'You should have heard the speech,' Chet said, moving up the street and wondering what had gone wrong.
'The girl's dead,' Ryan told the President barely two hours later, 1:00 P.M., Washington time.
'Natural causes?' Durling asked.
'Drug overdose, probably not self-administered. They have photos. We ought to have them in thirty-six hours. Our guys just got clear in time. The Japanese police showed up pretty fast.'
'Wait a minute. Back up. You're saying murder?'
'That's what our people think, yes, Mr. President.'
'Do they know enough to make that evaluation?'
Ryan took his seat and decided that he had to explain a little bit. 'Sir, our senior officer knows a few things about the subject, yes.'
'That was nicely phrased,' the President noted dryly. 'I don't want to know any more about that subject, do I?'
'No reason for it right now, sir, no.'
'Goto?'
'Possibly one of his people. Actually the best indicator will be how their police report it. If anything they tell us is at variance with what we've learned from our own people, then we'll know that somebody played with the data, and not all that many people have the ability to order changes in police reports.' Jack paused for a moment. 'Sir, I've had another independent evaluation of the man's character.' He went on to repeat Kris Hunter's story.
'You're telling me that you believe he had this young girl killed, and will use his police to cover it up? And you already knew he likes that sort of thing?' Durling flushed. 'You wanted me to extend this bastard an olive branch? What the hell's the matter with you?'
Jack took a deep breath. 'Okay, yes, Mr. President, I had that coming. The question is, now what do we do?'
Durling's face changed. 'You didn't deserve that, sorry.'
'Actually I do deserve it, Mr. President. I could have told Mary Pat to get her out some time ago—but I didn't,' Ryan observed bleakly. 'I didn't see this one coming.'
'We never do, Jack. Now what?'
'We can't tell the legal attache at the embassy because we don't 'know' about this yet, but I think we prep the FBI to check things out after we're officially notified. I can call Dan Murray about that.'
'Shaw's designated hitter?'
Ryan nodded. 'Dan and I go back a ways. For the political side, I'm not sure. The transcript of his TV speech just came in. Before you read it, well, you need to know what sort of fellow we're dealing with.'
'Tell me, how many common bastards like that run countries?'
'You know that better than I do, sir.' Jack thought about that for a moment. 'It's not entirely a bad thing. People like that are weak, Mr. President. Cowards, when you get down to it. If you have to have enemies, better that they have weaknesses.'
He might make a state visit, Durling thought. We might have to put him up at Blair House, right across the street. Throw a state dinner: we'll walk out into the East Room and make pretty speeches, and toast each other, and shake hands as though we're bosom buddies.
'That son of a bitch! 'America will have to understand', my ass!'
'Anger, Mr. President, isn't an effective way of dealing with problems.'
'You're right,' Durling admitted. He was silent for a moment, then he smiled in a crooked way. 'You're the one with the hot temper, as I recall.'
Ryan nodded. 'I've been accused of that, yes, sir.'
'Well, that's two big ones we have to deal with when we get back from Moscow.'
'Three, Mr. President. We need to decide what to do about India and Sri Lanka.' Jack could see from the look on Durling's face that the President had allowed himself to forget about that one.
Durling had allowed himself to semi-forget another problem as well.
'How much longer will I have to wait?' Ms. Linders demanded.
Murray could see her pain even more clearly than he heard it. How did you explain this to people? Already the victim of a vile crime, she'd gotten it out in the open, baring her soul for all manner of strangers. The process hadn't been fun for anyone, but least of all for her. Murray was a skilled and experienced investigator. He knew how to console, encourage, chivvy information out of people. He'd been the first FBI agent to listen to her story, in the process becoming as much a part of her mental-health team as Dr. Golden. After that had come another pair of agents, a man and a woman who specialized more closely in cases of this type. After them had come two separate psychiatrists, whose questioning had necessarily been somewhat adversarial, both to establish finally that her story was true in all details and to give her a taste of the hostility she would encounter.
Along the way, Murray realized, Barbara Linders had become even more of a victim than she'd been before. She'd built her self up, first, to reveal herself to Clarice, then again to do the same with Murray, then again, and yet once more still. Now she looked forward to the worst ordeal of all, for some of the members of the Judiciary Committee were allies of Ed Kealty, and some would take it upon themselves to hammer the witness hard either to curry favor with the cameras or to demonstrate their impartiality and professionalism as lawyers. Barbara knew that. Murray had himself walked her through the expected ordeal, even hitting her with the most awful of questions—always preceded with as gentle a preamble as possible, like, 'One of the things you can expect to be asked is—'
It took its toll, and a heavy toll at that. Barbara—they were too close now for him to think of her as Ms. Linders—had shown all the courage one could expect of a crime victim and more besides. But courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits. Just the waiting, the not knowing when she would have to take her seat in the committee room and make her opening statement in front of bright TV lights, the certainty that she would have to bare her soul for the entire world…it was like a robber coming into the bank night after night to steal from her hard-won accumulation of inner resolve.
It was hard enough for Murray. He had built his case, had the prosecutor lined up, but he was the one close to her. It was his mission, Murray told himself, to show this lady that men were not like Ed Kealty, that a man was as repulsed by such acts as women were. He was her knight-errant. The disgrace and ultimate imprisonment of that criminal was now his mission in life even more than it was hers.
'Barb, you have to hang in there, kid. We're going to get this bastard, but we can't do it the right way unless…' He mouthed the words, putting conviction he didn't feel into them. Since when did politics enter into a criminal case? The law had been violated. They had their witnesses, the their physical evidence, but now they were stuck in a holding pattern that was as damaging to this victim as any defense lawyer might be.
'It's taking too long!'
'Two more weeks, maybe three, and we go to bat, Barb.'
'Look, I know something is happening, okay? You think I'm dumb? He's not out making speeches and opening bridges and stuff now, is he? Somebody told him and he's building up his case, isn't he?'
'I think what's happening is that the President is deliberately holding him in close so that when this does break, he won't be able to fall back on a high public profile as a defense. The President is on our side, Barb. I've briefed him in on this case myself, and he said, 'A criminal is a criminal,' and that's exactly what he should have said.'
Her eyes came up to meet his. They were moist and desperate. 'I'm coming apart, Dan.'
'No, Barb, you're not,' Murray lied. 'You're one tough, smart, brave lady. You're going to come through this. He's the one who's going to come apart.' Daniel E. Murray, Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reached his hand across the table. Barbara Linders took it, squeezing it as a child might with her father, forcing herself to believe and to trust, and it shamed him that she was paying such a price because the President of the United States had to subordinate a criminal case to a question of politics. Perhaps it made sense in the great scheme of things, but for a cop the great scheme of things usually came down to one crime and one victim.
