months she'd have a house in the Hollywood Hills, a Porsche to drive to her reserved parking place off Melrose Boulevard, and that gold-plated computer. But no. All the world might be a stage, but the part she wrote for was the biggest and the brightest. The public might not know who she was, but she knew that her words changed the world.
'So, what am I, exactly?' the President asked, looking up.
'You're different. I told you that.'
12 PRESENTATION
THERE WERE FEW ASPECTS of life more predictable, Ryan thought. He'd had a light dinner so that his stomach flutters would not be too painful, and largely ignored his family as he read and reread the speech. He'd made a few penciled changes, almost all of them minor linguistic things to which Gallic'had not objected, and which she herself modified further. The speech had been transmitted electronically to the secretaries' room off the Oval Office. Gallic was a writer, not a typist, and the presidential secretaries could type at a speed that made Ryan gasp to watch. When the final draft was complete, it was printed on paper for the President to hold, while another version was electronically uploaded onto the TelePrompTer. Callie Weston was there to be sure that both versions were exactly the same. It was not unknown for someone to change one from the other at the last minute, but Weston knew about that and guarded her work like a lioness over newborn cubs.
But the predictably awful part came from van Damm: Jack, this is the most important speech you will ever give. Just relax and do it.
Gee, thanks, Arnie. The chief of staff was a coach who'd never really played the game, and expert as he was, he just didn't know what it was like to go out on the mound and face the batters.
The cameras were being set up: a primary and a backup, the latter almost never used, both of them with TelePrompTers. The blazing TV lights were in place, and for the period of the speech the President would be silhouetted in his office windows like a deer on a ridgeline, one more thing for the Secret Service to worry about, though they had confidence in the windows, which were spec'd to stop a.50-caliber machine-gun round. The TV crews were all known to the Detail, who checked them out anyway, along with the equipment. Everyone knew it was coming. The evening TV shows had made the necessary announcements, then moved on to other news items. It was all a routine exercise, except to the President, of course, for whom it was all new and vaguely horrifying.
HE'D EXPECTED THE phone to ring, but not at this hour. Only a few had the number of his cellular. It was too dangerous to have a real number for a real, hard-wired phone. The Mossad was still in the business of making people disappear. The newly found peace in the Middle East hadn't changed that, and truly they had reason to dislike him. They'd been particularly clever in killing a colleague through his cellular phone, first disabling it via electronic signal, and then arranging for him to get a substitute… with ten grams of high explosive tucked into the plastic. The man's last phone message, or so the story went, had come from the head of the Mossad: 'Hello, this is Avi ben Jakob. Listen closely, my friend.' At which point the Jew had thumbed the # key. A clever ploy, but good only for a single play.
The trilling note caused his eyes to open with a curse. He'd gone to bed only an hour earlier.
'Yes.'
'Call Yousif.' And the circuit went dead. As a further security measure, the call had come through several cutouts, and the message itself was too short to give much opportunity to the electronic-intelligence wizards in the employ of his numerous enemies. The final measure was more clever still. He immediately dialed yet another cellular number and repeated the message he'd just heard. A clever enemy who might have tracked the message through the cellular frequencies would probably have deemed him just another cutout. Or maybe not. The security games one had to play in this modern age were a genuine drag on day-to-day life, and one could never know what worked and what did not—until one died of natural causes, which was hardly worth waiting for.
Grumbling all the more, he rose and dressed and walked outside. His car was waiting. The third cutout had been his driver. Together with two guards, they drove to a secure location, a safe house in a safe place. Israel might be at peace, and even the PLO might have become part of a democratically elected regime—was the world totally mad? — but Beirut was still a place where all manner of people could operate. The proper signal was displayed there—it was the pattern of lighted and unlighted windows—showing that it was safe for him to exit the car and enter the building. Or so he'd find out in thirty seconds or so. He was too drowsy to care. Fear became boring after a life time of it.
There was the expected cup of coffee, bittersweet and strong, on the plain wooden table. Greetings were exchanged, seats taken, and conversation begun.
'It is late.'
'My flight was delayed,' his host explained. 'We require your services.'
'For what purpose?'
'One might call it diplomacy,' was the surprising answer. He went on to explain.
'TEN MINUTES,' the President heard.
More makeup. It was 8:20. Ryan was in place. Mary Abbot applied the finishing touches to his hair, which merely increased the feeling that Ryan was an actor instead of a… politician? No, not that. He refused to accept the label, no matter what Arnie or any of the others might say. Through the open door to his right, Callie Wes-ton stood by the secretary's desk, giving him a smile and a nod to mask her own unease. She had written a masterpiece—she always felt that way—and now it would be delivered by a rookie. Mrs. Abbot walked around to the front of the desk, occulting some of the TV lights to look at her work from the perspective of the viewer, and pronounced it good. Ryan merely sat there and tried not to fidget, knowing that soon he'd start sweating under the makeup again, and that it would itch like a son of a bitch, and that he couldn't scratch at it no matter what, because Presidents didn't itch or scratch. There were probably people out there who didn't think that Presidents had to use the toilet or shave or maybe even tie their shoes.
'Five minutes, sir. Mike check.'
'One, two, three, four, five,' Ryan said dutifully.
'Thank you, Mr. President,' the director called from the next room.
Ryan had occasionally wondered about this sort of thing. Presidents delivering these official statements—a tradition going back at least as far as FDR and his 'fireside chats,' which he'd first heard about from his mother— always seemed confident and at ease, and he'd always wondered how they ever managed to bring that off. He felt neither. One more layer of tension for him. The cameras were probably on now, so that the directors could be sure they were working, and somewhere a tape machine was recording the look on his face and the way his hands were playing with the papers in front of him. He wondered if the Secret Service had control of that tape, or whether they trusted the TV people to be honorable about such things… surely their own anchorpeople occasionally tipped over their coffee cups or sneezed or snarled at an assistant who messed up right before airtime… oh, yes, those taped segments were called bloopers, weren't they…? He was willing to bet, right there, right then, that the Service had a lengthy tape of presidential miscues.
'Two minutes.'
Both cameras had TelePrompTers. These were odd contraptions. A TV set actually hung from the front of each camera, but on those small sets the picture was inverted left-to-right because just above it was a tilted mirror. The camera lens was behind the mirror, shooting through it, while on it the President saw the text of his speech reflected. It was an otherworldly feeling talking to a camera you couldn't really see to millions of people who weren't really there. He'd actually be talking to his speech, as it were. Ryan shook his head as the speech text was fast-tracked, to make sure the scrolling system worked.
'One minute, stand by.'
Okay. Ryan adjusted himself in the seat. His posture worried him. Did he plant his arms on the desktop? Did he hold his hands in his lap? He'd been told not to lean back in the chair, because it was both too casual and too arrogant-looking, but Ryan tended to move around a lot, and holding still made his back hurt—or was it something he just imagined? A little late for that now. He noted the fear, the twisting heat in his stomach. He tried to belch, and then stifled it.
