reason for it.'
'Call Ali within the hour,' the President ordered. 'I want his opinion.'
'Yes, sir.'
'And if he wants to talk to me, at any time, night or day, tell him he's my friend, and I always have time for him.'
'And that's the morning news, sir.' He rose and stopped. 'Who ever decided on CARDSHARP, by the way?'
'We did,' Price said from the far end of the room. Her left hand went up to her earpiece. 'It's in your file. You evidently played a good game of poker in your frat house.'
'I won't ask you what my girlfriends said about me,' the acting National Security Advisor said, on his way out the door.
'I didn't know that, Andrea.'
'He's even won some money at Atlantic City. Everybody underestimates him 'cause of his age. TRADER just pulled in.'
Ryan checked his agenda. Okay, this was about George's appearance before the Senate. The President took a minute to review his morning appointment list, while a Navy mess steward brought in a light breakfast tray.
'Mr. President, the Secretary of the Treasury,' Agent Price announced at the side door to the corridor.
'Thank you, we can handle this alone,' Ryan said, rising from his desk as George Winston came in.
'Morning, sir,' SecTreas said, as the door closed quietly. He was dressed in one of his handmade suits, and was carrying a manila folder. Unlike his President, the Secretary of the Treasury was used to wearing a jacket most of the time. Ryan took his off and dropped it on the desk. Both sat on the twin couches, with the coffee table between them.
'Okay, how are things across the street?' Ryan asked, pouring himself some coffee, with the caffeine in this morning.
'If I ran my brokerage house like that, the SEC would have my hide on the barn door, my head over the fireplace, and my ass in Leavenworth. I'm going to—hell, I've already started bringing in some of my administrative folks down from New York. There are just too many people over there whose only job is looking at each other and telling them how important they all are. Nobody's responsible for anything. Damn it, at Columbus Group, we often make decisions by committee, but we make by-God decisions in time for them to matter. There are too many people, Mr. Pres—'
'You can call me Jack, at least in here, George, I—' The door to the secretaries' room opened and the photographer came in with his Nikon. He didn't say anything. He rarely did. He just snapped away, and the rubric was for everyone to pretend he simply wasn't there. It would have been a hell of an assignment for a spy, Ryan thought.
'Fine. Jack, how far can I go?' TRADER asked.
'I already told you that. It's your department to run. Just so you tell me about it first.'
'I'm telling you, then. I'm going to cut staff. I'm going to set that department up like a business.' He stopped for a second. 'And I'm going to rewrite the tax code. God, I didn't know how screwed up it was until two days ago. I had some in-house lawyers come in and—'
'It has to be revenue-neutral. We can't go dicking around with the budget. None of us has the expertise yet, and until the House of Representatives is reconstituted—' The photographer left, having caught the President in a great pose, both hands extended over the coffee tray.
'Playmate of the Month,' Winston said, with a hearty laugh. He lifted a croissant and buttered it. 'We've run the models. The effect on revenue will be neutral on the basis of raw numbers, Jack, but there will probably be an overall increase in usable funds.'
'Are you sure? Don't you need to study all the—'
'No, Jack. I don't need to study anything. I brought Mark Gant in to be my executive assistant. He knows computer modeling better than anybody I've ever met. He spent last week chewing through the—didn't anybody ever tell you? They never stop looking at the tax system over there. Study? I pick up the phone, and inside half an hour I'll have a thousand-page document on my desk telling me how things were in 1952, what the tax code then did in every segment of the economy—or what people think it did, as opposed to what they thought then that it did, or as opposed to what the studies in the 1960s said they thought that it did.' SecTreas paused for a bite. 'Bottom line? Wall Street is far more complex, and uses simpler models, and those models work. Why? Because they're simpler. And I'm going to tell the Senate that in ninety minutes, with your permission.'
'You're sure you're right on this, George?' POTUS asked. That was one of the problems, perhaps the largest of all. The President couldn't check everything that was done in his name—even checking one percent would have been an heroic feat—but he was responsible for it all. It was that knowledge that had doomed so many Presidents to micro-managerial failure. 'Jack, I'm sure enough to bet my investors' money on it.'
Two pairs of eyes met over the table. Each man knew the measure of the other. The President could have said that the welfare of the nation was a matter of greater moment than the few billions of dollars Winston had managed at the Columbus Group, but he didn't. Winston had built his investment house from nothing. Like Ryan, a man of humble origins, he'd created a business in a ferociously competitive environment on the basis of brains and integrity. Money entrusted to him by his clients had to be more precious than his own, and because it had always been so, he'd grown rich and powerful, but never forgotten the how and why of it all. The first important public- policy statement to be made by Ryan's administration would ride on Winston's savvy and honor. The President thought it over for a second, and then he nodded.
'Then run with it, TRADER.' But then Winston had his misgivings. It was instructive to the President that even so powerful a figure as the Secretary of the Treasury lowered his eyes for a second, and then said something quieter and less positive than his confident assertion of five seconds earlier.
'You know, politically this is going to—'
'What you're going to say to the Senate, George, is it good for the country as a whole?'
'Yes, sir!' An emphatic nod of the head.
'Then don't wimp out on me.'
SecTreas wiped his mouth with the monogrammed napkin, and looked down again. 'You know, after this is all over and we go back to normal life, we really have to find a way to work together. There aren't many people like us, Ryan.'
'Actually there are,' the President said, after a moment's reflection. 'The problem is that they never come here to work. You know who I learned that from? Cathy,' Jack told him. 'She fucks up, somebody goes blind, but she can't run away from making the call, can she? Imagine, you fuck up, and somebody loses his sight forever— or dies. The guys who work the emergency room are really on the ragged edge, like when Cathy and Sally went into Shock- Trauma. You blow the call, and somebody is gone forever. Big deal, George, bigger than trading equities like we used to do. Same thing with cops. Same thing with soldiers. You have to make the call, right now, or something really bad happens. But those kinds of people don't come here to Washington, do they? And mainly that sort of guy goes to the place he—or she—has to be, where the real action is,' Ryan said, almost wistfully. 'The really good ones go where they're needed, and they always seem to know where that is.'
'But the really good ones don't like the bullshit. So they don't come here?' Winston asked, getting his own course in Government 101, and finding Ryan a teacher of note.
'Some do. Adler at State. Another guy over there I've discovered, name of Vasco. But those are the ones who buck the system. The system works against them. Those are the ones we have to identify and protect. Mostly little ones, but what they do isn't little. They keep the system running, and mainly they go unnoticed because they don't care much about being noticed. They care about getting it done, serving the people out there. You know what I'd really like to do?' Ryan asked, for the first time revealing something from the depths of his soul. He hadn't even had the guts to say this to Arnie.
'Yeah, set up a system that really works, a system that recognizes the good ones and gives them what they deserve. You know how hard that is in any organization? Hell, it was a struggle at my shop, and Treasury has more janitors than I had trading executives. I'm not even sure where to start a job like that,' Winston said. He would be one to grasp the scope of the dream, his President thought.
'Harder than you think, even. The guys who really do the work don't — want to be bosses. They want to work. Cathy could be an administrator. They offered her the chair at the University of Virginia Medical School—and
