'A pleasure doing business with you, sir. Call me in… five days?'
The buyer nodded. He finished his drink and took his leave. Ten minutes after that, he made a call, the third such communication to the embassy in the day, and all for the same purpose. Though he didn't know it, yet more such calls had been made in Uganda, Zaire, Tanzania, and Mali.
JACK REMEMBERED HIS first time in the Oval Office, the way you shuffled left to right from the secretaries' room through what turned out to be a molded door set in a curved wall, much in the manner of an eighteenth- century palace, which the White House actually was, if a modest one in the context of the times. You tended to notice the windows first of all, especially on a sunny day. Their thickness made them look green, rather like the glass walls of an aquarium designed for a very special fish. Next you saw the desk, a large wooden one. It was always intimidating, all the more so if the President was standing there, waiting for you. All this was good, the President thought. It made his current job all the easier.
'George,' Ryan said, extending his hand.
'Mr. President,' Winston responded pleasantly, ignoring the two Secret Service agents standing immediately behind him, there to grab him if he did something untoward. You didn't have to hear them. The visitor could feel their eyes on the back of his neck, rather like laser beams. He shook Ryan's hand anyway, and managed a crooked smile. Winston didn't know Ryan very well. They'd worked together well during the Japanese conflict. Previously they'd bumped into each other at a handful of minor social functions, and he knew of Ryan's work in the market, discreet but effective. All that time in the intelligence business hadn't been entirely wasted.
'Sit down.' Jack waved to one of the couches. 'Relax. How was the trip down?'
'The usual.' A Navy mess steward appeared seemingly from nowhere and poured two cups of coffee, because it was that time of the day. The coffee, he found, was excellent, and the china exquisite with its gold trim.
'I need you,' Ryan said next.
'Sir, look, there was a lot of damage done to my—'
'Country.'
'I've never wanted a government job, Jack,' Winston replied at once, speaking rapidly.
Ryan didn't even touch his cup. 'Why do you think I want you? George, I've been there and done that, okay? More than once. I have to put a team together. I'm going to give a speech tonight. You might like what I'm going to say. Okay, first, I need somebody to run Treasury. Defense is okay for the moment. State's in good hands with Adler. Treasury is first on my list of things that have to be filled with somebody new. I need somebody good. You're it. Are you clean?' Ryan asked abruptly.
'What—bet your ass I am! I made all my money within the rules. Everybody knows that.' Winston bristled until he realized that he was expected to.
'Good. I need somebody who has the confidence of the financial community. You do. I need somebody who knows how the system really works. You do. I need somebody who knows what's broke and needs fixing, and what isn't and doesn't. You do. I need somebody who isn't political. You aren't. I need a dispassionate pro—most of all, George, I need somebody who's going to hate his job as much as I hate mine.'
'What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. President?'
Ryan leaned back for a second and closed his eyes before going on. 'I started working inside when I was thirty-one. I got out once, and I did okay on the Street, but I got sucked back, and here I am.' The eyes opened. 'Ever since I started with the Agency, I've had to watch how things work on the inside, and guess what? I never did like it. I started on the Street, remember, and I did okay then, too, remember? I figured I'd become an academic after I made my pile. History's my first love, and I thought I'd teach and study and write, figure out how things worked and pass my knowledge along. I almost made it, and maybe things didn't work out that way, exactly, but I've done a lot of studying and learning. So, George, I'm going to put a team together.'
'To do what?'
'Your job is to clean up Treasury. You've got monetary and fiscal policy.'
'You mean—'
'Yes.'
'No political bullshit?' He had to ask that.
'Look, George, I don't know how to be a politician, and I don't have time to learn. I never liked the game. I never liked most of the people in it. I just kept trying to serve my country as best I could. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I didn't have a choice. You remember how it started. People tried to kill me and my family. I didn't want to get sucked in, but God damn it, I learned that somebody has to try to get the job done. I'm not going to do it alone anymore, George, and I'm not going to fill all the vacant posts with ticket-punchers who know how to work 'the system, okay? I want people with ideas in here, not politicians with agendas.'
Winston set his cup down, managing not to rattle the saucer as he did so. He was a little surprised that his hand wasn't shaking. The length and breadth of what Ryan proposed was quite a bit more than the job which he'd had every intention of declining. It would mean more than was obvious. He'd have to cut himself off from his friends—well, not really, but it meant that he would not make executive decisions based on what campaign contributions the Street would give the President as a result of the nice things that Treasury did for the trading houses up there. That's the way the game had always been played, and though he'd never been a player, he'd talked often enough with those who were, working the system in the same old way, because that was how things were.
'Shit,' he whispered half to himself. 'You're serious, aren't you?'
As founder of the Columbus Group, he'd assumed a duty so basic that few ever thought about it, beyond those who actually undertook it—and not always enough of them. Literally millions of people, directly or indirectly, entrusted their money to him, and that gave him the theoretical ability to be a thief on the cosmic scale. But you couldn't do that. For one thing, it was illegal, and you ran the risk of rather substandard federal housing as a result of it, with very substandard neighbors to boot. But that wasn't the reason you didn't. The reason was that those were people out there, and they trusted you to be honest and smart, and so you treated their money the same as you treated your own, or maybe even a little better, because they couldn't gamble the way a rich man did. Every so often you'd get a nice letter from some widow, and that was nice, but it really came from inside. Either you were a man of honor or you were not, and honor, some movie writer had once said, was a man's gift to himself. Not a bad aphorism, Winston told himself. It was also profitable, of course. You did the job in the right way, and chances were that people would reward you for it, but the real satisfaction was playing the game well. The money was merely a result of something more important, because money was transitory, but honor wasn't.
'Tax policy?' Winston asked.
'We need Congress put back together first, remember?' Ryan pointed out. 'But, yes.'
Winston took a deep breath. 'That's a very big job, Ryan.'
'You're telling me that?' the President demanded… then grinned.
'It won't make me any friends.'
'You also become head of the Secret Service. They'll protect you, won't they, Andrea?'
Agent Price was not used to being pulled into these conversations, but she feared she'd have to get used to it. 'Uh, yes, Mr. President.'
'Things are just so damned inefficient,' Winston observed.
'So fix it,' Ryan told him.
'It might be bloody.'
'Buy a mop. I want your department cleaned up, streamlined, and run like you want it to make a profit someday. How you do that is your problem. For Defense, I want the same thing. The biggest problem over there is administrative. I need somebody who can run a business and make a profit to cull the bureaucracy out. That's the biggest problem of all, for all the agencies.'
'You know Tony Bretano?'
'The TRW guy? He used to run their satellite division….' Ryan remembered his name as a former candidate for a senior Pentagon post, which offer he'd turned down flat. A lot of good people declined such offers. That was the paradigm he had to break.
'Lockheed-Martin is going to steal him away in a couple weeks, at least that's what my sources tell me. That's why Lockheed's stock is nudging up. We have a buy-advisory on it. He gave TRW a fifty-percent profit increase in two years, not bad for an engineer who isn't supposed to know beans about management. I play golf with him sometimes. You should hear him scream about doing business with the government.'
