Ocean, and those together did not match the Japanese air strength on Guam and Saipan today, Ryan thought, for the first time feeling anger over the affair. It had taken him long enough to get over the disbelief, Jack told himself.
'I don't think we can do it,' SecDef concluded, and it was a judgment that no one in the room was prepared to dispute. They were too weary for recriminations. President Durling thanked everyone for the advice and headed upstairs for his bedroom, hoping to get a little sleep before facing the media in the morning.
He took the stairs instead of the elevator, thinking along the way as Secret Service agents at the top and bottom of the stairs watched. A shame for his presidency to end this way. Though he'd never really desired it, he'd done his best, and his best, only a few days earlier, hadn't been all that bad.
28—Transmissions
The United 747-400 touched down at Moscow's Scheremetyevo Airport thirty minutes early. The Atlantic jetstream was still blowing hard. A diplomatic courier was first off, helped that way by a flight attendant. He flashed his diplomatic passport at the end of the jetway, where a customs officer pointed him toward an American embassy official who shook his hand and led him down the concourse.
'Come with me. We even have an escort into town.' The man smiled at the lunacy of the event.
'I don't know you,' the courier said suspiciously, slowing down. Ordinarily his personality and his diplomatic bag were inviolable, but everything about this trip had been unusual, and his curiosity was thoroughly aroused.
'There's a laptop computer in your bag. There's yellow tape around it. It's the only thing you're carrying,' said the chief of CIA Station Moscow, which was why the courier didn't know him. 'The code word for your trip is STEAMROLLER.'
'Fair enough.' The courier nodded on their way down the terminal corridor. An embassy car was waiting-it was a stretched Lincoln, and looked to be the Ambassador's personal wheels. Next came a lead car which, once off the airport grounds, lit off a rotating light, the quicker to proceed downtown. On the whole it struck the courier as a mistake. Better to have used a Russian car for this. Which raised a couple of bigger questions. Why the hell had he been rousted at zero notice from his home to ferry a goddamned portable computer to Moscow? If everything was so goddamned secret, why were the Russians in on it? And if it were this goddamned important, why wait for a commercial flight? A State Department employee of long standing, he knew that it was foolish to question the logic of government decisions. It was just that he was something of an idealist.
The rest of the trip went normally enough, right to the embassy, set in west-central Moscow, by the river. Inside the building, the two men went to the communications room, where the courier opened his bag, handed over its contents, and headed off for a shower and a bed, his questions never to be answered, he was sure.
The rest of the work had been done by Russians at remarkable speed. The phone line to Interfax led in turn to RVS, thence by military fiberoptic line all the way to Vladivostok, where another similar line, laid by Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, led to the Japanese home island of Honshu. The laptop had an internal modem, which was hooked to the newly installed line and switched on. Then it was time to wait, typically, though everything else had been done at the best possible speed.
It was one-thirty when Ryan got home to Peregrine Cliff. He'd dispensed with his GSA driver, instead letting Special Agent Robberton drive him, and he pointed the Secret Service agent toward a guest room before heading to his own bed. Not surprisingly, Cathy was still awake.
'Jack, what's going on?'
'Don't you have to work tomorrow?' he asked as his first dodge. Coming home had been something of a mistake, if a necessary one. He needed fresh clothing more than anything else. A crisis was bad enough. For senior Administration officials to look frazzled and haggard was worse, and the press would surely pick up on it. Worst of all, it was visually obvious. The average Joe seeing the tape on network TV would know, and worried officers made for worried troopers, a lesson Ryan remembered from the Basic Officers' Course at Quantico. And so it was necessary to spend two hours in a car that would better have been spent on the sofa in his office.
Cathy rubbed her eyes in the darkness. 'Nothing in the morning. I have to deliver a lecture tomorrow afternoon on how the new laser system works to some foreign visitors.'
'From where?'
'Japan and Taiwan. We're licensing the calibration system we developed and—what's wrong?' she asked when her husband's head snapped around.
Robberton was undressing when he got to the guest room, his holstered pistol hanging on the bedpost. The explanation took only a few seconds, and Robberton lifted a phone and dialed the Secret Service operations center two blocks from the White House. Ryan hadn't even known that his wife had a code name.
'SURGEON'—well, that was obvious, Ryan thought—'needs a friend tomorrow…at Johns Hopkins…oh, yeah, she'll be fine. Seeya.' Robberton hung up. 'Good agent, Andrea Price. Single, willowy, brown hair, just joined the detail, eight years on the street. I worked with her dad when I was a new agent. Thanks for telling me that.'
'See you around six-thirty, Paul.'
'Yeah.' Robberton lay right down, giving every indication of someone who could go to sleep at will. A useful talent, Ryan thought.
'What was that all about?' Caroline Ryan demanded when her husband returned to the bedroom. Jack sat down on the bed to explain.
'Cathy, uh, tomorrow at Hopkins, there's going to be somebody with you. Her name is Andrea Price. She's with the Secret Service. And she'll be following you around.'
'Why?'
'Cathy, we have several problems now. The Japanese have attacked the U.S. Navy, and have occupied a couple of islands. Now, you can't—'
'They did what?'
'You can't tell that to anyone,' her husband went on. 'Do you understand? You can't tell that to anybody, but since you are going to be with some Japanese people tomorrow, and because of who I am, the Secret Service wants to have somebody around you, just to make totally certain that things are okay.' There would be more to it than that. The Secret Service was limited in manpower, and was not the least bit reticent about asking for assistance from local police forces. The Baltimore City Police, which maintained a high-profile presence at Johns Hopkins at all times—the hospital complex was not located in the best of areas—would probably assign a detective to back up Ms. Price.
'Jack, are we in any danger?' Cathy asked, remembering distant times and distant terrors, when she'd been pregnant with little Jack, when the Ulster Liberation Army had invaded their home. She remembered how pleased she'd been, and the shame she'd felt for it, when the last of them had been executed for multiple murder-ending, she'd thought, the worst and most fearful episode of her life.
For his part, Jack realized that it was just one more thing that they hadn't thought through. If America were at war, he was the National Security Advisor to the President, and, yes, that made him a high-value target. And his wife. And his three children.
'I don't think so,' he replied after a moment's consideration, 'but, well, we might want to—we might have some additional houseguests. I don't know. I'll have to ask.'
'You said they attacked our navy?'
'Yes, honey, but you can't—'
'That means war, doesn't it?'
'I don't know, honey.' He was so exhausted that he was asleep thirty seconds after hitting the pillow, and his last conscious thought was a recognition that he knew very little of what he needed to know in order to answer his wife's questions, or, for that matter, his own.
Nobody was sleeping in lower Manhattan, at least nobody whom others might think important. It occurred to more than one tired trailing executive to observe that they were really earning their money now, but the truth of the matter was that they were accomplishing very little. Proud executives all, they looked around trading rooms filled
