extremely fair. He handled a mob counterfeiting case my old partner ramrodded in New Orleans.'
'Okay, let him decide what to let out. He can start talking to the press right after lunch.' Ryan checked his watch. He'd been President for exactly twelve hours.
COLONEL PIERRE ALEXANDRE, U.S. Army, retired, still looked like a soldier, tall and thin and fit, and that didn't bother the dean at all. Dave James immediately liked what he saw as his visitor took his seat, liked him even more for what he'd read in the man's c.v., and more still for what he'd learned over the phone. Colonel Alexandre —'Alex' to his friends, of which he had many—was an expert in infectious disease who'd spent twenty productive years in the employ of his government, divided mainly between Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington and Fort Detrick in Maryland, with numerous field trips sprinkled in. Graduate of West Point and the University of Chicago Medical School, Dr. James saw. Good, his eyes again sweeping over the residency and other professional- experience entries. The list of published articles ran to eight single-spaced pages. Nominated for a couple of important prizes, but not lucky yet. Well, maybe Hopkins could change that. His dark eyes were not especially intense at the moment. By no means an arrogant man, Alexandre knew who and what he was—better yet, knew that Dean James knew.
'I know Gus Lorenz,' Dean James said with a smile. 'We interned together at Peter Brent Brigham.' Which Harvard had since consolidated into Brigham and Women's.
'Brilliant guy,' Alexandre agreed in his best Creole drawl. It was generally thought that Gus's work on Lassa and Q fever put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. 'And a great doc.'
'So, why don't you want to work with him in Atlanta? Gus tells me he wants you pretty bad.'
'Dean James—'
'Dave,' the Dean said.
'Alex,' the colonel responded. There was something to be said for civilian life, after all. Alexandre thought of the dean as a three-star equivalent. Maybe four stars. Johns Hopkins carried a lot of prestige. 'Dave, I've worked in a lab damned near all my life. I want to treat patients again. CDC would just be more of the same. Much as I like Gus—we did a lot of work together in Brazil back in 1987; we get along just fine,' he assured the dean. 'I am tired of looking at slides and printouts all the time.' And for the same reason he'd turned down one hell of an offer from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to head up one of their new labs. Infectious diseases were a coming thing in medicine, and both men hoped that it wasn't too late. Why the hell, James wondered, hadn't this guy made general-officer rank? Maybe politics, the dean thought. The Army had that problem, too, just as Hopkins did. But their loss…
'I talked about you with Gus last night.'
'Oh?' Not that it was surprising. At this level of medicine everyone knew everyone else.
'He says just hire you on the spot—'
'Good of him,' Alexandre chuckled.
' — before Harry Tuttle at Yale gets you for his lab.'
'You know Harry?' Yep, and everybody knew what everybody else was doing, too.
'Classmates here,' the dean explained. 'We both dated Wendy. He won. You know, Alex, there isn't much for me to ask you.'
'I hope that's good.'
'It is. We can start you off as an associate professor working under Ralph Forster. You'll have a lot of lab work — good team to work with. Ralph has put a good shop together in the last ten years. But we're starting to get a lot of clinical referrals. Ralph's getting a little old to travel so much, so you can expect to get around the world some. You'll also be in charge of the clinical side in, oh, six months to get your feet good and wet…?'
The retired colonel nodded thoughtfully. 'That's just about right. I need to relearn a few things. Hell, when does learning ever stop?'
'When you become an administrator, if you're not careful.'
'Yeah, well, now you know why I hung up the green suit. They wanted me to command up a hospital, you know, punch the ticket. Damn it, I know I'm good in a lab, okay? I'm very good in a lab. But I signed on to treat people once in a while — and to teach some, naturally, but I like to see sick people and send them home healthy. Once upon a time somebody in Chicago told me that's what the job was.'
If this was a selling job, Dean James thought, then he'd taken lessons from Olivier. Yale could offer him about the same post, but this one would keep Alexandre close to Fort Detrick, and ninety minutes' flying time to Atlanta, and close to the Chesapeake Bay — in the resume, it said Alexandre liked to fish. Well, that figured, growing up in the Louisiana bayous. In sum total, that was Yale's bad luck. Professor Harold Tuttle was as good as they came, maybe a shade better than Ralph Forster, but in five years or so Ralph would retire, and Alexandre here had the look of a star. More than anything else, Dean James was in the business of recruiting future stars. In another reality, he would have been the G.M. for a winning baseball team. So, that was settled. James closed the folder on his desk.
'Doctor, welcome to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.'
'Thank you, sir.'
4 OJT
THE REST OF THE DAY WAS a blur. Even while living through it, Ryan knew that he'd never really remember more than snippets. His first experience with computers had been as a student at Boston College. Before the age of personal computing, he'd used the dumbest of dumb terminals—a teletype—to communicate with a mainframe somewhere, along with other BC students, and more still from other local schools. That had been called 'time- sharing,' just one more term from a bygone age when computers had cost a million or so dollars for performance that now could be duplicated in the average man's watch. But the term still applied to the American presidency, Jack learned, where the ability to pursue a single thought through from beginning to end was the rarest of luxuries, and work consisted of following various intellectual threads from one separate meeting to the next, like keeping track of a whole group of continuing TV series from episode to episode, trying not to confuse one with another, and knowing that avoiding that error was totally impossible.
After dismissing Murray and Price, it had begun in earnest.
Ryan's introduction began with a national-security briefing delivered by one of the national intelligence officers assigned to the White House staff. Here, over a period of twenty-six minutes, he learned what he already knew because of the job he'd held until the previous day. But he had to sit through it anyway, if for no other reason than to get a feel for the man who would be one of his daily briefing team. They were all different. Each one had an individual perspective, and Ryan had to understand the nuances peculiar to the separate voices he'd be hearing.
'So, nothing on the horizon for now?' Jack asked.
'Nothing we see at the National Security Council, Mr. President. You know the potential trouble spots as well as I do, of course, and those change on a day-to-day basis.' The man hedged with the grace of someone who'd been dancing to this particular brand of music for years. Ryan's face didn't change, only because he'd seen it before. A real intelligence officer didn't fear death, didn't fear finding his wife in bed with his best friend, didn't fear any of the normal vicissitudes of life. A national intelligence officer did fear being found wrong on anything he said in his official capacity. To avoid that was simple, however: you never took a real stand on any single thing. It was a disease not limited to elected officials, after all. Only the President had to take a stand, and it was his good fortune to have such trained experts to supply him with the information he needed, wasn't it?
'Let me tell you something,' Ryan said after a few seconds of reflection.
'What is that, sir?' the NIO asked cautiously.
'I don't just want to hear what you know. I also want to hear what you and your people think. You are responsible for what you know, but I'll take the heat for acting on what you think. I've been there and done that, okay?'
'Of course, Mr. President.' The man allowed himself a smile that masked his terror at the prospect. 'I'll pass that along to my people.'
'Thank you.' Ryan dismissed the man, knowing then and there that he needed a National Security Advisor he could trust, and wondering where he'd get one.
