Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (123 page)

“What's that?”

“A CIA officer. He needs a pardon.”

“What for?” Durling asked, wondering if a sandbag was descending toward his own head.

“Murder,” Ryan replied honestly. “As luck would have it, my father worked the case back when I was in college. The people he killed had it coming—”

“Not a good way to look at things. Even if they did.”

“They did.” The Vice President-designate explained for two or three minutes. The magic word was “drugs,” and soon enough the President nodded.

“And since then?”

“One of the best field officers we've ever had. He's the guy who bagged Qati and Ghosn in Mexico City.”

“That's the guy?”

“Yes, sir. He deserves to get his name back.”

“Okay. I'll call the Attorney General and see if we can do it quietly. Any other favors that you need taken care of?” the President asked. “You know, you're picking this political stuff up pretty fast for an amateur. Nice job with the media this morning, by the way.”

Ryan nodded at the compliment. “Admiral Jackson. He did a nice job, too, but I suppose the Navy will take good care of him.”

“A little presidential attention never hurt any officer's career. I want to meet him anyway. You're right, though. flying into the islands to meet with them was a very astute move.”

“No losses,” Chambers said, and a lot of kills. Why didn't he feel good about that?

“The subs that killed Charlotte and Asheville?” Jones asked.

“We'll ask when the time comes, but probably at least one of them.” The judgment was statistical but likely.

“Ron, good job,” Mancuso said.

Jones stubbed out his cigarette. Now he'd have to break the habit again. And now, also, he understood what war was, and thanked God that he'd never really had to fight in one. Perhaps it was just something for kids to do. But he'd done his part, and now he knew, and with luck he'd never have to see one happen again. There were always whales to track.

“Thanks. Skipper.”

“One of our 747s has mechanical'd rather badly,” Sato explained. “It will be out of service for three days. I have to fly to Heathrow to replace the aircraft. Another 747 will replace mine on the Pacific run.” With that he turned over the flight plan.

The Canadian air-traffic official scanned it. “Pax?”

“No passengers, no, but I'll need a full load of fuel.”

“I expect your airline will pay for that, Captain,” the official observed with a smile. He scribbled his approval on the flight plan, keeping one copy for his records, and gave the other back to the pilot. He gave the form a last look.

“Southern routing? It's five hundred miles longer.”

“I don't like the wind forecast,” Sato lied. It wasn't much of a lie. People like this rarely second-guessed pilots on weather calls. This one didn't either.

“Thank you.” The bureaucrat went back to his paperwork.

An hour later, Sato was standing under his aircraft. It was at an Air Canada service hangar—the space at the terminal was occupied again by another international carrier. He took his time preflighting the airliner, checking visually for fluid leaks, loose rivets, bad tires, any manner of irregularity—called “hangar rash”—but there was none to be seen. His copilot was already aboard, annoyed at the unscheduled flight they had to make, even though it meant three or four days in London, a city popular with international aircrew. Sato finished his walk-around and climbed aboard, stopping first at the forward galley.

“All ready?” he asked.

“Preflight checklist complete, standing by for before-start checklist,” the man said just before the steak knife entered his chest. His eyes were wide with shock and surprise rather than pain.

“I'm very sorry to do this,” Sato told him in a gentle voice. With that he strapped into the left seat and commenced the engine-start sequence. The ground crew was too far away to see into the cockpit, and couldn't know that only one man was alive on the flight deck.

“Vancouver tower, this is JAL ferry flight five-zero-zero, requesting clearance to taxi.”

“Five-Zero-Zero Heavy, roger, you are cleared to taxi runway Two-Seven-Left. Winds are two-eight-zero at fifteen.”

“Thank you, Vancouver, Five-Zero-Zero Heavy cleared for Two-Seven Left.” With that the aircraft started rolling. It took ten minutes to reach the end of the departure runway. Sato had to wait an extra minute because the aircraft ahead of his was another 747, and they generated dangerous wake turbulence. He was about to violate the first rule of flight, the one about keeping your number of takeoffs equal to that for landings, but it was something his countrymen had done before. On clearance from the tower, Sato advanced the throttles to the takeoff power, and the Boeing, empty of everything but fuel, accelerated rapidly down the runway, rotating off before reaching six thousand feet, and immediately turning north to clear the controlled airspace around the airport. The lightly loaded airliner positively rocketed to its cruising altitude of thirty-nine thousand feet, at which point fuel efficiency was optimum. His flight plan would take him along the Canadian U.S. border, departing land just north of the fishing town of Hopedale. Soon after that, he'd be beyond ground-based radar coverage. Four hours, Sato thought, sipping tea while the autopilot flew the aircraft. He said a prayer for the man in the right seat, hoping that the copilot's soul would be at piece, as his now was.

The Delta flight landed at Dulles only a minute late. Clark and Chavez found that there was a car waiting for them. They took the official Ford and headed down to Interstate-64, while the driver who'd brought it caught a cab.

“What do you suppose will happen to him?”

“Yamata? Prison, maybe worse. Did you get a paper?” Clark asked.

“Yeah.” Chavez unfolded it and scanned the frontpage. “Holy shit!”

“Huh?”

“Looks like Mr. Ryan's getting kicked upstairs.” But Chavez had other things to think about for the drive down toward the Virginia Tidewater, like how he was going to ask Patsy the Big Question. What if she said no?

A joint session of Congress is always held in the House chamber due to its larger size, and also, members of the “lower” house noted, because in the Senate seats were reserved, and those bastards didn't let anyone else sit in their place. Security was usually good here. The Capitol building had its own police force, which was used to working with the Secret Service. Corridors were closed off with velvet ropes, and the uniformed officers were rather more alert than usual, but it wasn't that big a deal.

The President would travel to the Hill in his official car, which was heavily armored, accompanied by several Chevy Suburbans that were even more heavily protected, and loaded with Secret Service agents carrying enough weapons to fight off a company of Marines. It was rather like a traveling circus, really, and like people in the circus, they were always setting up and taking down. Four agents, for example, humped their Stinger missile containers to the roof, going to the customary spots, scanning the area to see if the trees had grown a little too much—they were trimmed periodically for better visibility. The Secret Service's Counter-Sniper Team took similar perches atop the Capitol and other nearby buildings. The best marksmen in the country, they lifted their custom-crafted 7mm Magnum rifles from foam-lined containers and used binoculars to scan the rooftops they didn't occupy. There were few enough of those, as other members of “the detail” took elevators and stairs to the top of every building close to the one J
UMPER
would be visiting tonight. When darkness fell, light-amplification equipment came out, and the agents drank hot liquids in order to keep alert.

Sato thanked Providence for the timing of the event, and for the TCAS system. Though the transatlantic air routes were never empty, travel between Europe and America was timed to coincide with human sleep patterns, and this time of day was slack for westbound flights. The TCAS sent out interrogation signals, and would alert him to the presence of nearby aircraft. At the moment there was nothing close—his display said
CLEAR OF CONFLICT
, meaning that there was no traffic within eighty miles. That enabled him to slip into a west-bound routing quite easily, tracking down the coast, three hundred miles out. The pilot checked his time against his memorized flight plan. Again he'd figured the winds exactly right in both directions. His timing had to be exact, because the Americans could be very punctual. At 2030 hours, he turned west. He was tired now, having spent most of the last twenty-four hours in the air. There was rain on the American East Coast, and while that would make for a bumpy ride lower down, he was a pilot and hardly noticed such things. The only real annoyance was all the tea he'd drunk. He really needed to go to the head, but he couldn't leave the flight deck unattended, and there was less than an hour to endure the discomfort.

“Daddy, what does this mean? Do we still go to the same school?” Sally asked from the rear-facing seat in the limousine. Cathy handled the answer. It was a mommy-question.

“Yes, and you'll even have your own driver.”

“Neat!” little Jack thought.

Their father was having second thoughts, as he usually did after making an important decision, even though he knew it was too late for that. Cathy looked at his face, read his mind, and smiled at him.

“Jack, it's only a few months, and then…”

“Yeah.” Her husband nodded. “I can always work on my golf game.”

“And you can finally teach. That's what I want you to do. That's what you need to do.”

“Not back to the banking business?”

“I'm surprised you lasted as long as you did in that.”

“You're an eye-cutter, not a pshrink.”

“We'll talk about it,” Professor Ryan said, adjusting Katie Ryan's dress. It was the eleven-months part that appealed to her. After this post, he'd never come back to government service again. What a fine gift President Durling had given them both.

The official car stopped outside the Longworth House Office Building. There were no crowds there, though some congressional staffers were heading out of the building. Ten Secret Service agents kept an eye on them and everything else, while four more escorted the Ryans into the building. Al Trent was at the corner entrance.

“You want to come with me?”

“Why—”

“After you're confirmed, we walk you in to be sworn, and then you take your seat behind the President, next to the Speaker,” Sam Fellows explained. “It was Tish Brown's idea. It'll look good.”

“Election-year theatrics,” Jack observed coolly.

“What about us?” Cathy asked.

“It's a nice family picture,” Al thought.

“I don't know why I'm so darned excited about this,” Fellows grumbled in his most good-natured way. “This is going to make November hard for us. I suppose that never occurred to you?”

“Sorry, Sam, no, it didn't,” Jack replied with a sheepish grin.

“This hovel was my first office,” Trent said, opening the door on the bottom floor to the suite of offices he'd used for ten terms. "I keep it for luck. Please-sit down and relax a little. One of his staffers came in with soft drinks and ice, under the watchful eyes of Ryan's protective detail. Andrea Price started playing with the Ryan kids again. It looked unprofessional but was not. The kids had to be comfortable around her, and she'd already made a good start at that.

President Durling's car arrived without incident. Escorts conveyed him to the Speaker's official office adjacent to the chamber, where he went over his speech again. J
ASMINE
, Mrs. Durling, with her own escorts, took an elevator to the official gallery. By this time the chamber was half-filled. It wasn't accepted for people to be fashionably late, perhaps the only such occasion for members of the Congress. They assembled in little knots of friends for the most part, and walked in by party, the seats divided by a very real if invisible line. The rest of the government would come in later. All nine justices of the Supreme Court, all members of the Cabinet who happened to be in town (two were not), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their beribboned uniforms were led to the front row. Then the heads of independent agencies. Bill Shaw of the FBI. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Finally, under the nervous eyes of security people and the usual gaggle of advance personnel, it was ready, on time, as it always seemed to happen.

The seven networks interrupted their various programming. Anchorpersons appeared to announce that the Presidential Address was about to begin, giving the viewers enough information that they could head off to the kitchen and make their sandwiches without really missing anything.

The Doorkeeper of the House, holder of one of the choicest patronage jobs in the country—a fine salary and no real duties—walked halfway down the aisle and performed his one public function with his customary booming voice:

“Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.”

Roger Durling entered the chamber, striding down the aisle with brief stops to shake hands, his red-leather folder tucked under his arm. It held a paper copy of his speech in the event that the TelePrompTers broke. The applause was deafening and sincere. Even those in the opposition party recognized that Durling had kept his promise to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and as powerful a force as politics was, there was also still honor and patriotism in the room, especially at times like this. Durling reached the well, then climbed up to his place on the podium, and it was time for the Speaker of the House to do his ceremonial duty:

“Members of the Congress, I have the distinct privilege, and high honor, to introduce the President of the United States.” And the applause began afresh. This time there was the usual contest between the parties to see who could clap and cheer the loudest and the longest.

“Okay, remember what happens—”

“Okay, Al! I go in, the Chief Justice swears me in, and I take my seat. All I have to do is repeat it all back.” Ryan sipped a glass of Coke and wiped sweaty hands on his trousers. A Secret Service agent fetched him a towel.