Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (172 page)

“Tax policy?” Winston asked.

“We need Congress put back together first, remember?” Ryan pointed out. “But, yes.”

Winston took a deep breath. “That’s a very big job, Ryan.”

“You’re telling
me
that?” the President demanded ... then grinned.

“It won’t make me any friends.”

“You also become head of the Secret Service. They’ll protect you, won’t they, Andrea?”

Agent Price was not used to being pulled into these conversations, but she feared she’d have to get used to it. “Uh, yes, Mr. President.”

“Things are just so damned inefficient,” Winston observed.

“So fix it,” Ryan told him.

“It might be bloody.”

“Buy a mop. I want your department cleaned up, streamlined, and run like you want it to make a profit someday. How you do that is your problem. For Defense, I want the same thing. The biggest problem over there is administrative. I need somebody who can run a business and make a profit to cull the bureaucracy out. That’s the biggest problem of all, for all the agencies.”

“You know Tony Bretano?”

“The TRW guy? He used to run their satellite division....” Ryan remembered his name as a former candidate for a senior Pentagon post, which offer he’d turned down flat. A lot of good people declined such offers. That was the paradigm he had to break.

“Lockheed-Martin is going to steal him away in a couple weeks, at least that’s what my sources tell me. That’s why Lockheed’s stock is nudging up. We have a buy-advisory on it. He gave TRW a fifty-percent profit increase in two years, not bad for an engineer who isn’t supposed to know beans about management. I play golf with him sometimes. You should hear him scream about doing business with the government.”

“Tell him I want to see him.”

“Lockheed’s board is giving him a free hand to—”

“That’s the idea, George.”

“What about my job, I mean, what you want me to do. The rule is—”

“I know. You’ll be acting Secretary until we get things put back together.”

Winston nodded. “Okay. I need to bring a few people down with me.”

“I’m not going to tell you how to do it. I’m not even going to tell you all the things you have to do. I just want it to get done, George. You just have to tell me ahead of time. I don’t want to read about it in the papers first.”

“When would I start?”

“The office is empty right now,” Ryan told him.

A final hedge: “I have to talk to my family about it.”

“You know, George, these government offices have phones and everything.” Jack paused. “Look, I know what you are. I know what you do. I might have turned out the same way, but I just never found it ... satisfactory, I guess, just to make money. Getting start-ups off the ground, that was something different. Okay, managing money is important work. I didn’t like it myself, but I never wanted to be a doctor, either. Fine, different strokes and all that. But I
know
you’ve sat around a lot of tables with beer and pretzels talking about how screwed up this town is. Here’s your chance. It will never come again, George. Nobody will ever have an opportunity to be SecTreas without political considerations. Never. You can’t turn it down, because you’d never forgive yourself if you did.”

Winston wondered how one could be so adroitly cornered in a room with curved walls. “You’re learning the political stuff, Jack.”

“Andrea, you have a new boss,” the President told his principal agent.

For her part, Special Agent Price decided that Callie Weston might be wrong after all.

THE NOTICE THAT there would be a presidential address tonight upset a carefully considered timetable, but only by a day. More of concern was the coordination of that event with another. Timing was everything in politics, as much as in any other field, and they’d spent a week working on this. It wasn’t the usual illusion of experts moving with practiced skill. There had never been practice in this particular exercise. It was all guesses, but they’d all made guesses before, and mostly good ones, else Edward J. Kealty would never have risen as far as he had, but like compulsive gamblers, they never really trusted the table or the other players, and every decision carried with it a lot of ifs.

They even wondered about right and wrong on this one—not the “right and wrong” of a political decision, the considered calculation of who would be pleased and who offended by a sudden stand on the principle du jour, but whether or not the action they were contemplating was objectively correct—honest,
moral!
—and that was a rare moment for the seasoned political operatives. It helped that they’d been lied to, of course. They knew they’d been told lies. They knew he knew that they knew that he’d lied to them, but that was an understood part of the exercise. To have done otherwise would have violated the rules of the game. They had to be protected so long as they did not break faith with their principal, and being protected from adverse knowledge was part of that covenant.

“So you never really resigned, Ed?” his chief of staff asked. He wanted the lie to be clear, so that he could tell everyone that it was the Lord’s truth, to the best of his knowledge.

“I still have the letter,” the former Senator and former Vice President, and that was the rub, replied, tapping his jacket pocket. “Brett and I talked things over and we decided that the wording of the letter had to be just so, and what I had with me wasn’t quite right. I was going to come back the next day with a new one, dated properly, of course, and it would have been handled quietly—but who would have thought... ?”

“You could just, well, forget about it.” This part of the dance had to be stepped out in accordance with the music.

“I wish I could,” Kealty said after a moment’s sincere pause, followed by a concerned, passionate voice. This was good practice for him, too. “But, dear God, the shape the country’s in. Ryan’s not a bad guy, known him for years. He doesn’t know crap about running a government, though.”

“There’s no law on this, Ed. None. No constitutional guidance at all, and even if there were, no Supreme Court to rule on it.” This came from Kealty’s chief legal adviser, formerly his senior legislative aide. “It’s strictly political. It won’t look good,” he had to say next. “It won’t look—”

“That’s the point,” the chief of staff noted. “We’re doing this for apolitical reasons, to serve the interests of the country. Ed knows he’s committing political suicide.” To be followed by instant and glorious resurrection, live on CNN.

Kealty stood and started walking around the room, gesturing as he spoke. “Take politics out of this, damn it! The government’s been
destroyed!
Who’s going to put it back together? Ryan’s a goddamned CIA spook. He knows
nothing
about government operations. We have a Supreme Court to appoint, policy to carry out. We have to get Congress put back together. The country needs leadership, and he doesn’t have a clue on how to do that. I may be digging my own political grave, but somebody has to step up and protect our country.”

Nobody laughed. The odd thing was that it never occurred to them to do so. The staffers, both of whom had been with EJK for twenty years or more, had so lashed themselves to this particular political mast that they had no choice in the matter. This bit of theater was as necessary as the passage of the chorus in Sophocles, or Homer’s invocation of the Muse. The
poetics
of politics had to be observed. It was about the country, and the country’s needs, and Ed’s duty to the country over a generation and a half, because he’d been there and done it for all that time, knew how the system worked, and when it all came down, only a person like he could save it. The government was the country, after all. He’d spent his professional lifetime devoted to that proposition.

They actually believed all that, and no less than the two staffers, Kealty was lashed to the same mast. How much he was responding to his own ambition even he could no longer say, because belief becomes fact after a lifetime of professing it. The country occasionally showed signs of drifting away from his beliefs, but as an evangelist has no choice but to entreat people back to the True Faith, so Kealty had a duty to bring the country back to its philosophical roots, which he’d espoused for five terms in the Senate, and a briefer time as Vice President. He’d been called the Conscience of the Senate for more than fifteen years, so named by the media, which loved him for his views and his faith and his political family.

It would have been well for him to consult the media on this call, as he’d done often enough in the past, briefing them on a bill or amendment, asking their views—the media
loved
for people to ask their opinion on things—or just making sure they came to all the right parties. But not in this case. No, he couldn’t do that. He had to play everything straight. The appearance of currying favor could not be risked, whereas the deliberate avoidance of that maneuver would give the patina of legitimacy to his actions. High-minded. That was the image to project. He’d forgo all of the political tapestry for the first time in his life, and in so doing embroider a new segment. The only thing to consider now was timing. And
that
was something his media contacts could help with.

“WHAT TIME?” RYAN asked.

“Eight-thirty Eastern,” van Damm replied. “There are a couple of specials tonight, sweeps week, and they’ve asked us to accommodate them.”

Ryan might have growled about that, but didn’t. His thoughts showed clearly on his face anyway.

“It means you get a lot of West Coast people on their car radios,” Arnie explained. “We have all five networks, plus CNN and C-SPAN. That’s not a given, you know. It’s a courtesy. They don’t have to let you on at all. They play that card for political speeches—”

“Damn it, Arnie, this
isn’t
political, it’s—”

“Mr. President, get used to it, okay? Every time you take a leak, it’s political. You can’t escape that. Even the absence of politics is a political statement.” Arnie was working very hard to educate his new boss. He listened well, but he didn’t always hear.

“Okay. The FBI says I can release all of this?”

“I talked to Murray twenty minutes ago. It’s okay with him. I have Callie incorporating that in the speech right now.”

SHE COULD HAVE had a better office. As the number-one presidential speechwriter, she could have asked for and gotten a gold-plated personal computer sitting on a desk of Carrara marble. Instead she used a ten-year-old Apple Macintosh Classic, because it was lucky and she didn’t mind the small screen. Her office might have been a closet or storeroom once upon a time, back when the Indian Treaty Room had really been used for Indian treaties. The desk had been made at a federal prison, and while the chair was comfortable, it was thirty years old. The room had high ceilings. That made it easier for her to smoke, in violation of federal and White House rules, which were in her case not enforced. The last time someone had tried to muscle her, a Secret Service agent really had been forced to pull her off the male staffer lest she scratch his eyes out. That she had not been terminated at once was a sign to the rest of the personnel in the Old Executive Office Building. Some staff people could not be touched. Callie Weston was one of those.

There were no windows in her room. She didn’t want them. For her, reality was her computer and the photographs on her walls. One was of her dog, an aging English sheepdog named Holmes (Oliver Wendell, not Sherlock; she admired the prose of the Yankee from Olympus, an accolade she accorded few others). The rest were of political figures, friends and enemies, and she studied them constantly. Behind her was a small TV and VCR, the former usually tuned to C-SPAN-1 and -2 or CNN, and the latter used to review tapes of speeches written by others and delivered in all manner of places. The political speech, she thought, was the highest form of communication. Shakespeare might have had two or three hours in one of his plays to get his idea across. Hollywood tried the same thing in much the same time. Not her. She had fifteen minutes at the bottom end, and maybe forty-five at the top, and her ideas had to count. They had to sway the average citizen, the seasoned pol, and the most cynical reporter. She studied her subject, and she was studying Ryan now, playing and replaying the few words he’d said on the night of his accession, then the TV spots the next morning. She watched his eyes and his gestures, his tension and intensity, his posture and body language. She liked what she saw in the abstract sense. Ryan was a man she’d trust as an investment adviser, for example. But he had a lot to learn about being a politician, and somebody had to teach him or maybe not? She wondered. Maybe ... by
not
being a politician ...

Win or lose, it would be fun. For the first time, fun, not work.

Nobody wanted to admit it, but she was one of the most perceptive of the people working here. Fowler had known that, and so had Durling, which was why they put up with her eccentricities. The senior political staff hated her, treated her as a useful but minor functionary, and seethed at how she could stroll across the street and go right into the Oval Office, because the President trusted her as he trusted few others. That had finally occasioned a comment suggesting that the President had a rather special reason for calling her over, and, after all, people from her part of the country were known to be a little loose when it came to ... She wondered if he’d managed to get it up lately. The agent had pulled her hands off the little prick’s face, but he’d been too slow to contain her knee. It hadn’t even made the papers. Arnie had explained to him that a return to the Center of Power would be impeded by a charge of sexual misconduct—and then blacklisted him anyway. She liked Arnie.

She liked the speech, too. Four hours instead of the three she’d promised, a lot of effort for twelve minutes and thirty seconds—she tended to write them a little short because presidents had a way of speaking slowly. Most did. Ryan would have to learn that. She typed CONTROL P to print up the speech in Helvetica 14-point, three copies. Some political pukes would look things over and try to make corrections. That wasn’t as much a problem now as it had been. When the printer stopped, she collated the pages, stapled them together, and lifted her phone. The topmost speed-dial button went to the proper desk across the street.