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.
2 PRE-DAWN
IT 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?'
