second half of the trip.
Lufthansa 601 was a European-made Airbus 310 twin-jet, roughly the same as the KLM Boeing in size and capacity. This one, too, had five travelers aboard, and left its gate at 2:55 for the nonstop flight to Frankfurt. The departure was routine in all details.
'THAT'S SOME STORY, Arnie.'
'Oh, yeah. I didn't know the important parts until this week.'
'How sure are you of this?' Holtzman asked.
'The pieces all fit.' He shrugged again. 'I can't say I liked hearing it. I think we would have won the election anyway, but, Jesus, the guy threw it. He tanked on a presidential election, but you know,' van Damm said wistfully, 'that might have been the most courageous and generous political act of the century. I didn't think he had it in him.'
'Does Fowler know?'
'I haven't told him. Maybe I should.'
'Wait a minute. Remember how Liz Elliot planted a story on me about Ryan and how—'
'Yes, that all folds into this. Jack went down personally to get those soldiers out. The guy next to him in the chopper was killed, and he's looked after the family ever since. Liz paid for it. She came apart the night the bomb went off in Denver.'
'And Jack really did… you know that's one story that never came out all the way. Fowler lost it and almost launched a missile at Iran—it was Ryan, wasn't it? He's the one who stopped it.' Holtzman looked down at his drink and decided on another sip. 'How?'
'He got onto the Hot Line,' Arnie replied. 'He cut the President off and talked directly with Narmonov, and persuaded him to back things off some. Fowler flipped out and told the Secret Service to go arrest him, but by the time they got to the Pentagon, things were calmed down. It worked, thank God.'
It took Holtzman a minute or so to absorb that, but again, the story fit with the fragments he knew. Fowler had resigned two days later, a broken man, but an honorable one who knew that his moral right to govern his country had died with his order to launch a nuclear weapon at an innocent city. And Ryan had also been shaken by the event, badly enough to leave government service at once, until Roger Durling had brought him back in.
'Ryan's broken every rule there is. Almost as if he likes it.' But that wasn't fair, was it?
'If he hadn't, we might not be here.' The chief of staff poured himself another. Holtzman waved him off. 'You see what I mean about the story, Bob? If you tell it all, the country gets hurt.'
'But then why did Fowler recommend Ryan to Roger Durling?' the reporter asked. 'He couldn't stand the guy and—'
'Whatever his faults, and he has them, Bob Fowler is an honest politician, that's why. No, he doesn't like Ryan personally, maybe it's chemistry, I don't know, but Ryan saved him and he told Roger—what was it? 'Good man in a storm. That's it,' Arnie remembered.
'Shame he doesn't know politics.'
'He learns pretty fast. Might surprise you.'
'He's going to gut the government if he gets the chance. I can't—I mean, I do like the guy personally, but his policies…'
'Every time I think I have him figured out, he swerves on me, and then I have to remind myself that he doesn't have an agenda,' van Damm said. 'He just does the job. I give him papers to read, and he acts on them. He listens to what people tell him—asks good questions, and always listens to the answers—but he makes his own decisions, as though he knows what's right and what's wrong—but the hell of it is, mostly he does. Bob, he's rolled me! But that's not it, either. Sometimes I'm not sure what it is with him, you know?'
'A total outsider,' Holtzman observed quietly. 'But—'
The chief of staff nodded. 'Yeah, but. But he's being analyzed as though he's an insider with a hidden agenda, and they're playing the insider games as if they apply to him, but they don't.'
'So the key to the guy is there's nothing to figure out… son of a bitch,' Bob concluded. 'He hates the job, doesn't he?'
'Most of the time. You should have been there when he spoke in the Midwest. He got it then. All those people loving him, and he loved them back, and it showed—and it scared the shit out of him. Nothing to figure out? Exactly. Like they say in golf, the hardest thing to do is to hit a straight ball, right? Everybody's looking for curves. There aren't any.'
Holtzman snorted. 'So, what's the angle if there isn't an angle?'
'Bob, I just try to control the media, remember? Damned if I know how you report this, except to state the facts—you know, like you're supposed to do.'
That was a lot for the journalist to take. He'd been in Washington for all of his professional life. 'And every politician is supposed to be like Ryan. But they're not.'
'This one is,' Arnie shot back.
'How am I supposed to tell my readers that? Who'll believe it?'
'Ain't that the problem?' he breathed. 'I've been in politics all my life, and I thought I knew it all. Hell, I do know it all. I'm one of the best operators ever was, everybody knows that, and all of a sudden this yahoo comes into the Oval Office and says the emperor's naked, and he's right, and nobody knows what to do about it except to say that he isn't. The system isn't ready for this. The system is only ready for itself.'
'And the system will destroy anybody who says different.' Holtzman snorted with the thought: If Hans Christian Andersen had written 'The Emperor's Clothes' about Washington, then the kid who'd spoken the truth out loud would have been killed on the spot by the assembled crowd of insiders.
'It'll try,' Arnie agreed.
'And what are we supposed to do about it?'
'You're the one who said that you don't want to officiate at the hanging of an innocent man, remember?'
'Where's that leave us?'
'Maybe to talk about the unruly mob,' Arnie suggested, 'or the emperor's corrupt court.'
NEXT TO GO was Austrian Airlines 774. It was down to a routine now, and the arrangements were well within the technical parameters. The cans of shaving cream had been filled a bare forty minutes before departure. The proximity of the Monkey House to the airport helped, as did the time of day, and having people race the last few hundred meters to the gate was not unusual anywhere in the world, particularly for flights like this one. The «soup» was sprayed into the bottom of the can, by a plastic valve that was invisible to X-ray examination. The nitrogen went in the top to a separate insulated container located in the center of the cans. The process was clean and safe—for extra but really unnecessary safety, the cans were sprayed and wiped; that was just to make the travelers happy. The cans were quite cold, of course, though not dangerously so. As the liquid nitrogen boiled off, it would vent through a pressure valve into the ambient atmosphere, where it merely joined the air. Though nitrogen is an important element in explosives, by itself it is totally inert, clear, and odorless. Nor would it react chemically with the contents of the cans, and so the pressure-relief valve retained a precise quantity of the warming gas to act as a safe propel-lant for the «soup» when the time came.
The filling was done by the medical corpsmen in their protective suits—they refused to work without them, and ordering them otherwise would only have made them nervous and sloppy, and so the director indulged their fears.
Two groups of five remained to be done. The cans could really all have been prepared at the same time, Moudi knew, but no unnecessary chances were being taken, a thought that made him stop cold. No unnecessary chances? Sure.
DARYAEI DIDN'T SLEEP that night, which was unusual for him. Though with increasing years he found that he needed less of it, getting off to sleep had never been difficult for him. On a really quiet night, if the winds were right, he could hear the airliners bring their engines to the roar of takeoff power—a distant sound, rather like a waterfall, he sometimes thought, or perhaps an earthquake. Some fundamental sound of nature, distant and foreboding. And now he found himself listening for it, and with his imagination, wondering if he heard it or not.
Had he gone too fast? He was an old man in a country where so many died young. He remembered the diseases of his youth, and later he'd learned their scientific causes, mainly poor water and sanitation, for Iran had been a backward country for most of his lifetime, despite its long history of civilization and power. Then it had been resurrected by oil and the immense riches that had come with it. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah—King of
