Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

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."

"That's okay, Mr. President. I've heard the word before, even from other presidents."

"Who do you talk to?" Jack asked. "Once upon a time, I'd talk to my father, my priest, to James Greer when I worked for him, or Roger, until a few weeks ago. Now they all ask me. You know, they told me at Quantico, at the Basic Officers' School, that command could be lonely. Boy, they weren't kidding. They really weren't kidding."

"You have one hell of a good wife, sir," Price pointed out, envying both of them for that.

"There's always supposed to be somebody smarter than you. The person you go to when you're just not sure. Now they come to me. I'm not smart enough for that." Ryan paused, just then hearing what Price had told him. "You're right, but she's busy enough, and I'm not supposed to burden her with my problems."

Price decided to laugh. "You are a chauvinist, Boss."

That snapped his head around. "I beg your pardon, Ms. Price!" Ryan said in a voice that sounded cross until a presidential laugh followed it. "Please don't tell the media I said that."

"Sir, I don't tell reporters where the bathroom is."

The President yawned. "What's tomorrow look like?"

"Well, you're in the office all day. I imagine this Iraq business will wreck your morning. I'll be out early, back in the afternoon. I'm going to do a walk-around tomorrow, to check security arrangements for all the kids. We have a meeting to see if there's a way to get SURGEON to work and back without the helicopter—"

"That is funny, isn't it?" Ryan observed.

"A FLOTUS with a real job is something the system never really allowed for."

"Real job, hell! She makes more money than I do, has for ten years, except for when I was back in the market. The papers haven't picked up on that, either. She's a great doc."