Executive orders - Tom Clancy [215]
Mr. President, they went and made me a senior watch officer for the Operations Center.
Good briefing, Ryan told the younger man, then turned to the DCI. Ed, he works for me now. I need an NIO who speaks my language.
Gee, do I at least get a decent relief pitcher back? Foley replied with a laugh. This kid's a good prospect, and I expect to be in the pennant race this fall.
Nice try, Ed. Ben, your hours just got worse. For now, you can have my old office around the corner. The food's a lot better here, the President promised.
Throughout it all, Aref Raman stood still, leaning against the white-painted walls while his eyes flickered automatically from one visitor to another. He was trained not to trust anyone, with the possible exceptions of the President's wife and kids. No one else. Of course, they all trusted him, including the ones who had trained him not to trust anyone, because everybody had to trust somebody.
It was just a matter of timing, really, and one of the things his American education and professional training had conferred upon him was the patience to wait for the chance to make the proper move. But other events on the other side of the globe were bringing that moment closer. Behind expressionless eyes Raman thought that maybe he needed guidance. His mission was no longer the random event he'd promised to fulfill twenty years earlier. That he could do almost any time, but he was here now, and while anyone could kill, and while a dedicated person could kill almost anyone, only a truly skilled assassin could kill the proper person at the proper moment in pursuit of a larger goal. So deliciously ironic, he thought, that while his mission came from God, every factor in its accomplishment had come directly from the Great Satan himself, embodied in the life of one man who could best serve Allah by departing this life at just the proper moment. Picking the moment would be the hard part, and so after twenty years, Raman decided that he might just have to break cover after all. There was a danger in that, but, he judged, a slight one.
YOUR OBJECTIVE IS a bold one, Badrayn said calmly. Inwardly he was anything but calm. It was breathtaking.
The meek do not inherit the earth, Daryaei replied, having for the first time explained his mission in life to someone outside his own inner circle of clerics.
It was a struggle for both of them to act like gamblers around a poker table, while they discussed a plan that would change the shape of the world. For Daryaei it was a concept toward which he'd labored and thought and planned for more than a generation, the culmination of everything he'd ever done in life, the fulfillment of a dream, and such a goal as to put his name aside that of the Prophet himself-if he achieved it. The unification of Islam. That was how he typically expressed it in his inner circle.
Badrayn merely saw the power. The creation of a new superstate centered on the Persian Gulf, a state with immense economic power, a huge population, self-sustaining in every detail and able to expand across Asia and Africa, perhaps fulfilling the wishes of the Prophet Mohammed, though he didn't pretend to know what the founder of his religion would or would not have wished. He left that to men like Daryaei. For Badrayn the game was simply power, and religion or ideology merely defined the team identities. His team was this one because of where he'd been born, and because he'd once looked closely at Marxism and decided it was insufficient to the task.
It is possible, Badrayn said after a few more seconds of contemplation.
The historical moment is unique. The Great Satan-he didn't really like to fall into ideological cant in discussions of statecraft, but sometimes there was no avoiding it-is weak. The Lesser Satan is destroyed, with its Islamic republics ready to fall into our laps. They need an identity, and what better identity could there be than the Holy Faith?
And that was entirely true, Badrayn agreed with a silent nod. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its replacement with the