wife. Mostly they were led barefoot from their homes into waiting trucks, heads down to the sidewalk, knowing the way this particular drama would end for them.
THESE TACTICAL RADIO nets were not encrypted, and the faint VHP signals were monitored, this time at STORM TRACK, which was closer to Baghdad. Names were spoken, more than once in every case as the pickup teams reported back to their dispatchers, which made life easy for the ELINT teams close to the border and at King Khalid Military City. The watch officers called in their supervisors, and CRiric-priority dispatches were shot off via satellite.
RYAN HAD JUST walked the last of the new senators to the door when Andrea Price walked up.
'My shoes are killing me, and I have a procedure at—' Cathy stopped talking.
'FLASH Traffic coming in now, sir.'
'Iraq?' Jack asked.
'Yes, Mr. President.'
The President kissed his wife. 'I'll be up in a little while.'
Cathy had no choice but to nod and head to the elevator, where one of the ushers was waiting to take the First Couple upstairs. The kids would already be in bed. Their homework was all done, probably in some cases with the help of their bodyguards. Jack turned right, trotted down the stairs, then right again, left to get outside of the building, then back inside the West Wing and the Situation Room.
'Talk to me,' the President commanded.
'It's started,' Ed Foley's face said on the wall-mounted TV. And all they could do was watch.
IRAQI NATIONAL TELEVISION greeted a new day and a new reality. This was clear when the newsreaders commenced their daily presentation with an invocation of Allah's name, not for the first time, but never with this degree of fervor. 'Gimme that oP time religion, it's good enough for me—now,' observed the chief master sergeant at PALM BOWL, because the transmission was national, and repeated from the transmitters in nearby Basra. He turned and waved. 'Major Sabah?'
'Yes, Chief, yes,' the Kuwaiti officer replied with a nod as he came over. He hadn't had much in the way of doubt before. His superiors had expressed reservations. They always did, they were never quite as close to the pulse of their enemy as the major was, thinking politics instead of ideas. He checked his watch. They'd be in their offices in two hours after the normal morning routine, and that didn't matter now. Hurrying wouldn't change anything. The dam had broken, and the water would spill out. The time to stop it had passed, assuming that such a chance had ever existed.
The Iraqi military had taken over, the TV news broadcast said. This was announced as though the situation were unique. A council of revolutionary justice had been formed. Those guilty of crimes against the people (a good catchall term which meant very little but was understood by all) were being arrested, and would face the judgment of their countrymen. The nation needed calm most of all, the TV told them. Today would be a national holiday. Only those in essential public-service jobs were expected to go to work. For the rest of the country's citizens, it was advised that they consider this a day of prayer and reconciliation. For the rest of the world, the new regime promised peace. The rest of the world would have all day to think about that.
DARYAEI HAD ALREADY done a good deal of thinking about it. He'd managed three hours of sleep before awakening for morning prayers. He found that as he aged he needed less and less. Perhaps the body understood that, with little time remaining, there was no longer time for rest, though there was for dreams, and he'd dreamed of lions in the early hours of this day. Dead lions. The lion had also been the symbol of the Shah's regime, and truly Badrayn had been correct. Lions could be killed. The real ones had once been native to Iran—Persia, in the old style—and had been hunted down to extinction in classical times. The symbolic ones, the Pahlavi dynasty, had similarly been eradicated with a combination of patience and ruthlessness. He'd played a role in that. It hadn't always been pretty. He'd ordered and supervised an atrocity, the fire-bombing of a crowded theater filled with people more interested in Western decadence than their Islamic faith. Hundreds had died horribly, but—but it had been necessary, a needed part of the campaign to bring his country and his people back to the True Path, and while he regretted that particular incident, and regularly prayed in atonement for the lives taken, no, he didn't regret it. He was an instrument of the Faith, and the Holy Koran itself told of the need for war, Holy War, in defense of the Faith.
Another gift of Persia (some said India) to the world was the game of chess, which he had learned as a child. The very word for the end of the game, checkmate, came from the Persian shah mat—'the king is dead' — something he had himself helped to achieve in real life, and while Daryaei had long since stopped playing mere games, he remembered that a good player thought not move by move, but four, or even more, moves ahead. One problem with chess, as with life, was that the next move could sometimes be seen, especially when the other player was skilled—to assume him to be anything else could be dangerous. But by playing ahead, it was far more difficult to see what was coming, until the very end, at which point the opponent could see clearly but, maneuvered out of position, depleted of his players, power, and options, he had no choice but to resign the game. Such had been the case in Iraq until this morning. The other player—actually, many of them— had resigned and run away, and Daryaei had been pleased to allow it. It was even more delicious when the other player could not run, but the point was winning, not satisfaction, and winning meant thinking farther and faster than the other player, so that the next move was a surprise, so that the other player was harried and confused, would be forced to take time to react, and in a chess match, as in life, time was limited. It was all a thing of the mind, not the body.
So it was with lions, it would seem. Even one so powerful could be outmaneuvered by lesser creatures if the time and the setting were right, and that was both the lesson and the task of the day. Finished with his prayers, Daryaei called for Badrayn. The younger man was a skilled tactician and gatherer of information. He needed the direction of one schooled in strategy, but with that guidance he would be very useful indeed.
IT HAD BEEN conclusively decided in an hour's conversation with his country's leading experts that the President could do absolutely nothing at all. The next move was simply to wait and watch and see. Any citizen could do it, but America's leading experts could wait and watch and see a little faster than anyone else, or so they told themselves. That would all be done for the President, of course, and so Ryan walked out of the Situation Room, up the steps, and outside to see wet, cold rain falling on the South Lawn beyond the overhang of the walkway. The coming day promised to be blustery, with March arriving, typically, like a lion, then to be replaced by a lamb. Or so the aphorism went. At the moment it just looked gloomy, however nurturing the rain might be to ground recovering from a cold, bitter winter.
'This will finish off the last of the snow,' Andrea Price said, surprising herself by speaking unbidden to her principal.
Ryan turned and smiled. 'You work harder than I do, Agent Price, and you're a—'
'Girl?' she asked with a weary smile.
'My chauvinism must be showing. I beg your pardon, ma'am. Sorry, I was just wishing for a cigarette. Quit years ago—Cathy bullied me into it. More than once,' Jack admitted with good humor. 'It can be tough, being married to a doctor.'
'It can be tough, being married.' Price was wedded to her job, with two failed relationships to prove it. Her problem, if one could call it that, was in possessing the same devotion to duty that only men were supposed to have. It was a simple enough fact, but one which first a lawyer and then an advertising executive had failed to grasp.
'Why do we do it, Andrea?' Ryan asked.
Special Agent Price didn't know, either. The President necessarily was a father figure to her. He was the man supposed to have the answers, but after years on the Detail, she knew better. Her father had always had such answers, or so it had seemed in her youth. Then she'd grown, finished her education, joined! the Service, worked her way rapidly up a steep and slippery ladder, and in the process lost her way in life somehow. Now she was at the pinnacle of her profession, alongside the nation's 'father,' only to learn that life didn't allow people to know what they wanted and needed to know. Her job was hard enough. His was infinitely worse, and maybe it was better for the President to be something other than the decent and honorable gentleman John Patrick Ryan was. Maybe a son of a bitch could survive better here…
'No answer?' Ryan smiled at the rain. 'I think you're supposed to say that somebody has to do it. Jesus, I just tried to seduce thirty new senators. You know that? Seduce,' Jack repeated. 'Like they were girls or something, and like I was that kind of guy—and I don't have a fucking clue.' The voice stopped cold and the head shook in surprise at what he'd said. 'Sorry, excuse me.'
