it when you get in.” Jack hit the kill button on the phone and set it down.
“What’s the story?”
“It’s a real mess, babe,” SWORDSMAN told SURGEON. He explained what he knew for a minute or so. “The ambassador hasn’t gotten to us with anything CNN didn’t just show.”
“You mean with all the money we spend on CIA and stuff, CNN is the best source of information we have?” Cathy Ryan asked, somewhat incredulously.
“You got it, honey,” her husband admitted.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Jack tried to explain: “CIA can’t be everywhere, and it would look a little funny if all our field spooks carried video-cams everywhere they went, you know?”
Cathy made a face at being shut down so cavalierly. “But—”
“But it’s not that easy, Cathy, and the news people are in the same business, gathering information, and occasionally they get there first.”
“But you have other ways of finding things out, don’t you?”
“Cathy, you don’t need to know about things like that,” POTUS told FLOTUS.
That was a phrase she’d heard before, but not one she’d ever learned to love. Cathy went back to her morning paper while her husband graduated to the Early Bird. The Beijing story, Jack saw, had happened too late for the morning editions, one more thing to chuff up the TV newsies and annoy the print ones. Somehow the debate over the federal education budget didn’t seem all that important this morning, but he’d learned to scan the editorials, because they tended to reflect the questions the reporters would ask at the press conferences, and that was one way for him to defend himself.
By 7:45, the kids were about ready for their drive to school, and Cathy was ready for her flight to Hopkins. Kyle Daniel went with her, with his own Secret Service detail, composed exclusively of women who would look after him at the Hopkins daycare center rather like a pack of she-wolves. Katie would head back to her daycare center, the rebuilt Giant Steps north of Annapolis. There were fewer kids there now, but a larger protective detail. The big kids went to St. Mary’s. On cue, the Marine VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter eased down on the South Lawn helipad. The day was about to start for real. The entire Ryan family took the elevator downstairs. First Mom and Dad walked the kids to the west entrance of the West Wing, where, after hugs and kisses, three of the kids got into their cars to drive off. Then Jack walked Cathy to the helicopter for the kiss goodbye, and the big Sikorsky lifted off under the control of Colonel Dan Malloy for the hop to Johns Hopkins. With that done, Ryan walked back to the West Wing, and inside to the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was waiting for him.
“How bad?” Jack asked his national security adviser.
“Bad,” Goodley replied at once.
“What was it all about?”
“They were trying to stop an abortion. The Chinese do them late-term if the pregnancy is not government-approved. They wait until just before the baby pops out and zap it in the top of the head with a needle before it gets to take a breath. Evidently, the woman on the tape was having an unauthorized baby, and her minister—that’s the Chinese guy who gets it in the head, a Baptist preacher educated, evidently, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, would you believe? Anyway, he came to the hospital to help. The Papal Nuncio, Renato Cardinal DiMilo, evidently knew the Baptist preacher pretty well and came to offer assistance. It’s hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it blew up real bad, as the tape shows.”
“Any statements?”
“The Vatican deplores the incident and has requested an explanation. But it gets worse. Cardinal DiMilo is from the DiMilo family. He has a brother, Vincenzo DiMilo, who’s in the Italian parliament—he was a cabinet minister a while back—and so the Italian government has issued its own protest. Ditto the German government, because the Cardinal’s aide is a German monsignor named Schepke, who’s a Jesuit, and he got a little roughed up, and the Germans aren’t very happy either. This Monsignor Schepke was arrested briefly, but he was released after a few hours when the Chinese remembered he had diplomatic status. The thinking at State is that the PRC might PNG the guy, just to get him the hell out of the country and make the whole thing all go away.”
“What time is it in Beijing?”
“Us minus eleven, so it’s nine at night there,” CARDSHARP