Executive orders - Tom Clancy [120]
The trilling note caused his eyes to open with a curse. He'd gone to bed only an hour earlier.
Yes.
Call Yousif. And the circuit went dead. As a further security measure, the call had come through several cutouts, and the message itself was too short to give much opportunity to the electronic-intelligence wizards in the employ of his numerous enemies. The final measure was more clever still. He immediately dialed yet another cellular number and repeated the message he'd just heard. A clever enemy who might have tracked the message through the cellular frequencies would probably have deemed him just another cutout. Or maybe not. The security games one had to play in this modern age were a genuine drag on day-to-day life, and one could never know what worked and what did not-until one died of natural causes, which was hardly worth waiting for.
Grumbling all the more, he rose and dressed and walked outside. His car was waiting. The third cutout had been his driver. Together with two guards, they drove to a secure location, a safe house in a safe place. Israel might be at peace, and even the PLO might have become part of a democratically elected regime-was the world totally mad?-but Beirut was still a place where all manner of people could operate. The proper signal was displayed there-it was the pattern of lighted and unlighted windows-showing that it was safe for him to exit the car and enter the building. Or so he'd find out in thirty seconds or so. He was too drowsy to care. Fear became boring after a life time of it.
There was the expected cup of coffee, bittersweet and strong, on the plain wooden table. Greetings were exchanged, seats taken, and conversation begun.
It is late.
My flight was delayed, his host explained. We require your services.
For what purpose?
One might call it diplomacy, was the surprising answer. He went on to explain.
TEN MINUTES, the President heard.
More makeup. It was 8:20. Ryan was in place. Mary Abbot applied the finishing touches to his hair, which merely increased the feeling that Ryan was an actor instead of a politician? No, not that. He refused to accept the label, no matter what Arnie or any of the others might say. Through the open door to his right, Callie Weston stood by the secretary's desk, giving him a smile and a nod to mask her own unease. She had written a masterpiece-she always felt that way-and now it would be delivered by a rookie. Mrs. Abbot walked around to the front of the desk, occulting some of the TV lights to look at her work from the perspective of the viewer, and pronounced it good. Ryan merely sat there and tried not to fidget, knowing that soon he'd start sweating under the makeup again, and that it would itch like a son of a bitch, and that he couldn't scratch at it no matter what, because Presidents didn't itch or scratch. There were probably people out there who didn't think that Presidents had to use the toilet or shave or maybe even tie their shoes.
Five minutes, sir. Mike check.
One, two, three, four, five, Ryan said dutifully.
Thank you, Mr. President, the director called from the next room.
Ryan had occasionally wondered about this sort of thing. Presidents delivering these official statements-a tradition going back at least as far as FDR and his fireside chats, which he'd first heard about from his mother-always seemed confident and at ease, and he'd always wondered how they ever managed to bring that off. He felt neither. One more layer of tension for him. The cameras were probably on now, so that the directors could be sure they were working, and somewhere a tape machine was recording the look on his face and the way his hands were playing with the papers in front of him. He wondered if the Secret Service had control of that tape, or whether they trusted the TV people to be honorable about such things surely their own anchorpeople