dressed—or what would the staff think? So, Ryan couldn’t walk out into the corridor without pants and at least some kind of shirt. At home, a normal person would have padded around barefoot in his shorts, but while a truck driver might have that freedom in his own home, the President of the United States did not have that freedom in his.
Then he had to smile wryly at the mirror. He bitched to himself about the same things every morning, and if he really wanted to change them, he could. But he was afraid to, afraid to take action that would cause people to lose their jobs. Aside from the fact that it would really look shitty in the papers—and practically everything he did made it into the news—it would feel bad to him, here, shaving every morning. And he didn’t really need to walk out to the box and get the paper in the morning, did he?
And if you factored out the dress code, it wasn’t all that bad. The breakfast buffet was actually quite nice, though it wasted at least five times the food it actually served. His cholesterol was still in the normal range, and so Ryan enjoyed eggs for his morning meal two or even three times a week, somewhat to his wife’s distaste. The kids opted mainly for cereal or muffins. These were still warm from the downstairs kitchen and came in all sorts of healthy—and tasty—varieties.
The Early Bird was the clipping service the government provided for senior officials, but for breakfast SWORDSMAN preferred the real paper, complete with cartoons. Like many, Ryan lamented the retirement of Gary Larson and the attendant loss of the morning Far Side, but Jack understood the pressure of enforced daily output. There was also a sports page to be read, something the Early Bird left out completely. And there was CNN, which started in the White House breakfast room promptly at seven.
Ryan looked up when he heard the warning that kids should not see what they were about to show. His kids, like all other kids, stopped what they were doing to look.
“Eww, gross!” Sally Ryan observed, when some Chinese guy got shot in the head.
“Head wounds do that,” her mother told her, wincing even so. Cathy did surgery, but not that sort. “Jack, what’s this all about?”
“You know as much as I do, honey,” the President told the First Lady.
Then the screen changed to some file tape showing a Catholic Cardinal. Then Jack caught “Papal Nuncio” off the audio, leaning to reach for the controller to turn the sound up.
“Chuck?” Ryan said, to the nearest Secret Service agent. “Get me Ben Goodley on the phone, if you could.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” It took about thirty seconds, then Ryan was handed the portable phone. “Ben, what the hell’s this thing out of Beijing?”
In Jackson, Mississippi, Reverend Gerry Patterson was accustomed to rising early in preparation for his morning jog around the neighborhood, and he turned on the bedroom TV while his wife went to fix his hot chocolate (Patterson didn’t approve of coffee any more than he did of alcohol). His head turned at the words “Reverend Yu,” then his skin went cold when he heard, “a Baptist minister here in Beijing ...” He came back into the bedroom just in time to see a Chinese face go down, and shoot out blood as from a garden hose. The tape didn’t allow him to recognize a face.
“My God ... Skip ... God, no ...” the minister breathed, his morning suddenly and utterly disrupted. Ministers deal with death on a daily basis, burying parishioners, consoling the bereaved, entreating God to look after the needs of both. But it was no easier for Gerry Patterson than it would have been for anyone else this day, because there had been no warning, no “long illness” to prepare the mind for the possibility, not even the fact of age to reduce the surprise factor. Skip was—what? Fifty-five? No more than that. Still a young man, Patterson thought, young and vigorous to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to his flock. Dead? Killed, was it? Murdered? By whom? Murdered by that communist government? A Man of God, murdered by the godless heathen?
Oh, shit,” the President said over his eggs. “What else do we know, Ben? Anything from SORGE?” Then Ryan looked around the room, realizing he’d spoken a word that was itself classified. The kids weren’t looking his way, but Cathy was..“Okay, we’ll talk about