GOLOVKO READ OVER Ambassador Lermonsov's report without sympathy for its subject. Ryan looked "harried and uncomfortable," "somewhat overwhelmed," and "physically tired." Well, that was to be expected. His speech at President Durling's funeral, the diplomatic community agreed—along with the American media, which was straining its capacity for politeness—was not presidential. Well, anyone who knew Ryan knew him to be sentimental, especially when it came to the welfare of children. Golovko could easily forgive that. Russians were much the same. He ought to have done otherwise—Golovko had read over the official, undelivered oration; it was a good one, full of assurances for all listeners—but Ryan had always been what the Americans called a maverick (he'd had to look up the word, discovering that it denoted a wild, untamed horse, which was not far off the mark). That made Ryan both easy and impossible for the Russian to analyze. Ryan was an American, and Americans were and had always been devilishly unpredictable from Golovko's perspective. He'd spent a professional lifetime, first as a field intelligence officer, then as a rapidly climbing staff officer in Moscow, trying to predict what America would do in all manner of situations, and only avoiding failure because he'd never failed to present three possible courses of action in his reports to his superiors.
But at least Ivan Emmetovich Ryan was predictably unpredictable, and Golovko flattered himself to think of Ryan as a friend—perhaps that was going a bit far, but the two men had played the game, most of the time from opposite sides of the field, and for the most part both had played it skillfully and well, Golovko the more experienced professional, Ryan the gifted amateur, blessed by a system more tolerant of mavericks. There was respect between them.
"What are you thinking now, Jack?" Sergey whispered to himself. Right now the new American President was sleeping, of course, fully eight hours behind Moscow, where the sun was only beginning to rise for a short winter day.
Ambassador Lermonsov had not been overly impressed, and Golovko would have to append his own notes to the report lest his government give that evaluation too much credence. Ryan had been far too skilled an enemy to the USSR to be taken lightly under any circumstances. The problem was that Lermonsov had expected Ryan to fit into one mold, and Ivan Emmetovich was not so easily classified. It wasn't so much complexity as a different variety of complexity. Russia didn't have a Ryan—it was not likely that he could have survived in the Soviet environment which still pervaded the Russian Republic, especially in its official bureaucracies. He was easily bored, and his temper, though kept under tight control at most times, was always there. Golovko had seen it bubbling more than once, but only heard of times when it had broken loose. Those stories had percolated out of CIA to ears which reported to Dzerzhinskiy Square. God help him as a head of government.
But that wasn't Golovko's problem.
He had enough of his own. He hadn't entirely relinquished control of the Foreign Intelligence Service—President Grushavoy had little reason to trust the agency which had once been the "Sword and Shield of the Party," and wanted someone he could rely upon to keep an eye on that tethered predator; Golovko, of course—and at the same time, Sergey was the principal foreign-policy adviser to the beleaguered Russian President. Russia's internal problems were so manifest as to deny the President the ability to evaluate foreign problems, and that meant that for all practical purposes the former spy gave advice that his President almost invariably followed. The chief minister—that's what he was, with or without the title—took the burden seriously. Grushavoy had a domestic hydra to deal with—like the mythical beast of old, every head cut off just gave room for another to grow into its place. Golovko had fewer to deal with, but they made up for it in size. And part of him wished for a return to the old KGB. Only a few years before, it would have been child's play. Lift a phone, speak a few words, and the criminals would have been picked up, and that would have been that—not really, but it would have made things more… peaceful. More predictable. More orderly. And his country needed order. But the Second Chief Directorate, the "secret police" division of the agency, was gone, spun off into an independent bureau, its powers diminished, and its public respect—fear bordering on outright terror in the not-so-old days—had evaporated. His country had never been under the degree of control expected by the West, but now it was worse. The Russian Republic teetered on the edge of anarchy as her citizens groped for something called democracy. Anarchy was what had brought Lenin to power, for the Russians craved strong rule, scarcely having known anything else, and while Golovko didn't want that—as a senior KGB officer he knew better than any what damage Marxism-Leninism had done to his nation— he desperately needed an organized country behind him, because the problems within attracted problems without. And so it was that his unofficial post as chief minister for national security was hostage to all manner of difficulties. His were the arms of an injured body, trying to fend off the wolves while it tried to heal.
And so he had little pity for Ryan, whose nation may have taken a severe blow to the head, but was otherwise healthy. However differently it might appear to others, Golovko knew better, and because he did, he would be asking Ryan for help.
China. The Americans had defeated Japan, but the real enemy hadn't been Japan. He had a desk covered with overhead photographs just brought down from a reconnaissance satellite. Too many divisions of the People's Liberation Army were exercising in the field. Chinese nuclear-rocket regiments were still at a somewhat increased alert status. His own country had discarded its ballistic weapons—despite the threat from China, the huge resulting development loans from American and European banks had made the gamble look attractive only a few months before. Besides, his country, like America, still had bombers and cruise missiles which could be armed with atomic warheads, and so the disadvantage was far more theoretical than real. If one assumed that the Chinese subscribed to the same theories, that is. The Chinese were in any case maintaining their armed forces at a high state of readiness, and Russia's Far Eastern group of forces was at a historic low. He consoled himself that with Japan taken out of play, the Chinese would not move. Probably not move, he corrected himself. If the Americans were hard to understand, the Chinese might as easily have been aliens from another planet. It was enough to remember that the Chinese had been as far as the Baltic once before. Like most Russians, Golovko had a deep respect for history. There he was, Sergey thought, lying on the snow, a stick in his hand to fight off the wolf while he tried to heal. His arm was still strong enough, and the stick still long enough to keep the fangs away. But what if there came another wolf? A document to the left of the satellite photographs was the first harbinger of that, like a distant howl on the horizon, the sort to make blood chill. Golovko didn't reflect far enough. Lying down on the ground, the horizon could be surprisingly close.
THE AMAZING THING was that it had taken so long. Protecting an important person against assassination is a complex exercise at best, all the more so when that person went out of his way to create enemies. Ruthlessness helps. The ability to snatch people off the street, to make them disappear, was a deterrent of no small value. The further willingness to take away not just a single person, but an entire family—sometimes an entire extended family—and do the same was more effective still. One selected the people to be "disappeared," an unhappy pseudo-verb that had originated in Argentina, through intelligence. That was a polite term for informers, paid in the coin of the realm or in power, which was better still. They would report conversations for their seditious content, to the point that a mere joke about someone's mustache could entail the sentence of death for its raconteur; and soon enough, because institutions were institutions, informers had quotas to fill, and since the informers were themselves human beings with likes and dislikes, their reports as often as not reflected personal slights or jealousy, because the delegated power of life and death was as corrupting to the small as to the great. Eventually a corrupt system was itself corrupted, and the logic of terror reached its logical conclusion: a humble rabbit, cornered by a fox, has nothing to lose by striking out, and rabbits have teeth, and sometimes the rabbit gets lucky.
Because terror was not enough, there were passive measures as well. The task of assassinating an important man can be made difficult by the simplest of procedures, especially in a despotic state. A few lines of guards to limit approach. Multiple identical cars in which the target might travel—often as many as twenty in this case—denied one the ability to know which car to engage. The life of such a person was busy, and so it was both a convenience and a protective measure to have a double or two, to appear, and give a speech, and take the risk in return for a comfortable life as the staked goat on the public stage.
Next came the selection of the protectors—how did one pick truly reliable fish from a sea of hatred? The obvious answer here was to pick people from one's extended family, then to give them a lifestyle that depended absolutely upon the survival of their leader, and finally to link them so closely with his protection and its necessary ramifications that his death would mean far more than the loss of a highly paid government job. That the guards' lives depended on the guarded one was an effective incentive toward efficiency.
But really it all came down to one thing. A person was invincible only because people thought him to be so, and therefore that person's security was, like all of the important aspects of life, a thing of the mind.
But human motivation is also a thing of the mind, and fear has never been the strongest emotion. Throughout history, people have risked their lives for love, for patriotism, for principle, and for God far more often than fear has made them run away. Upon that fact depends progress.
The colonel had risked his life in so many ways that he could scarcely remember them all, and done that just to be noticed, just to be asked to be a small part in a larger machine, then to rise within it. He'd taken a long time to get this close to the Mustache. Eight years, in fact. In that time he'd tortured and killed men, women, and children from behind blank and pitiless eyes. He'd raped daughters before their fathers' eyes, mothers before their sons'. He'd committed crimes to damn the souls of a hundred men, because there was no other way. He'd drunk liquor in quantities to impress an infidel in order to defile that law of his religion. All of this he had done in God's name, praying for forgiveness, desperately telling himself that it was written that his life should be so, that, no, he didn't enjoy any of it, that the lives he took were sacrifices necessary to some greater plan, that they would have died in any case, and that in this way their deaths by his hand could serve a Holy Cause. He had to believe in all of that lest he go mad—he'd come close enough in any case, until his fixed purpose passed far beyond the meaning of "obsession," and he became that which he did in every possible way, all with one objective, that he would get close enough and trusted enough for a single second's work, to be followed instantly by his own death.
He knew he had become that which he and everyone around him were trained to fear above all things. All the lectures and the drinking sessions with his peers always came back to the same thing. They spoke of their mission and the dangers of that mission. And that always came down to one subject. The lone dedicated assassin, the man willing to throw away his own life like a gambling chip, the patient man who waited his chance, that was the enemy whom every protective officer in the world feared, drunk or sober, on duty or off, even in his dreams. And that was the reason for all the tests required to protect the Mustache. To get here, you had to be damned before God and men, because when you got here, you saw what really was.
The Mustache was what he called his target. Not a man at all, an apostate before Allah who desecrated Islam without a thought, a criminal of such magnitude as to deserve a newly designed room in Perdition. From afar the Mustache looked powerful and invincible, but not up close. His bodyguards knew better because they knew all. They saw the doubts and the fears, the petty cruelties inflicted on the undeserving. He'd seen the Mustache murder for amusement, maybe just to see if his Browning pistol worked today. He'd seen him look out the window of one of his white Mercedes autos, spot a young woman, point, give a command, then use the hapless girl for one night. The lucky ones returned home with money and disgrace. The unlucky floated down the Euphrates with their throats cut, not a few by the Mustache himself, if they'd resisted a little too well in the protection of their virtue. But powerful as he was, clever and cunning as he was, heartlessly cruel as he was, no, he was not invincible. And it was now his time to see Allah.
The Mustache emerged from the building onto the expansive porch, his bodyguards behind him, his right arm outstretched to salute the assembled multitude. The people in the square, hastily assembled, roared their adoration, which fed the Mustache as surely as sunlight fed the flower. And then, from three meters away, the colonel drew his automatic pistol from its leather holster, brought it up in one hand, and fired a single aimed round straight into the back of his target's head. Those in the front of the crowd saw the bullet erupt from their dictator's left eye, and there followed one of those moments in history, the sort when the entire earth seemed to stop its spin, hearts paused, and even the people who'd been screaming their loyalty to a man already dead would remember only silence.
The colonel didn't bother with another shot. He was an expert marksman who practiced with his comrades almost every day, and his open, blank eyes had seen the impact of his round. He didn't turn, and didn't waste time in fruitless efforts at self-defense. There was no point in killing the comrades with whom he'd drunk liquor and raped children. Others would see to that soon enough. He didn't even smile, though it was very funny indeed, wasn't it, that the Mustache had one instant looked at the square full of the people whom he despised for their adoration of himself—then to look Allah in the face and wonder what had happened. That thought had perhaps two seconds to form itself before he felt his body jerk with the impact of the first bullet. There was no pain. He was too focused on his target, now on the flat paving stones of the porch, already a pool of blood draining rapidly from the ruined head. More bullets hit, and it seemed briefly strange that he could feel them yet not the pain of their passage, and in his last seconds he prayed to Allah for forgiveness and understanding, that all his crimes had been committed in the name of God and His Justice. To the last, his ears reported not the sound of the shots, but the lingering cries of the mob, not yet grasping that their leader was dead.
"WHO IS IT?" Ryan checked his clock. Damn, the extra forty minutes of sleep would have been nice.
"Mr. President, my name is Major Canon, Marine Corps," the unknown voice announced.
"That's nice, Major, who are you?" Jack blinked his eyes and forgot to be polite, but probably the officer understood.
"Sir, I'm the watch officer in Signals. We have a report with high confidence that the President of Iraq was assassinated about ten minutes ago."
"Source?" Jack asked at once.
"Kuwait and Saudi both, sir. It was on Iraqi TV live, some sort of event, and we have people over there to monitor their TV. We have a tape being uplinked to us right now. The initial word is a pistol right in the head, at close range." The tone of the officer's voice wasn't exactly regretful. Well, they finally popped that fucker! Of course, you couldn't exactly say that to the President.
And you needed to figure who «they» was.
"Okay, Major, what's the drill?" The answer came quickly enough. Ryan replaced the phone.
"Now what?" Cathy asked. Jack swung his feet out of bed before answering.
"The President of Iraq was just killed."
His wife almost said, Good, but stopped. The death of such a person was not as distant a concept as it had once been. How odd to feel that way about someone who could best serve the world by leaving it.
"Is that important?"
"In about twenty minutes, they'll tell me." Ryan coughed before going on. "What the hell, I used to be competent in those areas. Yeah, it's potentially very important." With that he did what every man in America did in the morning. He headed to the bathroom ahead of his wife. For her part, Cathy lifted the remote and performed the other ordinarily male function of clicking on the bedroom TV, surprised to find that CNN didn't have anything on but reports on which airports were operating behind schedule. Jack had told her a few times just how good the White House Signals Office was.
"Anything?" her husband asked, coming back out.
"Not yet." Then it was her turn.
Jack had to think about where his clothes were, wondering how a President was supposed to dress. He found his robe—moved in from the Naval Observatory after having been moved there from Eighth and I, after having been removed from their home… damn—and opened the bedroom door. An agent in the hall handed him three morning papers. "Thanks."
Cathy saw that and stopped cold in her tracks, belatedly realizing that there had been people just outside her bedroom door all night. Her face turned away, forming the sort of smile generated by finding an unexpected mess in the kitchen.
"Jack?"
"Yes, honey?"
"If I kill you in bed some night, will those people with guns get me right away, or will it wait until morning?"
THE REAL WORK was being done at Fort Meade. The video had traveled from one monitoring station on the Kuwait-Iraq border and another in Saudi Arabia, known as PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK, respectively, the latter set up to record all signals out of Baghdad, and the former watching the southeastern part of the country, around Basra. From both places the information traveled by fiberoptic cable to the National Security Agency's deceptively small building in King Khalid Military City (KKMC) and uplinked to a communications satellite, which then shot it back to NSA headquarters. There in the watch room, ten people summoned by one of the junior watch officers huddled around a TV monitor to catch the tape, while the more senior troops, in a separate glass-walled office, sipped their coffee soberly.
"Yes!" an Air Force sergeant observed on seeing the shot, "Nothin' but net!" Several high fives were exchanged. The senior watch officer, who'd already called White House Signals, nodded his more restrained approval and relayed the original signal along the way, and ordered a digital enhancement, which would take a few minutes—only a few frames were all that important, and they had a massive Cray supercomputer to handle that.
RYAN REMARKED QUIETLY that while Cathy was getting the kids ready for school, and herself ready to operate on people's eyes, here he was in Signals watching the instant replay of a murder. His designated national intelligence officer was still at CIA, finishing his morning intake of information, which he would then regurgitate to the President by way of the morning intelligence briefing. The post of National Security Advisor was currently vacant— one more thing to address today.
"Whoa!" Major Canon breathed.
The President nodded, then reverted to his former life as an intelligence officer. "Okay, tell me what we know."
"Sir, we know that somebody got killed, probably the Iraqi President."
"Double?"
Canon nodded, "Could be, but STORM TRACK is now reporting a lot of VHP signals that started all of a sudden, police and military nets, and the activity is radiating out from Baghdad." The Marine officer pointed to his computer monitor, which displayed real-time «take» from the NSA's many outposts. "Translations will take a little time, but I do traffic analysis for a living. It looks pretty real, sir. I suppose it could be faked, but I wouldn't—there!"
A translation was coming up, identified as emanating from a military command net. He's dead, he's dead, stsnd your regiment to and be prepared to move into the city ime-diately—recipient is Replican Gurds Special Operations regiment at Salmon Pak—reply is: Yes I will yes I will, who is giving the oders, what are my orders—
"Typos and all," Ryan noted.
"Sir, it's hard for our people to translate and type it at the same time. Usually we clean it up before— "
"Relax, Major. I only use three fingers myself. Tell me what you think."
"Sir, I'm only a junior officer here, that's why I draw the midwatch and—"
"If you were stupid, you wouldn't be here."
Canon nodded. "He's deader 'n hell, sir. Iraq needs a new dictator. We have the imagery, we have unusual signal traffic that fits the pattern of an unusual event. That's my estimate." He paused and went on to cover himself, like a good spook. "Unless it's a deliberate exercise to smoke out disloyal people inside his government. That's possible, but unlikely. Not in public like this."
"Kamikaze play?"
"Yes, Mr. President. Something you can only do once, and dangerous the first time."
"Agreed." Ryan walked to the coffee urn—the White House Office of Signals was mainly a military operation, and they made their own. Jack got two cups and came back, handing one to Major Canon, rather to the horror of everyone else in the room. "Fast work. Send a 'thanks' to the guys working this, okay?"
"Aye aye, sir."
"Who do I talk to to get things happening around here?"
"We got the phones right here, Mr. President."
"I want Adler in here ASAP, the DCI… who else? State and CIA desks for Iraq. DIA estimate of the state of their military. Find out if Prince Ali is still in town. If he is, ask him to please stand by. I want to talk to him this morning if possible. I wonder what else…?" Ryan's voice trailed off.
"CENTCOM, sir. He'll have the best military-intelligence troops down at Tampa, most familiar with the area, I mean."
"Get him up here—no, we'll do that by landline, and we give him time to get briefed in."
"We'll get it all going for you, sir." Ryan patted the officer on the shoulder and headed out of the room. The heavy door closed behind him before Major Charles Canon spoke again. "Hey, NCA knows his shit."
"Is it what I heard?" Price asked, coming up the corridor.
"Do you ever sleep?" Then he thought about it. "I want you in on this."
"Why me, sir, I'm not—"
"You're supposed to know about assassinations, right?"
"Yes, Mr. President."
"Then right now you're more valuable to me than a spook."
THE TIMING COULD have been better. Daryaei had been surprised by the information just delivered. Not in the least bit displeased by it—except maybe the timing. He paused for a moment, whispering a prayer first of thanks to Allah, then for the soul of the unknown assassin—assassin? he asked himself. Perhaps «judge» would be a better term for the man, one of many who'd been infiltrated into Iraq ages ago, while the war had still been going on. Most had merely disappeared, probably shot one way or another. The overall mission had been his idea, not nearly dramatic enough for the «professionals» working in his intelligence service. Largely leftovers from the Shah's Savak—trained by the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s— they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They'd proceeded along «conventional» lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah's perverse blessings somehow or other—but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d'etat such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he'd become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.
It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn't know all the things he had done, or all the people he'd dispatched.
THE DIGITIZED RENDITION of the event didn't change much, though now he had a more professional opinion of the options:
"Mr. President, a guy with a Silicon Graphics workstation could fake this," the NIO told him. "You've seen movies, and movie film has much higher resolution than a TV set. You can fake almost anything now."
"Fine, but your job is to tell me what did happen," Ryan pointed out. He'd seen the same few seconds of tape eight times now, and was growing tired of instant replay.
"We can't say with absolute certainty."
Maybe it was the week's sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the stress of the job. Maybe it was the stress of having to face his second crisis. Maybe it was the fact that Ryan was himself still a carded national intelligence officer. "Look, I'm going to say this once: Your job isn't to cover your ass. Your job is to cover mine!"
"I know that, Mr. President. That's why I'm giving you all the information I have…." Ryan didn't have to listen to the rest of the speech. He'd heard it all before, a couple of hundred times. There had even been cases when he'd said similar things himself, but in Jack's case, he'd always hung his hat on one of the options.
"Scott?" Jack asked the acting SecState.
"The son of a bitch is dead as yesterday's fish," Adler replied.
"Disagreement?" President Ryan asked the others in the room. Nobody contradicted the assessment, giving it a sort of blessing. Even the NIO would not disagree with the collective opinion. He'd delivered his assessments, after all. Any mistakes now were the Secretary of State's problem. Perfect.
"Who was the shooter?" Andrea Price asked. The answer came from CIA's Iraq-desk officer.
"Unknown. I have people running tapes of previous appearances just to make sure that he's been around before. Look, from all appearances it was a senior member of his protection detail, with the rank of an army colonel, and—"
"And I damned well know everybody on my detail," Price concluded the statement. "So, whoever it was, he belonged there, and that means whoever pulled this off managed to get somebody all the way inside, close enough to make the hit, and committed enough to pay the price for it. It must have taken years." The continuation of the tape—they'd watched that only five times—showed the man crumble after a cavalcade of pistol shots at point-blank range. That struck Agent Price as odd. You damned well wanted to bag such people alive. Dead men still didn't tell any tales, and executions could always be arranged. Unless he'd been killed by other members of a conspiracy. But how likely was it that more than one assassin had made it that far? Price reflected that she could ask Indira Gandhi that someday. Her whole detail had turned on her one afternoon in a garden. For Price that was the final infamy, killing the person you were sworn to defend. But, then, she hadn't sworn to defend such people as that. One other thing on the tape got her attention: "Did you notice the body language?"
"What do you mean?" Ryan asked.
"The way the gun came up, the way he took the shot, the way he just stood there and watched. Like a golfer, it's called follow-through. He must have waited a long time for the chance. He damned sure thought about it for a long, long time. He must have dreamed about it. He wanted the moment to be perfect. He wanted to see it and enjoy it before he went down." She shook her head slowly. "That was one focused, dedicated killer." Price was actually enjoying herself, chilling though the subject of the meeting was. More than one President had treated the Secret Service agents as if they were furniture, or at best nice pets. It wasn't often that big shots asked their opinion of much more than narrow professional areas, like where a bad guy might be in a particular crowd.
"Keep going," CIA said.
"He must have been from outside, a guy with a totally clean record, no connection at all with anybody who made noise in Baghdad. This wasn't a guy getting even for somebody taking his mother out, okay? It was somebody who worked his way up the system, slow and careful all the way."
"Iran," CIA said. "Best guess, anyway. Religious motivation. No way he'd walk away from the hit, so it had to be somebody who didn't care. That could also mean straight revenge, but Ms. Price is correct: his people were clean in that respect. Anyway, it wasn't the Israelis, wasn't the French. The Brits don't do this anymore. The domestic angle is probably taken out by their vetting procedures. So it wasn't for money. It wasn't for personal or family motives. I think we can discount political ideology. That leaves religion, and that means Iran."
"I can't say I'm familiar with all the intelligence side, but from looking at the tape, yeah," Andrea Price agreed. "It's like he was saying a prayer, the way he killed the guy. He just wanted the moment to be perfect. He didn't care about anything else."
"Somebody else to check that out?" Ryan asked.
"FBI, their Behavioral Sciences people are pretty good at reading minds. We work with them all the time," Price responded.
"Good idea," CIA agreed. "We'll rattle the bushes to ID the shooter, but even if we can get good information, it might not mean anything.". "What about the timing?"
"If we can stipulate that the shooter was there for a while—we have enough tapes of public appearances to determine that—then timing is an issue," CIA thought.
"Oh, that's just great," the President opined. "Scott, now what?"
"Bert?" SecState said to his desk officer. Bert Vasco was the State Department senior desk officer for that country. Rather like a specialist in the trading industry, he concentrated his efforts on learning everything he could about one particular country.
"Mr. President, as we all know, Iraq is a majority Shi'a Muslim country ruled by a Sunni minority through the Ba'ath political party. It has always been a concern that the elimination of our friend over there could topple—"
"Tell me what I don't know," Ryan interrupted.
"Mr. President, we simply do not know the strength of any opposition group that may or may not exist. The current regime has been very effective at cutting the weeds down early. A handful of Iraqi political figures has defected to Iran. None are top-quality people, and none ever had the chance to develop a firm political base. There are two radio stations that broadcast from Iran into Iraq. We know the names of the defectors who use those transmitters to talk to their countrymen. But there's no telling how many people listen and pay attention. The regime isn't exactly popular, we know that. We do not know the strength of the opposition, or what sort of organization exists to make use of an opportunity such as this one."
CIA nodded. "Bert's right. Our friend was awfully good at identifying potential enemies and taking them out of play. We tried to help during and after the Persian Gulf War, but all we really managed to do was get people killed. For sure nobody over there trusts us."
Ryan sipped at his coffee and nodded. He'd made his own recommendations back in 1991, and they hadn't been exercised. Well, he'd still been a junior executive then.
"Do we have any options to play?" the President asked next.
"Honestly, no," Vasco answered.
CIA agreed: "No assets in place. What few people we have operating in that country are tasked to coverage of weapons development: nuclear, chemical, and so forth. Nobody on the political side. We actually have more people in Iran looking at the political side. We can rattle those bushes some, but not in Iraq."
Fabulous, Jack thought, a country may or may not go down in one of the most sensitive areas of the world, and the world's most powerful nation could do nothing more than watch television coverage of the event. So much for the power of the American presidency.
"Arnie?"
"Yes, Mr. President," the chief of staff replied.
"We bumped Mary Pat off the schedule a couple days ago. I want her in today if we can work the schedule."
"I'll see what we can do on that, but—"
"But when something like this happens, the President of the United States is supposed to have more than his dick in his hand." Ryan paused. "Is Iran going to make a move?"