Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (77 page)

They'd been overly pessimistic on many things, and one of them was the quantity of virus that would be needed. In the culturing tank, the Ebola had consumed the monkey kidneys and blood with a gusto whose results chilled even the director. Though it happened fundamentally at the molecular level, overall it was like seeing ants going after dead fruit, seeming to come from nowhere and then covering it, turning it black with their bodies. So it was with the Ebola virus; even though it was too small to see, there were literally trillions of them eating and displacing the tissue offered them as food. What had been one color was now another, and you didn't have to be a physician to know that the contents of the chamber were hateful beyond words. It chilled his blood merely to look at the dreadful “soup.” There were liters of it now, and they were growing more, using human blood taken from the
Tehran
central blood bank.

The director was examining a sample under the electron microscope, comparing it with another. As Moudi approached, he could see the date-stamp labels on each. One was from Jean Baptiste. The other was newly arrived from a “patient” in the second group of nine.

“They're identical, Moudi,” he said, turning when the younger man approached.

This was not as much to be expected as one might think. One of the problems with viruses was that, since they were scarcely alive at all, they were actually ill suited for proper reproduction. The RNA strand lacked an “editing function” to ensure that each generation would fully follow in the footsteps of its predecessor. It was a serious adaptive weakness of Ebola, and many other similar organisms. Sooner or later each Ebola outbreak petered out, and this was one of the reasons. The virus itself, maladapted to the human host, became less virulent. And that was what made it the ideal biological weapon. It would kill. It would spread. Then it would die before doing too much of the latter. How much it did of the former was a function of the initial distribution. It was both horribly lethal and also self-limiting.

“So, we have at least three generations of stability,” Moudi observed.

“And by extrapolation, probably seven to nine.” The project director, whatever his perversion of medical science, was a conservative on technical issues. Moudi would have said nine to eleven. Better that the director was right, he admitted to himself, turning away.

On a table at the far wall were twenty cans. Similar to the ones used to infect the first collection of criminals, but slightly modified, they were labeled as economy-size cans of a popular European shaving cream. (The company was actually American-owned, which amused everyone associated with the project.) They'd been exactly what they said, and been bought singly in twelve different cities in five different countries, as the lot numbers inked on their curving bottoms showed. Here in the Monkey House they'd been emptied and carefully disassembled for modification. Each would contain a half liter of the thinned-out “soup,” plus a neutral-gas propellant (nitrogen, which would not involve any chemical reaction with the “soup” and would not support combustion) and a small quantity of coolant. Another part of the team had already tested the delivery system. There would be no degradation of the Ebola at all for more than nine hours. After that, with the loss of the coolant, the virus particles would start to die in a linear function. At 9 + 8 hours, less than ten percent of the particles would be dead—but those, Moudi told himself, were the weak ones anyway, and probably the particles that would be unlikely to cause illness. At 9 + 16 hours, fifteen percent would be dead. Thereafter, experiments had revealed, every eight hours—for some reason the numbers seemed to track with thirds of days—an additional five percent would die. And so . . .

It was simple enough. The travelers would all fly out of
Tehran
. Flight time to
London
, seven hours. Flight time to
Paris
, thirty minutes less. Flight time to
Frankfurt
, less still. Much of that factor was the time of day, Moudi had learned. In the three cities there would be easy connecting flights. Baggage would not be checked because the travelers would be moving on to another country, and therefore customs inspection wasn't necessary, and therefore no one would notice the cans of unusually cold shaving cream. About the time the coolant ran out, the travelers would be in their first-class seats, climbing to cruising altitude to their cities of final destination, and there again international air travel worked out nicely. There were direct flights from
Europe
to
New York
, to
Washington
, to
Boston
, to
Philadelphia
, to
Chicago
, to
San Francisco
, to
Los Angeles
, to
Atlanta
, to
Dallas
, to
Orlando
, and regular connecting flights to
Las Vegas
, and
Atlantic City
— in fact to all of
America
's convention cities. The travelers would all fly first class, the quicker to claim their luggage and get through customs. They would have good hotel reservations, and return tickets that took them out from different airports. From time-zero to delivery no more than twenty-four hours would pass, and therefore eighty percent of the Ebola released would be active. After that, it was all random, in Allah's hands—no! Moudi shook his head. He was not the director. He would not apply this act to the will of his God. Whatever it might be, however necessary it was to his country—and a new one at that—he would not defile his religious beliefs by saying or even thinking that.

Simple enough? It had been simple once, but then—it was a legacy of sorts. Sister Jean Baptiste, her body long since incinerated . . . instead of leaving children behind as a woman's body ought, disease was its only physical legacy, and that was an act of such malignance that surely Allah must be offended. But she'd left something else, too, a real legacy. Moudi had once hated all Westerners as unbelievers. In school he'd learned of the Crusades, and how those supposed soldiers of the prophet Jesus had slaughtered Muslims, as Hitler had later slaughtered Jews, and from that he'd taken the lesson that all Westerners and all Christians were something less than the people of his own Faith, and it was easy to hate such people, easy to write them off as irrelevancies in a world of virtue and belief. But that one woman. What was the West and what was Christianity? The criminals of the eleventh century, or a virtuous woman of the twentieth who denied every human wish she might have had—and for what? To serve the sick, to teach her faith. Always humble, always respectful. She'd never broken her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—Moudi was sure of that—and though those vows and those beliefs might have been false, they hadn't been that false. He'd learned from her the same thing that the Prophet had learned. There was but one God. There was but one Book. She had served both with a pure heart, however misguided her religious beliefs might have been.

Not just Sister Jean Baptiste
, he reminded himself. Sister Maria Magdalena, too. And she had been murdered— and why? Loyalty to her faith, loyalty to her vows, loyalty to her friend, not one of which the Holy Koran found the least bit objectionable.

It would have been so much easier for him had he only worked with black Africans. Their religious beliefs were things the Koran abhorred, since many of them were still pagans in deed if not in word, ignorant of the One God, and he could easily have looked down on them, and not worried at all about Christians—but he had met Jean Baptiste and Maria Magdalena. Why? Why had that happened?

Unfortunately for him it was too late to ask such questions. What was past was past. Moudi walked to the far corner of the room and got himself some coffee. He'd been awake for more than a day, and with fatigue came doubts, and he hoped the drink would chase them away until sleep could come, and with it rest, and with that, perhaps, peace.

“Y
OU HAVE TO
be kidding!” Arnie snarled into the phone.

Tom Donner's voice was as apologetic as it could be. “Maybe it was the metal detectors on the way out. The tape—I mean, it's damaged. You can still see it and hear it just fine, but there's a little noise on the audio track. Not broadcast quality. The whole hour's worth is shot. We can't use it.”

“So?” van Damm demanded.

“So, we have a problem, Arnie. The segment is supposed to run at nine.”

“So, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Is Ryan up to redoing it live? We'll get better share that way,” the anchorman offered.

The President's chief of staff almost said something else. If this had been sweeps week—during which the networks did their best to inflate their audiences in order to get additional commercial fees—he might have accused Donner of having done this deliberately. No, that was a line even he couldn't cross. Dealing with the press on this level was rather like being Clyde Beatty in center ring, armed with a bottomless chair and a blank-loaded revolver, holding great jungle cats at bay for the audience, having the upper hand at all times, but knowing that the cats needed to get lucky only once. Instead he just offered silence, forcing Donner to make the next move.

“Look, Arnie, it'll be the same agenda. How often do we give the President a chance to rehearse his lines? And he did fine this morning. John thinks so, too.”

“You can't retape?” van Damm asked.

“Arnie, I go on the air in forty minutes, and I'm wrapped till seven-thirty. That gives me thirty minutes to scoot down to the White House, set up and shoot, and get the tape back here, all before nine? You want to lend me one of his helicopters?” He paused. “This way—tell you what. I will say on the air that we goofed on the tape, and that the Boss graciously agreed to go live with us. If that isn't a network blow job, I don't know what is.”

Arnold van Damm's alarm lights were all flashing red. The good news was that Jack had handled himself pretty well. Not perfect, but pretty well, especially on the sincerity. Even the controversial stuff, he'd come across as believing what he'd said. Ryan took coaching well, and he learned fast. He hadn't looked as relaxed as he should, but that was okay. Ryan wasn't a politician—he'd said that two or three times—and therefore looking a little tense was all right. Focus groups in seven different cities all said that they liked Jack because he acted like one of them. Ryan didn't know that Arnie and the political staff were doing that. That little program was as secret as a C1A operation, but Arnie justified it to himself as a reality check on how the President could best project his agenda and his image in order to govern effectively—and no President had ever known all the things done in his name. So, yes, Ryan did come across as presidential—not in the normal way, but in his own way, and that, the focus groups all agreed, was good, too. And going live, yes, that would really look good, and it would get a lot more people to flip the channel to NBC, and Arnie wanted the people to get to know Ryan better.

“Okay, Tom, a tentative yes. But I do have to ask him.”

“Fast, please,” Donner replied. “If he cancels out, then we have to jerk around the whole network schedule for tonight, and that could mean my ass, okay?”

“Back to you in five,” van Damm promised. He killed the button on the phone and hustled out of the room, leaving the receiver on his desk pad.

“On the way to see the Boss,” he told the Secret Service agents in the east-west corridor. His stride told them to jump out of his way even before they saw his eyes.

“Yes?” Ryan said. It wasn't often his door opened without warning.

“We have to redo the interview,” Arnie said somewhat breathlessly.

Jack shook his head in surprise. “Why? Didn't I have my fly zipped?”

“Mary always checks that. The tape got screwed up, and there isn't time to reshoot. So Donner asked me to ask you if you would do it live at
nine o'clock
. Same questions and everything—no, no,” Arnie said, thinking fast. “What about we get your wife down here, too?”

“Cathy won't like that. Why?” the President asked.

“Really, all she has to do is sit there and smile. It will look good for the people out there. Jack, she has to act like the First Lady occasionally. This should be an easy one. Maybe we can even bring the kids in toward the end—”

“No. My kids stay out of the public eye, period. Cathy and I have talked about that.”

“But—”

“No, Arnie, no now, no tomorrow, no in'the future, no.” Ryan's voice was as final as a death sentence.

The chief of staff figured he couldn't talk Ryan into everything. This would take a little time, but he'd come around eventually. You couldn't be one of the people without letting them meet your kids, but now wasn't the time to press on that one. “Will you ask Cathy?”

Ryan sighed and nodded. “Okay.”

“Right, okay, I'll tell Donner that she might be on, but we're not sure yet because of her medical obligations. It'll give him something to think about. It will also take some of the heat off you. That's the First Lady's main job, remember.”

“You want to tell her that, Arnie? Remember, she's a surgeon, good with knives.”

Van Damm laughed. “I'll tell you what she is. She's a hell of a lady, and she's tougher than either one of us. Ask nicely,” he advised.

“Yeah.” Right before dinner, Jack thought.

“O
KAY, HE
'
LL DO
it. But we want to ask his wife to join us, too.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Arnie asked. “Not sure yet. She isn't back from work,” he added, and that was a line that made the reporters smile.

“Okay, Arnie, thanks, I owe you one.” Donner turned off the speakerphone.

“You realize that you just lied to the President of the
United States
,” John Plumber observed pensively. Plumber was an older pro than Donner. He wasn't of the Edward R. Murrow generation—quite. Pushing seventy now, he'd been a teenager in World War II, but had gone to Korea as a young reporter, and been foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Bonn, and finally Moscow. Plumber had been ejected from
Moscow
, and his somewhat left political stance had nonetheless never turned into sympathy with the
Soviet Union
. But more than that, though he was not of Murrow's generation, he had grown up listening to the immortal CBS correspondent, and he could still close his eyes and hear the gravelly voice which had somehow carried a measure of authority usually associated with the clergy. Maybe it was because Ed had started on the radio, when one's voice was the currency of the profession. He'd certainly known language better than most of his own time, and infinitely better than the semi-literate reporters and newswriters of the current generation. Plumber was something of a scholar in his own right, a devoted student of Elizabethan literature, and he tried to draft his copy and his spontaneous comments with an elegance in keeping with that of the teacher he'd only watched and heard, but never actually met. More than anything else, people had listened to Ed Murrow because of his honor, John Plumber reminded himself. He'd been as tough as any of the later generation of “investigative journalists” that the schools turned out now, but you always knew that Ed Murrow was fair. And you knew that he didn't break the rules. Plumber was of the generation that believed that his profession was supposed to have rules, one of which was you never told a lie. You could bend, warp, and twist the truth in order to get information out of someone—that was different—but you never told someone something that was deliberately and definitely false. That troubled John Plumber. Ed would never have done that. Not a chance.