answered.
“The trade delegation will need instructions of some sort about this. I need to talk to Scott Adler as soon as he gets in this morning.”
“You need more than that, Jack.” It was the voice of Arnold van Damm, at the door to the office.
“What else?”
“The Chinese Baptist who got killed, I just heard he has friends over here.”
“Oral Roberts University,” Ryan said. “Ben told me.”
“The churchgoers are not going to like this one, Jack,” Arnie warned.
“Hey, guy, I don’t goddamn like it,” the President pointed out. “Hell, I don’t like abortion under the best of circumstances, remember?”
“I remember,” van Damm said, recalling all the trouble Ryan had gotten into with his first Presidential statement on the issue.
“And this kind of abortion is especially barbaric, and so, two guys go to the fucking hospital and try to save the baby’s life, and they get killed for it! Jesus,” Ryan concluded, “and we have to do business with people like this.”
Then another face showed up at the door. “You’ve heard, I suppose,” Robby Jackson observed.
“Oh, yeah. Hell of a thing to see over breakfast.”
“My pap knows the guy.”
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Remember at the reception last week? He told you about it. Pap and Gerry Patterson both support his congregation out of Mississippi—some other congregations, too. It’s a Baptist thing, Jack. Well-off churches look after ones that need help, and this Yu guy sure as hell needed help, looks like. I haven’t talked to him yet, but Pap is going to raise pure fucking hell about this one, and you can bet on it,” the Vice President informed his boss.
“Who’s Patterson?” van Damm asked.
“White preacher, got a big air-conditioned church in the suburbs of Jackson. Pretty good guy, actually. He and Pap have known each other forever. Patterson went through school with this Yu guy, I think.”
“This is going to get ugly,” the Chief of Staff observed.
“Arnie, baby, it’s already ugly,” Jackson pointed out. The CNN cameraman had been a little too good, or had just been standing in a good place, and had caught both shots in all their graphic majesty.
“What’s your dad going to say?” Ryan asked.
TOMCAT made them wait for it. “He’s going to call down the Wrath of Almighty God on those murdering cocksuckers. He’s going to call Reverend Yu a martyr to the Christian faith, right up there with the Maccabees of the Old Testament, and those courageous bastards the Romans fed to the lions. Arnie, have you ever seen a Baptist preacher calling down the Vengeance of the Lord? It beats the hell out of the Super Bowl, boy,” Robby promised. “Reverend Yu is standing upright and proud before the Lord Jesus right now, and the guys who killed him have their rooms reserved in the Everlasting Fires of Hell. Wait till you hear him go at it. It’s impressive, guys. I’ve seen him do it. And Gerry Patterson won’t be far behind.”
“And the hell of it is, I can’t disagree with any of it. Jesus,” Ryan breathed. “Those two men died to save the life of a baby. If you gotta die, that’s not a bad reason for it.”
They both died like men, Mr. C,” Chavez was saying in Moscow. “I wish I was there with a gun.” It had hit Ding especially hard. Fatherhood had changed his perspective on a lot of things, and this was just one of them. The life of a child was sacrosanct, and a threat against a child was an invitation to immediate death in his ethical universe. And in the real universe, he was known to have a gun a lot of the time, and the training to use it efficiently.
“Different people have different ways of looking at things,” Clark told his subordinate. But if he’d been there, he would have disarmed both of the Chinese cops. On the videotape, they hadn’t looked all that formidable. And you didn’t kill people to make a fashion statement. Domingo still had the Latin temperament, John reminded himself. And that wasn’t so bad a thing, was it?
“What are you saying, John?” Ding asked in surprise.
“I’m saying two good men died yesterday, and I imagine God’ll look after both of them.”
“Ever been to China?”
He shook his head. “Taiwan once, for R and R, long time ago. That was okay, but aside from that, no closer than North Vietnam. I don’t speak the language and I can’t blend in.” Both factors were distantly frightening to Clark. The ability to disappear into the surroundings was