less than before because two of his agents helped. Then the kids were all down in their cots, with their blankets and bears, and the lights went down. Mrs. Daggett and her helpers found chairs to sit in and books to read.
'SANDBOX is sleeping,' Russell said, stepping outside for some fresh air.
'Sounds like a winner,' the mobile team thought, sitting in the den of the house across the street. Their Chevy Suburban was parked in the family garage. There were three agents there, two of whom were always on watch, seated close to the window which faced Giant Steps. Probably playing cards, ever a good way to pass dead time. Every fifteen minutes—not quite regularly in case someone was watching—Russell or another of the crew would walk around the grounds. TV cameras kept track of traffic on Ritchie Highway. One of the inside people was always positioned to cover the doors in and out of the center. At the moment it was Marcella Hilton; young and pretty, she always had her purse with her. A special purse of a type made for female cops, it had a side pocket she could just reach into for her SigSauer 9mm automatic, and two spare magazines. She was letting her hair grow to something approaching hippie length (he'd had to tell her what a hippie was) to accentuate her 'disguise.'
He still didn't like it. The place was too easy to approach, too close to the highway with its heavy volume of traffic, and there was a parking lot within plain sight, a perfect spot for notional bad guys to do surveillance.'At least reporters had been shooed away. On that one SURGEON had been ruthlessly direct. After an initial spate of stories about Katie Ryan and her friends, the foot had come down hard. Now visiting journalists who called were told, firmly but politely, to stay away. Those who came anyway had to talk to Russell, whose grandfatherly demeanor was saved for the children at Giant Steps. With adults he was simply intimidating, usually donning his Secret Service sunglasses, the better to appear like Schwarzenegger, who was shorter than he by a good three inches.
But his sub-detail had been cut down to six. Three directly on site, and three across the street. The latter trio had shoulder weapons, Uzi submachine guns and a scoped M-16. In another location, six would have been plenty, but not this one, he judged. Unfortunately, any more than that would have made this day-care center appear to be an armed camp, and President Ryan was having trouble enough.
'WHAT'S THE WORD, Gus?' Alexandre asked, back in his office before starting afternoon rounds. One of his AIDS patients had taken a bad turn, and Alex was trying to figure what to do about it.
'ID is confirmed. Ebola Mayinga, same as the two Zairean cases. The male patient isn't going to make it, but the child is reportedly recovering nicely.'
'Oh? Good. What's the difference in the cases?' 'Not sure, Alex,' Lorenz replied. 'I don't have much patient information, just first names, Saleh for the male and Sohaila for the child, ages and such.'
'Arabic names, right?' But Sudan was an Islamic country.
'I think so.'
'It would help to know what's different about the cases.'
'I made that point. The attending physician is an lan MacGregor, sounds pretty good, University of Edinburgh, I think he said. Anyway, he doesn't know any differences between them. Neither has any idea how they were exposed. They appeared at the hospital at roughly the same time, in roughly the same shape. Initial presentation was as flu and/or jet lag, he said—'
'Travel from where, then?' Alexandre interrupted.
'I asked. He said he couldn't say.'
'How come?'
'I asked that, too. He said he couldn't say that, either, but that it had no apparent connection with the cases.' Lorenz's tone indicated what he thought of that. Both men knew it had to be local politics, a real problem in Africa, especially with AIDS.
'Nothing more in Zaire?'
'Nothing,' Gus confirmed. 'That one's over. It's a head-scratcher, Alex. Same disease turned up in two different places, two thousand miles apart, two cases each, two dead, one dying, one apparently recovering. MacGregor has initiated proper containment procedures at his hospital, and it sounds as though he knows his business.' You could almost hear the shrug over the phone.
What the Secret Service guy had said over lunch was right on target, Alexandre thought. It was more detective work than medicine, and this one didn't make a hell of a lot of sense, like some sort of serial-murder case with no clues. Entertaining in book form, maybe, but not in reality.
'Okay, what do we know?'
'We know that Mayinga strain is alive and kicking. Visual inspection is identical. We're running some analysis on the proteins and sequences, but my gut says it's a one-to-one match.'
'God damn, what's the host, Gus? If we could only find that!'
'Thank you for that observation, Doctor.' Gus was annoyed—enraged—in the same way and for the same reason. But it was an old story for both of them. Well, the older man thought, it had taken a few thousand years to figure malaria out. They'd been playing with Ebola for only twenty-five or so. The bug had been around, probably, for at least that long, appearing and disappearing, just like a fictional serial killer. But Ebola didn't have a brain, didn't have a strategy, didn't even move of its own accord. It was super-adapted to something very limited and exceedingly narrow. But they didn't know what. 'It's enough to drive a man to drink, isn't it?'
'I imagine a stiff shot of bourbon will kill it, too, Gus. I have patients to see.'
'How do you like regular clinical rounds, Alex?' Lorenz missed them, too.
'Good to be a real doc again. I just wish my patients had a little more hope. But that's the job, ain't it?'
'I'll fax you data on the structural analysis on the samples if you want. The good news is that it seems pretty well contained,' Lorenz repeated.
'I'd appreciate it. See ya, Gus.' Alexandre hung up. Pretty well contained? That's what we thought before… But then his thoughts shifted, as they had to. White male patient, thirty-four, gay, resistant TB that came out of left field. How do we stabilize him? He lifted the chart and walked out of his office.
'SO I'M THE wrong guy to help with the court selections?' Pat Martin asked.
'Don't feel too bad,' Arnie answered. 'We're all the wrong guy for everything.'
'Except you,' the President noted with a smile.
'We all make errors of judgment,' van Damm admitted. 'I could have left with Bob Fowler, but Roger said he needed me to keep this shop running, and—'
'Yeah.' Ryan nodded. 'That's how I got here, too. So, Mr. Martin?'
'No laws were broken by any of this.' He'd spent the last three hours going over the CIA files and Jack's dietated summary of the Colombian operations. Now one of his secretaries, Ellen Sumter, knew about some rather restricted things—but she was a. presidential secretary, and besides, Jack had gotten a smoke out of it. 'At least not by you. Ritter and Moore could be brought up on failure to fully report their covert activities to the Congress, but their defense would be that the sitting President told them to do it that way, and the Special and Hazardous Operations guidelines appended to the oversight statute give them an arguable defense. I suppose I could get them indicted, but I wouldn't want to prosecute the case myself,' he went on. 'They were trying to work on the drug problem, and most jurors wouldn't want to hurt them for doing so, especially since the Medellin cartel came apart partly as a result. The real problem on that one is the international-relations angle. Colombia's going to be pissed, sir, and with very good reason. There are issues of international law and treaties which applied to the activity, but I'm not good enough in that field to render an opinion. From the domestic point of view, it's the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The President is Commander-in-Chief. The President decides what is or is not in the country's security interest as part of his executive powers. The President can, therefore, take whatever action he deems appropriate to protect those interests— that's what executive power means. The brake on that, aside from statutory violations that mainly apply inside the country, is found in the checks and balances exercised by the Congress. They can deny funds to prevent something, but that's about all. Even the War Powers Resolution is written in such a way as to let you act first before they try and stop you. You see, the Constitution is flexible on the really important issues. It's designed for reasonable people to work things out in a reasonable way. The elected representatives are supposed to know what the people want, and act accordingly, again, within reasonable limits.'
The people who wrote the Constitution, Ryan wondered to himself, were they politicians or something else?
'And the rest?' the chief of staff asked.
'The CIA operations? Not even close to any sort of violation, but again the problem is one of politics. Speaking for myself—I used to run espionage investigations, remember— Mr. President, what beautiful jobs they were. But
