself often enough, thinking about the best way to treat a patient’s problem while eating lunch at the Hopkins doctors’ cafeteria, her brain creating a picture as though in a Disney cartoon, simulating the problem and then trying out theoretical fixes. It didn’t happen all that much anymore. The laser applications she’d helped to develop were approaching the point that an auto mechanic could perform them-which was not something she or her colleagues advertised, of course. There had to be a mystique with medicine, or else you lost your power to tell your patients what to do in a way that ensured that they might actually do it.
For some reason, that didn’t translate to the Presidency, Cathy thought. With Congress, well, most of the time they went along with him-as well they ought, since Jack’s requests were usually as reasonable as they could be-but not always, and often for the dumbest reasons. “It may be good for the country, but it’s not so good for my district, and …” And they all forgot the fact that when they had arrived in Washington, they’d sworn an oath to the country, not to their stupid little districts. When she’d said that to Arnie, he’d had a good laugh and lectured her on how the real world worked-
“Jack?” she said, as she put her notebook down.
“Yeah, Cathy?”
“What are you thinking about now?”
“China, babe. They really stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes this time, but they don’t seem to know how bad it looked.”
“Killing those two people-how could it
“Not everybody values human life in the same way that we do, Cath.”
“The Chinese doctors I’ve met are-well, they’re doctors, and we talk to each other like doctors.”
“I suppose.” Ryan saw a commercial start on the TV show he was pretending to watch, and stood to walk off to the upstairs kitchen for another whiskey. “Refill, babe?”
“Yes, thank you.” With her Christmas-tree smile.
Jack lifted his wife’s wineglass. So, she had no procedures scheduled for the next day. She’d come to love the Chateau
“So, what’s going to happen in China?”
“We’ll find out the same way as everybody else, watching CNN. They’re a lot faster than our intelligence people on some things. And our spooks can’t predict the future any better than the traders on Wall Street.”
“So, what do you think?”
“I’m worried, Cath,” Ryan admitted, sitting back down.
“About what?”
“About what we’ll have to do if they screw things up again. But we can’t warn them. That only makes it certain that bad things are going to happen, because then they’ll do something really dumb just to show us how powerful they are. That’s how nation-states are. You can’t talk to them like real people. The people who make the decisions over there think with their …”
“… dicks?” Cathy offered with a half giggle.
“Yep,” Jack confirmed with a nod. “A lot of them follow their dicks everywhere they go, too. We know about some foreign leaders who have habits that would get them tossed out of any decent whorehouse in the world. They just love to show everybody how tough and manly they are, and to do that, they act like animals in a goddamned barnyard.”
“Secretaries?”
“A lot of that.” Ryan nodded. “Hell, Chairman Mao liked doing twelve-year-old virgins, like changing shirts. I guess old as he was, it was the best he could do-”
“No Viagra back then, Jack,” Cathy pointed out.
“Well, you suppose that drug will help civilize the world?” he asked, turning to grin at his physician wife. It didn’t seem a likely prospect.
“Well, maybe it’ll protect a lot of twelve-year-olds.”
Jack checked his watch. Another half hour and he’d be turning in. Until then, maybe he could actually watch the TV for a little while.
Rutledge was just waking up. Under his door was an envelope, which he picked up and opened, to find an official communique from Foggy Bottom, his instructions for the day, which weren’t terribly different from those of the previous day. Nothing in the way of concessions to offer, which were the grease of dealing with the PRC. You had to give them something if you wanted to get anything, and the Chinese never seemed to realize that such a procedure could and occasionally
Breakfast was served half an hour later, by which time Rutledge was showered and shaved pink. His staff were all there in the dining room, looking over the papers for the most part, learning what was going on back home. They already knew, or thought they knew, what was going to happen here. A whole lot of nothing. Rutledge agreed with that assessment. He was wrong, too.
CHAPTER 30 And the Rights of Men