to be in the room just then.
“Anything I need to know about, sir?” she asked, his voice had been so furious.
“No, Andrea, just that thing on CNN this morning.” Ryan paused, blushing that she’d heard his temper let go again—and in that way. “By the way, how’s your husband doing?”
“Well, he bagged those three bank robbers up in Philadelphia, and they did it without firing a shot. I was a little worried about that.”
Ryan allowed himself a smile. “That’s one guy I wouldn’t want to have a shoot-out with. Tell me, you saw CNN this morning, right?”
“Yes, sir, and we replayed it at the command post.”
“Opinion?”
“If I’d’ve been there, my weapon would have come out. That was cold-blooded murder. Looks bad on TV when you do dumb stuff like that, sir.”
“Sure as hell does,” the President agreed. He nearly asked her opinion on what he ought to do about it. Ryan respected Mrs. O’Day’s (she still went by Price on the job) judgment, but it wouldn’t have been fair to ask her to delve into foreign affairs, and, besides, he already had his mind pretty well made up. But then he speed-dialed Adler’s direct line on his phone.
“Yes, Jack?” Only one person had that direct line.
“What do you make of the SORGE stuff?”
“It’s not surprising, unfortunately. You have to expect them to circle wagons.”
“What do we do about it?” SWORDSMAN demanded.
“We say what we think, but we try not to make it worse than it already is,” SecState replied, cautious as ever.
“Right,” Ryan growled, even though it was exactly the good advice he’d expected from his SecState. Then he hung up. He reminded himself that Arnie had told him a long time ago that a president wasn’t allowed to have a temper, but that was asking a hell of a lot, and at what point was he allowed to react the way a man needed to react? When was he supposed to stop acting like a goddamned robot?
“You want Callie to work up something for you in a hurry?” Arnie asked over the phone.
“No,” Ryan replied, with a shake of the head. “I’ll just wing it.”
“That’s a mistake,” the Chief of Staff warned.
“Arnie, just let me be me once in a while, okay?”
“Okay, Jack,” van Damm replied, and it was just as well the President didn’t see his expression.
Don’t make things worse than they already are, Ryan told himself at his desk. Yeah, sure, like that’s possible ...
Hi, Pap,” Robby Jackson was saying in his office at the northwest comer of the West Wing.
“Robert, have you seen—”
“Yes, we’ve all seen it,” the Vice President assured his father.
“And what are y’all going to do about it?”
“Pap, we haven’t figured that out yet. Remember that we have to do business with these people. The jobs of a lot of Americans depend on trade with China and—”
“Robert”—the Reverend Hosiah Jackson used Robby’s proper name mainly when he was feeling rather stern—“those people murdered a man of God—no, excuse me, they murdered two men of God, doing their duty, trying to save the life of an innocent child, and one does not do business with murderers.”
“I know that, and I don’t like it any more than you do, and, trust me, Jack Ryan doesn’t like it any more than you do, either. But when we make foreign policy for our country, we have to think things through, because if we screw it up, people can lose their lives.”
“Lives have already been lost, Robert,” Reverend Jackson pointed out.
“I know that. Look, Pap, I know more about this than you do, okay? I mean, we have ways of finding out stuff that doesn’t make it on CNN,” the Vice President told his father, with the latest SORGE report right in his hand. Part of him wished that he could show it to his father, because his father was easily smart enough to grasp the importance of the secret things that he and Ryan knew. But there was no way he could even approach discussing that sort of thing with anyone without a TS/SAR clearance, and that included his wife, just as it included Cathy Ryan. Hmm, Jackson thought—maybe that was something he should discuss with Jack. You had to be able to talk this stuff over with someone you trusted, just as a reality check on what was right and wrong. Their wives weren’t security risks, were they?
“Like what?” his father asked, only halfway expecting an answer.
“Like I can’t discuss some things with you, Pap, and