Winston suggested. “If he breaks it to me, then it’s in the open, or at least open enough.”
“Can we trust him?”
Winston nodded. “Sam plays by the rules. We can’t ask him to screw over his own board, but he knows what flag to salute, Jack.”
“Okay, George, a discreet inquiry.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, sir.”
“God damn it, George!”
“Jack, when the hell are you going to learn to relax in this fucking job?” SecTreas asked POTUS.
“The day I move out of this goddamned museum and become a free man again,” Ryan replied with a submissive nod. Winston was right. He had to learn to stay on a more even keel in the office of President. In addition to not being helpful to himself, it wasn’t especially helpful to the country for him to be jumpy with the folderol of office-holding. That also made it easy for people like the Secretary of the Treasury to twist his tail, and George Winston was one of the people who enjoyed doing that ... maybe because it ultimately helped him relax, Ryan thought. Backwards English on the ball or something. “George, why do you think I should relax in this job?”
“Jack, because you’re here to be effective, and being tight all the time does not make you more effective. Kick back, guy, maybe even learn to like some aspect of it.”
“Like what?”
“Hell.” Winston shrugged, and then nodded to the secretaries’ office. “Lots of cute young interns out there.”
“There’s been enough of that,” Ryan said crossly. Then he did manage to relax and smile a little. “Besides, I’m married to a surgeon. Make that little mistake and I could wake up without something important.”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s bad for the country to have the President’s dick cut off, eh? People might not respect us anymore.” Winston stood. “Gotta go back across the street and look at some economic models.”
“Economy looking good?” POTUS asked.
“No complaints from me or Mark Gant. Just so the Fed Chairman leaves the discount rate alone, but I expect he will. Inflation is pretty flat, and there’s no upward pressure anywhere that I see happening.”
“Ben?”
Goodley looked through his notes, as though he’d forgotten something. “Oh, yeah. Would you believe, the Vatican is appointing a Papal Nuncio to the PRC?”
“Oh? What’s that mean, exactly?” Winston asked, stopping halfway to the door.
“The Nuncio is essentially an ambassador. People forget that the Vatican is a nation-state in its own right and has the usual trappings of statehood. That includes diplomatic representation. A nuncio is just that, an ambassador—and a spook,” Ryan added.
“Really?” Winston asked.
“George, the Vatican has the world’s oldest intelligence service. Goes back centuries. And, yeah, the Nuncio gathers information and forwards it to the home office, because people talk to him—who better to talk to than a priest, right? They’re good enough at gathering information that we’ve made the occasional effort to crack their communications. Back in the thirties, a senior cryppie at the State Department resigned over it,” Ryan informed his SecTreas, reverting back to history teacher.
“We still do that?” Winston directed this question at Goodley, the President’s National Security Adviser. Goodley looked first to Ryan, and got a nod. “Yes, sir. Fort Meade still takes a look at their messages. Their ciphers are a little old-fashioned, and we can brute-force them.”
“And ours?”
“The current standard is called TAPDANCE. It’s totally random, and therefore it’s theoretically unbreakable—unless somebody screws up and reuses a segment of it, but with approximately six hundred forty-seven million trans-positions on every daily CD-ROM diskette, that’s not very likely.”
“What about the phone systems?”
“The STU?” Goodley asked, getting a nod. “That’s computer-based, with a two-fifty-six-kay computer-generated encryption key. It can be broken, but you need a computer, the right algorithm, and a couple of weeks at least, and the shorter the message the harder it is to crack it, instead of the other way around. The guys at Fort Meade are playing with using quantum-physics equations to crack ciphers, and evidently they’re having some success, but if you want an explanation, you’re going to have to ask somebody else. I didn’t even pretend to listen,” Goodley admitted. “It’s so far over my head I can’t even see the bottom of it.”
“Yeah, get your friend Gant involved,” Ryan suggested. “He seems to know ’puters pretty well. As a matter of fact, you might want to get him briefed in on these developments in Russia. Maybe he can model the effects they’ll have on the Russian economy.”
“Only if everyone plays by the rules,” Winston said