Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (61 page)

There were the usual greetings in God's Holy Name, followed by the serving of tea, and then it was time for business.

“It is a sad thing,” the representative began, “to see the faithful living in such poverty.”

“It has always been so, but today we can practice our religion in freedom. My people are coming back to the Faith. Our mosques have been repaired, and every day they are more full. What are material possessions compared to the Faith?” the local leader responded, with the reasonable voice of a teacher.

“So true that is,” the representative agreed. “And yet Allah wishes for His Faithful to prosper, does He not?” There was general agreement. Every man in the room was an Islamic scholar, and few prefer poverty to comfort.

“Most of all, my people need schools, proper schools,” was the reply. “We need better medical facilities—I grow weary of consoling the parents of a dead child who needed not to have died. We need many things. I do not deny that.”

“All these things are easily provided—if one has money,” the representative pointed out.

“But this has always been a poor land. We have resources, yes, but they have never been properly exploited, and now we have lost the support of the central government—at the very moment when we have the freedom to control our own destiny, while that fool of a president we have gets drunk and abuses women in his palace. If only he were a just man, a faithful man, for then we might bring prosperity to this land,” he observed, more in sadness than in anger.

“That, and a little foreign capital,” one of the more economically literate of his retinue suggested modestly. Islam has never had a rule against commercial activity. Though it is remembered by the West for spreading by the sword, it had gone east on the ships of traders, much as Christianity had spread through the word and example of its own adherents.

“In
Tehran
, it is thought that the time has arrived for the faithful to act as the Prophet commands. We have made the error common to unbelievers, of thinking in terms of national greed rather than the needs of all people. My own teacher, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, has preached of the need to return to the foundations of our Faith,” the representative said, sipping his tea. He spoke as a teacher himself, his voice quiet. Passion he saved for the public arena. In a closed room, sitting on the floor with men as learned as himself, he, too, spoke only with reason's voice. “We have wealth—such wealth as only Allah could have awarded by His own plan. And now we have the moment as well. You men in this room, you kept the Faith, honored the Word in the face of persecution, while others of us grew rich. It is now our obligation to reward you, to welcome you back into the fold, to share our bounty with you. This is what my teacher proposes.”

“It is good to hear such words,” was the cautious reply. That the man was primarily a man of God did not make him naive. He guarded his thoughts with the greatest care - growing up under Communist rule had taught him that—but what he had to be thinking was obvious.

“It is our hope to unite all Islam under one roof, to bring the Faithful together as the Prophet Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, desired. We are different in place, in language, often in color, but in our Faith we are one. We are the elect of Allah.”

“And so?”

“And so, we wish your republic to join our own so that we may be as one. We will bring you schools and medical assistance for your people. We will help you take control of your own land, so that what we give you will be returned to all many-fold, and we shall be as the brothers Allah intends us to be.”

The casual Western observer might have remarked that these men all appeared unsophisticated, due to their less-than-splendid clothing, their simple mode of speech, or merely the fact that they sat on the floor. Such was not exactly the case, and what the visitor from
Iran
proposed was hardly less startling than an embassy from another planet might have been. There were differences between his nation and this one, between his people and theirs. Language and culture, for starters. They had fought wars over the centuries, there had been banditry and brigandage, this despite the most serious strictures in the Holy Koran about armed conflict between Islamic nations. There was, in fact, virtually no common ground between them at all—except for one. That one might have been called accidental, but the truly Faithful didn't believe in accidents. When
Russia
, first under the czars and then under Marxism-Leninism, had conquered their land (a lengthy process rather than an event), they'd stripped so much away. Culture, for one. History and heritage; everything but language, a sop to what the Soviets for generations had uneasily called “the nationalities question.” They'd brought schooling aimed first at destroying everything and then at rebuilding it in a new and godless mode, until the only unifying force left to the people was their Faith, which they'd tried hard to suppress. And even that was good, they all thought now, because the Faith could never be suppressed, and such attempts only made the truly Faithful more determined. It might even—had to have been a plan from Allah Himself, to show the people that their one salvation could only be the Faith. Now they were coming back to it, to the leaders who had kept the flame alight, and now, all in the room reflected, as their visitor knew they must, Allah Himself had washed away their petty differences so that they could unify as their God wished. So much the better to do so with the promise of material prosperity, as Charity was one of the Pillars of Islam, and so long denied by people calling themselves faithful to the Holy Word. And now the
Soviet Union
was dead, and its successor state crippled, and the distant and unloved children of
Moscow
left largely on their own, all of them governed by an echo of what was gone. If it were not a sign from Allah that this opportunity should present itself, then what was it? they all asked themselves.

They only had to do one thing to bring it all about. And he was an unbeliever. And Allah would judge him— through their hands.

“A
ND ALTHOUGH
I can't say that I liked the way you treated my Boston College Eagles last October,” Ryan said, with a smile, to the assembled NCAA football champions from the
University
of
Oklahoma
at
Norman
, “your tradition of excellence is part of the American soul.” Which hadn't been much of a pleasure for the
University
of
Florida
in the last Orange Bowl, in a 35-10 blowout.

And the people applauded again. Jack was so pleased by this that he almost forgot the fact that the speech was not really his. His smile, crooked teeth and all, lit up the arena, and he waved his right hand, this time not tentatively. One could tell the difference on the C-SPAN cameras.

“He's a fast learner,” Ed Kealty said. He was objective about such matters. His public face was one thing, but politicians are realists, at least in the tactical sense.

“He's very well coached, remember,” the former Vice President's chief of staff reminded his boss. “They don't come any better than Arnie. Our initial play got their attention, Ed, and van Damm must have laid the word on Ryan pretty hard and pretty fast.”

He didn't have to add that their “play” had gone nowhere fast after that. The newspapers had written their initial editorials, but then reflected a little and backed off—not editorially, since the media rarely admits to error, but the news stories coming from the White House press room, if not praising Ryan, hadn't used the usual assassination buzzwords: unsure, confused, disorganized, and the like. No White House with Arnie van Damm in it would ever be disorganized, and the whole
Washington
establishment knew it.

Ryan's major Cabinet appointments had shaken things up, but then the officials had all started doing the right things. Adler was another insider who'd worked his way to the top; as a junior official he'd briefed in too many foreign-affairs correspondents over the years for them to turn on him—and he never lost a chance to extol Ryan's expertise on foreign policy. George Winston, outsider and plutocrat though he was, had initiated a “quiet” reexamination of his entire department, and Winston had on his Rolodex the number of every financial editor from Berlin to Tokyo, and was seeking out their views and counsel on his internal study. Most surprising of all was Tony Bretano in the Pentagon. A vociferous outsider for the last ten years, he'd promised the defense-reporting community that he'd clean out the temple or die in the attempt, that the Pentagon was wasteful now as they'd always proclaimed, but that he, with the President's approval, was going to do his damnedest to de-corrupt the acquisition process once and for all. It was a singularly uncharming collection of people,
Washington
outsiders all, but, damn it, they were charming the media in the best possible way, quietly, in the back rooms of power. Most disturbingly of all, the Washington Post, an internal spy had told Kealty earlier in the day, was preparing a multipart story about Ryan's history at CIA, and it would be a canonization piece by no less than Bob Holtzman. Holtzman was the quintessential media insider, and for reasons unknown, he liked Ryan personally—and he had one hell of a source inside somewhere. That was the Trojan horse. If the story ran, and if it were picked up around the nation—both likely, since it would increase the prestige both of Holtzman and the Post—then his media contacts would back away rapidly; the editorials would counsel him to withdraw his claim for the good of the nation and he'd have no leverage at all, and his political career would end in greater disgrace than he'd accepted only a short time before. Historians who might have overlooked his personal indiscretions would instead focus on his overreaching ambition, and instead of seeing it as an irregularity, would then fold it back into his entire career, questioning everything he'd ever done, seeing him in a different and unfavorable light at every step, saying that the good things he'd done were the irregularities. Kealty wasn't so much looking into his political grave as at eternal damnation.

“You left out Callie,” Ed grumped, still watching the speech, listening to the content and paying close attention to the delivery—academic, he thought, fitting for an audience mainly of students, who cheered this Ryan as though he were a football coach or someone of similar irrelevance.

“One of her speeches could make Pee-Wee Herman look presidential,” the chief of staff agreed. And that was the greatest danger of all. To win, Ryan just had to appear presidential, whether he really was or not—and he wasn't, of course, as Kealty kept reminding himself. How could he be?

“I never said he was stupid,” Kealty admitted. He had to be objective. This wasn't a game anymore. It was even more than life.

“It's gotta happen soon, Ed.”

“I know.” But he had to have something bigger to shoot, Kealty told himself. It was a curious metaphor for someone who'd advocated gun control all of his political life.

BLOOMS

T
HE FARM HAD COME WITH A BARN.
It mainly served as a garage now. Ernie Brown had been in the construction business, and had earned a good deal of money, first in the late 1970s as a union plumber, then he'd established his own business in the 1980s to partake in the
California
building boom. Though a pair of divorces had depleted his funds, the selling of the business had been well timed, and he'd taken the money and run, and bought a sizable parcel of land in an area not yet chic enough to have its property values driven up by
Hollywood
types. What had resulted was almost a full “section”—a square mile—of privacy. Actually more than that, because the neighboring ranches were dormant at this time of year, the pastures frozen, and the cattle in pens comfortably eating silage. You could go several days without seeing so much as another car on the road, or so it seemed out in Big Sky Country. School buses, they told themselves, didn't count.

A five-ton flatbed truck also had been conveyed with the ranch—a diesel, conveniently enough—along with a buried two-thousand-gallon fuel tank right by the barn. The family that had sold off the ranch and barn and house to the newcomer from
California
hadn't known that they were giving over title to a bomb factory. The first order of business for Ernie and Pete was to get the old truck started up. That proved to be a forty-minute exercise, because it wasn't just a case of a dead battery, but Pete Holbrook was a competent mechanic, and in due course the truck's engine roared to unmuffled life and showed every sign of remaining with the living. The truck was not licensed, but that wasn't terribly unusual in this area of huge holdings, and their drive of forty miles north to the farm-supplies store was untroubled.

It could hardly have been a better portent of spring for the store. Planting season was coming (there were a lot of wheat farmers around), and here was the first major customer for the virtual mountain of fertilizer just trucked in from the distributor's warehouse in
Helena
. The men bought four tons, not an unusual quantity, which a propane-powered forklift deposited on the flatbed of the truck, and they paid cash for it, then drove off with a handshake and a smile.

“This is going to be hard work,” Holbrook observed, halfway back.

“That's right, and we're going to do it all ourselves.” Brown turned. “Or do you want to bring in somebody who might be an informer?”

“I hear you, Ernie,” Pete replied, as a state police car went the other way. The cop didn't even turn his head, chilling though the moment was for the two Mountain Men. “How much more?”

Brown had done the calculations a dozen times. “One more truckload. It's a shame this stuff is so bulky.” They'd make the second purchase tomorrow, at a store thirty miles southwest of the ranch. This evening would be busy enough, unloading all this crap inside the barn. A good workout. Why didn't the goddamn farm have a forklift? Holbrook wondered. At least when they refilled the fuel tank, the local oil company would do it. That was some consolation.

I
T WAS COLD
on the Chinese coast, and that made things easier for the satellites to see a series of thermal blooms at two naval bases. Actually, the “Chinese navy” was the naval service of the People's Liberation Army, so gross a disregard for tradition that Western navies ignored the correct name in favor of custom. The imagery was recorded and cross-linked to the
National
Military
Command
Center
in the Pentagon, where the senior watch officer turned to his intelligence specialist. “Do the Chinese have an exercise laid on?” “Not that we know of.” The photos showed that twelve ships, all of them alongside, had their engines running, instead of the normal procedure by which they drew electrical power from the dock. A closer look at the photo showed a half-dozen tugboats moving around the harbor, as well. The Intel specialist for this watch was Army. He called a naval officer over.

“Sailing some ships,” was the obvious analysis.

“Not just doing an engineering exam or something?”

“They wouldn't need tugboats for that. When's the next pass?” the Navy commander asked, meaning a satellite pass, checking the time reference on the photo. It was thirty minutes old.

“Fifty minutes.”

“Then it ought to show three or maybe four ships standing out to sea at both bases. That'll make it certain. For right now, two chances out of three, they're laying on a major exercise.” He paused. “Any political hoo-rah going on?”

The senior watch officer shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Then it's a FleetEx. Maybe somebody decided to check out their readiness.” They would learn more with a press release from
Beijing
, but that was thirty minutes into a future they couldn't see, paid though they were to do so.

T
HE DIRECTOR WAS
a religious man, as was to be expected, what with the sensitivity of his post. Gifted physician that he had been, and scientist-virologist that he still was, he lived in a country where political reliability was measured by devotion to the Shi'a branch of Islam, and in this there was no doubt. His prayers were always on time, and he scheduled his laboratory work around them. He required the same of his people, for such was his devotion that he went beyond the teachings of Islam without even knowing it, bending such rules as stood in his way as though they were made of rubber, and at the same time telling himself that, no, he never violated the Prophet's Holy Word, or Allah's Will. How could he be doing that? He was helping to bring the world back to the Faith.

The prisoners, the experimental subjects, were all condemned men in one way or another. Even the thieves, lesser criminals, had four times violated the Holy Koran, and they had probably committed other crimes as well, perhaps—probably, he told himself—those worthy of death. Every day they were informed of the time for prayer, and though they knelt and bowed and mouthed the prayers, you could tell by watching them on the TV monitor that they were merely going through the ritual, not truly praying to Allah in the manner prescribed. That made them all apostates—and apostasy was a capital crime in their country—even though only one had been convicted of that crime.

That one was of the Baha'i religion, a minority almost stamped out, a belief structure that had evolved after Islam. Christians and Jews were at least People of the Book; however misguided their religions, at least they acknowledged the same God of the Universe, of whom Mohammed was the final messenger. The Baha'i had come later, inventing something both new and false that relegated them to the status of pagans, denying the True Faith, and earning the wrath of their government. It was fitting that this man was the first to show that the experiment was successful.

It was remarkable that the prisoners were so brain-dulled by their conditions that the onset of flu symptoms caused no special reaction at first. The medical corpsmen went in, as always in full protective gear, to take blood samples, and one additional benefit of the prisoners' condition was that they were far too cowed to make trouble. All of them had been in prison for some time, subject to a deficient diet which had its own effects on their energy levels, plus a discipline regime so harsh that they didn't dare resist. Even the condemned prisoners who knew they faced death had no wish to accelerate the process. All meekly submitted to having their blood drawn by exquisitely careful medics. The test tubes were carefully labeled in accordance with the numbers on the beds, and the medics withdrew.

In the lab, it was Patient Three's blood which went under the microscope first. The antibody test was prone to give some false positive readings, and this was too important to risk error. So slides were prepared and placed under the electron microscopes, first set at magnification 20,000 for area search. The fine adjustments for the instruments were handled by exquisitely machined gears, as the slide was moved left and right, up and down, until. . .

“Ah,” the director said. He centered the target in the viewing field and increased the magnification to 112,000 . . . and there it was, projected onto the computer monitor in black-and-white display. His culture knew much of shepherding, and the aphorism “Shepherd's Crook” seemed to him a perfect description. Centered was the RNA strand, thin and curved at the bottom, with the protein loops at the top. These were the key to the action of the virus, or so everyone thought. Their precise function was not understood, and that also pleased the director's identity as a bio-war technician. “Moudi,” he called.

“Yes, I see it,” the younger doctor said, with a slow nod, as he walked to that side of the room. Ebola Zaire Mayinga was in the apostate's blood. He'd just run the antibody test as well, and watched the tiny sample change color. This one was not a false positive.

“Airborne transmission is confirmed.”

“Agreed.” Moudi's face didn't change. He was not surprised.

“We will wait another day—no, two days for the second phase. And then we will know.” For now, he had a report to make.

T
HE ANNOUNCEMENT IN
Beijing caught the American embassy by surprise. It was couched in routine terms. The Chinese navy would be holding a major exercise in the
Taiwan Strait
. There would be some live firings of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles on dates yet unspecified (weather considerations had yet to be resolved, the release said). The People's Republic of
China
government was issuing Notice to Airmen and Notice to Mariner alerts, so that both airlines and shipping companies would be able to adjust their routings accordingly. Other than that, the release said nothing at all, and that was somewhat disturbing to the deputy chief of mission in
Beijing
. The DCM immediately conferred with his military attaches and the CIA chief of station, none of whom had any insights to offer, except that the release had nothing at all to say about the Republic of China government on
Taiwan
. On the one hand, that was good news—there was no complaint about the continued political independence of what
Beijing
deemed a rebel province. On the other hand, it was bad news—the release did not say that this was a routine exercise and not intended to disturb anyone. The notice was just that, with no explanation at all attached to it. The information was dispatched to the NMCC in the Pentagon, to the State Department, and to CIA headquarters at
Langley
.

D
ARYAEI HAD TO
search his memory for the face that went with the name, and the face he remembered was the wrong one, really, for it was that of a boy from
Qom
, and the message came from a grown man half a world away. Raman . . . oh, yes, Aref Raman, what a bright lad he'd been. His father had been a dealer in automobiles, Mercedes cars, and had sold them in
Tehran
to the powerful, a man whose faith had wavered. But his son's had not. His son had not even blinked on learning of the death of his parents, killed by accident, really, at the hands of the Shah's army, for having been on the wrong street at the wrong time, caught up in a civil disturbance in which they'd had no part at all. Together, he and his teacher had prayed for them. Dead by the hands of those they trusted was the lesson from that event, but the lesson had not been a necessary one. Raman had already been a lad of deep faith, offended by the fact that his elder sister had taken up with an American officer, and so disgraced her family and his own name. She, too, had disappeared in the revolution, condemned by an Islamic court for adultery, which left only the son. They could have used him in many ways, but the chosen one had been Daryaei's own doing. Linked up with two elderly people, the new “family” had fled the country with the Raman family wealth and gone first to
Europe
and then almost immediately thereafter to
America
. There they had done nothing more than live quietly; Daryaei imagined they were dead by now. The son, selected for the mission because of his early mastery of English, had continued his education and entered government service, performing his duties with all the excellence he'd displayed in the revolution's earliest phases, during which he'd killed two senior officers in the Shah's air force while they drank whiskey in a hotel bar.

Since then, he'd done as he'd been told. Nothing. Blend in. Disappear. Remember your mission, but do nothing. It was gratifying for the Ayatollah that he'd judged the boy well, for now he knew from the brief message that the mission was almost fully accomplished.

The word assassin is itself derived from hashshash, the Arabic word for the narcotic hashish, the tool once used by members of the Nizari subsect of Islam to give themselves a drug-induced vision of
Paradise
prior to setting out on missions of murder. In fact, they'd been heretics to Daryaei's way of thinking—and the use of drugs was an abomination. They'd been weak-minded but effective servants of a series of master terrorists such as Hasan and Rashid ad-Din, and, for a time that stretched between two centuries, had served the political balance of power in a region stretching from
Syria
to
Persia
. But there was a brilliance in the concept which had fascinated the cleric since learning of it as a boy. To get one faithful agent inside the enemy's camp. It was the task of years, and for that reason a task of faith. Where the Nizaris had failed was that they were heretics, separate from the True Faith, able to recruit a few extremists into their cult, but not the multitude, and so they served a single man and not Allah, and so they needed drugs to fortify themselves, as an unbeliever did with liquor. A brilliant idea flawed. But a brilliant idea nonetheless. Daryaei had merely perfected it, and so now he had a man close, something he'd hoped for but not known. Better yet, he had a man close and waiting for instructions, at the far end of an unknown message path that had never been used, all composed of people who'd gone abroad no more recently than fifteen years ago, an altogether better state of affairs than that which he'd set in place in Iraq, for in America people who might be scrutinized were either arrested or cleared, or if they were watched, only for a little while, until the watchers became bored and went on to other tasks. In some countries when that happened, the watchers became bored, picked up those whom they watched, and frequently killed them. So it was just timing before Raman completed his mission, and after all these years, he still used his head, un-addled by drugs and trained by the Great Satan himself. The news was too sublime even to occasion a smile. Then the phone rang. The private one. “Yes?” “I have good news,” the director said, “from the Monkey Farm.”