'Have Scott Adler go over this, will you?' Somebody would have to determine how much time he should spend with the official visitors, and Ryan wasn't qualified to do that.
'Yes, Mr. President.'
'What sort of speeches will I have to deliver?' Jack asked.
'We have our people working on that for you. You should have preliminary drafts by tomorrow afternoon,' Mrs. Simmons replied.
President Ryan nodded and slid the papers into his out-pile. When the Chief of Protocol left, a secretary came in—he didn't know this lady's name—with a pile of telegrams, the leftovers from Eighth and I that he hadn't gotten to, plus another sheet of paper that showed his activities for the day, prepared without his input or assistance. He was about to grumble about that when she spoke.
'We have over ten thousand telegrams and e-mails from—well, from citizens,' she told him.
'Saying what?'
'Mainly that they're praying for you.'
'Oh.' Somehow that came as a surprise, and a humbling one at that. But would God listen?
Jack went back to reading the official messages, and the first day went on.
THE COUNTRY HAD essentially come to a halt, even as its new President struggled to come to terms with his new job. Banks and financial markets were closed, as were schools and many businesses. All the television networks had moved their broadcast headquarters to the various Washington bureaus in a haphazard process that had them all working together. A gang of cameras sited around the Hill kept up a continuous feed of recovery operations, while reporters had to keep talking, lest the airwaves be filled with silence. Around eleven that morning, a crane removed the remains of the 747's tail, which was deposited on a large flatbed trailer for transport to a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. That would be the site for what was called the 'crash investigation,' for want of a better term, and cameras tracked the vehicle as it threaded its way along the streets. Two of the engines went out shortly thereafter in much the same way.
Various «experts» helped fill the silence, speculating on what had happened and how. This was difficult for everyone involved, as there had been few leaks as yet— those who were trying to find out what had happened were too busy to talk with reporters on or off the record, and though the journalists couldn't say it, their most fertile source of leaks lay in ruin before thirty-four cameras. That gave the experts little to say. Witnesses were interviewed for their recollections—there was no tape of the inbound aircraft at all, much to the surprise of everyone. The tail number of the aircraft was known—it could hardly be missed, painted as it was on the wreckage of the aircraft, and that was as easily checked by reporters as by federal authorities. The ownership of the aircraft by Japan Airlines was immediately confirmed, along with the very day the aircraft had rolled out of the Boeing plant near Seattle. Officials of that company submitted to interviews, and along the way it was determined that the 747–400 (PIP) aircraft weighed just over two hundred tons empty, a number doubled with the mass of fuel, passengers, and baggage it could pull into the air. A pilot with United Airlines who was familiar with the aircraft explained to two of the networks how a pilot could approach Washington and then execute the death dive, while a Delta colleague did the same with the others. Both airmen were mistaken in some of the particulars, none of them important.
'But the Secret Service is armed with antiaircraft missiles, isn't it?' one anchor asked.
'If you've got an eighteen-wheeler heading for you at sixty miles an hour, and you shoot out one of the tires on the trailer, that doesn't stop the truck, does it?' the pilot answered, noting the look of concentrated intelligence on the face of a highly paid journalist who understood little more than what appeared on his TelePrompTer. 'Three hundred tons of aircraft doesn't just stop, okay?'
'So, there was no way to stop it?' the anchor asked with a twisted face.
'None at all.' The pilot could see that the reporter didn't understand, but he couldn't come up with anything to clarify matters further.
The director, in his control room off of Nebraska Avenue, changed cameras to follow a pair of Guardsmen bringing another body down the steps. An assistant director was keeping an eye on that set of cameras, trying to maintain a running tally of the number of bodies removed. It was now known that the bodies of President and Mrs. Durling had been recovered and were at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for autopsy—required by law for wrongful death—and disposition. At network headquarters in New York, every foot of videotape of or about Durling was being organized and spliced for presentation throughout the day. Political colleagues were being sought out and interviewed. Psychologists were taken on to explain how the Durling children could deal with the trauma, and then expanded their horizons to talk about the impact of the event on the country as a whole, and how people could deal with it. About the only thing not examined on the television news was the spiritual aspect; that many of the victims had believed in God and attended church from time to time was not worthy of air time, though the presence of many people in churches was deemed newsworthy enough for three minutes on one network—and then, because each was constantly monitoring the others for ideas, that segment was copied by the others over the next few hours.
IT ALL CAME down to this, really, Jack knew. The numbers only added individual examples, identical to this one in magnitude and horror. He'd avoided it for as much of the day as had been possible, but finally his cowardice had run out.
The Durling kids hovered between the numbness of denial, and terror of a world destroyed before their eyes as they'd watched their father on TV. They'd never see Mom and Dad again. The bodies were far too damaged for the caskets to be open. No last good-byes, no words, just the traumatic removal of the foundation that held up their young lives. And how were children supposed to understand that Mom and Dad weren't just Mom and Dad, but were—had been—something else to someone else, and for that reason, their deaths had been necessary to someone who hadn't known or cared about the kids?
Family members had descended on Washington, most of them flown in by the Air Force from California. Equally shocked, they nevertheless, in the presence of children, had to summon from within themselves the strength to make things somewhat easier for the young. And it gave them something to do. The Secret Service agents assigned to JUNIPER and JUNIOR were probably the most traumatized of all. Trained to be ferociously protective of any 'principal,' the agents who looked after the Durling kids—more than half were women—carried the additional burden of the normal solicitude any human held for any child, and none of them would have hesitated a microsecond to give his or her life to protect the youngsters—in the knowledge that the rest of the Detail would have weapons out and blazing. The men and women of this sub-detail had played with the kids, had bought them Christmas and birthday presents, had helped with homework. Now they were saying good-bye, to the kids, to the parents, and to colleagues. Ryan saw the looks on their faces, and made a mental note to ask Andrea if the Service would assign a psychologist to them.
'No, it didn't hurt.' Jack was sitting down so that the kids could look level into his eyes. 'It didn't hurt at all.'
'Okay,' Mark Durling said. The kids were immaculately dressed. One of the family members had thought it important that they be properly turned out to meet their father's successor. Jack heard a gasp of breath, and his peripheral vision caught the face of an agent—this one a man—who was on the edge of losing it. Price grabbed his arm and moved him toward the door, before the kids could take note of it.
'Do we stay here?'
'Yes,' Jack assured him. It was a lie, but not the sort to hurt anyone. 'And if you need anything, anything at all, you can come and see me, okay?'
The boy nodded, doing his best to be brave, and it was time to leave him to his family. Ryan squeezed his hand, treating him like the man he ought not to have become for years, for whom the duties of manhood were arriving all too soon. The boy needed to cry, and Ryan thought he needed to do that alone, for now.
Jack walked out the door into the oversized hall of the bedroom level. The agent who'd left, a tall, rugged- looking black man, was sobbing ten feet away. Ryan went over to him.
'You okay?'
'Fuck—sorry—I mean—shit!' the agent shook his head, ashamed at the display of emotion. His father had been lost in an Army training accident at Fort Rucker, Price knew, when he was twelve years old, and Special Agent Tony Wills, who'd played tight end at Grambling before joining the Service, was unusually good with kids. At times like this, strengths often became weaknesses.
'Don't apologize for being human. I lost my mom and dad, too. Same time,' Ryan went on, his voice dreamy
