Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (57 page)

“
Pakistan
,” the Prime Minister said, foolishly tipping her hand, Zhang thought.

“
Islamabad
has been an American puppet for too long, and cannot be trusted,” Daryaei replied at once, having thought that one through already, though he hadn't really expected
India
to jump so readily. This woman hated
America
as much as he did. Well, the “lesson” as she'd called it must have injured her pride even more deeply than his diplomats had told him. How typical for a woman to value her pride so highly. And how weak. Excellent. He looked over at Zhang.

“Our arrangements with
Pakistan
are commercial only, and as such are subject to modification,”
China
observed, equally delighted at
India
's weakness. It was no one's fault but her own. She'd committed forces to the field—well, the sea—in support of Japan's inefficient attack on America . . . while China had done nothing and risked nothing, and emerged from the “war” unhurt and uninvolved. Even Zhang's most cautious superiors had not objected to his play, failed though it was. And now, again, someone else would take the risks, and
India
would move in pacifist support, and
China
would have to do nothing but repeat an earlier policy that seemingly had nothing to do with this new UIR, but was rather a test of a new American President, and that sort of thing happened all the time anyway. Besides,
Taiwan
was still an annoyance. It was so curious.
Iran
, motivated by religion of all things.
India
, motivated by greed and anger.
China
, on the other hand, thought for the long term, dispassionately, seeking what really mattered, but with circumspection, as always.
Iran
's goal was self-evident, and if Daryaei was willing to risk war for it, then, why not watch in safety, and hope for his success? But he wouldn't commit his country now. Why appear too eager? India was eager, enough so to overlook the obvious: If Daryaei was successful, then Pakistan would make its peace with the new UIR, perhaps even join it, and then India would be isolated and vulnerable. Well, it was dangerous to be a vassal, and all the more so if you had aspirations to graduate to the next level—but without the wherewithal to make it happen. One had to be careful choosing allies. Gratitude among nations was a hothouse flower, easily wilted by exposure to the real world.

The Prime Minister nodded in acknowledgment of her victory over
Pakistan
, and said no more.

“In that case, my friends, I thank you for graciously agreeing to meet with me, and with your permission, I will take my leave.” The three stood. Handshakes were exchanged, and they headed to the door. Minutes after that, Daryaei's aircraft rotated off the bumpy fighter strip. The mullah looked at the coffeepot and decided against it. He wanted a few hours of sleep before morning prayers. But first—

“Your predictions were entirely correct.”

“The Russians called these things 'objective conditions.' They are and remain unbelievers, but their formulas for analysis of problems have a certain precision to them,” Badrayn explained. “That is why I have learned to assemble information so carefully.”

“So I have seen. Your next task will be to sketch in some operations.” With that, Daryaei pushed back his seat and closed his eyes, wondering if he would dream again of dead lions.

M
UCH AS HE
wished for a return to clinical medicine, Pierre Alexandre didn't especially like it, at least this matter of treating people who would not survive. The former Army officer in him figured that defending
Bataan
had been like this. Doing all you could, firing off your best rounds, but knowing that relief would never come. At the moment, it was three AIDS patients, all homosexual men, all in their thirties, and all with less than a year to live. Alexandre was a fairly religious man, and he didn't approve of the gay lifestyle, but nobody deserved to die like this. And even if they did, he was a physician, not God sitting in judgment. Damn, he thought, walking off the elevator and speaking his patient notes into a mini-tape recorder.

It's part of a doctor's job to compartmentalize his life. The three patients on his unit would still be there tomorrow, and none of them would require emergency attention that night. Putting their problems aside was not cruel. It was just business, and their lives, were they to have any hope at all, would depend on his ability to turn away from their stricken bodies and back to researching the microsized organisms that were attacking them. He handed the tape cassette to his secretary, who'd type up the notes.

“Dr. Lorenz down in
Atlanta
returned your call returning his call returning your original call,” she told him as he passed. As soon as he sat down, he dialed the direct line from memory.

“Yes?”

“Gus? Alex here at
Hopkins
. Tag,” he chuckled, “you're it.” He heard a good laugh at the other end of the line. Phone tag could be the biggest pain in the ass.

“How's the fishing, Colonel?”

“Would you believe I haven't had a chance yet? Ralph's working me pretty hard.”

“What did you want from me—you did call first, didn't you?” Lorenz wasn't sure anymore, another sign of a man working too hard.

“Yeah, I did, Gus. Ralph tells me you're starting a new look at the Ebola structure—from that mini-break in
Zaire
, right?”

“Well, I would be, except somebody stole my monkeys,” the director of CDC reported sourly. “The replacement shipment is due in here in a day or two, so they tell me.”

“You have a break-in?” Alexandre asked. One of the troublesome developments for labs that had experimental animals was that animal-rights fanatics occasionally tried to bust in and “liberate” the animals. Someday, if everyone wasn't careful, some screwball would walk out with a monkey under his arm and discover it had Lassa fever—or worse. How the hell were physicians supposed to study the goddamned bug without animals—and who'd ever said that a monkey was more important than a human being? The answer to that was simple: in
America
there were people who believed in damned near anything, and there was a constitutional right to be an ass. Because of that, CDC,
Hopkins
, and other research labs had armed guards, protecting monkey cages. And even rat cages, which really made Alex roll his eyes to the ceiling.

“No, they were highjacked in
Africa
. Somebody else is playing with them now. Anyway, so it kicks me back a week. What the hell. I've been looking at this little bastard for fifteen years.”

“How fresh is the sample?”

“It's off the Index Patient. Positive identification, Ebola
Zaire
, the Mayinga strain. We have another sample from the only other patient. That one disappeared—”

“What?” Alexandre asked in immediate alarm.

“Lost at sea in a plane crash. They were evidently flying her to
Paris
to see Rousseau. No further cases, Alex. We dodged the bullet this time for a change,” Lorenz assured his younger colleague.

Better
, Alexandre thought, to crunch in a plane crash than bleed out from that little fucker. He still thought like a soldier, profanity and all. “Okay.”

“So, why did you call?”

“Polynomials,” Lorenz heard.

“What do you mean?” the doctor asked in
Atlanta
.

“When you map this one out, let's think about doing a mathematical analysis of the structure.”

“I've been playing with that idea for a while. Right now, though, I want to examine the reproduction cycle and—”

“Exactly, Gus, the mathematical nature of the interaction. I was talking to a colleague up here—eye cutter, you believe? She said something interesting. If the amino acids have a quantifiable mathematical value, and they should, then how they interact with other codon strings may tell us something.” Alexandre paused and heard a match striking. Gus was smoking his pipe in the office again.

“Keep going.”

“Still reaching for this one, Gus. What if it's like you've been thinking, it's all an equation? The trick is cracking it, right? How do we do that? Okay, Ralph told me about your time-cycle study. I think you're onto something. If we have the virus RNA mapped, and we have the host DNA mapped, then—”

“Gotcha! The interactions will tell us something about the values of the elements in the polynomial—”

“And that will tell us a lot about how the little fuck replicates, and just maybe—”

“How to attack it.” A pause, and a loud puff came over the phone line. “Alex, that's pretty good.”

“You're the best guy for the job, Gus, and you're setting up the experiment anyway.”

“Something's missing, though.”

“Always is.”

“Let me think about that one for a day or so and get back to you. Good one, Alex.”

“Thank you, sir.” Professor Alexandre replaced the phone and figured he'd done his duty of the day for medical science. It wasn't much, and there was an element missing from the suggestion.

EXPERIMENTS

I
T TOOK SEVERAL DAYS TO GET
everything in place. President Ryan had to meet with yet another class of new senators—some of the states were a little slow in getting things done, mainly because some of the governors established something akin to search committees to evaluate a list of candidates. That was a surprise to a lot of Washington insiders who'd expected the state executives to do things as they'd always been done to appoint replacements to the upper house just as soon as the bodies were cold—but it turned out that Ryan's speech had mattered a little bit. Eight governors had realized that this situation was unique, and had therefore acted in a different way, earning, on reflection, the praise of their local papers, if not the complete approval of the establishment press.

Jack's first political trip was an experimental one. He rose early, kissed his wife and kids on the way out the door, and boarded the helicopter on the South Lawn just before seven in the morning. Ten minutes later, he left the aircraft to trot up the stairs onto Air Force One, technically known to the Pentagon as a VC-25A, a 747 expensively modified to be the President's personal conveyance. He boarded just as the pilot, a very senior colonel, was making his airline-like preflight announcements. Looking aft, Ryan could see eighty or so reporters belting into their better-than-first-class leather seats—actually some didn't strap in, because Air Force One generally rode more smoothly than an ocean liner on calm seas—and when he turned to head forward, he heard, “And this is a nonsmoking flight!”

“Who said that?” the President asked.

“One of the TV pukes,” Andrea replied. “He thinks it's his airplane.”

“In a way, it is,” Arnie pointed out. “Remember that.”

“That's Tom Donner,” Callie Weston added. “The NBC anchor. His personal feces are not odorific, and he uses more hair spray than I do. But part of it's glued on.”

“This way, Mr. President.” Andrea pointed forward. The President's cabin in Air Force One is in the extreme nose on the main deck, where there are regular, if very plush, seats, plus a pair of couches that fold out into beds for long trips. As the principal agent watched, her principal strapped in. Passengers could get away with breaking the rules—the USSS wasn't all that concerned with journalists—but not POTUS. When that was done, she waved to an Air Force crewman, who lifted a phone and told the pilot that he could go now. With that, the engines started up. Jack had mostly lost his fear of flying, but this was the part of the flight where he closed his eyes and thought (earlier in his life he'd whispered) a prayer for the collective safety of the people aboard—in the belief that praying merely for yourself might appear selfish to God. About the time that was finished, the takeoff roll began, rather more quickly than was normal on a 747. Lightly loaded, it felt like an airplane instead of a train pulling out of a station.

“Okay,” Arnie said, as the nose lifted off. The President studiously did not grip the armrests as he usually did. “This is going to be an easy one.
Indianapolis
,
Oklahoma
City, and back home for dinner. The crowds will be friendly, and about as reactionary as you are,” he added with a twinkle. “So you don't really have anything to worry about.”

Special Agent Price, sitting in the same compartment for the takeoff, hated it when anybody said that. Chief of Staff van Damm—C
ARPENTER
to the Secret Service; Callie Weston was C
ALLIOPE
—was one of the staffers who never quite appreciated the headaches the Service went through. He thought of danger as a political hazard, even after the 747 crash. Remarkable, she thought. A few feet aft, Agent Raman was in an aft-facing seat watching access forward, in case a reporter showed up with a gun instead of a pencil. There were six more agents aboard to keep an eye on everyone, even the uniformed crewmen, and a platoon of them standing by in each of the two destination cities, along with a huge collection of local cops. At Tinker Air Force Base in
Oklahoma City
, the fuel truck was already under USSS guard, lest someone contaminate the JP to go into the presidential aircraft; it would remain so until well after the 747 returned to Andrews. A C-5B Galaxy transport was already in
Indianapolis
, having ferried the presidential automobiles there. Moving the President around was rather like transporting the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, except people generally didn't worry about people trying to assassinate the man on the flying trapeze.

Ryan, Agent Price saw, was going over his speech. That was one of his few normal acts. They were almost always nervous about speeches—generally not so much stage fright as concern for the content spin. The thought made Price smile. Ryan wasn't worried about the content, but was worried about blowing the delivery. Well, he'd learn, and his good fortune was that Callie Weston, administrative pain in the ass that she was, wrote one hell of a speech.

“Breakfast?” a steward asked now that the aircraft was leveled off. The President shook his head.

“Not hungry, thanks.”

“Get him ham and eggs, toast, and decaf,” van Damm ordered.

“Never try to give a speech on an empty stomach,” Callie advised. “Trust me.”

“And not too much real coffee. Caffeine can make you jumpy. When a President gives a speech,” Arnie explained for this morning's lesson, “he's— Callie, help me out here?”

“Nothing dramatic for these two today. You're the smart neighbor coming over because the guy next door wants your advice on something he's been thinking about. Friendly. Reasonable. Quiet. 'Gee, Fred, I really think you might want to do it this way,' ” Weston explained with raised eyebrows.

“Kindly family doctor telling a guy to go easy on the greasy food and maybe play an extra round of golf—exercise is supposed to be fun, that sort of thing,” the chief of staff explained on. “You do it all the time in real life.”

“Just do it this morning in front of four thousand people, right?” Ryan asked.

“And C-SPAN cameras, and it'll be on all the evening network news broadcasts—”

“CNN will be doing it live, too, 'cuz it's your first speech out in the country,” Callie added. No sense lying to the man.

Jesus
. Jack looked back down at the text of his speech. “You're right, Arnie. Better decaf.” He looked up suddenly. “Any smokers aboard?”

It was the way he asked it that made the Air Force steward turn. “Want one, sir?”

The answer was somewhat shameful, but—“Yes.”

She handed him a Virginia Slim and lit it with a warm smile. It wasn't every day one got a chance to provide so personal a service to the Commander-in-Chief. Ryan took a puff and looked up.

“If you tell my wife, Sergeant—”

“Our secret, sir.” She disappeared aft to get breakfast, her day already made.

T
HE FLUID WAS
surprisingly horrid in color, deep scarlet with a hint of brown. They'd monitored the process with small samples under an electron microscope. The monkey kidneys exposed to the infected blood were composed of discrete and highly specialized cells, and for whatever reason, Ebola loved those cells as a glutton loves his chocolate mousse. It had been both fascinating and horrifying to watch. The micron-sized virus strands touched the cells, penetrated them—and started to replicate in the warm, rich biosphere. It was like something from a science-fiction movie, but quite real. This virus, like all the others, was only equivocally alive. It could act only with help, and that help had to come from its host, which by providing the means for the virus to activate, also conspired at its own death. The Ebola strands contained only RNA, and for mitosis to take place, both RNA and DNA are required. The kidney cells had both, the virus strands sought them out, and when they were joined, the Ebola started to reproduce. To do that required energy, and that energy was supplied by the kidney cells, which were, of course, completely destroyed in the process. The multiplication process was a microcosm of the disease process in a human community. It started slowly, then accelerated geometrically—the faster it went, the faster it went: 2-4-16-256-65,536—until all of the nutrients were eaten up and only virus strands remained, then went dormant and awaited their next opportunity. People applied all manner of false images to disease. It would lie in wait for its chance; it would kill without mercy; it would seek out victims. All of that was anthropomorphic rubbish, Moudi and his colleague knew. It didn't think. It didn't do anything overly malevolent. All Ebola did was to eat and reproduce and go back to its dormant state. But as a computer is only a collection of electrical switches which can only distinguish between the numerals 1 and 0—but does so more rapidly and efficiently than its human users—so Ebola was supremely well adapted to reproduce so rapidly that the human body's immune system, ordinarily a ruthlessly effective defense mechanism, was simply overwhelmed, as though by an army of carnivorous ants. In that lay Ebola's historic weakness. It was too efficient. It killed too fast. Its survival mechanism within the human host also tended to kill the host before it could pass the disease along. It was also super-adapted to a specific ecosystem. Ebola didn't survive long in the open, and only then in a jungle environment. For this reason, and since it could not survive in a human host without killing that host in ten days or less, it had also evolved slowly—without taking the next evolutionary step of becoming airborne.

Or so everyone thought. Perhaps “hoped” would be a better word, Moudi reflected. An Ebola variant that could be spread by aerosol would be catastrophically deadly. It was possible they had exactly that. This was the Mayinga strain, as repeated microscopy had established, and that strain was suspected to be capable of aerosol transmission, and that was what they had to prove.

Deep-freezing, using liquid nitrogen as the refrigerant, for example, killed most normal human cells. When they froze, the expansion of the water, which accounted for most of the cellular mass, burst the cell walls, leaving nothing behind but wreckage. Ebola, on the other hand, was too primitive for that to happen. Too much heat could kill it. Ultraviolet light could kill it. Micro-changes in the chemical environment could kill it. But give it a cold, dark place to sleep, and it was content to slumber in peace.

They worked in a glove box. It was a highly Controlled and lethally contaminated environment bordered with clear lexan strong enough to stop a pistol bullet. On two sides holes were cut into the sturdy plastic, and riveted at each workstation was a pair of heavy rubber gloves. Moudi withdrew 10cc's of the virus-rich liquid and transferred it to a small container, which he sealed. The sluggishness of the process was less from physical danger than from the awkwardness of the gloves. When the container was sealed, he transferred it from one gloved hand to another, then off to the director, who performed a similar switch, finally moving it into a small airlock. When that door was closed, as indicated by a light which read off a pressure sensor, the small compartment was flooded with disinfectant spray—dilute phenol—and allowed to sit for three minutes, until it was certain that the air and the transfer container were safe to release. Even then no one would touch it with ungloved hands, and despite the safety of the glove box, both physicians also wore full protective gear. The director removed the container, cradling it in both hands for the three-meter walk to the worktable.

For experimental purposes, the aerosol can was of the type used for insect spray, the sort one can place on a floor, activate, and leave to fog a whole room. It had been fully disassembled, cleaned out three times with live steam, and put back together—the plastic parts had been a problem, but that had been figured out a few months earlier. It was a crude device. The production versions would be far more elegant. The only danger here was from the liquid nitrogen, a watery-appearing fluid which, if spilled on the gloves, would freeze them immediately and soon thereafter cause them to fragment like black crystal glass. The director stood aside as Moudi poured the cryogenic liquid around the pressure vessel. Only a few cc's were required for the purpose of the experiment. Next, the Ebola-rich liquid was injected into the stainless-steel inner container, and the top screwed in place. When the cap was sealed, the new container was sprayed with disinfectant, then washed with sterile saline. The smaller transfer container went into a disposal bin for incineration.

“There,” the director said. “We are ready.”

Inside the spray can, the Ebola was already deep-frozen, but not for long. The nitrogen would boil off relatively rapidly, and the sample would thaw. In that time, the rest of the experiment would be set up. And in that time, the two physicians would remove their protective clothing and have dinner.

T
HE COLONEL DRIVING
the airplane touched down with consummate skill. It was his first time flying this President, and he had something to prove. The rollout was routine, with the reverse-thrusters slowing the jumbo to auto-speed before the nose came around to the left. Out the windows, Ryan could see hundreds—no, he realized, thousands—of people. All there to see me? he wondered. Damn. In their hands, dangling over the low perimeter fence, were the red, white, and blue colors of the national flag, and when the aircraft finally stopped, those flags came up at one time, as though in a wave. The mobile stairs came to the door, which was opened by the steward—to call her a stewardess would have been incorrect—who'd given him a cigarette.

“Want another one?” she whispered.

Ryan grinned. “Maybe later. And thanks, Sarge.”

“Break a leg, Mr. President—but not on the stairs, okay?” She got a chuckle as reward.

“All ready for the Boss,” Price heard over her radio circuit from the leader of the advance team. With that, she nodded at President Ryan.

“Showtime, Mr. President.”

Ryan took a deep breath and stood in the center of the door, looking out into the bright Midwestern sunlight.

The protocol was that he had to walk down first and alone. Barely had he stood in the opening when a cheer went up, and this from people who scarcely knew a thing about him. His coat buttoned, his hair combed down and sprayed into place despite his objections, Jack Ryan walked down the steps, feeling more like a fool than a President until he got to the bottom. There an Air Force chief master sergeant snapped a salute, which Ryan, so imprinted by his brief months in the Marine Corps, returned smartly—and another cheer went up. He looked around to see Secret Service and other Treasury agents deployed around, almost all of them looking outward. The first person to come close was the governor of the state.