Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

"Coffee'll do for a start."

"Follow me, sir."

"Attention on deck!" a sailor shouted a few seconds later, when Ryan went into the cook shed—or whatever they called it here.

"As you were," the President told them. "I thought this was the Presidential Retreat, not boot camp." He picked a seat at the table the staff used. Coffee appeared as if by magic. Then more magic happened.

"Good morning, Mr. President."

"Hi, Andrea. When did you get in?"

"Around two, helicopter," she explained.

"Get any sleep?"

"About four hours."

Ryan took a sip. Navy coffee was still Navy coffee. "And?"

"The investigation is under way. The team's put together. Everybody's got a seat at the table." She handed over a folder, which Ryan would get to read before his morning paper. Anne Arundel County and Maryland State Police, Secret Service, FBI, ATF, and all the intelligence agencies were working the case. They were running IDs on the terrorists, but the two whose documents had so far been checked turned out to be non-persons. Their papers were false, probably of European origin. Big surprise. Any competent European criminal, much less a terrorist organization, could procure phony passports. He looked up.

"What about the agents we lost?"

A sigh, a shrug. "They all have families."

"Let's get it set up so that I can meet with them… should it be all at once or one at a time?"

"Your choice, sir," Price told him.

"No, it has to be what's best for them. They're your people, Andrea. You work that out for me, okay? I owe them my daughter's life, and I have to do what's right for them," POTUS said soberly, remembering why he was in this quiet and peaceful place. "And I presume that they will be properly looked after. Get me the details on that, insurance, pensions, and stuff, okay? I want to look that over."

"Yes, sir."

"Do we know anything important yet?"

"No, not really. The terrorists who've been posted, their dental work definitely isn't American, that's it for now."

Ryan flipped through the papers he had. One preliminary conclusion leaped off the page at him: "Eleven years?"

"Yes, sir."

"So this is a major operation for somebody—a country."

"That's a real possibility."

"Who else would have the resources?" he asked, and Price reminded herself that he'd been an intelligence officer for a long time.

Agent Raman came in and took his seat. He'd heard that observation, and he and Price traded a look and a nod.

The wall phone rang. Captain Overton walked over to get it. "Yes?" He listened for a few minutes, then turned. "Mr. President, this is Mrs. Foley at CIA."

The President went to take the call. "Yeah, Mary Pat."

"Sir, we had a call a few minutes ago from Moscow. Our friend Golovko asks if he can be of any assistance. I recommend a 'yes' on that."

"Agreed. Anything else?"

"Avi ben Jakob wants to talk to you later today. Ears-only," the DDO told him.

"About an hour, let me get woke up first."

"Yes, sir…. Jack?"

"Yeah, MP?"

"Thank God about Katie," she said, mother to father, then going on as mother alone: "If we can get a line on this, we will."

"I KNOW YOU'RE our best," Mrs. Foley heard.

"We're doing okay right now."

"Good. Ed and I will be in all day." She hung up.

"How's he sound?" Clark asked.

"He'll make it, John." Chavez rubbed his hand over the night's growth of beard. The three of them plus quite a few others had spent the night reviewing everything CIA had on terrorist groups. "We have to do something about this, guys. This is an act of war." His voice was devoid of accent now, as it tended to be when he got serious enough to call on his education instead of his L.A. origins.

"We don't know much. Hell," the DDO said, "we don't know anything yet."

"Shame he couldn't have taken one alive." This observation, to the surprise of the two others, came from Clark.

"He probably didn't have much of a chance to snap the cuffs on the guy," Ding replied.

"True." Clark lifted the set of crime-scene photos that had been couriered over from the FBI just after midnight. He'd worked the Middle East, and it had been hoped that he might have recognized a face, but he hadn't. Mainly he'd learned that whichever FBI puke had been inside, the gent could shoot as well as he ever had. Lucky man, to have been there, to have had that chance, and to take it.

"Somebody's taking one hell of a big chance," John said.

"That's a fact," Mary Pat agreed automatically, but then they all wondered about it.

The question was not how big the chance was, but rather how big the chance was perceived to be by whoever had tossed the dice. The nine terrorists had all been throwaways, as surely marked for death as the Hezbol-lah fanatics who'd gone strolling down Israeli streets in clothing made by DuPont—that was the CIA joke about it, though in fact the plastic explosives had probably come from the Skoda Works in the former Czechoslovakia. "Not-so-smart bombs" was the other in-house sobriquet. Had they really believed that they could pull it off? The problem with some of the fanatics was that they didn't weigh things very well… maybe they hadn't even cared.

That was also the problem of those who sent them. This mission had been different, after all. Ordinarily, terrorists boasted widely of what they did, however odious the act, and at CIA and elsewhere they'd waited for fifteen hours for the press release. But it never came, and if it hadn't by now, then it never would. If they didn't make the release, then they didn't want anyone to know. But that was an illusion. Terrorists always proclaimed their acts, but they didn't always appreciate that police agencies could figure things out anyway.

Nation-states knew better, or were supposed to. Okay, fine, the dealers hadn't had anything that could identify their point of origin—or so some might think. But Mary Pat was under no such illusions. The FBI was better than good, good enough that the Secret Service was letting the Bureau handle all of the forensics. And so it was likely that whoever had initiated the mission might actually expect that the story would eventually unravel. Knowing that— probably—they'd gone ahead with it anyway. If this line of speculation were true, then—

"Part of something else?" Clark asked. "Not a standalone. Something else, too."

"Maybe," Mary Pat observed.

"If it is, it's big," Chavez went on for them. "Maybe that's why the Russians called in to us."

"So big… so big that even if we figure it out, it won't matter when we do."

"That's pretty big, Mary Pat," Clark said quietly. "What could it be…?"

"Something permanent, something we can't change after it's done," Domingo offered. His time at George Mason University hadn't been wasted.

Mrs. Foley wished her husband were in on this, but Ed was meeting with Murray right now.

SATURDAYS IN THE spring are often days of dull but hopeful routine, but in just over two hundred homes little was done. Gardens were not planted. Cars were not washed. Garage sales were not attended. Paint cans went unopened. That wasn't counting government employees or news personnel working the big story of the week. Mainly the people suffering from the flu were men. Thirty of them were in hotel rooms. Several even tried to work, attending their trade shows in the new cities. Wiping their faces, blowing their noses, and wishing the aspirin or Tylenol would kick in. Of the last group, most went back to the hotel rooms to relax—no sense in getting the customers sick, was there? In not a single case did anyone seek medical attention. There was the usual winter/spring flu bug circulating around, and everybody got it sooner or later. They weren't that sick, after all, were they?

NEWS COVERAGE OF the incident at Giant Steps was entirely predictable, starting with camera shots taken from about fifty yards away, and the same words repeated by all of the correspondents, followed by the same words delivered by «experts» in terrorism and/or other fields. One of the networks took the viewer all the way back to Abraham Lincoln for no other reason than that it was otherwise a very slow news day. All of the coverage pointed to the Middle East, though the investigating agencies had declined any comment at all on the event so far, except to cite an FBI agent's heroic interference and the spirited battle put up by the Secret Service bodyguards of little Katie Ryan. Words like "heroic," "dedicated," and «determined» were bandied about with great frequency, leading to the "dramatic conclusion."