sergeant, but God damn if he wasn't the quickest learner John had ever met. He was even learning to control his temper and passion. When it suited him to, John corrected himself.
'So? Different culture, different motivation, different—'
'John, I'm talking about a capability. The political will to use it, 'mano. And patience. It must have taken years. Sleeper agents I know about. First time I saw a sleeper shooter.'
'Could have been a regular guy who just got pissed and—'
'Who was willing to die? I don't think so, John. Why not pop the guy on the way to the latrine at midnight and try to get the hell out of Dodge? No way, Mr. C. Gomer there was making a statement. Wasn't just his, either. He was delivering a message for his boss, too.'
Clark looked up from his briefing papers and thought about that one. Another government employee might have dismissed the observation as something out of his purview, but Clark had been suborned into government service as a result of his inability to see limits on his activities. Besides that, he could remember being in Iran, being part of a crowd shouting 'Death to America!' at blindfolded captives from the U.S. embassy. More than that, he remembered what members of that crowd had said after Operation Blue Light had gone to shit, and how close it had been—how near the Khomeini government had been to taking out its wrath on Americans and turning an already nasty dispute into a shooting war. Even then, Iranian fingerprints were on all manner of terrorist operations worldwide, and America's failure to address the fact hadn't helped matters.
'Well, Domingo, that's why we need more field officers.'
SURGEON HAD ONE more reason not to like her husband's presidency. She couldn't see him on the way out the door, for one thing. He was in with somebody—well, it had to do with what she'd seen on the morning news, and that was business, and sometimes she'd had to scoot out of the house unexpectedly for a case at Hopkins. But she didn't like the precedent.
She looked at the motorcade. Nothing else to call it, a total of six Chevy Suburbans. Three were tasked to getting Sally (now code-named SHADOW) and Little Jack (SHORTSTOP) to school. The other three would conduct Katie (SANDBOX) to her day-care center. Partly, Cathy Ryan admitted, that was her fault. She didn't want the children's lives disrupted. She wouldn't countenance changing their schools and friends because of the misfortune that had dropped on their lives. None of this was the kids' fault. She'd been dumb enough to agree to Jack's new post, which had lasted all of five minutes, and as with many things in life, you had to accept the consequences. One consequence was increased travel time to their classes and finger-painting, just to keep friends, but, damn it… there was no right answer.
'Good morning, Katie!' It was Don Russell, squatting down for a hug and a kiss from SANDBOX. Cathy had to smile at that. This agent was a godsend. A man with grandchildren of his own, he truly loved kids, especially little ones. He and Katie had hit it right off. Cathy kissed her youngest good-bye, and her bodyguard—it was just outrageous, a child needed a bodyguard! But Cathy remembered her own experiences with terrorists, and she had to accept that, too. Russell lifted SANDBOX into her car seat, strapped her in, and the first set of three vehicles pulled away.
'Bye, Mom.' Sally was going through a phase in which she and Mom were friends, and didn't kiss. Cathy accepted that without liking it. It was the same with Little Jack: 'See ya, Mom.' But John Patrick Ryan Jr. was boy enough to demand a front seat, which he'd get this one time. Both sub-details were augmented due to the manner in which the Ryan family had come to the White House, with a total of twenty agents assigned to protect the children for the time being. That number would come down in a month or so, they'd told her. The kids would ride in normal cars instead of the armored Suburbans. In the case of SURGEON, her helicopter was waiting.
Damn. It was all happening again. She'd been pregnant with Little Jack, then to learn that terrorists were… why the hell had she ever agreed to this? The greatest indignity of all, she was married to supposedly the world's most powerful man, but he and his family both had to take orders from other people.
'I know, Doc.' It was the voice of Roy Altman, her principal agent. 'Hell of a way to live, isn't it?'
Cathy turned. 'You read minds?'
'Part of the job, ma'am, I know—'
'Please, my name is Cathy. Jack and I are both 'Doctor Ryan. '
Altman nearly blushed. More than one First Lady had taken on royal airs with the accession of her husband to POTUS, and the children of politicians weren't always fun to guard, but the Ryan family, the Detail members had already agreed, were not at all like the people they usually had to guard. In some ways that was bad news, but it was hard not to like them.
'Here.' He handed over a manila folder. It was her caseload for the day.
'Two procedures, then follow-ups,' she told him. Well, at least she could do paperwork on the flight. That was convenient, wasn't it?
'I know. We've arranged with Professor Katz to keep us posted—so we can keep up with your schedule,' Altman explained.
'Do you do background checks on my patients, too?' Cathy asked, thinking it a joke.
It wasn't. 'Yes. Hospital records provide names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers. We run NCIC checks, and checks against our own file of—uh, of people we keep an eye on.'
The look that pronouncement generated wasn't exactly friendly, but Altman didn't take it personally. They walked back into the building, then back out a few minutes later to the waiting helicopter. There were news cameras, Cathy saw, to record the event, as Colonel Hank Goodman lit up his engines.
In the operations room for the U.S. Secret Service, a few blocks away, the status board changed. POTUS (President of the United States) was shown by the red LED display as in the White House. FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) was shown as in transit. SHADOW, SHORT-STOP, and SANDBOX were covered on a different board. The same information was relayed by secure digital radio link to Andrea Price, sitting and reading the paper outside the Oval Office. Other agents were already at St. Mary's Catholic School and the Giant Steps Day Care Center, both near Annapolis, and at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Maryland State Police knew that the Ryan children were rolling along U.S. Route 50, and had additional cars posted along the travel route for an obvious police presence. At the moment, yet another Marine helicopter was following SURGEON'S, and a third, with a team of heavily armed agents aboard, was pacing the three children. Were there a serious assassin out there, then he would see the overt display of force. The agents in the moving vehicles would be at their usual alert state, scanning for cars, filing them away for the chance that the same one would show up a little too much. Unmarked Secret Service cars would maneuver around independently, doing much the same thing while being disguised as ordinary commuters. The Ryans would never really know how much security was arrayed around them, unless they asked, and few ever wanted to know.
A normal day was under way.
THERE WAS NO denying it now. She didn't need Dr. Moudi to tell her. The headaches had worsened, the fatigue had gotten worse. As with young Benedict Mkusa, she'd thought, then hoped it might be a recurrence of her old malaria, the first time she'd ever entertained that sort of thought. But then the pains had come, not in the joints, but in the stomach first of all, and that had been like watching an advancing weather front, the tall white clouds that led a massive, violent storm, and there was nothing for her to do but wait and dread what was approaching, for she knew everything that was to be. Part of her mind still denied it, and another part tried to hide away in prayer and faith, but as with a person at a horror movie, face covered by denying hands, her eyes still peeked sideways to see what was coming, the horror all the worse because of her useless retreat from it.
The nausea was worse, and soon she'd be unable to control it with her will, strong as that was.
She was in one of the hospital's few private rooms. The sun was still bright outside, the sky clear, a beautiful day in the unending African spring-summer season. An IV tree was next to her bed, running sterile saline into her arm, along with some mild analgesics and nutrients to fortify her body, but really it was a waiting game. Sister Jean BajJtiste could do little else but wait. Her body was limp with fatigue, and so pained that turning her head to look at the flowers out the window required a minute of effort. The first massive surge of nausea came almost as a surprise, and somehow she managed to grasp the erne-sis tray. She was still nurse enough and detached enough to see the blood there, even as Maria Magdalena took the tray away from her, to empty it into a special container. Fellow nurse, and fellow nun, she was dressed in sterile garb, wearing rubber gloves and a mask as well, her eyes unable to conceal her sorrow.
'Hello, Sister.' It was Dr. Moudi, dressed much the same way, his darker eyes more guarded above the green mask. He checked the chart hanging at the foot of the bed. The temperature reading was only ten minutes old, and
