serious student of history. He liked Thomas Jefferson for his statement about how a country governed least was governed best, which was about all he knew of the adages from the Sage of Monticello.
'And it took a Jap to do it, looks like.' The statement was trailed by an ironic snort. Such an event could even invalidate his closely held racism. Couldn't have that, could he?
They'd been up all night—it was 5:20 local time— watching the TV news coverage, which hadn't stopped. The newsies, they noted, looked even more wasted than this Ryan guy. Time zones did have an advantage. Both had stopped drinking beer around midnight, and had switched to coffee two hours later when they'd both started dozing. Couldn't have that. What they saw, switching through channels downloaded on a large satellite dish outside the cabin, was like some sort of fantastic telethon, except this one wasn't about raising money for crippled children or AIDS victims or nigger schools. This one was fun. All those Washington bastards, must have been burned to a crisp, most of them.
'Bureaucrat barbecue,' Peter Holbrook said for the seventeenth time since 11:30, when he'd come up with his summation of the event. He'd always been the creative one in the movement.
'Aw, shit, Pete!' gasped Ernest Brown, spilling some of his coffee into his lap. It was still funny, enough so that he didn't leap immediately to his feet from the uncomfortable feeling that resulted from his slip.
'Has been a long night,' Holbrook allowed, laughing himself. They'd watched President Durling's speech for a couple of reasons. For one, all of the networks had preempted normal programs, as was usually the case for an important event; but the truth of the matter was that their satellite downlink gave them access to a total of 117 channels, and they didn't even have to switch the set off to avoid input from the government they and their friends despised. The deeper reason was that they cultivated their anger at their government, and usually watched such speeches—both men caught at least an hour a day of C-SPAN-1 and -2—to fuel those feelings, trading barbed comments back and forth every minute of a presidential speech.
'So, who is this Ryan guy, really?' Brown asked, yawning.
'Another 'crat, looks like. A bureaucrat talking bureaucrap.'
'Yeah,' judged Brown. 'With nothing to back him up, Pete.'
Holbrook turned and looked at his friend. 'It's really som'thin', isn't it?' With that observation he got up and walked to the bookshelves that walled the south side of his den. His copy of the Constitution was a well-thumbed pamphlet edition which he read as often as he could, so as to improve his understanding of the intent of the drafters. 'You know, Pete, there's nothing in here to cover a situation like this.'
'Really?'
Holbrook nodded. 'Really.'
'No shit.' That required some thought, didn't it?
'MURDERED?' PRESIDENT RYAN asked, still wiping the makeup off his face with wet towelettes of the same sort he'd used to clean off baby bottoms. At least it made his face feel clean when he'd finished.
'That's the preliminary indication, both from a cursory examination of the body and from a quick-and-dirty examination of the cockpit tapes.' Murray flipped through the notes faxed to him only twenty minutes before.
Ryan leaned back in his chair. Like much else in the Oval Office, it was new. On the credenza behind him, all of Durling's family and personal photos had been removed. The papers on the desk had been taken away for examination by the presidential secretarial staff. What remained or what had been substituted were accoutrements from White House stores. The chair at least was a good one, expensively designed to protect the back of its occupant, and it would soon be substituted for a custom-designed chair fitted to his own back by a manufacturer who performed the service for free and—remarkably— without public fanfare. Sooner or later he'd have to work in this place, Jack had decided a few minutes earlier. The secretaries were here, and it wasn't fair to make them trek across the building, up and down stairs. Sleeping in this place was another issue entirely—for the moment; that, too, had to change, didn't it? So, he thought, staring across the desk at Murray, murder.
'Shot?'
Dan shook his head. 'Knife right in the heart, only one penetration. The wound looked to our agent to be from a thin blade, like a steak knife. From the cockpit tapes, it appears that it was done prior to takeoff. Looks like we can time-stamp that pretty exactly. From just prior to engine start-up to the moment of impact, the only voice on the tapes is the pilot. His name was Sato, a very experienced command pilot. The Japanese police have gotten a pile of data to us. It would seem that he lost a brother and a son in the war. The brother commanded a destroyer that got sunk with all hands. The son was a fighter pilot who cracked up on landing after a mission. Both on the same day or near enough. So, it was personal. Motive and opportunity, Jack,' Murray allowed himself to say, for they were almost alone in the office. Andrea Price was there, too. She didn't quite approve; she had not yet been told exactly how far back the two men went.
'That's pretty fast on the ID,' Price observed.
'It has to be firmed up,' Murray agreed. 'We'll do that with DNA testing just to be sure. The cockpit tape is good enough for voice-print analysis, or so they told our agent. The Canadians have radar tapes tracking the aircraft out of their airspace, so confirming the timing of the event is simple. We have the aircraft firmly ID'd from Guam to Japan to Vancouver, and into the Capitol building. Like they say, it's all over but the shouting. There will be a lot of shouting. Mr. President' — Andrea Price felt better this time—'it will be at least two months before we have every lead and tidbit of information nailed down, and I suppose it's possible that we could be wrong, but for all practical purposes, in my opinion and that of our senior agents at the scene, this case is well on its way to being closed.'
'What could make you wrong?' Ryan asked.
'Potentially quite a few things, but there are practical considerations. For this to be anything other than the act of a single fanatic—no, that's not fair, is it? One very angry man. Anyway, for this to be a conspiracy, we have to assume detailed planning, and that's hard to support. How would they know the war was going to be lost, how did they know about the joint session—and if it were planned as a war operation, like the NTSB guy said, hell, ten tons of high explosives would have been simple to load aboard.'
'Or a nuke,' Jack interjected.
'Or a nuke.' Murray nodded. 'That reminds me: the Air Force attache is going to see their nuclear-weapons- fabrication facility today. It took the Japanese a couple of days to figure out where it was. We're having a guy who knows the things flying over there right now.' Murray checked his notes. 'Dr. Woodrow Lowell—oh, I know him. He runs the shop at Lawrence Livermore. Prime Minister Koga told our ambassador that he wants to hand over the damned things PDQ and get them the hell out of his country.'
Ryan turned his chair around. The windows behind him faced the Washington Monument. That obelisk was surrounded by a circle of flagpoles, all of whose flags were at half-staff. But he could see that people were lined up for the elevator ride to the top. Tourists who'd come to D.C. to see the sights. Well, they were getting a bargain of sorts, weren't they? The Oval Office windows, he saw, were incredibly thick, just in case one of those tourists had a sniper rifle tucked under his coat….
'How much of this can we release?' President Ryan asked.
'I'm comfortable with releasing a few things,' Murray responded.
'You sure?' Price asked.
'It's not as though we have to protect evidence for a criminal trial. The subject in the case is dead. We'll chase down all the possibilities of co-conspirators, but the evidence we let go today will not compromise that in any way. I'm not exactly a fan of publicizing criminal evidence, but the people out there want to know something, and in a case like this one, you let them have it.'
Besides, Price thought, it makes the Bureau look good. With that silent observation, at least one government agency started returning to normal.
'Who's running this one at Justice?' she asked instead.
'Pat Martin.'
'Oh? Who picked him?' she asked. Ryan turned to see the discourse on this one.
Murray almost blushed. 'I guess I did. The President said to pick the best career prosecutor, and that's Pat. He's been head of the Criminal Division for nine months. Before that he ran Espionage. Ex-Bureau. He's a particularly good lawyer, been there almost thirty years. Bill Shaw wanted him to become a judge. He was talking to the AG about it only last week.'
'You sure he's good enough?' Jack asked. Price decided to answer.
'We've worked with him, too. He's a real pro, and Dan's right, he's real judge material, tough as hell, but also
