together, where do I start?' Jack asked. Next to him, Cathy was seething. Now her hand felt cold in his. 'Secretary of State, Scott Adler, a career foreign service officer, son of a Holocaust survivor. I've known Scott for years. He's the best man I know to run State. Treasury, George Winston, a self-made man. He was instrumental in saving our financial system during the conflict with Japan; he has the respect of the financial community, and he's a real thinker. Defense, Anthony Bretano, is a highly successful engineer and businessman who's already making needed reforms at the Pentagon. FBI, Dan Murray, a career cop, and a good one. You know what I'm doing with my choices, Tom? I'm picking pros, people who know the work because they've done it, not political types who just talk about it. If you think that's wrong, well, I'm sorry about that, but I've worked my way up inside the government, and I have more faith in the professionals I've come to know than I do in the political appointees I've seen along the way. And, oh, by the way, how is that different from a politician who selects the people he knows—or, worse, people who contributed to his campaign organization?'
'Some would say that the difference is that ordinarily people selected to high office have much broader experience.'
'I would not say that, and I have worked under such people for years. The appointments I've made are all people whose abilities I know. Moreover, a President is supposed to have the right, with the assent of the people's elected representatives, to pick people he can work with.'
'But with so much to do, how do you expect to succeed without experienced political guidance? This is a political town.'
'Maybe that's the problem,' Ryan shot back. 'Maybe the political process that we've all studied over the years gets in the way more than it helps. Tom, I didn't ask for this job, okay? The idea, when Roger asked me to be Vice President, was that I serve out the remaining term and leave government service for good. I wanted to go back to teaching. But then that dreadful event happened, and here I am. I am not a politician. I never wanted to be one, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not a politician now. Am I the best man for this job? Probably not. I am, however, the President of the United States, and I have a job to do, and I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. That's all I can do.'
'And that's the last word. Thank you, Mr. President.'
Jack barely waited for the camera lights to go off a final time before unclipping the microphone from his tie and standing. The two reporters didn't say a word. Cathy glared at them.
'Why did you do that?'
'Excuse me?' Donner replied.
'Why do people like you always attack people like us? What have we done to deserve it? My husband is the most honorable man I know.'
'All we do is ask questions.'
'Don't give me that! The way you ask them and the questions you choose, you give the answers before anyone has a chance to say anything.'
Neither reporter responded to that. The Ryans left without another word. Then Arnie came in. 'Okay,' he observed, 'who set this up?'
'THEY GUTTED HIM like a fish,' Holbrook thought aloud. They were due for some time off, and it was always a good thing to know your enemy.
'This guy's scary,' Ernie Brown thought, considering things a little more deeply. 'At least, politicians you can depend on to be crooks. This guy, Jesus, he's going to try to—we're talking a police state here, Pete.'
It was actually a frightening thought for the Mountain Man. He'd always thought that politicians were the worst thing in creation, but suddenly he realized that they were not. Politicians played the power game because they liked it, liked the idea of power and jerking people around because it made them feel big. Ryan was worse. He thought it was right.
'God damn,' he breathed. 'The court he wants to appoint…'
'They made him look like a fool, Ernie.'
'No, they didn't. Don't you get it? They were playing their game.'
33 REBOUNDS
THE EDITORIALS WERE EStablished by front-page stories in every major paper. In the more enterprising of them, there were even photographs of Marko Ramius's house—it turned out that he was away at the moment—and that of the Gerasimov family—he was home, but a security guard managed to persuade people to leave, after getting his own photo shot a few hundred times.
Donner came into work very early, and was actually the most surprised by all of that. Plumber walked into his office five minutes later, holding up the front page of the New York Times.
'So who rolled whom, Tom?'
'What do you—'
'That's a little weak,' Plumber observed acidly. 'I suppose after you walked out of the meeting, Kealty's people had another little kaffeeklatsch. But you've trapped everybody, haven't you? If it ever gets out that your tape wasn't—'
'It won't,' Donner said. 'And all this coverage does is make our interview look better.'
'Better to whom?' Plumber demanded on his way out the door. It was early in the day for him, too, and his first irrelevant thought of the day was that Ed Murrow would never have used hair spray.
DR. GUS LORENZ finished his morning staff meeting early. Spring was coming early to Atlanta. The trees and bushes were budding, and soon the air would be filled with the fragrances of all the flowering plants for which the southern city was so famous—and a lot of pollen, Gus thought, which would get his sinuses all stuffed, but it was a fain trade for living in a vibrant and yet gracious southern city. With the meeting done, he donned his white lab coat and headed off to his own special fiefdom in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC ('and P' had never been added to the acronym) was one of the government's crown jewels, an elite agency that was one of the world's important centers of medical research—many would say the most important. For that reason the center in Atlanta attracted the best of the profession. Some stayed.
Some left to teach at the nation's medical schools, but all were forever marked as CDC people, as others might boast of having served their time in the Marine Corps, and for much the same reason. They were the first people their country sent to trouble spots. They were the first to fight diseases, instead of armed enemies, and that cachet engendered an esprit de corps which more often than not retained the best of them despite the capped government salaries.
'Morning, Melissa,' Lorenz said to his chief lab assistant—she had a master's and was finishing up her doctorate in molecular biology at nearby Emory University, after which she'd get a sizable promotion.
'Good morning, Doctor. Our friend is back,' she added.
'Oh?' The specimen was all set up on the microscope. Lorenz took his seat, careful as always to take his time. He checked the paperwork to identify the proper sample against the record he'd had on his desk: 98-3-063A. Yes, the numbers matched. Then it was just a matter of zooming in on the sample… and there it was, the Shepherd's Crook.
'You're right. Got the other one set up?'
'Yes, Doctor.' The computer screen split into two vertical halves, and next to the first was a specimen from 1976. They weren't quite identical. The curve at the bottom of the RNA chain was seemingly never the same way twice, as snowflakes had almost infinite patterns, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the protein loops at the top, and those were—
'Mayinga strain.' He spoke the words matter-of-factly.
'I agree,' Melissa said from just behind him. She leaned across to type on the keyboard, calling up -063B. 'These were a lot harder to isolate, but—'
'Yes, identical again. This one's from the child?'
'A little girl, yes.' Both voices were detached. One can only bear so much exposure to sadness before the mind's defense mechanism kicks in, and the samples become samples, disembodied from the people who donated them. 'Okay, I have some calling to do.'
