Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Sam, I’m Secretary of the Treasury. I leave the birds and bees to EPA. I don’t hug trees, not until they turn the wood chips into T-Bills, anyway.”

A chuckle: “Sorry, George. I’m always hearing that stuff at home. Maybe it’s Disney. All wild animals wear white gloves and talk to each other in good Midwestern Iowa English.”

“Cheer up, Sam. At least they’re laying off the supertankers out of Valdez now. How much of the eastern Alaska/Western Canada strike is yours?”

“Not quite half, but that’ll keep my stockholders in milk and cookies for a long time.”

“So, between that one and Siberia, how many options will they give you to exercise?” Sam Sherman got a nice salary, but at his level the way you earned your keep was measured in the number of options in the stock whose value your work had increased, invariably offered you by the board of directors, whose own holdings you inflated in value through your efforts.

A knowing smile, and a raised eyebrow: “A lot, George. Quite a lot.”

Married life agrees with you, Andrea,” President Ryan observed with a smile at his Principal Agent. She was dressing better, and there was a definite spring in her step now. He wasn’t sure if her skin had a new glow, or maybe her makeup was just different. Jack had learned never to comment on a woman’s makeup. He always got it wrong.

“You’re not the only one to say that, sir.”

“One hesitates to say such things to a grown adult female, especially if you’re fashion-bereft, as I am,” Jack said, his smile broadening somewhat. His wife, Cathy, still said she had to dress him because his taste was entirely, she said, in his mouth. “But the change is sufficiently marked that even a man such as myself can see it.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. Pat is a very good man, even for a Bureau puke.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“He’s up in Philadelphia right now. Director Murray sent him off on a bank robbery, two local cops got killed in that one.”

“Caught that one on TV last week. Bad.”

The Secret Service agent nodded. “The way the subjects killed the cops, both in the back of the head, that was pretty ruthless, but there’s people out there like that. Anyway, Director Murray decided to handle that one with a Roving Inspector out of Headquarters Division, and that usually means Pat gets to go do it.”

“Tell him to be careful,” Ryan said. Inspector Pat O”Day had saved his daughter’s life less than a year before, and that act had earned him undying Presidential solicitude.

“Every day, sir,” Special Agent Price-O’Day made clear.

“Okay, what’s the schedule look like?” His “business” appointments were on his desk already. Andrea Price-O’ Day filled him in every morning, after his national-security briefing from Ben Goodley.

“Nothing unusual until after lunch. National Chamber of Commerce delegation at one-thirty, and then at three the Detroit Red Wings, they won the Stanley Cup this year. Photo op, TV pukes and stuff, take about twenty minutes or so.”

“I ought to let Ed Foley do that one. He’s the hockey fanatic-”

“He’s a Caps fan, sir, and the Red Wings swept the Caps four straight in the finals. Director Foley might take it personally,” Price-O’Day observed with half a smile.

“True. Well, last year we got the jerseys and stuff for his son, didn’t we?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good game, hockey. Maybe I ought to catch a game or two. Trouble to arrange that?”

“No, sir. We have standing agreements with all the local sports facilities. Camden Yards even has that special box for us-they let us help design it, the protective stuff, that is.”

Ryan grunted. “Yeah, I have to remember all the people who’d like to see me dead.”

“My job to think about that, sir, not yours,” Price-O’Day told him.

“Except when you won’t let me go shopping or to a movie.” Neither Ryan nor his family was entirely used to the restrictions imposed on the life of the President of the United States or his immediate family members. It was getting especially tough on Sally, who’d started dating (which was hard on her father), and dating was difficult with a lead car and a chase car (when the young gentleman drove himself) or an official car with a driver and a second armed agent up front (when he did not), and guns all over the place. It tended to restrain the young gentlemen in question-and Ryan hadn’t told his daughter that this was just fine with him, lest she stop speaking to him for a week or so. Sally’s Principal Agent, Wendy Merritt, had proven to be both a good Secret Service agent and a superb big sister of sorts. They spent at least two Saturdays per month shopping with a reduced detail-actually it wasn’t reduced at all, but it appeared so to Sally Ryan when they went out to Tyson’s Corner or the Annapolis Mall for the purpose of spending money, something for which all women seemed to have a genetic predisposition. That these shopping expeditions had been planned days in advance, with every site scouted by the Secret Service, and a supplementary detail of young agents selected for their relative invisibility who showed up there an hour before SHADOW’S arrival, had never occurred to Sally Ryan. That was just as well, as the dating problems grated on her badly enough, along with being followed around St. Mary’s School in Annapolis by the rifle squad, as she sometimes termed it. Little Jack, on the other hand, thought it was pretty neat, and had recently learned to shoot at the Secret Service Academy in Beltsville, Maryland, with his father’s permission (and something he’d not allowed the press to learn, lest he get hammered on the front page of the New York Times for the social indiscretion of encouraging his own son to touch, much less actually to fire, something so inherently evil as a pistol!). Little Jack’s Principal Agent was a kid named Mike Brennan, a South Boston Irishman, a third-generation Secret Service agent with fiery red hair and a ready laugh, who’d played baseball at Holy Cross and frequently played catch and pepper with the President’s son on the South Lawn of the White House.

“Sir, we never don’t let you do anything,” Price said.

“No, you’re pretty subtle about it,” Ryan allowed. “You know that I’m too considerate of other people, and when you tell me about all the crap you people have to go through so that I can buy a burger at Wendy’s, I usually back off … like a damned wimp.” The President shook his head. Nothing frightened him more than the prospect that he’d somehow get used to all this panoply of “specialness,” as he thought of it. As though he’d only recently discovered royal parentage, and was now to be treated like a king, hardly allowed to wipe his own ass after taking a dump. Doubtless some people who’d lived in this house had gotten used to it, but that was something John Patrick Ryan, Sr., wanted to avoid. He knew that he was not all that special, and not deserving of all this folderol … and besides, like every other man in the world, when he woke up in the morning the first thing he did was head to the bathroom. Chief Executive he might be, but he still had a working-class bladder. And thank God for that, the President of the United States reflected.

“Where’s Robby today?”

“Sir, the Vice President is in California today, the Navy base at Long Beach, giving a speech at the shipyard.”

Ryan grinned a little sideways. “I work him pretty hard, don’t I?”

“That’s the Vice President’s job,” Arnie van Damm said from the door. “And Robby’s a big boy about it,” added the President’s Chief of Staff.

“Your vacation was good for you,” Ryan observed. He had a very nice tan. “What did you do?”