'Morning, honey.'
'Is the world still out there?' she asked, getting her own coffee. That told the President that the First Lady wasn't operating today. She never touched coffee on a surgery day, saying that she couldn't risk the slight tremor that caffeine might impart to her hands when she was carving up somebody's eyeball. The image always made him shudder, even though she mainly operated with lasers now.
'Looks like the Iraqi government is falling.'
A female snort. 'Didn't that happen last week?'
'That was act one. This is act three.' Or maybe act four. He wondered what act five would be.
'Important?' Jack also heard the toast go down.
'Could be. What's your day like?'
'Clinic and follow-ups, budget meeting with Bernie.'
'Hmph.' Jack next started looking at the Early Bird, a collection of government-edited clippings from the major papers. Cathy appeared again in his peripheral vision, as she looked at his office schedule.
'Golovko…? Didn't I meet him in Moscow—he's the one who joked about having a gun on you!'
'Wasn't a joke,' Ryan told his wife. 'It really happened.'
'Come on!'
'He said later that the gun wasn't loaded.' Jack wondered if that was true. Probably, he thought.
'But he was telling the truth?' she asked incredulously.
The President looked up and smiled. Amazing, he thought, that it seemed funny now. 'He was very pissed with me at the time. That's when I helped with the defection of the KGB chairman.'
She lifted her morning paper. 'Jack, I never know when you're kidding or not.'
Jack thought about that. The First Lady was, technically, a private citizen. Certainly in Cathy's case, since she was not a political wife but a working physician who had about as much interest in politics as she did in group sex. She was also, therefore, not technically the holder of a security clearance, but it was assumed that the President would confide in his spouse just as any normal person did. Besides, it made sense. Her judgment was every bit as good as his, and unschooled as she might be in international relations, every day she made decisions that directly affected the lives of real people in the most immediate way. If she goofed, they went blind.
'Cathy, I think it's about time to tell you some of the things I've been stuck with over the years, but for now, yeah, Golovko had a pistol to my head once, on one of the runways at Moscow airport, because I helped two very senior Russians skip the country. One of them was his boss at KGB.'
That made her look up, and wonder again about the nightmares that had plagued her husband for months, a few years ago. 'So where is he now?'
'In the D.C. area, I forget exactly where, Virginia horse country, I think.' Jack vaguely remembered hearing that the daughter, Katryn Gerasimov, was engaged to some old-money fox-killer out around Winchester, having changed from one form of nobility to another. Well, the stipend CIA had paid to the family was enough to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle.
Cathy was used to her husband's jokes. Like most men, he would tell amusing little stories whose humor was in their exaggeration—and besides, his ancestry was Irish— but now she marked the fact that his revelation was as casual as a report of the baseball scores. He didn't see her stare at the back of his head. Yes, she decided, as the kids entered the room, I'd like to hear the stories.
'Daddy!' Katie said, seeing Jack first. 'Mommy!'
With that the morning routine stopped, or rather changed over to something more immediately important than world news and events. Katie was already in her school clothes, like most small children, able to awaken in a good mood.
'Hi,' Sally said, coming next, clearly vexed.
'What's the matter?' Cathy asked her elder daughter.
'All those people out there! You can't even walk around here without people seeing you everywhere!' she grumped, getting a glass of juice off the tray. And she didn't feel like Frosted Flakes this morning. She'd rather have Just Right. But that box was all the way down on the ground floor in the capacious White House kitchen. 'It's like living in a hotel, but not as private.'
'What exam is it today?' Cathy asked, reading the signals for what they were.
'Math,' Sally admitted.
'Did you study?'
'Yes, Mom.'
Jack ignored that problem, and instead fixed cereal for Katie, who liked Frosted Flakes. Little Jack arrived next and turned on the TV, selecting the Cartoon Channel for his morning ration of Road Runner and Coyote, which Katie also approved.
Outside, the day was starting for everyone else. Ryan's personal NIO was putting the finishing touches on his dreaded morning intelligence brief. This President was far too hard to please. The chief usher was in early to supervise some maintenance on the State Floor. In the President's bedroom, the valet was setting out clothes for POTUS and FLOTUS. Cars were waiting to take the children off to school. Maryland State Police officers were already checking out the route to Annapolis. The Marines were warming up their helicopter for the trip to Baltimore—that problem had still not been worked out. The entire machine was already in motion.
GUS LORENZ WAS in his office early because of a telephone call from Africa returning his call from Atlanta. Where, he demanded, were his monkeys? His purchasing agent explained from eight time zones away that, because CDC had fumbled getting the money cleared, somebody else had bought up the shipment, and that a new batch had to be obtained from out in the bush. A week, perhaps, he told the American doctor.
Lorenz grumbled. He'd hoped to start his new study this week. He made a note on his desk pad, wondering who the hell would have bought so many African greens just like that. Was Rousseau starting something new in Paris? He'd call the guy a little later, after his morning staff conference. The good news, he saw, was that—oh, that was too bad. The second patient, killed in a plane crash, the telex from WHO said. But there were no hew cases reported, and it had been long enough from Number Two that they could say now, rather than hope, that this micro-outbreak was over—probably, maybe, hopefully, Lorenz added with his thoughts. That was good news. It looked like the Ebola Zaire Mayinga strain under the electron microscope, and that was the worst of the subtypes of the virus. It could still be that the host was out there, waiting to infect someone else, but the Ebola host was the most bafflingly elusive quarry since malaria—'bad air,' in Italian, which was what people had thought caused it. Maybe, he thought, the host was some rodent that had gotten run over by a truck. He shrugged. It was possible, after all.
WITH THE REDUCTION in her morphine drip, Patient Two was semiconscious at the Hasanabad facility. She was aware enough to know, and to feel, the pain, but not to understand what was really happening. The pain would have taken over in any case, all the worse because Jean Baptiste knew what every twinge meant. The abdominal pain was the worst, as the disease was destroying her gastrointestinal tract throughout its ten-meter length, quite literally eating the delicate tissues designed to convert food into nutrients, and dumping infected blood down toward her rectum.
It felt as though her entire body were being twisted and crushed and burned at the same time. She needed to move, to do something to make things different, just to make the pain come briefly from a new direction, and so briefly relieve that which tormented her, but when she tried to move she found that every limb was restrained with Velcro-coated straps. The insult of that was somehow worse than the pain, but when she tried to object it only caused violent nausea that started her gagging. At that indication the blue-coated spaceman rotated the bed—what sort of bed was this? she wondered—which allowed her to vomit into a bucket, and what she saw there was black, dead blood. It distracted her from the pain for a second, but all the distraction told her was that she could not survive, that the disease had gone too far, that her body was dying, and then Sister Jean Baptiste started praying for death, because this could have only one end, and the pain was such that the end needed to come soon, lest she lose her faith in the process. The prospect sprang out into her diminished consciousness like a jack-in-the-box. But this childhood toy had horns and hooves. She needed a priest at hand. She needed—where was Maria Magdalena? Was she doomed to die alone? The dying nurse looked at the space suits, hoping to find familiar eyes behind the plastic shields, but though the eyes she saw were sympathetic, they were not familiar. Nor was their language, as two of them came close.
The medic was very careful drawing blood. First he checked to see that the arm was fully restrained, unable
