Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

"No, you don't," van Damm interrupted.

"But you've always—"

"I'm the chief of staff, Bob. I have to be loyal to my boss, and so I have to play the game from my side, but if you think I don't respect the press, you're not as smart as you're supposed to be. We're not always friends. Sometimes we're enemies, but we need you as much as you need us. For Christ's sake, if I didn't respect you, why the hell are you drinking my booze?"

It was either an elegant roll or a truthful statement, Holtzman thought, and Arnie was too skillful a player for him to tell the difference right off. But the smart thing to do was finish the drink, which he did. A pity that his host preferred cheap booze to go along with his L. L. Bean shirts. Arnie didn't know how to dress, either. Or maybe that was a considered part of his mystique. The political game was so intricate as to be a cross between classical metaphysics and experimental science. You could never know it all, and finding out one part as often as not denied you the ability to find out another, equally important part. But that was why it was the best game in town.

"Okay, Arnie, I'll accept that."

"Good of you." Van Damm smiled, and refilled the glass. "So why did you call me?"

"It's almost embarrassing." Another pause. "I will not participate in the public hanging of an innocent man."

"You've done that before," Arnie objected.

"Maybe so, but they were all politicians, and they all had it coming in one way or another. I don't know what— okay, how about I'm not into child abuse? Ryan deserves a fair chance."

"And you're pissed about losing your story and the Pulitzer that—"

"I have two of them already," Holtzman reminded him. Otherwise, he would have been taken off the story by his managing editor, but internal politics at the Washington Post were as vicious as those elsewhere in the city.

"So?"

"So, I need to know about Colombia. I need to know about Jimmy Cutter and how he died."

"Jesus, Bob, you don't know what our ambassador went through down there today."

"Great language for invective, Spanish." A reporter's smile.

"The story can't be told, Bob. It just can't."

"The story will be told. It's just a question of who tells it, and that will determine how it's told. Arnie, I know enough now to write something, okay?"

As so often happened in Washington at times like this, everyone was trapped by circumstance. Holtzman had a story to write. Doing it the right way would, perhaps, resurrect his original story, put him in the running for another Pulitzer—it was still important to him, previous denials notwithstanding, and Arnie knew it—and tell whoever had leaked his story to Ed Kealty that he or she had better leave the Post before Holtzman nailed that name down and wrecked his or her career with a few well-placed whispers and more than a few dead-end assignments. Arnie was trapped by his duty to protect his President, and the only way to do it was to violate the law and his President's trust. There had to be an easier way, the chief of staff thought, to earn a living. He could have made Holtzman wait for his decision, but that would have been mere theatrics, and both men were past that.

"No notes, no tape recorder."

"Off the record. 'Senior official, not even 'senior administration official, " Bob agreed.

"And I can tell you who to confirm it with."

"They know it all?"

"Even more than I do," van Damm told him. "Hell, I just found out about the important part."

A raised eyebrow. "That's nice, and the same rules will apply to them. Who really knows about this?"

"Even the President doesn't know it all. I'm not sure if anybody knows it all."

Holtzman took another sip. It would be his last. Like a doctor in an operating room, he didn't believe in mixing alcohol and work.

FLIGHT 534 TOUCH ED down at Istanbul at 2:55 A.M. local time, after a flight of 1,270 miles and three hours, fifteen minutes. The passengers were groggily awake, having been, roused by the cabin staff thirty minutes earlier and told to put their seat-backs to the upright position in a series of languages. The landing was smooth, and a few of them raised the plastic shades on the windows to see that they were indeed on the ground at one more anonymous piece of real estate with white runway lights and blue taxiway lights, just like those all over the world. Those getting out stood at the proper time to stumble off into the Turkish night. The rest pushed their seats back for another snooze during the forty-five-minute layover, before the aircraft left yet another gate at 3:40 A.M. for the second half of the trip.

Lufthansa 601 was a European-made Airbus 310 twin-jet, roughly the same as the KLM Boeing in size and capacity. This one, too, had five travelers aboard, and left its gate at 2:55 for the nonstop flight to Frankfurt. The departure was routine in all details.

"THAT'S SOME STORY, Arnie."

"Oh, yeah. I didn't know the important parts until this week."

"How sure are you of this?" Holtzman asked.

"The pieces all fit." He shrugged again. "I can't say I liked hearing it. I think we would have won the election anyway, but, Jesus, the guy threw it. He tanked on a presidential election, but you know," van Damm said wistfully, "that might have been the most courageous and generous political act of the century. I didn't think he had it in him."

"Does Fowler know?"

"I haven't told him. Maybe I should."

"Wait a minute. Remember how Liz Elliot planted a story on me about Ryan and how—"

"Yes, that all folds into this. Jack went down personally to get those soldiers out. The guy next to him in the chopper was killed, and he's looked after the family ever since. Liz paid for it. She came apart the night the bomb went off in Denver."

"And Jack really did… you know that's one story that never came out all the way. Fowler lost it and almost launched a missile at Iran—it was Ryan, wasn't it? He's the one who stopped it." Holtzman looked down at his drink and decided on another sip. "How?"

"He got onto the Hot Line," Arnie replied. "He cut the President off and talked directly with Narmonov, and persuaded him to back things off some. Fowler flipped out and told the Secret Service to go arrest him, but by the time they got to the Pentagon, things were calmed down. It worked, thank God."

It took Holtzman a minute or so to absorb that, but again, the story fit with the fragments he knew. Fowler had resigned two days later, a broken man, but an honorable one who knew that his moral right to govern his country had died with his order to launch a nuclear weapon at an innocent city. And Ryan had also been shaken by the event, badly enough to leave government service at once, until Roger Durling had brought him back in.

"Ryan's broken every rule there is. Almost as if he likes it." But that wasn't fair, was it?

"If he hadn't, we might not be here." The chief of staff poured himself another. Holtzman waved him off. "You see what I mean about the story, Bob? If you tell it all, the country gets hurt."

"But then why did Fowler recommend Ryan to Roger Durling?" the reporter asked. "He couldn't stand the guy and—"

"Whatever his faults, and he has them, Bob Fowler is an honest politician, that's why. No, he doesn't like Ryan personally, maybe it's chemistry, I don't know, but Ryan saved him and he told Roger—what was it? 'Good man in a storm. That's it," Arnie remembered.

"Shame he doesn't know politics."

"He learns pretty fast. Might surprise you."

"He's going to gut the government if he gets the chance. I can't—I mean, I do like the guy personally, but his policies…"

"Every time I think I have him figured out, he swerves on me, and then I have to remind myself that he doesn't have an agenda," van Damm said. "He just does the job. I give him papers to read, and he acts on them. He listens to what people tell him—asks good questions, and always listens to the answers—but he makes his own decisions, as though he knows what's right and what's wrong—but the hell of it is, mostly he does. Bob, he's rolled me! But that's not it, either. Sometimes I'm not sure what it is with him, you know?"