“You’re still a babe in the woods, Jack. Aside from being videotaped raping a girl or diddling a young boy, there isn’t much a politician would not risk for the Presidency.”
“That brings up a question I can’t quite get my head around: Does Kealty like being President?”
“He probably doesn’t even know himself. Is he doing a good job? No, not really. But he doesn’t even know that. He thinks he’s doing as well as any man could, and better than most. He likes playing the game. He likes answering the phone. He likes having people come to him when they have a problem. He likes being the guy who answers the questions, even when he doesn’t have a clue what the answer is. Remember what Mel Brooks said? ‘It’s good to be the king,’ even if the king is a total fuckup. He wants to be there, and for nobody else to be there, because he’s been a politician all his life. It’s Mount Everest, and he climbed up it because it’s there, and so what if you get to the top and there’s nothing you can do there? It’s there, and you’re on top of it, and nobody else is. Would he kill for the job? Probably, if he had the guts. But he doesn’t. He’d have one of his troops do it, deniably, with no written records. You can always find people who do that sort of thing for you, and you kiss them off if they get caught.”
“I never—”
“That guy John Clark. He’s killed people, and the reasons for it would not always have stood the test of public scrutiny. You have to do that sort of thing when you run a whole country, and fine, maybe it’s technically legal, but you keep it secret because it wouldn’t look good on the front page of the paper. If you left anything like that behind, Kealty will make it public, through intermediaries and carefully structured leaks.”
“If it came to that, I could handle it,” Ryan said coolly. He’d never reacted well to threats and had rarely issued them, not without a lot of gun in his holster. But Kealty would never let that happen. Like too many “great” men, and like very many political figures indeed, he was a coward. Cowards were the first to resort to a show of force. It was the sort of power that some men found intoxicating. Ryan had always found it frightening, but Ryan had never had to pull that gun out of the holster without grave cause. “Arnie, I’m not afraid of anything that bastard can throw at me, if it comes to that. But why should it come to that?”
“Because the country needs you, Jack.”
“I tried to fix it. I had the best part of five years, and I failed.”
“System’s too corrupt, eh?”
“I got a decent Congress. Most of them were okay—the ones who’ve gone back home because of campaign promises. Hell, those were the honest ones, weren’t they? Congress is much improved, but the President sets the national tone, and I couldn’t change that. Christ knows I tried.”
“Callie Weston wrote you some good speeches. You might have made a good priest.” Arnie leaned back and finished his coffee. “You did make an earnest effort, Jack. But it wasn’t enough.”
“So you want me to try again. When you bash your head against a stone wall, the squishy sound gets kinda depressing after a while.”
“Have Cathy’s friends found a cure for cancer yet?”
“No.”
“Have they stopped trying?”
“No,” Jack had to admit.
“Because it’s worth doing even if it’s impossible?”
“Playing with the laws of science is easier than amending human nature.”
“Okay, you can always just sit here and watch CNN and read the paper and bitch.”
And I do a lot of that, Jack didn’t have to admit. The thing about Arnie was that he knew how to manipulate Ryan the same way a four-year-old girl could manipulate her father. Effortlessly and innocently. About as innocently as Bonnie and Clyde in a bank, of course, but Arnie knew how it was done.
“I’ll say it again, Jack. Your country—”
“And I’ll ask you again: Who sent you?”
“Why do you think somebody sent me?”
“Arnie.”
“Nobody, Jack. I mean it. I’m retired, too, remember?”
“Do you miss the action?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: I used to think that politics was the highest form of human activity, but you cured me of that. You have to stand for something. Kealty doesn’t. He just wants to be