you have planned?”
“I’m going to spend a few hours at their big teaching hospital. Their chief eye-cutter wants me to look at his operation.” It was always the same for FLOTUS, and she didn’t mind. It came from being an academic physician, treating patients, but also teaching young docs, and observing how her counterparts around the world did their version of her job. Every so often, you saw something new that was worth learning from, or even copying, because smart people happened everywhere, not just at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was the one part of the First Lady folderol that she actually enjoyed, because she could learn from it, instead of just being a somewhat flat-chested Barbie doll for the world to gawk at. To this end she was dressed in a beige business suit, whose jacket she would soon exchange for a doc’s proper white lab coat, which was always her favorite item of apparel. Jack was wearing one of his dark-blue white-pinstriped President-of-the-United-States suits, with a maroon striped tie because Cathy liked the color combination, and she really did decide what Jack wore, except for the shirt. SWORDSMAN wore only white cotton shirts with button-down collars, and despite Cathy’s lobbying for something different, on that issue he stood firm. This had caused Cathy to observe more than once that he’d wear the damned things with his tuxedos if convention didn’t demand otherwise.
The aircraft came to a halt, and the stagecraft began. The Air Force sergeant—this one always a man—opened the door on the left side of the aircraft to see that the truck-mounted stairs were already in place. Two more non-coms scurried down so that they could salute Ryan when he walked down. Andrea Price-O’Day was talking over her digital radio circuit to the chief of the Secret Service advance team to make sure it was safe for the President to appear in the open. She’d already heard that the Poles had been as cooperative as any American police force, and had enough security deployed here to defend against an attack by space aliens or Hitler’s Wehrmacht. She nodded to the President and Mrs. Ryan.
“Showtime, babe,” Jack told Cathy, with a dry smile.
“Knock ’em dead, Movie Star,” she said in reply. It was one of their inside jokes.
John Patrick Ryan, President of the United States of America, stood in the door to look out over Poland, or at least as much of it as he could see from this vantage. The first cheers erupted then, for although he’d never even been close to Poland before, he was a popular figure here, for what reason Jack Ryan had no idea. He walked down, carefully, telling himself not to trip and spill down the steps. It looked bad to do so, as one of his antecedents had learned the hard way. At the bottom, the two USAF sergeants snapped off their salutes, which Ryan unconsciously returned, and then he was saluted again by a Polish officer. They did it differently, Jack saw, with ring and little finger tucked in, like American Cub Scouts. Jack nodded and smiled to this officer, then followed him to the receiving line. There was the U.S. ambassador to introduce him to the Polish president. Together they walked down a red carpet to a small lectern, where the Polish president welcomed Ryan, and Ryan made remarks to demonstrate his joy at visiting this ancient and important new American ally. Ryan had a discordant memory of the “Polack” jokes so popular when he’d been in high school, but managed not to relate any to the assembled throng. This was followed by a review past the honor guard of soldiers, about three companies of infantrymen, all spiffed up for this moment; Jack walked past them, looking in each face for a split second and figuring they just wanted to go back to barracks to change into their more comfortable fatigues, where they’d say that this Ryan guy looked okay for a damned American chief of state, and wasn’t it good that this pain-in-the-ass duty was over. Then Jack and Cathy (carrying flowers given to her by two cute Polish kids, a boy and a girl, age six or so, because that was the best age to greet an important foreign woman) got into the official car, an American limo from the U.S. Embassy, for the drive into town. Once there, Jack looked over to the ambassador.
“What about Moscow?”
Ambassadors had once been Very Important People,