'Barry, those plans are still being made. First and foremost, we have to let the FBI and other law- enforcement agencies do their job. There will be more information coming out later today, but it's been a long and difficult night for a lot of people.' The correspondent nodded at that, and decided it was time for a human-interest question.
'Where did you and your family sleep? I know it wasn't here.'
'The Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I,' Ryan answered.
'Oh, shit, Boss,' Andrea Price muttered, just outside the room. Some media people had found out, but the Service hadn't confirmed it to anyone, and most news organizations had reported that the Ryan family was at 'an undisclosed location.' Well, they'd be sleeping somewhere else tonight. And the location would not be disclosed this time. Damn.
'Why there?'
'Well, it had to be somewhere, and that seemed convenient. I was a Marine myself once, Barry,' Jack said quietly.
'REMEMBER WHEN WE blew them up?'
'A fine night.' The intelligence officer remembered watching through binoculars from the top of the Beirut Holiday Inn. He'd helped set that mission up. The only hard part, really, had been selecting the driver. There was an odd cachet about the American Marines, something seemingly mystical about them that this Ryan's nation clung to. But they died just like any other infidel. He wondered with amusement if there might be a large truck in Washington that one of his people might buy or lease…. He set the amusing thought aside. There was work to be done. It wasn't practical, anyway. He'd been to Washington more than once, and the Marine Barracks was one of the places he'd examined. It was too easily defended. Too bad, really. The political significance of the target made it highly attractive.
'NOT SMART,' DING observed over his morning coffee.
'Expect him to hide?' Clark asked.
'You know him, Daddy?' Patricia asked.
'Yes, as a matter of fact. Ding and I used to look after him back when we were SPOs. I knew his father, once…,' John added without thinking, which was very unusual for him.
'What's he like, Ding?' Patsy asked her fiance, the ring still fresh on her finger.
'Pretty smart,' Chavez allowed. 'Kinda quiet. Nice guy, always has a kind word. Well, usually.'
'He's been tough when he had to be,' John observed with an eye to his partner and soon-to-be son-in-law, which thought almost occasioned a chill. Then he saw the look in his daughter's eyes, and the chill became quite real. Damn.
'That's a fact,' the junior man agreed.
THE LIGHTS MADE HIM sweat under his makeup, and Ryan fought the urge to scratch the itches on his face. He managed to keep his hands still, but his facial muscles began a series of minor twitches that he hoped the camera didn't catch.
'I'm afraid I can't say, Barry,' he went on, holding his hands tightly together. 'It's just too soon to respond substantively to a lot of questions right now. When we're able to give hard answers, we will. Until then, we won't.'
'You have a big day ahead,' the CNN reporter said sympathetically.
'Barry, we all do.'
'Thank you, Mr. President.' He waited until the light went off and he heard a voice-over from the Atlanta headquarters before speaking again. 'Good one. Thank you.'
Van Damm came in then, pushing Andrea Price aside as he did so. Few could touch a Secret Service agent without seriously adverse consequences, much less bustle one, but Arnie was one who could.
'Pretty good. Don't do anything different. Answer the questions. Keep your answers short.'
Mrs. Abbot came in next to check Ryan's makeup. A gentle hand touched his forehead while the other adjusted his hair with a small brush. Even for his high-school prom—what was her name? Ryan asked himself irrelevantly—neither he nor anyone else had been so fussy about his coarse black hair. Under other circumstances it would have been something to laugh about.
The CBS anchor was a woman in her middle thirties, and proof positive that brains and looks were not mutually exclusive.
'Mr. President, what is left of the government?' she asked after a couple of conventional get-acquainted questions.
'Maria' — Ryan had been instructed to address each reporter by the given name; he didn't know why, but it seemed reasonable enough—'as horrid as the last twelve hours have been for all of us, I want to remind you of a speech President Durling gave a few weeks ago: America is still America. All of the federal executive agencies will be operating today under the leadership of the sitting deputy secretaries, and—'
'But Washington—'
'For reasons of public safety, Washington is pretty well shut down, that is true—' She cut him off again, less from ill manners than from the fact that she only had four minutes to use, and she wanted to use them.
'The troops in the street…?'
'Maria, the D.C. police and fire departments had the roughest night of all. It's been a long, cold night for those people. The Washington, D.C., National Guard has been called out to assist the civilian agencies. That also happens after hurricanes and tornadoes. In fact, that's really a municipal function. The FBI is working with the mayor to get the job done.' It was Ryan's longest statement of the morning, and almost left him breathless, he was wound so tightly. That was when he realized that he was squeezing his hands to the point that his fingers were turning white, and Jack had to make a conscious effort to relax them.
'LOOK AT HIS arms,' the Prime Minister observed. 'What do we know of this Ryan?'
The chief of her country's intelligence service had a file folder in his lap which he had already memorized, having had the luxury of a working day to familiarize himself with the new chief of state.
'He's a career intelligence officer. You know about the incident in London, and later in the States some years ago—'
'Oh, yes,' she noted, sipping her tea and dismissing that bit of history. 'So, a spy…'
'A well-regarded one. Our Russian friends think very highly of him indeed. So does Century House,' said the army general, whose training went back to the British tradition. Like his Prime Minister, he'd been educated at Oxford, and, in his case, Sandhurst. 'He is highly intelligent. We have reason to believe that in his capacity as Durling's National Security Advisor he was instrumental in controlling American operations against Japan—'
'And us?' she asked, her eyes locked on the screen. How convenient it was to have communications satellites—and the American networks were all global now. Now you didn't have to spend a whole day in an aircraft to go and see a rival chief of state—and then under controlled circumstances. Now she could see the man under pressure and gauge how he responded to it. Career intelligence officer or not, he didn't look terribly comfortable. Every man had his limitations.
'Undoubtedly, Prime Minister.'
'He is less formidable than your information would suggest,' she told her adviser. Tentative, uncomfortable, rattled… out of his depth.
'WHEN DO YOU expect to be able to tell us more about what happened?' Maria asked.
'I really can't say right now. It's just too soon. Some things can't be rushed, I'm afraid,' Ryan said. He vaguely grasped that he'd lost control of this interview, short as it was, and wasn't sure why. It never occurred to him that the TV reporters were lined up outside the Roosevelt Room like shoppers in a checkout line, that each one wanted to ask something new and different—after the first question or two—and that each wanted to make an impression, not on the new President, but on the viewers, the unseen people behind the cameras who watched each morning show out of loyalty which the reporters had to strengthen whenever possible. As gravely wounded as the country was, reporting the news was the business which put food on their family tables, and Ryan was just one more subject of that business. That was why Arnie's earlier advice on how they'd been instructed on what questions to ask had been overly optimistic, even coming from an experienced political pro. The only really good news was that the interviews were all time-limited—in this case by local news delivered by the various network affiliates at twenty-five minutes after the hour. Whatever tragedy had struck Washington, people needed to know about local weather and traffic in the pursuit of their daily lives, a fact perhaps lost on those inside the D.C.
