RYAN AWOKE AT DAWN, wondering why. The quiet. Almost like his home on the Bay. He strained to listen for traffic or other sounds, but there were none. Moving out of the bed was difficult. Cathy had decided to have Katie in with them, and there she was in her pink sleeper, looking angelic as toddlers did, still babies at that age whatever others might say. He had to smile,
then made his way to the bathroom. Casual clothes had been set out in the dressing room, and he put them on, with a pair of sneaks and a sweater, to head outside. The air was brisk, with traces of frost on the boxwoods, and the sky clear. Not bad. Robby was right. This wasn't a bad place to come to. It put a distance between himself and other things, and he needed that right now. "Morning, sir." It was Captain Overton.
"Not bad duty, is it?"
The young officer nodded. "We do the security. The Navy does the petunias. It's a fair division of labor, Mr. President. Even the Secret Service guys can sleep in here, sir."
Ryan looked around and saw why. There were two armed Marines immediately around the cabin, and three more within fifty yards. And those were just the ones he could see. "Get you anything, Mr. President?"
"Coffee'll do for a start."
"Follow me, sir."
"Attention on deck!" a sailor shouted a few seconds later, when Ryan went into the cook shed—or whatever they called it here.
"As you were," the President told them. "I thought this was the Presidential Retreat, not boot camp." He picked a seat at the table the staff used. Coffee appeared as if by magic. Then more magic happened.
"Good morning, Mr. President."
"Hi, Andrea. When did you get in?"
"Around two, helicopter," she explained.
"Get any sleep?"
"About four hours."
Ryan took a sip. Navy coffee was still Navy coffee. "And?"
"The investigation is under way. The team's put together. Everybody's got a seat at the table." She handed over a folder, which Ryan would get to read before his morning paper. Anne Arundel County and Maryland State Police, Secret Service, FBI, ATF, and all the intelligence agencies were working the case. They were running IDs on the terrorists, but the two whose documents had so far been checked turned out to be non-persons. Their papers were false, probably of European origin. Big surprise. Any competent European criminal, much less a terrorist organization, could procure phony passports. He looked up.
"What about the agents we lost?"
A sigh, a shrug. "They all have families."
"Let's get it set up so that I can meet with them… should it be all at once or one at a time?"
"Your choice, sir," Price told him.
"No, it has to be what's best for them. They're your people, Andrea. You work that out for me, okay? I owe them my daughter's life, and I have to do what's right for them," POTUS said soberly, remembering why he was in this quiet and peaceful place. "And I presume that they will be properly looked after. Get me the details on that, insurance, pensions, and stuff, okay? I want to look that over."
"Yes, sir."
"Do we know anything important yet?"
"No, not really. The terrorists who've been posted, their dental work definitely isn't American, that's it for now."
Ryan flipped through the papers he had. One preliminary conclusion leaped off the page at him: "Eleven years?"
"Yes, sir."
"So this is a major operation for somebody—a country."
"That's a real possibility."
"Who else would have the resources?" he asked, and Price reminded herself that he'd been an intelligence officer for a long time.
Agent Raman came in and took his seat. He'd heard that observation, and he and Price traded a look and a nod.
The wall phone rang. Captain Overton walked over to get it. "Yes?" He listened for a few minutes, then turned. "Mr. President, this is Mrs. Foley at CIA."
The President went to take the call. "Yeah, Mary Pat."
"Sir, we had a call a few minutes ago from Moscow. Our friend Golovko asks if he can be of any assistance. I recommend a 'yes' on that."
"Agreed. Anything else?"
"Avi ben Jakob wants to talk to you later today. Ears-only," the DDO told him.
"About an hour, let me get woke up first."
"Yes, sir…. Jack?"
"Yeah, MP?"
"Thank God about Katie," she said, mother to father, then going on as mother alone: "If we can get a line on this, we will."
"I KNOW YOU'RE our best," Mrs. Foley heard.
"We're doing okay right now."
"Good. Ed and I will be in all day." She hung up.
"How's he sound?" Clark asked.
"He'll make it, John." Chavez rubbed his hand over the night's growth of beard. The three of them plus quite a few others had spent the night reviewing everything CIA had on terrorist groups. "We have to do something about this, guys. This is an act of war." His voice was devoid of accent now, as it tended to be when he got serious enough to call on his education instead of his L.A. origins.
"We don't know much. Hell," the DDO said, "we don't know anything yet."
"Shame he couldn't have taken one alive." This observation, to the surprise of the two others, came from Clark.
"He probably didn't have much of a chance to snap the cuffs on the guy," Ding replied.
"True." Clark lifted the set of crime-scene photos that had been couriered over from the FBI just after midnight. He'd worked the Middle East, and it had been hoped that he might have recognized a face, but he hadn't. Mainly he'd learned that whichever FBI puke had been inside, the gent could shoot as well as he ever had. Lucky man, to have been there, to have had that chance, and to take it.
"Somebody's taking one hell of a big chance," John said.
"That's a fact," Mary Pat agreed automatically, but then they all wondered about it.
The question was not how big the chance was, but rather how big the chance was perceived to be by whoever had tossed the dice. The nine terrorists had all been throwaways, as surely marked for death as the Hezbol-lah fanatics who'd gone strolling down Israeli streets in clothing made by DuPont—that was the CIA joke about it, though in fact the plastic explosives had probably come from the Skoda Works in the former Czechoslovakia. "Not-so-smart bombs" was the other in-house sobriquet. Had they really believed that they could pull it off? The problem with some of the fanatics was that they didn't weigh things very well… maybe they hadn't even cared.
That was also the problem of those who sent them. This mission had been different, after all. Ordinarily, terrorists boasted widely of what they did, however odious the act, and at CIA and elsewhere they'd waited for fifteen hours for the press release. But it never came, and if it hadn't by now, then it never would. If they didn't make the release, then they didn't want anyone to know. But that was an illusion. Terrorists always proclaimed their acts, but they didn't always appreciate that police agencies could figure things out anyway.
Nation-states knew better, or were supposed to. Okay, fine, the dealers hadn't had anything that could identify their point of origin—or so some might think. But Mary Pat was under no such illusions. The FBI was better than good, good enough that the Secret Service was letting the Bureau handle all of the forensics. And so it was likely that whoever had initiated the mission might actually expect that the story would eventually unravel. Knowing that— probably—they'd gone ahead with it anyway. If this line of speculation were true, then—
"Part of something else?" Clark asked. "Not a standalone. Something else, too."
"Maybe," Mary Pat observed.
"If it is, it's big," Chavez went on for them. "Maybe that's why the Russians called in to us."
"So big… so big that even if we figure it out, it won't matter when we do."
"That's pretty big, Mary Pat," Clark said quietly. "What could it be…?"
"Something permanent, something we can't change after it's done," Domingo offered. His time at George Mason University hadn't been wasted.
Mrs. Foley wished her husband were in on this, but Ed was meeting with Murray right now.
SATURDAYS IN THE spring are often days of dull but hopeful routine, but in just over two hundred homes little was done. Gardens were not planted. Cars were not washed. Garage sales were not attended. Paint cans went unopened. That wasn't counting government employees or news personnel working the big story of the week. Mainly the people suffering from the flu were men. Thirty of them were in hotel rooms. Several even tried to work, attending their trade shows in the new cities. Wiping their faces, blowing their noses, and wishing the aspirin or Tylenol would kick in. Of the last group, most went back to the hotel rooms to relax—no sense in getting the customers sick, was there? In not a single case did anyone seek medical attention. There was the usual winter/spring flu bug circulating around, and everybody got it sooner or later. They weren't that sick, after all, were they?
NEWS COVERAGE OF the incident at Giant Steps was entirely predictable, starting with camera shots taken from about fifty yards away, and the same words repeated by all of the correspondents, followed by the same words delivered by «experts» in terrorism and/or other fields. One of the networks took the viewer all the way back to Abraham Lincoln for no other reason than that it was otherwise a very slow news day. All of the coverage pointed to the Middle East, though the investigating agencies had declined any comment at all on the event so far, except to cite an FBI agent's heroic interference and the spirited battle put up by the Secret Service bodyguards of little Katie Ryan. Words like "heroic," "dedicated," and «determined» were bandied about with great frequency, leading to the "dramatic conclusion."
Something very simple had gone wrong, Badrayn was certain, though he wouldn't know for sure until his colleague got back to Tehran from London, via Brussels and Vienna, on several different sets of travel documents.
"The President and his family are at the Presidential Retreat at Camp David," the reporter concluded, "to recover from the shock of this dreadful event just north of peaceful Annapolis, Maryland. This is…"
"Retreat?" Daryaei asked.
"It means many things in English, first among them is to run away," Badrayn answered, mainly because he was sure that's what his employer would like to hear.
"If he thinks he can run away from me, he is mistaken," the cleric observed in dark amusement, the spirit of the moment getting the better of his discretion.
Badrayn didn't react to the revelation. It was easy at the instant of his realization, since he was looking at the TV and not at his host, but things then became more clear. There was not all that much risk at all, was there? Mah-moud Ilaji had a way to kill this man, perhaps whenever he wished to do so, and it was all being orchestrated. Could he really do it? But, of course, he already had.
IVIS MADE LIFE hard on the OpFor. Not all that hard! Colonel Hamm and the Blackhorse had won this one, but what only a year before would have been a wipeout of cosmic proportions—Fort Irwin was in California, and some linguistic peculiarities were inevitable—had been a narrow victory. War was about information. It was always the lesson of the National Training Center: Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. The IVIS system, operated by halfway competent people, shot the information out to everyone so fast that the soldiers were leaning in the right direction even before the orders came down. That had nearly negated a maneuver on the OpFor's part, which would have been worthy of Erwin Rommel on his best day, and as he watched the fast-play of the exercise on the big screen in the Star Wars Room, Hamm saw just how close it had been. If one of those Blue Force tank companies had moved just five minutes faster, he would have lost this one, too. The NTC would surely lose its effectiveness if the Good Guys won regularly.
"That was a beautiful move, Hamm," the colonel of the Carolina Guard admitted, reaching in his pocket for a cigar and handing it over. "But we'll whip your ass tomorrow."
Ordinarily, he would have smiled and said, Sure you will. But the cracker son of a bitch just might pull it off, and that would take a lot of the fun out of Hamm's life. The colonel of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment would now have to come up with ways of spoofing IVIS. It was something he'd thought about, and had been the subject of a few discussions over beers with his operations officer, but so far they had only agreed that it was no small feat, probably involving dummy vehicles… like Rommel had used. He'd have to get funding for those. He walked outside to smoke his cigar. It had been honorably won. He found the Guard colonel there, too.
"For Guardsmen, you're pretty damned good," Hamm had to admit. He'd never said such a thing to a Guard formation before. He rarely said it to anyone at all. Except for one deployment error, the Blue Force plan had been a thing of beauty.
"Thank you for saying that, Colonel. IVIS came as a rude surprise, didn't it?"
"You might say that."
"My people love it. A lot come in on their own time to play on the simulators. Hell, I'm surprised you took us on this one."
"Your reserve was too close in," Hamm told him. "You thought you knew what to exploit. Instead, I caught you out of position to meet my counterattack." It wasn't a revelation. The senior observer/controller had made that lesson clear to the momentarily contrite tank commander.
"I'll try to remember that. Catch the news?"
"Yeah, that sucks," Hamm thought aloud.
"Little kids. I wonder if they award medals to the Secret Service?"
"They have something, I imagine. I can think of worse things to die for." And that's what it was all about. Those five agents had died doing their jobs, running to the sound of the guns. They must have made some mistakes, but sometimes you didn't have a choice in the matter. All soldiers knew that.
"God rest their brave souls." The man sounded like Robert Edward Lee. It triggered something in Hamm.
"What's the story on you guys? You, Colonel Edding-ton, you're not supposed—what the hell do you do in real life?" The guy was over fifty, very marginal for an officer in command of a brigade, even in the Guard.
"I'm professor of military history at the University of North Carolina. What's the story? This brigade was supposed to be the round-out for 24th Mech back in 1991, and we came here for workups and got our ass handed to us. Never got to deploy. I was a battalion XO then, Hamm. We wanted to go. Our regimental standards go back to the Revolution. It hurt our pride. We've been waiting to come back here near on ten years, boy, and this IVIS box gives us a fair chance." He was a tall, thin man, and when he turned, he was looking down at the regular officer. "We are going to make use of that chance, son. I know the theory. I been readin' and studyin' on it for over thirty years, and my men ain't'a'gonna roll over and die for you, you he'ah?" When aroused, Nicholas Eddington tended to adopt an accent.
" 'Specially not for Yankees?"
"Damn right!" Then it was time for a laugh. Nick Ed-dington was a teacher, with a flair for the impromptu dramatic. The voice softened. "I know, if we didn't have IVIS, you'd murder us—"
"Ain't technology wonderful?"
"It almost makes us your equal, and your men are the best. Everybody knows that," Eddington conceded. It was a worthy peace gesture.
"With the hours we keep, kinda hard to get a beer at the club when you need one. Can I offer you one at my home, sir?"
"Lead on, Colonel Hamm."
"What's your area of specialty?" BLACKHORSE Six asked on the way to his car.
"My dissertation was on the operational art of Nathan Bedford Forrest."
"Oh? I've always admired Buford, myself."
"He only had a couple of days, but they were all good days. He might have won the war for Lincoln at Gettysburg."
"The Spencer carbines gave his troopers the technical edge," Hamm announced. "People overlook that factor."
"Choosing the best ground didn't hurt, and the Spencers helped, but what he did best was to remember his mission," Eddington replied.
"As opposed to Stuart. Jeb definitely had a bad day. I suppose he was due for one." Hamm opened the car door for his colleague. It would be a few hours before they had to prepare for the next exercise, and Hamm was a serious student of history, especially of the cavalry. This would be an interesting breakfast: beer, eggs, and the Civil War.
THEY BUMPED INTO each other in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, which was doing a great business in coffee and donuts at the moment.
"Hi, John," Holtzman said, looking at the crime scene from across the street.
"Bob," Plumber acknowledged with a nod. The area was alive with cameras, TV and still, recording the scene for history.
"You're up early for a Saturday—TV guy, too," the Post reporter noted with a friendly smile. "What do you make of it?"
"This really is a terrible thing." Plumber was himself a grandfather many times over. "Was it Ma'alot, the one in Israel, back—what? 1975, something like that?" They all seemed to blend together, these terrorist incidents.
Holtzman wasn't sure, either. "I think so. I have somebody checking it back at the office."
"Terrorists make for good stories, but, dear God, we'd be better off without them."
The crime scene was almost pristine. The bodies were gone. The autopsies were complete by now, they both imagined. But everything else was intact, or nearly so. The cars were there, and as the reporters watched, ballistics experts were running strings to simulate shots at mannequins brought in from a local department store, trying to re-create every detail of the event. The black guy in the Secret Service windbreaker was Norman Jeffers, one of the heroes of the day, now demonstrating how he'd come down from the house across the street. Inside was Inspector Patrick O'Day. Some agents were simulating the movements of the terrorists. One man lay on the ground by the front door, aiming a red plastic "play gun" around. In criminal investigations, the dress rehearsals always came after the play.
"His name was Don Russell?" Plumber asked.
"One of the oldest guys in the Service," Holtzman confirmed.
"Damn." Plumber shook his head. "Horatius at the bridge, like something from a movie. 'Heroic' isn't a word we use often, is it?"
"No, that isn't something we're supposed to believe in anymore, is it? We know better. Everybody's got an angle, right?" Holtzman finished off his coffee and dumped the cup in the trash bin. "Imagine, giving up your life to protect other people's kids."
Some reports talked about it in Western terms. "Gun-fight at the Kiddy Corral" some local TV reporter had tried out, winning the low-taste award for last night, and earning his station a few hundred negative calls, confirming to the station manager that his outlet had a solid nighttime viewership. None had been more irate about that than Plumber, Bob Holtzman noted. He still thought it was supposed to mean something, this news business they both shared.
"Any word on Ryan?" Bob asked.
"Just a press release. Callie Weston wrote it, and Arnie delivered it. I can't blame him for taking the family away. He deserves a break from somebody, John."
"Bob, I seem to remember when—"
"Yeah, I know. I got snookered. Elizabeth Elliot fed me a story on Ryan back when he was Deputy at CIA." He turned to look at his older colleague. "It was all a lie. I apologized to him personally. You know what it was really all about?"
"No," Plumber admitted.
"The Colombian mission. He was there, all right. Along the way, some people got killed. One of them was an Air Force sergeant. Ryan looks after the family. He's putting them all through college, all on his own."
"You never printed that," the TV reporter objected.
"No, I didn't. The family—well, they're not public figures, are they? By the time I found out, it was old news. I just didn't think it was newsworthy." That last word was one of the keys to their profession. It was news personnel who decided what got before the public eye and what did not, and in choosing what got out and what didn't, it was they who controlled the news, and decided what, exactly, the public had a right to know. And in so choosing, they could make or break everyone, because not every story started off big enough to notice, especially the political ones.
"Maybe you were wrong."
Holtzman shrugged. "Maybe I was, but I didn't expect Ryan to become President any more than he did. He did an honorable thing—hell, a lot more than honorable. John, there are things about the Colombian story that can't ever see the light of day. I think I know it all now, but I can't write it. It would hurt the country and it wouldn't help anybody at all."
"What did Ryan do, Bob?"
"He prevented an international incident. He saw that the guilty got punished one way or another—"
"Jim Cutter?" Plumber asked, still wondering what Ryan was capable of.
"No, that really was a suicide. Inspector O'Day, the FBI guy who was right there across the street?"
"What about him?"
"He was following Cutter, watched him jump in front of the bus."
"You're sure of this?"
"As sure as I've ever been. Ryan doesn't know that I'm into all this. I have a couple of good sources, and everything matches up with the known facts. Either it's all the truth or it's the cleverest lie I've ever run into. You know what we have in the White House, John?"
"What's that?"
"An honest man. Not 'relatively honest, not 'hasn't been caught yet. Honest. I don't think he's ever done a crooked thing in his life."
"He's still a babe in the woods," Plumber replied. It was almost bluster, if not disbelief, because his conscience was starting to make noise.
"Maybe he is. But who ever said we were wolves? No, that's not right. We're supposed to chase after the crooks, but we've been doing it so long and so well that we forgot that there are some people in government who aren't." He looked over at his colleague again. "And so then we play one off against another to get our stories—and along the way we got corrupted, too. What do we do about that, John?"
"I know what you're asking. The answer is no."
"In an age of relative values, nice to find an absolute, Mr. Plumber. Even if it is the wrong one," Holtzman added, getting the reaction he'd hoped for.
"Bob, you're good. Very good, in fact, but you can't roll me, okay?" The commentator managed a smile, though. It was an expert attempt, and he had to admire that. Holtzman was a throwback to the days Plumber remembered so fondly.
"What if I can prove I'm right?"
"Then why didn't you write the story?" Plumber demanded. No real reporter could turn away from this one.
"I didn't print it. I never said I didn't write it," Bob corrected his friend.
"Your editor would fire you for—"
"So? Aren't there things you never did, even after you had everything you needed?"
Plumber dodged that one: "You talked about proof."
"Thirty minutes away. But this story can't ever get out."
"How can I trust you on that?"
"How can I trust you, John? What do we put first? Getting the story out, right? What about the country, what about the people? Where does professional responsibility end and public responsibility begin? I didn't run this one because a family lost a father. He left a pregnant wife behind. The government couldn't acknowledge what happened, and so Jack Ryan stepped in himself to make things right. He did it with his own money. He never expected people to find out. So what was I supposed to do? Expose the family? For what, John? To break a story that hurts the country—no, that hurts one family that doesn't need any more hurt. It could jeopardize the kids' educations. There's plenty of news we can cover without that. But I'm telling you this, John: You've hurt an innocent man, and your friend with the big smile lied to the public to do it. We're supposed to care about that."
"So why don't you write that?"
Holtzman made him wait a few seconds for the answer. "I'm willing to give you the chance to set things right. That's why. You were there, too. But I have to have your word, John. I'll take yours."
There was more to it than that. There had to be. For Plumber, it was a matter of two professional insults. First, that he'd been steamrolled by his younger associate at NEC, one of the new generation who thought journalism was how you looked in front of a camera. Second, that he'd also been rolled by Ed Kealty—used… to hurt an innocent man? If nothing else, he had to find out. He had to, otherwise he'd be spending a lot of time looking in mirrors.
The TV commentator took Holtzman's mini-tape recorder from his hand and punched the record button.
"This is John Plumber, it's Saturday, seven-fifty in the morning, and we're standing across the street from the Giant Steps Day Care Center. Robert Holtzman and I are about to leave this location to go somewhere. I have given my word that what we are about to investigate will remain absolutely confidential between us. This tape recording is a permanent record of that promise on my part. John Plumber," he concluded, "NBC News." He clicked it off, then clicked it back on again. "However, if Bob has misrepresented himself to me, all bets are off."
"That's fair," Holtzman agreed, removing the tape cassette from the recorder and pocketing it. The promise had no legal standing at all. Even if it had been a contractual agreement, the First Amendment would probably negate it, but it was a man's word, and both of the reporters knew that something had to hold up, even in the modern age. On the way to Bob's car, Plumber grabbed his field producer.
"We'll be back in an hour or so."
THE PREDATOR WAS circling at just under ten thousand feet. For purposes of convenience, the three UIR army corps were identified as I, II, and III by the intelligence officers at STORM TRACK and PALM BOWL. The UAV was circling I Corps now, a reconstituted Iraqi Republican Guard armored division and a similar division from the former Iranian army, "The Immortals," it was called, harkening back to the personal guard of Xerxes. The deployment was conventional. The regimental formations were in the classic two-up/one-back disposition, a triangle of sorts, with the third forming the divisional reserve. The two divisions were abreast. Their frontage was surprisingly narrow, however, with each division covering a mere thirty kilometers of linear space, and only a five-kilometer gap between the two.
They were training hard. Every few kilometers were targets, plywood cutouts of tanks. When they came into view, they were shot at. The Predator couldn't tell how good the gunnery was, though most of the targets were knocked over by the time the first echelon of fighting vehicles passed. The vehicles were mainly of Russian/Soviet origin. The heavy ones were T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks made at the huge Chelyabinsk works. The infantry vehicles were BMPs. The tactics were Soviet, too. That was evident from the way they moved. Sub-units were kept under tight control. The huge formations moved with geometric precision, like harvesting machines in a Kansas wheatfield, sweeping across the terrain in regular lines.
"Geez, I've seen the movie," the chief master sergeant observed at the Kuwaiti ELINT station.
"Yes?" Major Sabah asked.
"The Russians—well, the Soviets, used to make movies of this, sir."
"How would you compare the two?" And that, the NCO intelligence-specialist thought, was a pretty good question.
"Not much different, Major." He pointed to the lower half of the screen. "See here? The company commander has everything on line, proper distance and interval. Before, the Predator was over the division reconnaissance screen, and that was right out of the book, too. Have you read up on Soviet tactics, Major Sabah?"
"Only as the Iraqis implemented them," the Kuwaiti officer admitted.
"Well, it's pretty close. You hit hard and fast, just go right through your enemy, don't give him a chance to react. You keep your own people under control. It's all mathematics to them."
"And the level of their training?"
"Not bad, sir."
"ELLIOT HAD SURVEILLANCE on Ryan, right over there," Holtzman pointed as he brought the car intp the 7-Eleven.
"She was having him followed?"
"Liz hated his guts. I never—well, okay, I did figure it out. It was personal. She really had it in for Ryan, something that happened before Bob Fowler got elected. Enough that she leaked a story that was supposed to hurt his family. Nice, eh?"
Plumber wasn't all that impressed. "That's Washington."
"True, but what about using official government assets for a personal vendetta? That may be real Washington, too, but it's against the law." He switched off the car and motioned for Plumber to get out.
Inside they found a diminutive owner, female, and a bunch of Amerasian kids stocking the shelves on this Saturday morning.
"Hello," Carol Zimmer said. She recognized Holtzman from previous visits to buy bread and milk—and to eyeball the establishment. She had no idea he was a reporter. But she did recognize John Plumber. She pointed. "You on TV!"
"Yes, I am," the commentator admitted with a smile.
The eldest son—his name tag said Laurence—came up with a less friendly look on his face. "Can I help you with something, sir?" His voice was unaccented, his eyes bright and suspicious.
"I'd like to talk to you, if I might," Plumber asked politely.
"About what, sir?"
"You know the President, don't you?"
"Coffee machine's that way, sir. You can see where the doughnuts are." The young man turned his back. His height must have come from his father, Plumber saw, and he had education.
"Wait a minute!" Plumber said.
Laurence turned back. "Why? We have a business to run here. Excuse me."
"Larry, be nice to man."
"Mom, I told you what he did, remember?" When Laurence looked back at the reporters, his eyes told the tale. They wounded Plumber in a way he hadn't known in years.
"Excuse me. Please," the commentator said. "I just want to talk to you. There aren't any cameras with me."
"Are you in medical school now, Laurence?" Holtzman asked.
"How did you know that? Who the hell are you?"
"Laurence!" his mother objected.
"Wait a minute, please." Plumber held his hands up. "I just want to talk. No cameras, no recorders. Everything is off the record."
"Oh, sure. You give us your word on that?"
"Laurence!"
"Mom, let me handle this!" the student snapped, then instantly apologized. "Sorry, Mom, but you don't know what this is about."
"I'm just trying to figure out—"
"I saw what you did, Mr. Plumber. Didn't anybody tell you? When you spit on the President, you spit on my father, too! Now, why don't you buy what you need and take a hike." The back turned again.
"I didn't know," John protested. "If I've done something wrong, then why don't you tell me about it? I promise, you have my word, I will not do anything to hurt you or your family. But if I've done something wrong, please tell me."
"Why you hurt Mr. Ryan?" Carol Zimmer asked. "He good man. He look after us. He—"
"Mom, please. These people don't care about that!" Laurence had to come back and handle this. His mom was just too naive.
"Laurence, my name is Bob Holtzman. I'm with the Washington Post. I've known about your family for several years now. I never ran the story because I didn't want to invade your privacy. I know what President Ryan is doing for you. I want John to hear it from you. It will not become public information. If I wanted that to happen, I would have done it myself."
"Why should I trust you?" Laurence Zimmer demanded. "You're reporters." That remark broke through Plumber's demeanor hard and sharp enough to cause physical pain. Had his profession sunk so low as that?
"You're studying to be a doctor?" Plumber asked, starting at square one.
"Second year at Georgetown. I have a brother who's a senior at MIT, and a sister who just started at UVA."
"It's expensive. Too expensive for what you make off this business. I know. I had to educate my kids."
"We all work here. I work weekends."
"You're studying to be a physician. That's an honorable profession," Plumber said. "And when you make mistakes, you try to learn from them. So do I, Laurence."
"You sure talk the talk, Mr. Plumber, but lots of people do that."
"The President helps, doesn't he?"
"If I tell you something off the record, does that mean you can't report it at all?"
"No, actually 'off the record' doesn't quite mean that. But if I tell you, right here and right now, that I will never use it in any way—and there are other people around to back you up—and then I break my word, you can wreck my career. People in my business are allowed to get away with a lot, maybe even too much," Plumber conceded, "but we can't lie." And that was the point, wasn't it?
Laurence looked over to his mother. Her poor English did not denote a poor mind. She nodded to him.
"He was with my dad when he got killed," the youth reported. "He promised Pop that he would look after us. He does, and yeah, he pays for school and stuff, him and his friends at CIA."
"They had some trouble here with some rowdies," Holtzman added. "A guy I know at Langley came over here and—"
"He shouldna done that!" Laurence objected. "Mr. Clar—well, he didn't have to."
"How come you didn't go to Johns Hopkins?" Holtzman asked.
"They accepted me," Laurence told them, hostility still in his voice. "This way I can commute easier, and help out here with the store. Dr. Ryan—Mrs. Ryan, I mean—she didn't know at first, but when she found out, well, 'nother sister starts at the university this fall. Pre-med, like me."
"But why…?" Plumber's voice trailed off.
" 'Cuz maybe that's the kind of guy he is, and you fucked him over."
"Laurence!"
Plumber didn't speak for fifteen seconds or so. He turned to the lady behind the counter. "Mrs. Zimmer, thank you for your time. None of this will ever be repeated. I promise." He turned. "Good luck with your studies, Laurence. Thank you for telling me that. I will not be bothering you anymore."
The two reporters walked back outside, straight to Holtzman's Lexus.
Why should I trust you? You're reporters. The artless words of a student, perhaps, but deeply wounding even so. Because those words had been earned, Plumber told himself.
"What else?" he asked.
"As far as I know they don't even know the circumstances of Buck Zimmer's death, just that he died on duty. Evidently, Carol was pregnant with their youngest when he died. Liz Elliot tried to get a story out that Ryan was fooling around and the baby was his. I got suckered."
A long breath. "Yeah. Me, too."
"So, what are you going to do about it, John?"
He looked up. "I want to confirm a few things."
"The one at MIT is named Peter. Computer science. The one going to Charlottesville, I think her name is Al-jsha. I don't know the name of the one graduating high school, but I could look that up. I have dates for the purchase of this business. It's a sub-chapter-S corporation. It all tallies with the Colombian mission. Ryan does Christmas for them every year. Cathy, too. I don't know how they'll work that now. Pretty well, probably." Holtzman chuckled. "He's good at keeping secrets."
"And the CIA guy who—"
"I know him. No names. He found out that some punks were annoying Carol. He had a little chat with them. The police have records. I've seen them," Holtzman told him. "He's an interesting guy. He's the one who got Gerasimov's wife and daughter out. Carol thinks he's a great big teddy bear. He's also the guy who rescued Koga. Serious player."
"Give me a day. One day," Plumber said.
"Fair enough." The drive back to Ritchie Highway passed without another word.
"DR. RYAN?" BOTH heads turned. It was Captain Overton, sticking his head in the door.
"What is it?" Cathy asked, looking up from a journal article.
"Ma'am, there's something happening that the kids might like to see, with your permission. All of you, if you want."
Two minutes later they were all in the back of a Hummer, heading into the woods, close to the perimeter fence. The vehicle stopped two hundred yards away. The captain and a corporal led them the rest of the way, to within fifty feet.
"Shh," the corporal said to SANDBOX. He held binoculars to her eyes.
"Neat!" Jack Junior thought.
"Will she be scared of us?" Sally asked.
"No, nobody hunts them here, and they're used to the vehicles," Overton told them. "That's Elvira, she's the second-oldest doe here."
She'd given birth only minutes before. Elvira was getting up now, licking the newborn fawn whose eyes were confused by a new world it had no reason to expect.
"Bambi!" Katie Ryan observed, being an expert on the Disney film. It only took minutes, and then the fawn wobbled to its—they couldn't tell the gender yet—feet.
"Okay. Katie?"
"Yes?" she asked, not looking away.
"You get to give her her name," Captain Overton told the toddler. It was a tradition here.
"Miss Marlene," SANDBOX said without hesitation.