much for a guy who’d twice made a good living in the trading business, but it was a damned sight more than most of the taxpayers made, and they gave it to him in return for his work. That made the obligation as sacred as a vow sworn to God’s own face. Auschwitz had happened because other men hadn’t recognized their obligation to the people whom they had been supposed to serve. Or something like that. Ryan had never quite made the leap of imagination necessary to understand the thought processes of dictators. Maybe Caligula had really figured that the lives of the Roman people were his possessions to use and discard like peanut shells. Maybe Hitler had thought that the German people existed only to serve his ambition to enter the history books—and if so, sure enough it had happened, just not quite the way he’d hoped it would. Jack Ryan knew objectively that he’d be in various history books, but he tried to avoid thinking about what future generations would make of him. Just surviving in his job from day to day was difficult enough. The problem with history was that you couldn’t transport yourself into the future so that you could look back with detachment and see what the hell you were supposed to do. No, making history was a damned sight harder than studying it, and so he’d decided to avoid thinking about it altogether. He wouldn’t be around to know what the future thought anyway, so there was no sense in worrying about it, was there? He had his own conscience to keep him awake at night, and that was hard enough.
Looking around the room, he could see the chiefs of government of more than fifteen countries, from little Iceland to the Netherlands to Turkey. He was President of the United States of America, by far the largest and most powerful country of the NATO alliance—until tomorrow, anyway, he corrected himself—and he wanted to take them all aside and ask each one how the hell he (they were all men at the moment) reconciled his self and his duties. How did you do the job honorably? How did you look after the needs of every citizen? Ryan knew that he couldn’t reasonably expect to be universally loved. Arnie had told him that—that he only needed to be liked, not loved, by half-plus-one of the voters in America—but there had to be more to the job than that, didn’t there? He knew all of his fellow chief executives by name and sight, and he’d been briefed in on each man’s character. That one there, he had a mistress only nineteen years old. That one drank like a fish. That one had a little confusion about his sexual preference. And that one was a crook who’d enriched himself hugely on the government payroll. But they were all allies of his country, and therefore they were officially his friends. And so Jack had to ignore what he knew of them and treat them like what they appeared to be rather than what they really were, and the really funny part of that was that they felt themselves to be his superiors because they were better politicians than he was. And the funniest part of all was that they were right. They were better politicians than he was, Ryan thought, sipping his wine. The British Prime Minister walked off to see his Norwegian counterpart, as Cathy Ryan rejoined her husband.
“Well, honey, how did it go?”
“The usual. Politics. Don’t any of these women have a real job?” she asked the air.
“Some do,” Jack remembered from his briefings. “Some even have kids.”
“Mainly grandkids. I’m not old enough for that yet, thank God.”
“Sorry, babe. But there are advantages to being young and beautiful,” POTUS told FLOTUS.
“And you’re the best-looking guy here,” Cathy replied with a smile.
“But I’m too tired. Long day at the bargaining table.”
“Why are you bringing Russia into NATO?”
“To stop a war with China,” Jack replied honestly. It was time she knew. The answer to her question got her attention.
“What?”
“I’ll fill you in later, babe, but that’s the short version.”
“A war?”
“Yeah. It’s a long story, and we hope that what we agreed to do today will prevent it.”
“You say so,” Cathy Ryan observed dubiously.
“Meet anybody you like?”
“The French President is very charming.”
“Oh, yeah? He was a son of a bitch in the negotiating session today. Maybe he’s just trying to get in your knickers,” Jack told his wife. He’d been